My New Track - Destination Zero

Writing this track was my last assignment for Berkleemusic's Composing and Producing Electronic Music course.

Destination Zero by Ozmoroz

Cost and Complexity of Making Electronic Music

The Composing and Producing Electronic Music course is finally over. I learned a lot over the past 12 weeks on topics like sound design, harmony, song composition and sound mixing. It was a great experience.

However, this is what concerns me.
I found that making music is:
1.    Terribly expensive
2.    Terribly unproductive

It may make perfect sense for someone aiming to make professional recordings. But what about someone for whom it is just a hobby? It looks like we can’t even start doing anything without spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on MIDI controllers, DAWs and plugins. All that stuff is expensive and it looks like there is no other option.

In 1997 when I started playing with digital audio, I had a Yamaha sound card that had few hundreds instrument samples in it and a software that allowed me to tweak the parameters of every single one of them. I paid $200 for it. It had samples of real pianos, guitars, organs, you name it, as well as built-in subtractive and FM synthesizers.

If I want to get anything like that now, what are my options? $500 NI Komplete? If anything, in these 15 years it got more expensive. For one of my projects I needed a sound of a steel guitar. I discovered that it was not easy to get. Kontakt is awesome but it is expensive. It comes with 50 Gb of samples. I wanted something that had a couple of hundreds multisampled instruments in maybe 5-6 Gb for the quarter of that price. And I couldn't find it. That choice had to be available 10 years ago, now it just disappeared.

Is there an option to even start doing good music on the cheap?

Then comes complexity. It is uncommon for an EDM artist to spend hundreds of hours on a 5-minute song. On something that will be enjoyed for 5 minutes. Of all the arts this must be one of the most unproductive. During the course we learned to program drums, write bass lines, layer, synths, etc. What looks odd to me that for each new song we have to do all that from the scratch – we need to put all these tiny little pieces together bit by bit. There seem to be no way to reuse, to build on top of what’s already done. Again, this may be fine for someone doing EDM full time. But if I have a couple of hours here and there, it looks like I need to give up without even trying.

There are some entry-level DAWs such as Garage Band and Cubase LE. But my impression is they are just stripped-down versions of the fully-functional DAWS. They don’t make anything easier. If anything, they actually make music making harder because they maintain the same attitude as the fully-functional DAWs but remove critical pieces of functionality. What’s the point paying $100 less for a DAW that is not capable of running VSTs? That is not a kind of "simplification" I’d like to get. And all the modern fully-functional DAWs grew into multi-headed hydras. Compare Cakewalk 10 years ago and now. I know some people who tried to do anything in Ableton Live and immediately felt intimidated by its complexity.

I don’t like where it is all going. I reckon that electronic music will benefit by bringing more people into it, by making producing EDM more accessible. Everyone can be an artist, but not everyone needs to be a professional artist. However, I see exactly the opposite. Computers became cheaper and more accessible, but over the last 10 years the complexity and cost of making electronic music skyrocketed. And I don’t think that is right.

If tomorrow one of my friends wants to get into EDM and asks me how, what should I say: "Don't bother. If you are not prepared to spend big bucks, then leave your job and make music full time, it's not even worth trying?" It is ridiculous. But is looks like that because all the software and the process that software enforces are tailored for professional producers.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t have to be like that.

Let's take photography. It used to be complex to make photos. Now everyone can do it. Professinal use Photoshop for photos processing. And it suits them. I'm not a professional and I use Picasa. Instead of hundreds of sliders like in Photoshop, Picasa has button "adjust photo automatically". Which works for me 90% of times.

Now, if I want to make music, I have no alternative but to use a DAW equivalent of Photoshop with all its cost and complexity. Why my DAW doesn't have "make sound awesome" button? You say it's impossible? I don't think so. For example, professional mastering plugin iZotope Ozone retails for $250 in its basic configuration. Although it has tens of sliders and knobs, a pretty common way to use it is to start with a preset and then made tiny adjustments. So why not make it simpler - drop all the knobs and sliders and leave just 20 presets. Then sell in for the quarter of the price. It will make it accessible to a lot more people, and will be enough for 80% of them. Making something simple does not mean making it less sophisticated. Think iPhone. It is a masterpiece of sophistication in a beautifully simple form.

I think a current state of music making art is wrong, and it is due for a change. Everyone should be able to make music. And all the software should make it more accessible to everyone, not just for a bunch of professional music producers. The message that should be out there is that making music is simple, and it is fun. But at the moment it is neither of those.

