Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Guitar Hero: Metallica, which lets gamers play along with the band and its influences, comes out in the U.S. on March 29. Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett spoke to me this afternoon at the South by Southwest music festival about the game and other issues related to music and technology.

Metallica's Kirk Hammett as he appears in Guitar Hero: Metallica.

(Credit: Gamespot)

Q: With the Guitar Hero game, do you think you'll be reaching longtime fans, or is this mainly a way to reach younger fans who might know a song or two but don't really know Metallica?
Hammett: We'll be reaching fans across the board, longtime fans, fans who've just gotten into us, Guitar Hero fans who might have reached Metallica through Guitar Hero. It works in a lot of different directions. Our demographic gets wider and wider through the years; at our shows we see a lot of kids who are 10, 12 years old, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that their parents have been fans for a long time. And a certain percentage of it is because they're Guitar Hero fans and they got turned on to Metallica through Guitar Hero, and they want to actually see Metallica as a live performing band.

Were you a Guitar Hero player before this?
Hammett: I have to say, I've only really played Guitar Hero once. I'm the kind of person who, if I start playing video games, I don't stop. So a few years back, I said to myself that I have to stop playing because I don't play guitar, I don't eat, I don't sleep. I had found out about Guitar Hero from seeing it in the media, seeing the poster on the wall in the studio where we were recording our album, hearing about it from friends. So I did actually play it once, I played against Lars and I beat him. He plays it all the time. But I had to tell him I had a fair advantage being a guitar player myself.

Do you find there's a split between musicians and non-musicians? I think a lot of musicians look at Guitar Hero and say "I'd rather be playing."
Hammett: I never feel like I'm playing my instrument enough. It leads back to what I was saying earlier about being totally obsessive. I've talked to other guitar players who've played this game, it's apples and oranges, it's a different thought process between this and actually playing an instrument.

Do you think kids growing up today are going to be drawn to games like Guitar Hero instead of learning how to play the guitar? Or do you think musicians will always be musicians?
Hammett: I think it's going to be responsible for creating a lot of musicians, for kids making the leap to playing a real instrument. I have a friend who works at a music instrument store, and he told me that because of Guitar Hero, guitar sales are up. For me, that's a great thing because these kids are being brought up on the music that's in Guitar Hero, it's great music, great classic rock, great classic metal that they wouldn't hear otherwise. It's all just about pop drivel on the radio. They're getting an education through Guitar Hero, and if some of these kids are truly inspired, they'll make the leap and grab a guitar and learn how to play the songs for real.

What about the songs from other bands that are in the game? Did you guys pick all of those bands, and were there any specifics that you picked?
Hammett: Well, I wanted UFO to be in there, but for legal reasons we couldn't do it so we had to settle for Michael Schenker Group. Same thing with The Misfits. We would have loved for The Misfits to be on here, but for legal reasons, we have Samhain instead.

Do you have a recording rig that you use to get ideas down outside the studio?
Hammett: Traditionally, I'll use a small recording processor, which I'll eventually load into ProTools. A lot of the stuff written in the last four or five years, I used (Apple's) GarageBand. Then from GarageBand I put it on a CD and then dumped that into ProTools. GarageBand is really handy in that I can just have my laptop, have my guitar, have a guitar cord, and plug my guitar into the laptop. Once I've tweaked it and modified things, and built upon the ideas, I'll put the music into ProTools, which has become the industry standard. So for me, it's really about GarageBand and ProTools.

So you just go direct, you don't even need a microphone?
Hammett: Sometimes I'll use an Mbox, yeah.

I know they captured a lot of moves for the game, how did that work?
Hammett: They filmed us with sensors on us. It was pretty cool. We lip-synced to the songs, and they got full-motion captures of us playing the music. They did full body scans of us as well.We tried to aim it to be as accurate as possible.

CNET has written several times over the years about Audacity, a free, general-purpose sound-editing tool. I've known people who have used it to manipulate sound for podcasts and the like. But I'd completely forgotten about it until today.

One of my colleagues been looking for a tool to split recorded audio presentations into portions to go with the corresponding individual PowerPoint slides. I thought Apple's GarageBand might work, but he found it too opaque, and our office (like most) is PC-heavy, which would have complicated efforts to train other folks on how to do this job.

