Creative Caffeine: Nashville Recording Studio

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails made headlines again this week as he released his new, four-part instrumental album Ghosts I-IV, at a variety of price points, including a $300 super-deluxe package. He’s also giving away Ghosts I at no charge, even throwing the tracks up on The Pirate Bay for anyone to download. And it appears to be working quite well for Reznor, who has managed to sell all 2,500 copies of his $300 package without major label backing or much in the way of splashy marketing. If Reznor’s earlier experiments in digital distribution failed to recoup their costs, he’s clearly learned his lesson: grossing $750,000 in the space of three days isn’t a bad haul for any businessperson.
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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.

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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.”

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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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