Recording Guitar Music on my Computer

My youngest son's daughters are used to me playing the guitar when I go visit them in Ohio. It is a nightly ritual for me to sit on the end of a bed and play while the girls fall asleep. If I am allowed to play long enough, they fall asleep before I am done. The girls love it and so they asked me to record the guitar so they can listen to me playing even though I am in Utah.

It is a lot of work to set up the recording equipment and so I put it off until my oldest granddaughter asked me two days in a row. The second day, my son forwarded a video of an impassioned plea to record the music. How could I turn her down? On Saturday evening I pulled out my wife's old Mac laptop and connected it to my audio converter. Then I plugged in my acoustic-electric guitar and got ready to record.

The Mac comes with GarageBand which is great for recording audio onto your computer. I have a high-end microphone that I use to record audio for my YouTube videos but my guitar also plugs right in. I thought I could just start playing. I clicked on the GarageBand application only to have it crash repeatedly. The simplest solution is to reinstall the application so I loaded up the App Store and downloaded the latest version. That worked and I could run it on the laptop.

My audio converter connects to the computer though a USB cable and the Mac isn't quite sure what to do with audio afterwards. It can pull input from the converter but also send output to it even though it doesn't have a speaker. I had to go in and tell the Mac to use the device for input but to route output through the computer's speakers. I actually had headphones plugged into the Mac and couldn't hear anything until I adjusted these settings. Then I clicked the "Monitor" checkbox in GarageBand so I could hear my own playing and what the computer recorded.

When I play for my granddaughters before bed, they don't care if I make a mistake. When I practice for myself, I just play through the song and don't worry if the music doesn't sound 100% correct. All that changes when you record music to play over and over. I want it to be perfect and so it took me about 20 attempts on the first song before I felt I did it justice. Knowing I wanted to record around 15 songs, I had to come up with a better way to finish the project. Or I had to stop being so picky.

The first thing I did was to change how I recorded my songs. Instead of stopping the recording after a mistake and starting over, I would keep the recording going and just stop long enough so I knew where to cut the mistake from the track. That sped things up somewhat. I also decided to play each song through once before even attempting to record it. That helped a lot and I cut the number of takes from 20 down to just 1 or 2. Being less picky also had something to do with that.

It normally takes me about 20 minutes to go through the 15 or so songs I have memorized. Recording them took over an hour with all the stops and starts. It also made for great guitar practice as I could really see my common mistakes and work to fix them. I highly recommend recording your music practice on a periodic basis to help you improve. It is something I will incorporate into my practice.

I sent the music off to my son on Saturday evening thanks to some help from Google Drive. He put it on my granddaughters' music player. When I called them yesterday, I could hear my music in the background. This morning my son sent me a video of my oldest granddaughter listening to some of my songs and being happy that she can now hear them whenever she wants. That makes me feel great as a musician but even better as a grandpa.

The Evolution of Music Listening

This week I have been thinking about my personal evolution of music listening habits. Part of this has been triggered by my problems with getting Spotify to play from my playlist instead of substituting recommended songs. Another part is due to the Thanksgiving holiday and the technological advancements I am thankful for.

I know this will date me but I remember getting a Sony Walkman for my 14th birthday. I wish I still had it because those things are worth a lot of money now but mine is long gone. When I got the device, I could listen to my favorite radio stations on either the AM or FM bands. It also included a cassette-tape player. My parents thoughtfully included Def Leppard's Pyromania tape with the gift as it happened to be my favorite album at that time. The tape player only had basic functionality and could not skip songs nor reverse back to the beginning of the song. Each side of the tape held 5 or 6 songs and when you finished one side, you flipped the tape over and listened to the other side.

Dual cassette boom boxes became all the rage so you could copy songs onto blank cassettes and create your own mix tape. That way if you only liked a few songs from a particular artist, you could fill a blank tape with a dozen or so of your favorite songs from different bands. I'm sure music companies hated those dual-cassette devices but it didn't take too many copies of copies for the music to start sounding ugly.