Then he downloaded Audacity, and it fit the bill perfectly. It let him see audio waveforms to figure out where the speaker stopped talking between slides, easily split the recording at those points, and clean up other extraneous noise from the track. At the same time, it didn't burden him with features more geared toward budding musicians such as built-in instrument sounds or an on-screen keyboard.

Reading through the documentation, I realized Audacity might be the perfect solution to a problem I've been facing myself. Today, I use Microsoft's Digital Media Plus Pack to record my LP records to digital format. But Microsoft discontinued that XP-only product when it released Vista and doesn't support it anymore. Worse, it records only to Windows Media Audio, which means I have to convert the files to AAC or MP3 before I can play them on my iPod.

But Audacity lets me record directly to MP3 using the LAME encoder, which I've already got installed for another audio-conversion program. Although MP3 offers sound at the same bitrate as AAC and WMA, hard drive space is now plentiful enough to encode everything at 320kbps, which is perfectly adequate for on-the-go sound.

Screenshot of Audacity running on Windows

(Credit: Audacity)

Recently, I've noticed two interesting changes at my local Apple Store, both evidence of Apple's mastery of retail.

My local Apple Store is an attraction, not just a store.

A few months ago, they remodeled to get rid of the large screen and seating area they used for in-store workshops. I liked the few classes I happened in upon during the weekend, but most of them were sparsely attended, and the workshops I really wanted to take--like Garage Band--were during normal work hours. In place of the demo area, they more than doubled the size of the Genius Bar, Apple's in-store customer support desk. The end-result: a mass of highly engaged customers at the back of the store, instead of a mostly empty space. (Engaged might mean enraged, but it seems that even customers with serious problems--like a dead iPod out of warranty--remain calm when faced with a real person as opposed to an anonymous phone support employee.)

More recently, my wife went in to buy me a Shuffle as a surprise--my 4th-generation iPod died a copule years ago, her iPod is permanently connected to an iHome clock radio upstairs, and my 30GB Zune is a little bulky for walking the dog or going to the gym. After talking to a salesperson who led her through colors and GB sizes and prices, she said she was ready to buy and started walking toward the registers at the front of the store. Not necessary--the salesperson had a handheld device with a credit card scanner, checked her out on the spot, and e-mailed her a receipt. Genius.

Sony has a lot of great products as well, but when I go to the nearby Sony Style store, it always feels a little haphazard, with PlayStations next to flat TVs next to Blu-ray discs. And it's never crowded. And I never leave with a purchase. (Although the array of flat-screens looping this Bravia commercial is refreshingly inoffensive--very little branding--and completely mesmerizes my two-year-old daughter.)

I've occasionally seen and heard rumors of a Microsoft push into retail. If so, they should be using the Apple Store as a model--nobody else does it better.

I've always preferred prognostication to nostalgia, so rather than replay the best of 2007, I'll use these late December doldrums to make 10 predictions for the coming year. Some editors will warn you that this kind of list is suicide--it's too easy for everybody to look back a year later and see where you were wrong--but it hasn't hurt Cringely, so here goes. In no particular order.

DRM will die. The trendline is clear--Apple's been selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes since May, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store has three of the four majors signed up, and eMusic has become the second-most-popular music download service (after iTunes) thanks in part to its longstanding insistence on selling DRM-free MP3s. A year from now, DRM will be irrelevant and hardly used in digital music. All four labels will agree sell their songs without DRM on Amazon. Nearly every iTunes audio (but not video) file will be DRM-free, and Apple will get rid of the "Plus" designation. Some music subscription services like Rhapsody and Microsoft's Zune Pass might retain DRM so that users can't cancel their subscriptions and keep the songs they've downloaded, but they'll be the last holdouts--and some of them might try eMusic's approach of limiting monthly downloads rather than limiting compatibility and usage with DRM.

3G iPhone and iTunes. A 3G iPhone is a fairly safe prediction, given that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson already let it slip, but I think there'll still be a small surprise embedded in the announcement: iTunes 3G, a service that will come with the phone and give users anytime-anywhere downloads of any audio content in the iTunes Music Store. Impulse buying will go through the roof.

No Zune phone. Microsoft won't release an iPhone competitor this year--at least not one with hardware designed by Microsoft. The company might release some sort of software update or client application that allows Windows Mobile users to play songs from the Zune Marketplace and transfer them from the Zune PC client software to their phones, but even that probably won't happen until 2009. And it'll sink like a lead balloon against v3 of the iPhone, at which point Microsoft will bend to the inevitable and start building its own phone from scratch.

