Some background: Most of you probably don’t know this because I haven’t talked about it much, but before I got involved with music on YouTube, I used to be a sample library programmer/producer (proof). A pretty good one. My products were given high star ratings and reviews in Electronic Musician magazine, Sound on Sound and elsewhere.

My first sample library release was so successful in fact that the Garritan company – makers of the Garritan Personal Orchestra, which is shipped with every single copy of Finale Music Notation software – flew me out to Seattle for a week-long interview. I was given the job, but unfortunately had to turn it down due to the amount of unforeseen traveling that would have been involved.

During my time working in the sample library field, I got to learn and collaborate with some very knowledgable music makers and music tool makers. I was an official product tester for Native Instruments. I was on a beta team for GigaStudio. But most importantly, I got to have regular phone calls with Tom Hopkins. Tom is the man behind the programming of the Garritan Personal Orchestra, which was an industry changing product when it was released.

Tom and I got into a number of discussions about composing, arranging, and performing music using nothing but sampled instruments. His feelings were strong that sample library technology had given us an opportunity to finally make music “perfect”.

What’s a sample library? Let me explain. Typically when you play a keyboard, you are hearing a synthesized (fake) sound. That sound resembles a piano, or a violin, or a harp, or a trumpet. But it is not a recording of any of those things, it is synthesized.

On the other hand, a sample library is an actual recording of every single note on any given instrument. The more expensive sample libraries include not just every single note, but also every single note played in a variety of ways (articulations), and at a variety of volumes (velocities (different velocities are important because some instruments change sound (timbre) dramatically when they are played softly compared to when they are played loudly).

So, when using a sample library, when you hit the A above middle C, you trigger an actual recording (or a “sample”) of someone playing an A note on a violin (or any other sampled instrument you may be using). And most violin sample libraries aren’t just recordings of random violin majors, no, national orchestras have been sampled, one player at a time, to build massive orchestral sample libraries. They are recorded in state of the art performance halls for reverb-baked-in libraries, or in professional isolation rooms for completely dry libraries that you can add your own ‘verb to in post production.

SIDENOTE: The most impressive orchestral sample library is the Vienna Symphonic Library. A special facility was built in Vienna solely for the purpose of recording, editing and programming this library. The full library consists of 1,143,482 individual note recordings and costs $13,990 to purchase. The total package clocks in at 746 GBs of data. But it sounds amazing! ;)

Okay, back to the individual sample recordings…

Through the use of MIDI programming and a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, like Logic, Cubase, ProTools, Sonar, et al.), you can actually control whether each note is bowed up on the violin, bowed down, sliding to the note from a higher note, sliding to the note from a lower note, playing the note harshly, playing the note gently, playing with vibrato, playing without vibrato. Some libraries even let you control which string the note is being played on.

Even if you’re not a music composer, you can clearly see how powerful and revolutionary and… cool this technology is. You basically have a 100 piece orchestra dangling from puppet strings tied to your hands, mouse and keyboard.

You control all of the above with MIDI data. MIDI records and plays back a musical performance, but it’s not an audio file. It’s a list of commands. A single MIDI data file will tell your sampling software to play an A note, slid in to from a lower note, with vibrato, for two beats. That same data file will tell your sampling software how loud and hard to play the note, and will include any minute pitch bends or muting or other playing/performance cues you can think of. You get up to 127 different commands for each and every note on each and every instrument!

Want to learn more about MIDI? I made TWO separate VIDEOS about MIDI data a few years ago.

An additional benefit, because all this MIDI data is not an audio file, you can edit every single command independent of the others. Let’s say I program in a perfect pitch bend, vibrato, volume and slide for my note, but then, “oops, that was supposed to be an A sharp, not an A!”. No problem, I change just one of those 127 commands, and now all that perfectly programmed data plays back just the same, only now it’s a recording of an A sharp, not an A.

If your mind’s not completely blown right now, you’re not human.

MIDI and Controller Data in Cubase

With all of this insane note and performance control, you could compose an entire original symphony, performed by a first-class orchestra, one note at a time, completely from your desktop. The resulting recording would be made up of thousands of individual actual recordings of individual notes, no synthesized sounds. And, most importantly for my friend Tom Hopkins… you could make it perfect. Not one mistake, not one early note, and zero “swing” on any of the notes.

