Alkaline Trio singer/guitarist Matt Skiba waves from behind the microphone at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on Feb. 18, 2010. Five days later they released their 7th full-length album, This Addiction.
Photo: whenwedie/Flickr | view set
alkalinetrio.com | thisaddiction.org | blood-pact.com
Epitaph | iTunes | Amazon | Insound

Last month I wrote about five tactics for finding music blogs. Let’s revisit this addiction with three more massive resources and a hit of punk rock.

1. MOG Music Network is a network of music blogs integrated with the social music community MOG. An estimated 800+ external music blogs are now part of MMN—including ours—so MOG it up.

2. CaptainCrawl is an extensive up-to-date music blog aggregator similar to elbo.ws. I even like CaptainCrawl better because of its cleaner design. Thanks to MTT for dealing me this one.

3. Image search engines that crawl the blogosphere can help too. Search for artist images on Google, Bing, NachoFoto, and Picsearch. You’ll be able to discover the blogs that posted them.

From MOG to Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr to last.fm, fans have the voice. Don’t kick this writing addiction. Alkaline Trio hasn’t. That is, they haven’t kicked their addiction to writing pure punk rock. Feeling the need to get back to their indie roots, they started their own label, Heart & Skull, and partnered with Epitaph Records, to release their seventh full-length album, This Addiction.

Alkaline Trio is on the Warped Tour this summer. The more I listen to This Addiction the more I get hooked. What sets the Trio apart for me has always been their clever writing and live energy. If you’ve seen them live, then you know the real thing. IMO this is their best album since their BYO Split Series in 2004. You hear the honest, raw vibe they were going for, but it’s larger, more fluid, and upbeat now—it’s most reminiscent of those champion BYO Split Series or “War Brain” days. The new song “Piss and Vinegar” is a worthy sequel to “Cooking Wine”, which, like “Radio” or “My Friend Peter”, is a gateway drug into the heart of the Trio’s sound. It’s rad that Alkaline Trio produced This Addiction with Chicago engineer Matt Allison, who produced their early albums/EP’s. His mixing is straight up.

Artists can get their music on the site by uploading it to SoundCloud. CitySounds launched last summer and released a 99-cent iPhone App earlier this year rated 2.5 stars on iTunes. The underlying idea is awesome, as is its execution on the web so far. Looking to discover new music…then why wouldn’t you want to search local? The flip side is you can travel the world via music.

Tune up, in sixth gear, for 10 bucks. Modeled after the popular pedal, the TC Electronic PolyTune app has now cruised into the App Store.

Think Death From Above 1979 meets The Knife. Call it noise pop…breakbeat rock…or dance punk. Sleigh Bells mixes heavy dance beats and lo-fi distorted guitars, produced/performed by Derek Miller, with the hi-energy vocals of female singer Alexis Krauss. This Brooklyn-based duo is blasting earbuds with their debut album, Treats, which was released in digital formats on May 11. Treats redefines loud. It’s a simplified sound that rocks, and the killer beats make it unique. I first heard Sleigh Bells earlier in 2010 when I saw photos/videos from SXSW. I was pretty blown away by the videos, and the album backs them up. My favorite tracks are Crown On The Ground, Riot Rhythm, and A/B Machines.

The production on Treats is loud-to-the-max but it really seems to work. Even my mom was down with the sound, but I imagine some might find it a bit overdriven. The duo makes great use of negative space throughout the album. The tracks are each different, but are all delivered with a great energy. There’s not a track that I don’t like. It’s next level, like Die Antwoord, who apparently Sleigh Bells will be performing with via M.I.A.‘s N.E.E.T. recordings on July 24th at the Hard NYC festival. For the most up-to-date Sleigh Bells tour dates, look on their MySpace page. From what I understand they use a backing track for the drums when they perform—with Derek on guitar and Alexis on the mic. I definitely want to check them out live. Treats was released by New York indie label Mom + Pop Music.

Treats is available on: iTunes | Last.fm | Grooveshark | Amazon | Insound

App screenshot. Image: ultimate-guitar.com

Ultimate-Guitar.com—if you’ve ever Googled for a guitar tab, then you’ve no doubt come across this tab mega-source. Well, tab addicts can now access the same database on a much sleeker interface with the new iPhone app, Ultimate Guitar Tabs, which was released 3/16, and is now the #1 paid music app.

