We’re glad to be part of the few and the brave that are helping pop the cherry of this unique event that will hopefully become a firm establishment on the Cape Town circuit.

Our lovely friends at Peachy Keen are gonna be spoiling everyone’s ears with their throwback-to-yesteryear sound and there will be prizes such as Alcohol, Tattoo Vouchers, More alcohol and…well, check out the link for yourself….it promises to be great though.

So better late than never we find ourselves writing about 7th son and The Hogs and the fact that we think they’re gonna be making some waves not just locally but on the international scene. Why do we think that? Well, haven’t you heard? Sublime is back together with new frontman, Rome. Despite what some die-hard fans are saying about the band not being the same (and i tend to agree) it is still going to cause a ripple effect in the music industry. Hopefully those ripple are going to be carrying ska and punk right back into the forefront of people’s minds and if bands like 7th Son and Hog Hoggidy Hog play their cards right they could be turning those ripples into waves and riding them all the way up to “quit my job and I’m now a full time band member baby!”.

7th Son and The Hogs in particular are the music industry equivalent of the guy(s) that you invite over to a party to make sure its gonna be interesting, that there’s always something to talk about, that somebody gets offended and somebody pukes in something that’s generally not meant to be puked in…Now, although we may appear to seem bias over these lovable bands (we should be, we play in them) you just have to watch these music videos to appreciate the effort that goes into both the music and video production…

]]> http://heypapalegend.com/2011/08/7th-son-the-hogs/feed/ 0 http://heypapalegend.com/2011/07/280/ http://heypapalegend.com/2011/07/280/#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:55:54 +0000 Ross http://heypapalegend.com/?p=280 Check this awesome new short movie by Tim Henny out.  It just got nominated as a finalist in the San Fransisco International Short Film Festival!!!  Well done Timmy!

We’d like to think the music we composed played some role in that

Password = mini

When I look at what music is popular these days I wonder about the state of mind of the general population.  Everybody seems to be digging on synthetic grooves and virtual instruments.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I love electronic music.  I think as a genre or group of genres it has a whole lot of merits and appeals to a certain area of the brain that, well, for want of a better turn of phrase…likes to shake tail…

What I’m talking about is music created on live instruments played by real people and then destroyed at some point along the line.  It doesn’t matter whether its a sound engineer that is ‘edit crazy’ or a mastering engineer who squashes all the dynamics out of a track in order to make it pop.  The result is the same.  The people are taken out of the music and the machines are put in.

Music by its very nature is a fluid thing.  It can be broken down, analyzed and divided into segments which can be seen to have mathematical elements such as beat subdivisions and chords built on the harmonic series; but you listen to a song that you love and that’s when maths falls dramatically short of the mark.

I digress though…

What I’m really trying to say is that I would like to see a return to the days when music was recorded for the energy and passion it contained.  Technology has allowed musicians to become lazy, why?  Well, we’ll just fix it in the mix, that’s why.  But can you add emotion in the mix?  Certainly to an extent, but most of it needs to come from the performance.  This is where I have ENORMOUS amounts of respect for guys like Jack White that have scoffed at the modern way of doing things and have kept it real and ‘organic’, recording music with little or no overdubs and using a sound that is so raw that it cuts through all the bullshit that we hear today.

The virtual instruments that one can buy these days are so good that it is getting cheaper and cheaper to compose big music works.  Where before you had to hire an orchestra, now all you need is the software and a keyboard.  A little know-how would also be good, but so many of the ‘composers’ out there making money, whether its from commercials or producing artists, don’t actually know what they’re doing.

The resulting sound?  Plastic.

Yes, the sounds are sampled phenomenally well.  You can create an orchestra that really sounds close to the real thing, but the fact of the matter is that you cannot beat the emotion felt when you have a real violinist or a real drummer playing the music the way they feel it.

The same goes for re-sampling live instruments.  So many people replace snares and kick drums after the recording when they’re mixing and for some styles of music you can get away with this, but you have to ask yourself…what would drummer say?  Maybe he hit a few of those snares in a subtly different way, maybe he did this because that’s the way he was feeling it?  Or maybe he miss-hit the snare because he was so into the music that his technique slipped just that little bit.  Do we now want to get rid of that?  Or is that maybe just part of the magic?

Either way, its human.

Its organic.

Its making music.

Saatchi & Saatchi briefed us to re-orchestrate a track sung by vocal legend, Sammy Davis Jnr, entitled “I gotta be me”.

The trend these days is to save on money and to use ‘plastic’ instruments, ie synthetic instruments.  Software companies are bringing out a continuous stream of extremely high-end ‘real’ sounding virtual instruments.  These are instruments where the sounds have not been created, but rather recorded with every available articulation and dynamic and then set to be triggered by a click of a mouse or a note on the piano keyboard.