Tom went on to mention some of the other exciting aspects. Composers could now write pieces that could never be performed before. Computers can play notes faster than any human ever could. Computers can sustain those faster tempos indefinitely. Computers could sustain notes longer than is physically possible in the world we inhabit. No longer would composers have to search endlessly for a virtuoso who could handle their works. Their computer could do it, just as easily as it could check their email for them. And given the recording quality of the individual sampled notes, very few would know the difference.

So is all this perfection really better than a human performance? Sure, humans make mistakes. Humans are not metronomes. Humans add swing to triplets and other note patterns. But is the alternative not stale? Is the alternative not… soulless?

This is the question I am currently struggling with as my band The Caulden Road begins production on our first album. Sure Christian and I can program in every drum and percussion hit. We could program in pianos and violins and choirs and harps and anything else that’s ever been sampled. And it can be perfect. And it can sound like a million bucks. But will it still have life? Will it still have passion? Hiring choirs ain’t cheap. And an orchestra won’t fit in my office/home studio. And maybe perfect is what the modern music fan wants anyway. Quantized rhythm sections, pitch-corrected vocals.

It’s just, something about it all might be too synthetic for me.

PS. Wanna hear a sample library in action? This is an original piece I composed and programmed using a “lite” version of the VIenna Symphonic Library mentioned above, along with a few sampled instruments from my own private collection I’ve produced:

Lullaby by Alan Lastufka

AKA “we’re going to need a bigger harddrive”
AKA “why I just deleted my entire iTunes library”

With the stroke of one key, I deleted over 10,000 songs this weekend. I was tired. Tired of listening to a random playlist and going an hour without hearing a song I really liked. Tired of missing ID tags like artist names, track numbers, proper album release dates… Tired of all this music I have no connection with.

Then, I pulled all of my old CDs out of storage.

Nine Inch Nail’s The Downward Spiral. Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes. Roger Waters’ Amused to Death. Ahhh… now these were albums. These were songs I had a connection with. I had the lyrics booklets. I had the various inserts and limited edition slip cases. I had 1,000 finger print smudges on each disc from repeated playing and traveling.

The music coming out of the speakers was the same as it was yesterday, but the listening experience had changed.

I began building towers of CDs on my office floor. One stack for albums I couldn’t wait to reimport. Another stack for albums I wanted, but could put off importing, and others still that had a few good tracks, but also a few bad ones.

I began the process of rebuilding my iTunes music library from scratch. I filled in every ID tag before importing. I corrected every song title variation that bugged me, and properly labeled all special editions, imports, bonus tracks, reissues and featured artists.

I even used the vastly overlooked “sort album” ID tag feature to input the year the album was originally released. Now, when I browse my music library, each album is listed first by the artist, and then in the order it was released, NOT alphabetical order. A small detail, but a really important one when listening to more than random singles.

For instance, this glorious collection of Tori Amos CD singles (US and UK imports)…

…were a mess in my old iTunes. Now, they are presented in the actual order of release, not alphabetic order:

…ah! So much better!

I also imported every track utilizing the Apple Lossless codec (ALAC). This is a little technical but, basically, when you rip CDs to mp3, you are throwing away about half of the audio signal information. So you know those horribly pixelated jpgs you sometimes see online, or the YouTube videos that were processed before 2009 where the edges are just kinda blurry on everything – yeah, that’s what you’re doing to your music when you use mp3 or other lossy compressions. Apple Lossless does just what its name says, it imports your CDs with zero loss of the original audio signal. The files are bigger, but so is the sound. =)

I then spent hours on Google Images, tracking down accurate album art for each title. So this Smashing Pumpkins CD singles box set…

…actually has accurate album cover art:

Now my new music library is clean, and organized, and only filled with the good stuff. No more “Track 01”s no more “alexday_covers_ladygagaomglol.mp3”, just full, (personally) important albums that I can listen to without skipping or randomizing. And ones that I can pull the lyric booklets out for, and sing along (out of tune) to every word.