GarageBand will win a Grammy. Not the program itself, but somebody will make a record using Apple's Garage Band--which comes included with every Macintosh sold--as their primary recording and mixing tool, and that record will win a Grammy award. There's already been a critically acclaimed movie, Tarnation, made exclusively with iMovie, so now it's time for all those bedroom musicians to get into the do-it-yourself spotlight.

Mashups will go mainstream. Have mashups already jumped the shark? The controversy about The Grey Album, in which DJ Danger Mouse combined lyrics from Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' untitled white album, is almost four years old. There was a burst of experimentation from big-time artists like David Bowie and Beck around the same time, but not much since 2005. Nonetheless, I predict that artists and even some labels will begin re-releasing their back catalogs as standalone instrumental and vocal tracks, and fans will recombine like crazy using programs like Garage Band and Splice. At least one mashup will get significant radio play, with the complete approval of the original artists. (Although you might say that Puff Daddy accomplished this 10 years ago.) They might even be incorporated into video games like Rock Band--imagine the challenge of having to sing Abba while the rest of the band plays Judas Priest. By the end of 2008, putting a mere song on your social-networking profile will seem hopelessly old-fashioned.

The campaign--don't call it "marketing"--that preceded Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero release will become the gold standard for building audience engagement for tours, albums, or new artists.

Year Zero will become the precedent. On the plane trip home from visiting family over Christmas, I read Eric Davis's analysis of Led Zeppelin's fourth album, part of the 33 1/3 book series. While a lot of it seemed like a stretch--as is the case with any highly intellectualized deconstruction of rock music--it did remind me of a certain sensation created by certain artists and albums, a sense that the listener is more than a mere consumer, but is in fact an active member in a secret club that only other members fully understand, a sort of musical Masonic society. Think of that Zeppelin album, the Grateful Dead, the Residents, or Secret Chiefs 3. In 2007, Trent Reznor, working with 42 Entertainment, took this kind of mystical clubbishness and updated it for the digital era. USB drives with leaked tracks from the upcoming Year Zero record were surreptitiously placed in bathroom stalls at concert venues. Phone numbers with frightening secret messages were encoded in bursts of static or out-of-phase audio signals. Cell phones were distributed to fans who figured out some of the clues; a phone call placed to those phones summoned them to a secret concert. In 2008, we'll see more of these kinds of musical events that use digital technology to break down the wall between audience and artist.

The world's best offline record store will go online. There's nothing else like Amoeba Records. Its three locations in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offer unsurpassed selection--including cellophane-packaged vinyl I've never seen anywhere else--and seem to be curated by music fans with amazing depth and breadth of knowledge. In 2007, Amoeba took its first tentative steps into digital distribution, releasing exclusive recordings from Gram Parsons and Brandi Shearer in both MP3 and CD formats. In 2008, I predict Amoeba will finally go online in a huge way, offering an unsurpassed quantity of MP3 downloads from every imaginable source: major labels (like Amazon MP3 and the other high-profile stores), independent labels (like eMusic), and do-it-yourselfers (like CDBaby). Look for the nascent Amoeba label to offer distribution on terms never before seen in the recording industry--more of a non-exclusive commission model like CD Baby than a typical all-inclusive marketing-recording-publishing-distribution deal like most labels have favored--and for several high-profile artists who've recently quit their labels to sign on.

The loudness wars will end. It's been repeated so many times, it's become a cliche: today's recordings are mastered too loud, eliminating dynamic range and making it hard to listen to a complete album. In 2008, artists and producers will finally begin to demand a return to proper mastering, and radio stations and record execs will be in no position to contradict them.

The concert business will follow the recorded music business down. It's a bad time to be a big rock concert promoter like Live Nation. According to a recent story in Pollstar, the concert business actually declined in 2007, despite high-profile reunion tours by The Police and Van Halen and David Lee Roth--two acts with so much internal strife that nobody expected to see them on stage again. I say the 15 percent drop in ticket revenues from 2006 to 2007 will be followed by the same or greater drop next year. Music fans are fed up with exorbitant ticket prices, false scarcity, and quasi-legal scalpers, and there are only so many more nostalgia acts to trot out. Where are the young bands that can sell out 20,000-seat arenas for the next 5, 10, 20 years? (And before you call me out on the Arctic Monkeys, let me just counter with Oasis. Huge in the U.K., briefly popular in the U.S., and irrelevant to all but the die-hardest of fans 10 years later.) In other words, the concert business is about to suffer from the main problem that's hurting the recording industry--not MP3s, not piracy, but lack of interest and investment in artists with long-term (as opposed to instant) commercial potential.