We chose not to go with this approach and instead used real musicians, because one CANNOT replicate the sound, feel and emotion of a musician playing his/her instrument.

I just wanted to touch on that briefly, I think that the topic of real vs. virtual instruments will have to be discussed in another blog.

Please enjoy this new release!

My words aren’t enough…

This preview of the movie (still to be shot) is a thing of beauty.  Our good friend and director, Roy Zetisky, did 10 years of research on a story of which moved a nation but as yet has been untold.  It is the story of the very first riots against Apartheid that happened in New Brighton, PE.

The screenplay for the film has won numerous awards and when the film actually gets shot and released, it will easily rival any Hollywood blockbuster for production value and surpass many for content.

We did all the sound for this trailer, form composing the theme song for Zulani from Freshly Ground to sing ont, to doing the cinematic score, to final mix…and we loved every moment.

Okay, so I just got my copy of Dan Shout’s new album and it feeeeels gooood!!
Well done to everyone who was involved. Gorm (bru), never knew you cold design like such a mo-fo!  Sweet stuff man.
So, every mix engineer’s nightmare is to have an album you mixed get mastered and it comes back sounding different to what you were doing (cause that would mean the mixes sucked!), but to my relief it came back feeling and sounding pretty much the same!  I breathe a sigh of relief and bless Tim’s audio-nerd heart for being such a kieeeeeeeeef mastering engineer.  Sweetness and high-fives all around to everyone, oh, and in true soccer spirit maybe a slap on the arse too. (I never realised sportsman like to do the whole arse-slap thing so much, I thought it was just punk-rock musos…)

On the not-so-kief side, Hannes has moved on to oranger pastures, but things are still awesome between us, there’s still loads of bromance in the air so have no fear! The x-box will not be forgotten!

Most professional sound engineers know that the almighty Compact Disc is really anything but. The CD was born out of a manufactured need for “improvement” in a time when the music industry’s Toffee Noses (read record labels) were bored with the “lack of progress” in their industry.

Unlike it’s predecessor, vinyls, whose evolution spans more than a century, the CD-format was hammered together in rush by a few well paid mathematicians and scientists, with hardly any involvement from actual musicians and sound engineers.

You see,  digital recording, (unlike analog recording) by its very nature can be (and has been) improved more and more as computer technology grows, which pretty much equates to infinity. And although it was quite horrible compared to analog recording a few years back, digital recording today has undeniably evolved into a phenomenal recording medium, and is the staple medium world wide.

The problem is that all that improvement in recording quality (i.e sampling and bit rates) means almost squat when you’re always forced to down scale back to CD “quality” (44.1Khz / 16Bit).  Imagine TV recording and broadcasting reaching full 1080 HD, but TV’s never evolving past small black and white tubes on your grandma’s Formica kitchen counter.

Now, I must jump in and stop my own rant at this point and mention that CD’s today are not all bad. There have been improvements in the technology. Disks are pressed with more detail, laser technology has improved by leaps and bounds and the high quality of digital recordings made today do filter through to the final product. In fact, as I am only 26, I grew up with CD’s, only occasionally listening to my parents’ and grand parents’ vinyls, and if I was kept in the dark about the theory behind CD’s I  probably would never have complained, because the music still sounds great to me, as much on CD as on vinyl.

By now you’re wondering:  “So what’s your %$#@*&% point!?” and I apologise for the lengthy “intro”, but I needed you to understand where I’m coming from.

My real issue, the real reason I cry in the shower every morning while gently hugging a pool noodle, is the abomination that followed the CD. It followed in less than great footsteps to start with and was not even really conceived from the CD, but is rather some bastard offspring that is fast destroying the world of music, it should be called the mp666, but it hides behind a much less sinister name, it is the mp3.

Mpeg Layer 3 or Moving Picture Experts Group – Layer Three, was introduced to the (FILM) industry in the early 90′s as a compression tool for audio that dramatically reduces the size of audio files while retaining the original sound quality… apparently.

The very idea is absurd. Lets say you take a 3min song at CD quality – it will be about 30MB big. Encode it with a mp3 algorithm and it is reduced to about 3MB. Now the last time I checked the Chinese have not yet managed to hide tiny, well trained wizards in computers that roam motherboards looking to cast some spells, so I can assure you that the drastic reduction in size is not magic. That 27MB of data is lost, destroyed, deleted.  What remains is a faint resemblance of the song that is made up of only 10% of the original file.