I particularly enjoyed digging in to my Pink Floyd mini LP box set again…

Which ended up in all its lossless digital glory as…

From here on out, if I want an album enough to spend money on it, I will buy the physical package. I know, first hand, how hard artists (and some good labels) work on the physical packaging of their releases, and I miss holding a piece of each artist in my hand as I listen to them. I will utilize the free streaming players that so many artist use, from Alex Day to… myself, on their websites to listen to the albums before making a purchasing decision. And my iTunes will again be relevant to my musical interests.

It’s been a very relaxing, enjoyable (looong) weekend. =)

I’m coming up on the fifth anniversary of my original YouTube channel “fallofautumndistro”. It’s been a great five years. I’ve gained over 60,000 subscribers, my videos were watched over 7.5 million times, I worked on a lot of great projects with a lot of great friends, all who I met because of that channel.

But I haven’t updated it in months. I’ve only uploaded two new videos in the last year. I just feel like I’ve done all I can do with that channel.

So, it’s time for a change.

Today I uploaded a video called “Nothing Left To Prove” to a new, small channel tucked away in a quiet little corner of YouTube. That channel can be found here:

http://youtube.com/persistenceofvideo

I had been vlogging there, but not promoting the channel at all, just letting people find me on their own through video responses, comments I left on other videos and the like. (I’ve recently removed all of those vlogs, see the following)

But that really wasn’t pushing me to do anything more with the channel than treat it as a response channel.

I don’t want to just respond to what’s happening around me and with me, I want to affect the things and people around me. So I’m being a little more proactive with the channel now.

My last channel, fallofautumndistro, quickly turned from a tutorial and video art channel, into a parody and music channel, in my quest for subscribers and views. Can you blame me? Subscribers and views are the shit! But somewhere along that path, I lost interest. And my upload history proves that.

My new channel, persistenceofvideo, isn’t going to chase subscribers or views. I’m simply going to make things that make me smile. And hope that they make you smile too… enough to subscribe, and like, and comment, and share with your friends, and gah, I’m doing it again!

Anyway, TL;DR version: fallofautumndistro is now dead, persistenceofvideo is rising from its ashes.

My new first video:

It has been one year since I released my debut album, Erase This, with Luke Conard.

I don’t usually celebrate these kinds of anniversaries. And had the album not been released only four days before my birthday, I probably wouldn’t have remembered the date. But Erase This isn’t really like any of my other projects.

First, there was the budget difference. With Taking Leave, Tom Milsom and I did everything. Studio time was extremely limited and hurried. Our instrument choices were limited to what we had on hand. We mixed and mastered the EP ourselves. And all of that shows. For Erase This, I was determined to not be limited by my own talents or musical knowledge, or lack there of.

So I invested a great deal of money in the writing, recording and production of Erase This. In the end, well over $10,000 that I have receipts for, and probably much more in small PayPal payments that I never recorded. I hired the best producer I could find, Christian Caldeira, who originally was just supposed to fill in for our absentee drummer. Without Christian behind the mixing board, Erase This as it stands today, would not exist.

I hired some of the best songwriters I knew to work with me. I know my own strengths, and my own weaknesses. I am a very strong lyricist, and wrote every line on Erase This. But my melodies lack… well, melody. The majority of the music on Erase This was written by Jason Munday and Raven Zoe. But some of the tracks, or elements of some tracks were written by Eddplant, JB Dazen, Tom Milsom or Ted Hu. All people who seriously know their shit.

I hired half of the DFTBA Records artist roster to record their own versions of every song on the album, resulting in the second bonus disc which features the entire album re-performed by Craig Benzine, Alex Day, Meghan Tonjes, Mike Lombardo, Eddplant and others. Truly the best “collaboration” I’ve had the privilege of being involved with yet.

Second, there was Luke Conard’s voice. Luke is a frontman. He’s got the voice. He’s got the personality. He’s got the looks. His voice soars on Erase This. He’s told me personally that Erase This is usually the CD he reaches for when sharing his new music with family and friends. His falsetto on “Shortwave, Part 1” still gives me goosebumps.