Led Zeppelin will play again, but not tour. Speaking of nostalgia, it won't be 1973, but the reunited Led Zeppelin will play a handful of shows in the U.S., focusing on a multi-night stand at New York's Madison Square Garden timed around Robert Plant's 60th birthday on August 20.

It's intellectually lazy to divide the world into two types of people, but when it comes to using computers to create music, it seems to be true.

With this $30 microphone from Logitech and Garage Band, you've got a quick and dirty way to record home demos.

(Credit: Logitech)

The first group are what I'd call digital music enthusiasts. They compose almost exclusively at a computer, using a MIDI controller and/or sounds from a wide variety of third-party digital sources--loops from a program like ACID, beats and virtual synthesizers from a program like Reason, short samples that they recorded themselves or spliced from another source.

I'm a member of the second group, the reluctant analog dinosaurs. We came up playing instruments other than the piano or keyboard--guitar, bass, horns, drums--and value the spontaneity and collaboration of a live setting. To us, a night composing in front of a computer seems unbearably tedious. Instead, we use computers mainly in the recording process--either recording to hard disk, or mixing from another medium (ADAT or perhaps analog tape) to a program like ProTools. Of course, many people start in this group and eventually become full-fledged digital enthusiasts, but a lot of us approach computer-generated music with suspicion and even a bit of (often undeserved) scorn.

I was under the mistaken impression that Garage Band, part of the iLife suite that comes with every new Macintosh computer, is a tool for budding digital enthusiasts. A lot of the program's appeal is that you don't need to be a musician to use it--Garage Band includes dozens of built-in instrument sounds, with thousands more available through Apple's Jam Packs, and you don't even need a MIDI keyboard to enter notes, but can type them directly onto the typewriter keypad (the middle row of letters serves as the white keys, and the top row as black keys). It's trivially easy to import audio files or sounds from other programs such as iDrum, then cut and splice and loop and add effects.

But I recently realized how easy it is to use Garage Band for simple home recordings. Don't worry about an audio interface--sure, you'll eventually need one when you want to make higher-quality recordings or do live multitracking--but you can get started with a simple USB microphone. You'll have to be careful with the levels, and you can't record loud amplifiers or drums or it'll distort in ugly ways. (Use Garage Band's built-in drum beats or a program like iDrum.) You won't get a finished release-quality recording, but if you just want to hear how a few parts sound together before bringing them to the rest of the band, or need to make a quick sketch of a musical idea you got in the middle of the night, this is a cheap and very easy way to get started.

Last night, I started a professional audio production program at the University of Washington Extension. There are about 40 students in the class. A half dozen or so are like me--in our 30s or older, with full-time careers outside the music industry, but with a longtime interest in recording and a lot of experience writing and playing music.

(Credit: FL Studio)

But most are full-time students, or between college and graduate school, and are expecting to make a career in the music industry. Some of these kids are frighteningly single-minded--there's an 18-year-old who's been messing around with recording software since he was 9 and claims to be competent on drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards. Nearly all of them have created and recorded many hours of their own music, usually playing all the instruments. Several of them expect to start their own record labels, on which they'll release music by friends and artists they like. Their level of excitement is remarkable to me, given all the doom and gloom about collapsing record sales and the death of the big label system.

But most interesting to me: what software do they use? One guy recorded everything in Garage Band, but the program that kept coming up again and again was Fruity Loops (recently renamed FL Studio).

Nearly everybody who used it prefaced it with some sort of apology--"I know it's not considered a real recording program"--and our instructor didn't mention it among his recommendations of low-cost entry-level software (he's a huge fan of Cubase3 SE for multitrack mixing, even as he acknowledges that Pro Tools is the industry standard for recording). Nonetheless, Fruity Loops seems to be the standard for budding musicians--just like kids used to buy a Strat and a cheap Peavey amp, and maybe a Tascam 4-track tape recorder, now they buy a laptop, MIDI keyboard, and cheap sequencing software.