The app’s advanced search lets me filter by type, part, rating, difficulty, or tuning. For example, I can search for chords-only tabs for The Cardigans that have at least a 4-star rating. The tabs load quickly and navigation within the app is simple and responsive. It’s easy to favorite a tab by touching the star in the corner, and tabs that you’ve favorited can be viewed offline. I don’t think there’s a way to rate the tabs within the app, but there is an auto-scroll option that moves through the tab at a whatever speed you set. I’m not that crazy about the auto-scroll, but once you set the speed it does seem to work pretty well. I’m usually after a specific tune, but the “tab packs” mode makes it easy to browse tabs by genre or skill level. Even on the small screen, the tabs were easy to read, especially by zooming in landscape view. Bottom line—if you’re a tab junkie with an iPhone then this app is worth the $2. This is only the first version and it’s rock solid. Its iTunes user rating is 4.5 out 5 stars—I give it a 5. Tabs and YouTube go hand-in-hand—maybe a future app version could have the option to play the audio at the same time.

Style-wise how does iMatik compare to your previous albums?

TF: Well, I usually produce hip hop and rap albums that are vocal-based, with verses and choruses, etc. I thought about getting a bunch of artists to add vocals to the album, but once I started actually working on it, I thought the vibe was more upbeat than most of my other work. I used to love instrumental “Scratch DJ” albums like DJ Shadow, Invisible Skratch Picklz, etc. and thought maybe I could go in this direction.

Once I found Flare, the iPhone app that is remarkably like a real vinyl turntable and mixer, and found out how realistic it sounded, plus that it allows you to upload your own samples, I knew what I was going to do. I used to have a DJ rig when I was younger, and knew a little bit about scratching, so I just made it work with an iPhone.

I really love the result, since most of my other music is dark or just plain strange, and this album immediately seems to make friends with people, instead of scare them off!

Mobility is the obvious advantage to iPhone music creation, but how do iPhone apps compare feature-wise to software and drum machines?

TF: There are some limitations on the iPhone that are hard to overcome. The biggest issue is pressure sensitivity. Not having pressure sensitivity takes a lot away from the expressiveness of an instrument, since each note comes out with the same volume and timbre. There are ways to overcome this though, such as programming individual sounds to play just right, or editing velocity after the performance, on apps like Beatmaker that support velocity editing. Also, just picking the right sound sometimes is the solution without having control over volume, some sounds are better suited to fitting in, or can be edited to fit.

The second, and more obvious disadvantage, is the small screen. I can’t tell you how many times I pressed the wrong drum sound or key, and had to go back and try again. This is just something you have to live with if you are doing music on a phone, although some apps allow you to adjust the size of the playing area to try and make it easier. For me, the solution to this problem is in the iPad, which I am foaming at the mouth for already!

Besides these two limitations, it is amazing how much sound quality, programmability, and depth some of these apps have! Especially Intua Beatmaker, which allows you to import/export any sounds you want via wireless, so you can program sounds in your computer and load them on your iPhone. This is an area I just brushed the surface of.

You mentioned Beatmaker, iDrum, Flare, and Jasuto—can you give us a breakdown on the advantages of each app?

TF: Sure:

Beatmaker is definitely the most “pro” as far as looking and feeling like a real production device. It is very similar to an MPC with some of it’s functionality, having a 4 x 4 grid of pads to work with, and being able to assign anything to those pads. Beatmaker’s sequencer also lets you build complex arrangements, so if you really want a program that will mimic a computer application like Fruityloops or Reason for example, this will come the closest to doing that. iTunes link

iDrum was my first favorite, because it’s so easy to get hooked on its simple, fun, step sequencer. The main method of programming beats with this device is a visual grid of buttons that represent a note value—mainly sixteenth notes—that you can touch and they light up. When the button is lit that means it will play on that step each time around. You can use common iPhone motions like finger sweeps and shaking to get around in the sequencer. There’s an option for realtime sequencing as well. The built in sounds were awesome and well programmed, so even though I could have used my own huge arsenal of sounds on my main computer, I found using the built-in sounds almost always got me the sound I was looking for. iTunes link

Flare is the ultimate iPhone DJ app. It is a lot like having a mini actual turntable on your phone, with a built in DJ scratch mixer with features useful to a DJ. I used the mixer in hamster-switch mode for most of my scratching, since it allows you to punch in just little snippets of audio. The feature that truly makes this app amazing is it that enables wireless upload of any audio file you want to use. I grabbed weird found sounds, movie samples, old beats, just about anything I could think of, and uploaded it into the phone to scratch with. iTunes link

Jasuto is crazy—it is a modular synth and effects-creation environment on your phone! You can drag and drop modules such as oscillators, compressors, delays, and route or key them from all types of things. I’m a bit of a caveman when it comes to this stuff, so I just dragged objects until it made crazy sounds, and used that. In the future I plan on trying harder to learn how to use this app more, since I think the idea is so amazing! iTunes link

My desert island app is definitely Intua Beatmaker. That’s the one I can sit down with anywhere and feel like I’m in the studio.