Finally, there is the staying power. I don’t end up liking most of the things I create after some time passes. I can’t watch my old YouTube videos, I can’t read old zines or blog posts. My 4-track and shoebox full of tapes are embarrassing. But I can crank the hell out of Erase This and enjoy it. Not just listen, but enjoy it. Some people tease me on last.fm or skype when they see I’m listening to my own music. But what’s the point in creating something that you yourself wouldn’t even listen to and enjoy? I set out to create my ideal record, and, as my iTunes play count will tell you, I believe I succeeded.

After manufacturing costs and paying out royalties to the main players on Erase This, I’ve barely made back half of what I spent to produce the album. But I would do it again in a heart beat. I have a job, my job is other people’s music. Luckily, that means my music can be about personal expression, and if that comes at the price of lower sales, that’s just fine with me.

Next, I’m going to attempt to branch out from concept albums and story arcs with my new musical project, The Caulden Road. The Caulden Road released our first digital single last month, “Shine” with a rock version of my song “Summer of ’09” (originally performed by ALL CAPS) as the b-side. Writing and recording singles is exciting and moves much quicker than producing a full concept album. Though our second digital single has been sidetracked as we’re now the backing band for Mike Lombardo’s new mini-musical, The Alchemist (slated for release in July). So much for branching out, huh?

• Buy the album (new permanently reduced price of $12 for the CD + DVD Deluxe Edition): erasethis.com
• Listen to the entire album, streaming for free on YouTube: Erase This Playlist

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I get asked to do interviews often. Most of the time I do them. Some of those times I repost them here for you guys to read, if you’d like. This interview was for a college student writing a dissertation on YouTube’s influence on the music industry. If you’re writing your own school paper about YouTube, indie music or DFTBA Records, you might find some of this information helpful. =)

1) What was the reason you began to take interest in youtube to this greater extent? At what point did you think or realise that there was opportunity here to utilise YouTube in the way you have to start your label?

It was all very innocent. I never set out to start a company. Before DFTBA Records, I had been on YouTube over two years, making videos with my friends, vlogging, etc. In 2008 I was part of a project called fiveawesomeguys. There were five of us, and we took turns uploading a new video every single day of the week. I was Monday. Through this project I became pretty close friends with Charlie McDonnell (Tuesday) and Alex Day (Wednesday). They were both uploading fun songs to their YouTube channels fairly regularly. Their viewers kept asking them where they could buy those songs, I mean tens of thousands of people. Charlie and Alex had to keep telling them, “nowhere”. I decided I wanted to change that.

Knowing that there was already a demand, I didn’t have a lot of the hurdles that most new companies have. All I had to do was figure out how to scale the whole project once we started. I told my friend Hank Green about my idea for a YouTube record label and he saw the full potential even before I did. We registered the company and set out building a website/cart system. The first release came quickly. We had no idea what we were doing. We sat up all weekend (Hank, myself, and my friend Monica Carr) cutting and pasting addresses from PayPal, printing them on regular paper and scotch taping them to envelopes. We’ve, of course, upgraded our system since then.

We quickly learned how to make things more efficient. Our second release sold almost 1,000 CDs on preorder, more than I thought we’d ever sell of anything we put out. We grew from being run out of my bedroom, to the living room, to the garage, to a commercial warehouse and office space within a year and a half. Our releases now regularly land on the iTunes top sales charts. We’ve branched out into other merchandise, including t-shirts, buttons and stickers. We have over two dozen artists on our roster. We’ve been interviewed in the Chicago Tribune’s Red Eye, Hypebot, and numerous music blogs. And YouTube has written about us on a few occasions in their official blog.

2) Without Youtube, do you believe that your label’s success would have been as substantial as it has been (financially and culturally)?

Without YouTube there would be no label. The entire label was born out of the need for YouTube musicians to sell their music to fans who wanted to buy it. I believe our success has largely come from the simple motivation of filling that need. None of us wanted to be rock stars, none of us were business executives sitting around trying to capitalize on the internet. We’re just a bunch of kids making music that people enjoy.

3) You co-founded DFTBA Records, and your label has exclusively been signing artists/bands that made a name for themselves on Youtube. Do you want this to be something the company is known for? Are you concerned that you will limit your ability to sign future non-YouTube sensation artists?

DFTBA Records will always be known as the YouTube record label. We don’t work the way most labels work. We don’t make stars. We don’t spend buckets of money promoting our artists. We don’t pay for nation-wide tours. We don’t hire fancy directors to make fancy commercials… I mean, music videos. We work more like a distribution service, and let our artists promote themselves the way they feel most comfortable.