I don't know why. Maybe because software companies just aren't interested. Maybe it is beneficial for them in some way to create an aura of music making as something accessible only to chosen ones. It is wrong. It needs to change.

Who knows, may be one day it will be my job to change that. Everything is possible in this world.

My new track: Chaos Engine

It is a scientific fact that the amount of entropy in the universe increases all the time. One day it may break the hell lose on our world, leading to a new Big Bang.

Entropy is the Engine of Chaos, and this is its song of destruction.

Chaos Engine by Ozmoroz

Composing and Producing Electronic Music week 2

The assigmnent for week 2 of Composing and Producing Electronic Music was to make a drum groove for a Drum'n Bass track. Here's how I did it.

My first ever remix

Here's my first ever remix made as an assignment for Composing and Producing Electronic Music course.

• This is the original tune by Loudon Stearns (who teaches this course).
• And here is my techno remix.

Databases Matter

Databases are at the core of virtually all modern information technology systems. Sometimes these databases are exposed, for example, as in data warehouse systems. The centrepiece of a system like that is a powerful industrial database such as Oracle, or Sybase, or Microsoft SQL Server, or something similar. The presence of a database is pretty obvious in that case – only these powerful databases can crunch the immense amounts of data processed by data warehouses. In other cases databases are hidden. For example, Apple iTunes uses a SQLite database to store the details of music tracks on your computer. That database is not obvious; it does not advertise itself, but it's there. It makes sure that the ratings you assigned to songs are saved and can be synchronised between all your iPhones and iPads. It counts the number of times every song was played so that you don't listen to the same song twice when you put your iPhone on shuffle. Databases are everywhere. They all serve the same purpose – to store data and make its retrieval as easy and fast as possible – but they are also vastly different from each other.

Let's take another example. When you log into your Google account and bring up your Gmail inbox, all the emails you see are actually stored in the remote database. That database is called BigTable, and it contains not only your emails, but all the emails of all Gmail users in the world, and also virtually all of Google's data. While your iTunes SQLite database may be about 50 megabytes in size (and that's assuming you have A LOT of songs), Google's BigTable contains petabytes of data. That's your iTunes database times one billion.

If you think about it, it becomes obvious that these databases require vastly different approaches to the way the data are stored and retrieved: You can fit an iTunes database into memory and query it whichever way you like without a performance penalty. At the same time, no machine has been built yet that could apply the same approach to Google's BigTable.

Unfortunately, not all software developers understand that. Databases once were an inspiring topic but in recent years they went out of fashion. Software developers are geeks; they like new toys; they all want to work on something latest and greatest and cutting-edge. So many new exciting things are happening in the area of Information Technology – Web 2.0, HTML5 and Apple iOS to name just a few – that databases just fade in comparison, despite the fact that they make all these new shiny things tick. Most of the developers these days take a database just as generic data storage: “We'll just stuff the data in and we don't care what's inside.” 10 years ago SQL language was a necessary skill for database application developers. Nowadays the majority of programmers don't know SQL. They rely on frameworks such as Hibernate to produce SQL statements for them. They think that all databases are the same and therefore, if necessary, they can take one system that uses MS SQL Server as a backend and put it onto Oracle and it will work just fine.

Well, that may be true for very simple applications. The myth that all databases are the same is flawed, especially when it comes down to performance. Today cloud computing is a buzzword, and Google is the patriarch of the cloud. Google's servers process billions of requests every day, crunching petabytes of data. Yet, every request made to a Google search engine is served within seconds. This places such a high demand on the Google's database layer, that Google's engineers couldn't afford using even the most powerful of industrial databases, and they had to develop their own – the aforementioned BigTable. If you told these guys that “all databases are the same”, they would laugh into your face, and rightfully so, because Google knows that performance matters and they try to squeeze every bit of performance out of their systems.

Databases matter, and if you consider yourself a decent software developer, you need to learn how to tame them. Learn the differences between them. Learn what they are, what makes them tick, and the most importantly, how to make them tick faster, because writing applications that are slow is just bad taste.

Nokia+MSFT: Power of Incentives

Considering that the present Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop is one of the largest individual shareholders of Microsoft, no wonder they tied a knot.

Source: dailyfinance.com

And it'snot a surprise he tries to talk the Nokia's share price down. He doesn't currently have any Nokia shares, but he will have to buy some soon. And the cheaper Nokia shares are, the less he will pays for them.

As Charlie Munger puts it:

'I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.'