Next came the compact disc or CD. My oldest daughter never had a Walkman but she did have a Discman, which she loved. Like a cassette tape, the CD could only hold a dozen or so songs. Unlike the cassette though, you never had to flip it over as one side had the songs and the other had neatly silk-screened graphics. One feature the Discman had that the Walkman did not is the ability to randomly shuffle songs. Yes, it would pick one of a dozen random songs to play next. Talk about technological advancement.

The next evolutionary moment came from two new technologies: MP3 files and inexpensive hard drives. MP3 files are important because you could now squish an entire song that used to take around 33 to 65 MB of space down to 4 or 5 MB. That means you could fit a lot of songs on a fairly small hard drive that could be packaged into a personal-music device. 

I am a big fan of Sony and work for them. I also know how Sony lost their market lead for the personal-music-device market. They lost it by throwing their weight behind CD's and ignoring MP3 players. Why, because they also owned Sony Music and the lawyers didn't want to make copying music any easier. Remember that you can make as many copies of a digital song as you want and it will always play the same with no degradation in quality.

Apple seized on Sony's missed opportunity and created the iTunes store. You could now buy the listening rights to a single song and store it on your iPod and later your iPhone. Now it is almost impossible to find CD's any more. We also discovered that moving your music from one iPhone to another became a problem as Apple tried to limit sharing of music. There is still a way to do it but requires a little bit of technical knowledge.

Now everybody has moved to streaming music. Nobody buys a song any more. Instead we stream songs from our favorite service such as Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, or Amazon Music. It is like we have gone back to listening to the radio but with much more control over the songs that get played. If you don't want to listen to meaningless advertisements, you can upgrade your streaming service and listen ad free.

Thinking about this evolutionary cycle, I have decided that I really don't like streaming music services and prefer going back to an MP3 music player. You have control over what songs you listen to and if you paid for them, don't have to continue to pay a monthly fee nor listen to those stupid ads. Then again I don't add to my music playlists very often. I have a set list and don't mind adding a single song a month for $1. If you are someone that changes the music listened to frequently, then you probably prefer a streaming service. I just happen to fit that demographic that doesn't. 

I Don't Know Any Popular Music Artists

One of my jobs at Sony is working with Sony Music Group and that involves analyzing the latest music trends. I have a spreadsheet in front of me with Artists' names and the top tracks being listened to on streaming music services and I don't recognize a single name nor song. I take that back. It is Christmas time and one of the most popular songs is by Mariah Carey called "All I Want for Christmas is You." It is at this point that I have to state that she is a Sony Music artist so people don't think I am promoting her music. The truth is, I think the song is overplayed and prefer quite a few other Christmas songs.

I know I may be old but I didn't think I had grown so out of touch with songs that are popular. The songs I hear on the radio are not even close to what is popular for those that stream music. Now I will confess that I am looking at data for a decidedly younger crowd that is fairly tech savey. That confuses me though as the second most popular song is by Drake and titled "IDGAF" which stands for "I Don't Give a F..." I'll let you fill in the last 3 characters but am surprised youth find the song so popular. While I know Drake is a popular Hip Hop artist, I have never heard any of his songs.

Streaming services have really changed the music we listen to. It is now possible to create your own playlist with only the songs you want to hear. When you hear some songs too many times, like "All I Want for Christmas," you can unlike it and add new songs to your list. While I have a radio in my car, I also have the ability to play songs from my smartphone so I am not subjected to songs that someone else thinks I should be listening to. Unfortunately I think that is true because I don't care what other people listen to. Youth probably don't have that luxury.

I remember riding the bus home in junior high and an older kid asking another if he liked the group AC DC. Not wanting to sound ignorant, the kid replied, "Of course." The older kid then probed by asking him to name a song. I went home that day trying to find out who AC DC was and some of their songs. The only tool I had was the radio. Fortunately "Back in Black" was popular at the time and received a lot of air time. I knew at least one song and felt that would keep me from getting pummeled on the bus by any older kids.

