Creative Caffeine: Nashville Recording Studio

July has been a busy month for transferring old recordings to Pro Tools.  The sooner the better with these old tapes… if you wait too long they have to be baked due to excessive oxide shedding.  Creative Caffeine is one of the few studios setup to transfer 24 track analog tapes straight into Pro Tools HD with pristine Apogee converters.

Early this month John Mills transferred a number of 24 track tapes to Pro Tools for the highly respected John Anderson.  Chief engineer Collin Peterson has been working with Dave Shipley to transfer recordings for the Del McCoury Band, some of which may be featured on an upcoming release,  as well has some early recordings from John Hartford,  some of which featuring the Aereoplane band with Tut Taylor, Norman Blake, and Randy Scruggs!  Most of the McCoury tapes were 16 track 2″ recorded at Ricky Skaggs’ studio in Hendersonville. We were able to rent a 16 track head for our JH-24 and make that option available to clients at an extra charge.

The music industry is suffering, and it’s all because of those darn fans. Er, what? It turns out that KISS member Gene Simmons believes exactly that. He claims that piracy is to blame for the industry’s woes, and KISS is apparently taking its ball and going home until the situation gets under control.

“The record industry is dead. It’s six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this,” Simmons said, according to AOL News. “They’ve decided to download and file share. There is no record industry around so we’re going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilized. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we’ll record new material.”

It’s never a smart move to blame your loyal and devoted fans for the injustices of the world, but Simmons seems to think that his fans (unlike everyone else’s) would rather steal from the band than continue paying for music they enjoy. Simmons also thinks bands that encourage the public to download their music for free (such as Radiohead with its famed In Rainbows experiment) are only making the situation worse, despite the fact that Radiohead has made a nice chunk of change from the In Rainbows release so far.

Simmons’ latest comments come just over six months after his previous rant about the music industry, wherein he told Billboard, “Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid’s face should have been sued off the face of the earth.” At that time, he blamed the record industry for letting foxes into the henhouse (presumably by allowing DRM-free music to be sold online, or perhaps any music at all to be sold online). “Doesn’t affect me. But imagine being a new band with dreams of getting on stage and putting out your own record. Forget it,” he said.

So, does this apparently rampant piracy problem affect Simmons or not? His comments between last November and now seem to contradict each other a bit, although they clearly share the same underlying sentiment: anger. Simmons might want to reconsider speaking for anyone but himself, though. Many young and independent bands are able to enjoy success on and off the stage, all while selling their music online. As part of an upcoming feature we’re doing on indie bands and online music, one band told us that its members believe that P2P is all part of the ecosystem, and that they even saw increased sales after their album showed up on Bit Torrent.

The sad part is that Simmons’ continued comments aren’t going to cause anyone (fans or not) to have an epiphany and quit their P2P-slingin’ ways. In fact, it may have the opposite effect—the clear disdain in his words may well drive some of KISS’ fans away. The only thing Simmons is doing by lashing out at fans is earning him a reputation as a curmudgeonly artist unwilling to adapt to a changing music landscape.

Original Article:
Gene Simmons blames fans, P2P for killing music industry

Major musicians are exploring the market potential for directly interacting with their fans and releasing music independently. Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead both made headlines recently for experimenting with Internet-based releases, but NIN frontman Trent Reznor has just called Radiohead’s effort “insincere.”

“I think the way [Radiohead] parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd,” Reznor said when speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Michael Atkin. “But if you look at what they did, though, it was very much a bait and switch to get you to pay for a MySpace-quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale.”

link to full article:
Reznor: Radiohead offering was insincere, industry is inept

Nine Inch Nails kingpin Trent Reznor has followed up last years Year Zero with the new Ghosts I-IV, a collection of experimental recordings — both in the sonic and business sense.