What features would like to see in the next round of music production apps?

TF: I think everything right now regarding mobile music apps is limited to screen size. That is such a limiting factor, since you can’t add a lot of buttons or menus in a small area without killing the fun. So when the iPad is released, I really hope application developers take advantage of the screen real estate, and make apps that offer more features visible without having to hunt through menus. Also I hope apps start taking more advantage of the gyroscopic features of the iPhone—like I would want to be able to wave or tilt the phone to control filter frequencies, etc.

What’s your beat-making software of choice in the studio?

TF: It’s a toss-up between Reason and Ableton Live, and now sometimes Logic. My day job is testing music software, so I know all the apps, and I love little things about all the apps that keeps me switching from one to the other. I guess I would choose Reason just because I am almost guaranteed to not crash my system with that!

Do you prefer programming the beats or recording them live with your fingers? What’s easier on the iPhone?

TF: I’ve always been more of a live-recording guy, coming from a bass-playing background, so I usually record in realtime. But on some apps like iDrum, they make step sequencing so fun, I ended up doing a lot of that too. This album definitely has way more step-sequenced parts than I usually make.

Did you transfer the iMatik album tracks to your computer to do post-production, or was everything done on the iPhone?

TF: Yes, everything was transferred to a Mac Pro running Cubase 5, which is my main recording app, and I just used the computer like a tape machine. I used a mini-dual 1/4″ cable to get everything over to my Universal Audio 2108 stereo preamp, and tracked everything in using that, since it usually sounds great with line level sources.

Because the iPhone does not have the ability to run two apps simultaneously, I realized all overdubs would have to be done using a separate app. To me this still fits in with the mentality of an iPhone-only album, just like a saxophone-only album could be tracked into a recording app and still be considered “pure” if there’s anything “pure” anyway about an album made on a phone. ;-)

I used plugins and hardware in the mixdown, most notably a Summit DCL-200 on mix buss, Universal Audio EMT 250 and 140 for reverbs, and during the mastering phase I used the new UA Manley Massive EQ plugin, which sounded amazing!

What was the weirdest place you created a song with the iPhone?

TF: Well, since my commute to work is really far, and my girlfriend lives even farther away, I find myself staying in motels on a regular basis, just to make things work. It is usually a weird but fun feeling to be in some strange motel, sitting on the bed, with a basketball game on or something, and me with my headphones on making a beat.

I went to Mavericks surf competition recently, and the waves were so amazing I didn’t really use the phone a lot, but that was also a cool place to make a beat. The funniest place is probably making a beat while waiting at a place like Applebee’s or something—it’s just cheesy enough to work!

How long did it take you to make iMatik?

TF: About 4 months (3 months to make the initial beats and songs, and 1 month for overdubs, mixing, mastering, etc.) Really at first I didn’t start it as a serious project, I just started doing it because it was fun. But then I got, uh, kind of addicted to it, so I figured I might as well make it into an album!

In what ways do you think the iPhone is changing music production and the music industry?

TF: Well for one thing, I grew up with old drum machines, and none of them ever had wireless or 3G! Now I can upload any sound I want to a little device that I can carry with me. Sure, you can make music with a laptop, but that still involves wires, powercords, etc. Once the iPad comes out, and developers make the next generation of music apps, I think making music on a mobile device is going to explode.

What’s your take on touchscreens in general? Will computer keyboard/mice become things of the past?

TF: I don’t know, because I still hate typing on the iPhone. I always am missing the letter I was trying to hit. There is something about the tactile response of a keyboard that I love, so as far as communicating, I would still want an actual keyboard. The mouse on the other hand, I wouldn’t miss at all! It has been a great run for the mouse, and maybe for pinpoint accuracy in some apps, the mouse will always be needed by some people, but I hope to not need one in the future.

For music production, though, touchscreens are so necessary, due to the need to control multiple parameters at once.

Are there any up-and-coming local artists in the SF Bay area music scene that we should know about?

TF: Well I’ve been working with a lot of cats from the Hayward and Oakland areas, and they are mostly just kids, but I’ve never seen a more hungry group of talented individuals in my life. I just hope they can work together a little bit more to bring everyone up. Rappers like Too Much, The Kid AY, The Scholars, Studio Pete, New New, etc. Also from the South Bay I gotta give a shout out to Brycentenial, the workhorse in the south bay, Big Blac, No Mercy Records, Magruff Muttley, Marcus Weezy, and the list goes on and on.