One of the advantages of streaming music is that you can find music that you really like. I hope there isn't any peer pressure trying to get you to listen to music that others think is popular. If that is the case, then we are no more advanced in our music listening than we were 30 years ago.

Advances in Music Notation

Nobody likes to see their parents get old and start forgetting things. One activity that helps keep the mind young is playing a musical instrument, especially one that you learned to play as a child. To help combat my own father's failing memory I worked with my son and got him an electric bass. Then I picked up a copy of Rocksmith. In addition to teaching you how to play guitar, it can also teach you how to play the bass.

My dad played bass in high school and even played with the local symphony. Then he got married, had kids, and never really picked it up again. Once in my youth, my dad borrowed a bass and tried to play it at a talent show but that was it. I have had a lot of fun learning how to play the guitar and hoped that my father would enjoy it as much as I do. What I didn't realize is how something as simple as advances in music notation would cause problems for him.

Guitar chords have been appearing on sheet music as long as I can remember. Then in the late 1980's and early 1990's a new guitar music notation started gaining favor. Instead of the usual 5 lines on the treble clef, guitar tabs have 6, one for each string. Instead of music notes, numbers represent which fret should be held to create the correct note. It is very intuitive for someone that does not have much music training. For someone like my dad that grew up playing the bass as well as the piano, it created a learning hurdle. Instead of embracing this new music notation, my dad ridicules it and belittles guitar players for not knowing how to "read music."

Fortunately I know enough about traditional music notations and guitar tabs to be able to explain the merits of the later. One thing you lose with tabs is timing information.There is no distinction between whole, half, quarter, or eighth notes. This is fixed by showing the treble clef notes above the space for lyrics and guitar tabs below them (often where the bass clef can be found in regular piano music).

The guitar is somewhat unique in that you can play the same note many different ways. If you hold the low-E string (the thickest one) at the 5th fret, it is an A note. That is the same note as the 2nd thickest string without any frets pressing. On a piano, each key represents a unique note and there are not any duplicates like there are on a guitar. Sometimes guitar music is written so that you will play the same note on 2 different strings. This is the way the introduction to "Wake me up When September Ends" by Green Day is written. The only way to indicate that with traditional music notation is to create a footnote that is impossible to figure out when sight reading the music. With guitar tabs, it is very intuitive and can easily be sight read.

There are technological advances happening around us constantly and it is important to embrace these advances even when they seem different and foreign. A lot of older people shy away from technological advances simply because they find it difficult to learn a new way of doing something. While it is easy to see the flaw in my own father, I too suffer from the same reluctance to embrace certain advancements. Naturally my kids are the ones that point it out to me.

Comments on a Post

Imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from another blogger commenting on one of my posts. I think in the entire time I have been posting, I have received maybe a dozen comments. She liked my posting on how to keep your mind active. As someone that is an advocate of music, she asked that I pass along a link to her site extolling the virtues of music lessons as a young adult. Perhaps you will find it useful.

Free Content - Part 2

My last posting provided a little history about how we went from software pirates to music pirates and now to movie pirates. Congress has proposed legislation to help curb this piracy, but is has been put on hold for the time being. This brings up the question: Is legislation the answer? In a nutshell, no.

If you look at the software and music industries, enacting new laws didn't really help. A combination of enforcing existing laws coupled with simple technological advances like software licensing keys had the largest success for the software industry. As for music, piracy just went underground. The same will happen with movies.

Talking with one of my co-workers exposed a mindset of the younger generation that was new to me. He expressed that teenagers and young adults expect certain things to be free. If you look at the software industry, open source is a large movement that gains more and more projects every day. The same thing is happening with music. If you look at iTunes, they constantly have the free song of the week. There are also bands that make their music freely available from their websites. One would think this would kill innovation. I personally believe it has the opposite effect. If you are a commercial software company and put out a sub-standard product, there is an open source project that your customers can replace you with. That means your product had better be good enough that people will pay money for it. I see the same thing happening with music.