The four Ghosts volumes collect 36 untitled instrumental tracks, which Reznor crafted during a 10-week recording period late last year with help from King Crimson guitar hero/Middle Tennessean Adrian Belew, revered producer Alan Moulder and a host of others. The alt-rock elder statesman is releasing his Ghosts in a similar manner to his recent collaboration with spoken-word poet Saul Williams, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust — fans can download some of the music for free, or purchase different Ghosts configurations at various price points.
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The free download option includes the nine tracks of Ghosts I as DRM-free MP3s, a 40-page PDF of liner notes and a collection of digital extras. For $5, fans can download the 36 Ghosts tracks in total, along with the liner notes and digital extras.

A two-CD set a gatefold digipack with a 16-page booklet runs $10.

Amongst the bounty in Reznors $75 limited edition deluxe package: two CDs, a DVD with all 36 multi-track audio files, a Blu-ray disc of high-def stereo recordings, and a hardcover book with 48 pages of photographs by Phillip Graybill and Rob Sheridan. The $300 ultra-deluxe package adds four 180-gram vinyl LPs, two limited edition, exclusive Giclee prints and other extras there will only be 2,500 of these, and all are numbered and signed by the artist himself.

A four-LP vinyl version will hit stores April 8, for $39. Further Ghosts volumes, a news blast hinted, may pop up in the future.

For more Nine Inch Nails information, and to download the new Ghosts recordings, visit www.nin.com.

read the full article:
TuneInMusicCity.com

The following article talks about what many of us in the studio business already know. Today’s recordings are waaaaay to loud! The mastering techniques demanded by today’s struggling record labels have seriously damaged the sound of nearly all recent albums. We constantly get clients who want us to make their recordings “louder” to compete on the radio. They have no choice anymore… either slam it beyond recognition, or risk radio not touching it and the common idiot music listener from complaining that it isn’t as “loud” as their other cds.

Excerpt from Rolling Stone:
Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. “They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention,” Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. “I think most everything is mastered a little too loud,” Bendeth says. “The industry decided that it’s a volume contest.”

Producers and engineers call this “the loudness war,” and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn’t the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today’s listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. “With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse,” says Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. “God is in the details. But there are no details anymore.”

read full article:
The Death of High Fidelity : Rolling Stone

the following appeared in the Tennessean Friday March 30, 2007

Caffeine Studio Mixes Old with the New

Berry Hill — Creative Caffeine Recording Studio in Berry Hill (south nashville) features vintage microhpones, a full-sized grand piano, recording drum kit and three separate recording systems.

The studio makes extensive use of wood, for aesthetics and sound. It includes an all-wood main tracking room with vaulted ceiling and wood in the keyboard room, utility booth, and vocal booth.

After World War II, some German manufacturers, such as Neumann, built microphones “that were unparalleled,” Brock said. The studio has several Neumann microphones and one Telefunken, which was the East German counterpart to Neumann.

Brock said he uses a combination of analog and digital recording formats so that he can stay on the cutting edge with digital and at the same time retain the warmer sound of the analog era.

Brock said there are some qualities to analog tape “that you can’t get on digital.” He believes live drums, bass and acoustic piano just sound better on analog tape. But, he added, the speed of digital is essential for less critical overdubs and editing, mixing, and archiving.

“We can use them separately or in conjunction with one another,” Brock said about the different recording systems. “We can accommodate any format.”

The studio uses converters to convert the analog signal to digital. Brock referred to it as a “hybrid” approach to recording.

The studio has two engineers on staff: Collin Peterson, studio manager and chief engineer, and John Mills, former chief engineer for Capitol Records in Hollywood.

Andy Leftwich, fiddle player for Ricky Skaggs and his band Kentucky Thunder, has participated in several recordings at the studio and refers to Peterson as a “musician’s engineer.”

“He’s great at troubleshooting and getting a real handle on how it’s supposed to sound,” Leftwich said.

written by Suzanne Normond Blackwood – Tennessean.com

Creative Caffeine Studio specializes in the nearly lost art of analog recording.

“Direct-to-digital”, the epitome of convenience, has nevertheless given the world music that is frequently harsh, characterless, and fatiguing. However, the problem with music recording today is not the embracing of the newest digital technology, but that most studios have completely replaced the “sound” with that digital “convenience” by throwing out its analog “dinosaurs” with the bath water. This allows “product” to be cranked out at an amazing rate, but often with disappointing sonic results.

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