Many people don’t know how to react—a sign of great art—and many are obsessed. Albeit R-rated, Enter The Ninja is uplifting and upbeat. It has all the key components to music video greatness—originality, emotion, energy, dance moves, realism, symbolism, shock value, humor, balance, and masterful execution. It’s a musical blend of deft artistic expression formed by four creative friends having fun. On DieAntwoord.com you can listen to their 16-track beat-heavy album $O$. The site is in-your-face artistic euro-style and includes 20 fun facts about the Zef-rap crew, which consists of dynamic rapper frontman Ninja (Waddy Jones), sexy profane blonde singer Yo-Landi Vi$$er, and PC-beatmaker DJ Hi-Tek. Also appearing in the crew is Leon Botha—a Cape Town artist with the hyper-aging disease progeria. Each member is a unique persona fueled by their own inner Zef—a term best described by Ninja in the video interview below the break. Ninja says, “If you love it, we love you too, and if you hate it, it’s because you’re not on my level.” Pitchfork posted an email interview.

Ninja has sculpted, both with his flesh and his music, the ultimate South African. He is everything in the country, “fucked into one person.” That he is willing to go so far to embody this idea is thrillingly, gloriously radical. Cape Flats Calling | The Walrus

Die Antwoord is radical but true-to-life, and personally I can’t get enough of their Zef flow. Enter The Ninja is my favorite track but the whole album is sublimely groundbreaking. I love the lyrics, the vision, the creativity, and the fierce (but IMO positive) energy. Expect Die Antwoord to tour in Europe/USA this year, and if the video below is any indication, it looks like the show will be next level.

Tagging (-verb): Applying a word or phrase as a label or means of description.
Tagaholic (-noun): A person who gets more than cheap thrills from tagging.

As a self-professed tag-a-holic I’m pretty stoked about the news, and especially so because I had emailed them suggesting a tagging feature. Bandcamp artists can now list themselves in up to five genres, they can add their location, and they can add specific traits to individual tracks in the form of tags. Adding the genre and location isn’t that groundbreaking on its own (almost all music sites have this to some degree) but this feature is positioning Bandcamp towards an indie music discovery community. When you click on the tags/genres/locations you can see all the other artists or tracks tagged the same way. There’s not a set list of tags that you are confined too either—you can describe your music how you see fit. I’ve written before about how I think Bandcamp is the best way to represent an indie artist’s music online. I’ve already discovered some new artists by just browsing through the tags, and because the presentation is so ace, it just makes you want to press play.

Bandcamp’s Tag Cloud on Day 1. bandcamp.com/tag

Bandcamp seems to grasp the importance of maintaining their already-superb platform but it’s great to see they’re continuing to fine-tune and add new features. I think the addition of more community features on Bandcamp like commenting (or fan reviews) would be welcomed, and in case not, they could leave it up to each artist whether they want to allow commenting on their tracks via having an option in their artist settings. Comments or fan reviews under each track remind me of Amie Street’s Rec’s which IMO in my opinion is that site’s best and most engaging feature. There you have to download (buy) the track to recommend (review) it. Another potential community-driver could be digg-like voting. However it’d be smart for Bandcamp to take things one step at a time and be sure to continue to deliver its core features as a service for bands.

Community Overload?

There is an abundance of online music communities, but there’s not many sites that offer the high-quality DIY service that Bandcamp does, and there’s room for them to keep advancing there too. Last year they added sales of physical goods. I’d like to see them add embeddable mailing list sign-up widgets—they already collect emails with downloads for you so this seems like an easy feature extension that would make them more of an all-in-one service for musicians. Or they could somehow integrate with YouTube or Ustream to have video on the Bandcamp page/storefront/channel/station (or however you want to call it). What’s your take on these ideas? I don’t think I’d go as far as having listeners create profiles—who needs another profile, right? I’d try to find a way to let people interact through a service that lets them login with their existing online profiles. In yesterday’s blog post on the tagging, Bandcamp says they originally had “no desire to create another online music community.”

Because there are so many other music sites, one can see what works, what flops, and and try to understand why. I don’t know if any of you have followed the story about TheSixtyOne’s recent redesign. TheSixtyOne is an indie music community where “new artists make music and listeners decide what’s good.” Think indie radio + voting + discussion + digital store. Last month they did a major redesign of the site with no warning and upset a lot of their users. The new design is what I call euro-style and looks cool but the community features are less prevalent. I give them credit for trying something new but they should have communicated the upcoming changes better with their uses. If they did, they might have realized that their users care more about the community than flashy design.