Because we don’t do any of that major label stuff mentioned above, we can pay our artists an average of 6 to 7 times more than other labels. Most major label deals are for 10% of sales. We pay our artists between 60 and 70% of their sales. That’s huge. That means artists no longer have to sell millions of records to eat and pay rent. We have some artists who only sell two or three thousand CDs a year and they’re able to make a living from their music that way.

By severely limiting our overhead, we can maximize what we pay our artists. We receive just enough of a cut to keep the business operating (rent, manufacturing, IT services, etc), keep ourselves paid (we have four employees, including myself and Hank), and turn a tiny profit each month that we then invest in smaller acts who can’t yet sell enough CDs to make a living from their music.

4) Do you feel as if “traditional” record companies in the business perceive you differently than their labels? What has the reception for you label in the industry been like?

I don’t think too many traditional record labels even know we exist. We’re barely a blip on their radars right now. That will change. And quickly. Mainstream music sales continue to nose-dive every year, while our sales last year TRIPLED over the year before it. But for those who have heard of us, there has been some excitement. Hypebot published a two part interview with me, and their readers reacted well to the label. Music Think Tank has published a number of my articles, all met with enthusiasm and excitement. So there is hope.

5) Rio Caraeff President and CEO of VEVO said that it is hard to charge people for something they have been able to get for free for years. When you decided to release your first album, did you find that your fans were prepared to pay for your music, which they were used to getting for free?

Yeah, there was very little drama when we launched. Mostly, there was just excitement. Our fans understand that we’re not mega stars. We’re not living the cliches that so many rock stars fall into. We take our music, and those willing to pay for it, very seriously. We play small shows. We read and reply to comments and emails. We work on collabs with our community. Most of us don’t even use the word “fans” as you did above. We’re all friends. Some of us make music, some of us make videos and some of us write blogs. I’ll read your blog, and you can listen to my music, and we can share our experiences with each other. If you feel like spending a couple bucks to buy something I’ve made, that’s awesome. And if you don’t, that’s cool too, we post most of our music to YouTube still, where it’s available for free streaming. We haven’t changed anything from how we were sharing and interacting three years ago when this all started, we were just also able to make the music available on iTunes for those who want a copy they can take with them outside of YouTube.

6) Do you think that YouTube will charge money for its services in the future? How would this impact your label?

YouTube may or may not try a premium service option in the future. But it will be exactly that, an option. Maybe if you pay a couple bucks a month you won’t have to sit through pre-roll ads. Or maybe you can upload longer videos. Etc. They will never make the site a paid site. They’ve become too big and too ingrained in people’s every day lives to suddenly shut out a huge portion of their users by going to a paid model. So, we’ve never given it much thought.

7) From what I understand, DFTBA encourages its artists to cover songs by their label-mates on Youtube? Can you explain why?

Because it’s fun! Actually, it was an idea I had after watching one of my favorite bands, Death Cab for Cutie, play a few late night talk shows. I thought about how, after someone releases a new song on YouTube, there is a lot of excitement and buzz for about exactly 24 hours, then it’s dead. It’s old news. No one cares. Or it gets buried in subscription boxes and viewers never get to hear the song. By having other artists cover those songs after they’re released, they get a new 24 hour excitement period. People are reminded those songs exist. New viewers are introduced to new artists or songs, the same way Death Cab for Cutie playing on the Letterman show exposes them to new listeners.

If DFTBA Records is going to struggle with anything in the future, it is that. The internet moves very quickly. A new song is no longer new after 24 hours, and there are tens of thousands of viewers patiently (and sometimes impatiently) waiting for your next new song. As an artist, that kind of consume-and-move-on attitude online can be depressing. And it means that successful artists have to be continuously creating to remain relevant.

I’d like to start slowing that cycle down. Before you know, by the time a song is 8 hours old, people will be talking about how they can’t wait for your next new song. And eventually, artists will burn out. After you create something, it should be given time to grow and mature and be experienced by music lovers. It shouldn’t have a three minute life span before the back button is clicked and the song is forgotten.

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