So what is the solution for Hollywood? My suggestion would be to embrace the Internet and don't try to litigate or legislate it. Use it as a new medium for distributing your products. While fewer people are interested in actually buying DVDs, more people are interested in streaming movies from places like Netflix. Think about it. If you don't have to create a DVD and ship it somewhere, you shouldn't have to charge nearly as much, but still be able to make the same amount of profit.

Unfortunately movies are not the end of free content. Today I saw a prototype of a new electronics device created on a 3D printer. It is only a matter of time before you will be able to download plans from the Internet and create your own Ferrari. Let's see Congress try to figure out how to legislate that one.

Free Content - Part 1

I recently had a conversation with several coworkers and we talked about the new anti-piracy legislation that seems to have been put on hold by Congress. On one hand, Hollywood wants to protect their movies, and on the other, Silicon Valley doesn't want censorship, which is what they felt was happening. This brought up a very interesting discussion.

When computers first came out, there was little to keep friends and family from sharing software with each other. If you had a program your friend wanted, simply make a copy of it and he had it too. Then software companies came up with anti-piracy methods to keep this from happening. After all, why should software developers miss out on lost revenue from software pirates.

Then the Compact Disk or CD was developed. The deterrent that kept people from copying and sharing music was the massive size of one single song. Twenty years ago, 75 megabytes was huge and that only got you a single song. Back then, a 100 megabyte hard drive was considered massive. Eventually better compression techniques were created and the size of disk drives increased. Gigabyte hard drives emerged and MP3s shrunk the size of a song to around 5 megabytes. Then the same problem the software industry faced years earlier, plagued music companies. Their solution was to litigate. Sites like Napster were shut down and several high-profile offenders were slapped with huge fines and threats of jail. Unfortunately the music companies were not nearly as effective as software companies and stolen music continues to be a problem.

Now we face the same issue with movies and Hollywood isn't too happy with the music industry's success. Hard drives have continued to increase capacity to the point where countless movies can be stored on even the most basic laptop. The movie industry has enough trouble making profitable films and they don't want to loose any potential revenue. So what is their solution? Lobby Congress to enact tougher laws regarding copyrighted material. This includes creating a new police force, which is made up of Internet service providers (ISPs). Furthermore, anyone can claim a copyright which could force ISPs to suspend service to anyone with a false claim against them. If you don't like the content found on a website, claim it is yours and force the ISP to remove it. Then wait for the court system to churn through all of the false claims, which takes a lot of time.

So that is how we got to this point. What do we do now?

Internet Music

Lately I have been listening to a lot of music on the Internet. It makes me wonder how much longer traditional radio stations will be around. While I doubt they will all disappear completely, I do believe we will see a number of them cease to exist. After all, how many "Top 40" radio stations do we need in one broadcast area?

I started going to the Internet for music because I was tired of listening to the same songs over and over on the radio. The first place I went went was Pandora which is like an Internet radio station. You can listen for a number of hours each month for free as long as you are willing to also listen to advertisements. One nice thing about Pandora is that you can specify what types of music you hear. If you don't like a song, simply click on the thumbs-down icon and you will never hear it again.

Pandora is great when you want to hear different music than you might already have on your iPod or in your MP3 collection. Many regular broadcast radio stations also have an Internet presence and allow you to listen to their content even though you are half-way around the world. However, what about those times when you want to hear a specific song? For that, my preference is YouTube. If you bring up another browser tab, you don't even have to watch the music video (some of which are really awful).

YouTube has been a lot of fun lately. There were some songs that I remember hearing on the radio when I was a young kid and I have been able to listen to them again. I was really young when the Bay City Rollers released "Saturday Night" but I remember that it was very popular. I also remember C. W. McCall's "Convoy." I can't help but laugh when I go back to listen to some of those old songs. Some are still good while I can't understand what I found appealing in others. However, it is fun to take a walk down memory lane every once and a while.