Let’s say you take a high quality photograph of someone sitting on a chair, in a professional photography studio with proper lighting etc. Then give the developed photo to a talented amateur artist to copy with a few coloured pencils.

Then take that pencil drawing and show it to anybody and ask them what they see. They’ll inevitably say “a person sitting on a chair” and will probably be happy to look at it as is. If you never show them the original photograph, how will they know how great the original looked with it’s vivid colours, depth, textures, shadows etc.

The mp3 equates to virtually the same thing. You see, as far as compression codecs go, most of the mp3 algorithms out there are really good at what they do (hence me suggesting a “talented amateur artist”). However the fact remains that converting a file into mp3 destroys almost every detail of the original music, the very thing you are paying for as a client.

Mp3′s were never intended to conquer the world as it has, burning down villages, killing peasants and kicking dogs on its way to world domination. It was meant for film engineers so they can move audio data around quickly.

But before you could say “I’m gonna jab a pencil in my ear” the mp3 is everywhere – spreading like a moist, swollen rash in to every crevice of the industry we all work in.

Just to prove my point, take any song you love, whether it is on CD, vinyl even an old tape deck. Sit down in a comfy chair, close your eyes and listen to it nice and loud, hopefully on a relatively good sound system or HiFi. Now go download the same song off the net (and do not pretend you don’t know how…). Now do the same thing, sit down close your eyes and listen to the mp3 nice and loud. Nuff said.

If you can’t hear the difference I suggest cleaning out your iPod and replacing all those nasty mp3′s with the originals in a lossless format like .wav or .aif. Ipods do accept these formats, though you won’t be able to fit 9 billion songs on, but let’s be honest, you only ever listen to a hundred songs max! You see your brain has gotten so used to the low quality of mp3′s that you can’t tell the difference anymore.

So, finally my bottom line. You won’t send a TV advert off to station in low res Quicktime file over email right? Not after you paid all that money to get it shot properly, edited properly etc.

So why then spend good money on music that’s been recorded by great musos, mixed and mastered to make it sound as good as it can get… and then ask me to email you an mp3 to stripe to picture… FML.

Obviously mp3′s are great for the approval process where the track get’s sent back and forth until everyone’s happy, but for final product? I think not.

Die mp3, die…

by Allan McDonald

In general, South African advertising trends tend to follow those established in the larger markets of Europe and US just as fashion and music trends do. Well, they are all related, after all.

There was a time, in the late 70’s and through the 80’s when jingles and straplines were used to differentiate brands and portray a brand’s character. Toyota’s “everything keeps going right” is a landmark example. Eno and Deep Heat are others that resonated through the marketplace for many years.

Of course, these aren’t sonic logos in today’s sense of the word, they are more creative treatments of campaign themes which, by definition, delineate their own expiry dates.

More recently, over the last decade, the increase in channels to market and the flood of messages they carry clutter just about every aspect of our daily lives. Most of these touchpoints are visual stimulae; and because of this inordinate visual clutter, logos are becoming covert, subtly insinuating themselves in a visual language designed to translate the traditional parent brand logo into more adoptable sensory dialects.

Smoke and mirrors, courtesy of the cigarette companies. And the liquor companies. And the fashion labels. All conscious of a shift away from banging the consumer on the side of the head with their traditional brand cues toward more seductive visual entrapments.

But it’s eyes only. And mine are hurting. It’s trees hiding wood, blind leading blind. Smudges of what should pass as recognition painted over by subconscious indifference.

Martin Lindstrom, author of Brand Sense, reports that 83% of global marketing expenditure focusses on visual stimulae only!

Don’t they know that hearing is the first sense we develop and remains our most potent emotive receptor?

Your mother’s heartbeat is a perfect example. First heard at 12 weeks after conception. Long before your eyes are formed. Hearing is also our most critical primal survival sense. We have no “deaf-spot”, unlike our restricted 180 degree visual sense. We don’t close our ears when we sleep. The average human ear can detect 1,378 tonal differences against the eye’s 150 tones of colour.*

And yet, according to Lindstrom and Millward Brown, while 41% of consumers recognise sound as a key element in brand communication, only 12% of the world’s marketing communication budgets are committed to it.

Sounds like a loud gap in the market for a brand looking to develop a deeper sensory appeal to its audience, and differentiate itself with the power of sound.

BMW are doing it. Intel have done it for 5 years. Apple hasn’t changed its start-up sound since it started up. Nokia could have the most recognisable audio logo in the world.

Next time you hear a lion roar, check what comes to mind: Acacia trees or MGM?

But what should be music to most South African marketers ears right now is that the local ad industry hasn’t switched on to it yet.

And that sounds like Opportunity.

*Richard Norton, University of Chicago