It’s All About The Data

Bandcamp’s new tagging should go over well. It’s subtle but powerful. I even think everyone would benefit more if Bandcamp takes this one step further by enabling the users (listeners) to tag tracks. We’ve seen that crowdsourced-tagging approach before on other music sites—Last.fm and Amie Street come to mind—and it’s a fun way to create data that engages fans (because they have to think about your music as they tag). Tag. Tag. Tag. I’m a tagging freak. I don’t try to organize, I just tag. I tag in excess because it makes things easier to find later. See, I can’t even help but over-tag my blog posts (you’re supposed to use at most 10 tags). My Delicious bookmarks total 7000+ tags. I’m not alone either. Widely-used social bookmarking apps like Delicious, Xmarks, and Google Bookmarks hold the tag data created by thousands and thousands of users. Combine all that and you’ve got a helluva lot of data to crunch. It’s like using humans to crawl the web instead of search bots. Humans zone in on content and label it in a way that’s effective and meaningful for, well, humans. Delicious is essentially a crowdsourced search engine. They provide a great service but they’ve failed to innovate. They’re owned by Yahoo. They have the data, but they don’t leverage it in their apps.

Back to music—think about how Last.fm powers its similar artists based on listener behavior. Think about combining listener behavior with crowdsourced tagging could make recommendation engines. Multiple tag queries or basic seach operators would be great for filtering by genre and location simultaneously—e.g. electronica + new york—but I wouldn’t stop at genre and location—I’d try to encourage mood tags and sounds-like tags too. If Bandcamp collected tag data from everyone they could better use it analyze trends and could bring their upcoming search that they mention to a whole new level. I hope they attempt to deliver more in the way of music analytics and music intelligence.

Read more posts tagged Bandcamp here.

Paramore outperforms both on and off the stage.

Why do I like Paramore? They are kick-ass live performers. But I’ve never seen them in person. Hulu delivered them to me last year when I saw them perform Ignorance on Conan O’Brien. I knew of them before via Andrew Kendall’s photos, but seeing them on Conan is what engaged me to find out more. I searched “paramore live” on YouTube. I was impressed with their energetic live show and fan-driven website, which I wrote about highlighting their fan community and presence in the social web. Paramore fans go the distance because Paramore does the same for them.

Live music trumps studio recordings.

The best music is live music. Right now I think live video footage is the next best thing—whether it’s live-as-in-streaming or recorded live events. I don’t have a cable television. But if I’m looking for home entertainment I go straight to Hulu. As far as TV goes, if it’s not on Hulu, then I don’t watch it. In today’s music industry putting out video content is a must, especially live video content. In fact I think that’s where über-commercial Vevo has it wrong—lacking rawness and intimacy. I’d rather watch bands on Hulu. The concert videos already on Paramore’s channel come from their live album The Final Riot! In my opinion, Paramore’s best videos are the live ones, and on top of the stellar performances the videos have stellar production. But even bands without access to top production can still produce video content by being creative, sourcing their fans to record or produce live videos, and distributing them with free tools like YouTube and Ustream.

Paramore tells a story.

In addition to music videos, Paramore’s Hulu channel contains a 30-min documentary on the making of their latest album Brand New Eyes. They attract fans not only because of their music, but also because they have a story to tell that their fans can relate too. Their story is about growing up—as a band, but also as people, and their fans can relate to that. The album’s theme is seeing people through brand new eyes—you have to accept the past to move on. Paramore has an intimate connection with the Internet Generation. The new channel enriches their existing fan community and exposes them to a wider audience—brand new eyes—on Hulu.

Timeline: Bands on Hulu.

In November 2009 Hulu partnered with EMI and launched a Norah Jones channel. The next month Hulu partnered with Warner Music Group launching the Muse channel in December, the Jason Mraz channel in January, and the Paramore channel yesterday. Hulu’s music content is hi-fidelity and free. Now what more can you ask for besides, well, more Hulu artist channels and frequent content, right?

Mood-based technology might zap us to better understand how music relates to human emotions. In their press release, Syntonetic says they’ve “cracked the emotional codes found in music to create an intelligent system that deciphers every musical property in a song, including moods and emotions, as well as musical genres and sub-genres, styles, tempo/beat, vocals, instruments and production features.” The way I see it, we’re only on the brink of emotion technology. App enthusiast Diego Balbuena says, “I do think that these type of programs can be the next killer app” but he stresses the importance of the apps being human-like. The more users that use the app, the more data they’ll have, and the better the algorithms will be. Happiness is a warm iPhone.