Time to Think Outside the Box

If anyone can do it, so can you! At least that's what my grandpappy told me, and I take it as sage advice, all is possible. A lot of elements go into a successful Kickstarter campaign. Spanish Prisoners combine a unique request, funding the purchase of a low-budget tour van, with unique offerings, songs recorded in the van along with other goodies from their upcoming trip to SXSW. Original article in full.

Music Industry Internship!

In the industry of music, whether we are talking: record labels, studios, publishers, licensing houses, etc, you need to pay your dues the old fashion way, work! When I say work, I mean getting dirty with it by running errands without complaint, helping around the office diligently, able to be seen and not heard yet helpful, among other things that are hard to swallow. I did 2 internships while finishing my degree at Bloomfield College, one at a production studio and another with a post-production house in mid-town(5 days a week). I did these while going to school with a minimum of 4 classes and a part-time job and I was already in my 30s, which is a disadvantage all by itself. Despite all of this I was humble, attentive, and always carried enthusiasm with me which help pay off in the end. The music industry is very small and there is always a strong possibility that you will run into someone you've worked with previously at some point in time.

With all that said I suggest you go after all internship possibilities with the same zeal you would a paying job. Conduct yourself in a way that is appropriate, helpful and humble to say the least, and take this opportunity to network at your internship in a way that won't damage you relationship with the business or the staff.

There is an opening with a record label in New York City for a music intern, click here to find out more. As with jobs I would apply promptly, since there are thousands of other students with the same goal in mind.

good luck

Job Posting: Asst Mastering Engineer

Its rare for us, as audio professionals, to find a decent position opening up in our field. Usually these positions are held for years until someone passes or moves on and then it's usually about who you know. This position is with Audible.com which is located in downtown Newark and an Amazon.com affiliate. For all the seniors in the program and juniors as well, I suggest you apply for this position with graduation right around the corner. To apply click here.

"WAR HORSE" Sound Design Article in NY Times

HaPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL -
I Found this story on the sound design of "War Horse" to be particularly interesting
JANUARY 3, 2012, 2:05 PM

‘War Horse’ Sound Tricks: Otters Stand in for Horses and Other Trade Secrets

By MELENA RYZIK

Box office-wise, the surprise winner of the holiday season was “War Horse,” Steven Spielberg’s military epic. With an absence of recognizable stars -– save perhaps, for the horse -– the film’s appeal is in the very filmmaking:Mr. Spielberg’s own style, of course, and that of frequent collaborators like the Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the sound designer Gary Rydstrom, who has won Oscars for “Saving Private Ryan,” “Titanic,” “Jurassic Park” and more.

In his long career Mr. Rydstrom has worked on “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Terminator 2” and “Spaceballs.” But he had never done a World War I movie, and, sonically, the prospect excited him.

“World War I has a specific sound to it,” he said. “I thought the tanks and the guns should sound more primitive, unrefined. In World War II, the guns weren’t as clattery, the artillery didn’t make as much of a whistle when they came in, the tanks probably had more oil in them. The movie is about the historical clash when the old ways of war met the new ways -– cavalry vs. machine guns.”

Skywalker SoundThe sound crew actually plowed land (Skywalker Ranch, in this case) for the farming scenes in “War Horse.”

He did research but, he said, “there aren’t too many people around who remember what World War I sounded like.” For Mr. Rydstrom this proved extra-delectable because he got to make it up. “You are always going to hear a lot more than you’re going to see if you’re in the middle of the battle, and when I talk to people who have been in the middle of battle, a lot of their memories were about the sounds of war,” he told the Bagger in a recent phone interview from his office at Skywalker Studios in California. “For this movie, I tried to imagine what the iconic sounds of war would be, from the horse’s point of view or soldier’s point of view.”

Among the instruments he used to recreate these sounds: swarms of bees, ice skates, copper bowls, gallon water bottles and a vacuum cleaner.

“What I usually do, out of laziness, is I do a lot of my recording around my house,” he said. “The golden rule of sound design is, it doesn’t matter what a sound really it is, it matters how it works in the movie, how it makes you feel. It doesn’t matter that it’s a vacuum cleaner.”

Of course, there are moments of realism. The sound for a pivotal early scene in the movie involved actually plowing Skywalker Ranch (it sits on 5,000 acres in Marin County), using a borrowed old-fashioned plow and two plowhorses. “The moment of success, the plow dipping on the dirt, there’s now this smooth yet heavy and extremely satisfying sound, that was a wonderful day that we spent recording plowing on every possibly angle,” Mr. Rydstrom said. But they also needed the sound of a plow stalling. So they pulled it themselves.

“I just want to point out how dedicated the sound crew was,” Mr. Rydstrom said.

Here, a glossary of other effects in the distinctive soundscape in “War Horse.”

Bullet whizzing by: The “bullet-by” is what sound guys call it, Mr. Rydstrom said, and for that effect he went Winter Olympics: “If you do quick turns in ice skating or skiing, you get that ripping sound,” he said. “We extract those and maybe do a little Doppler effect on them.”

Bullet-by of artillery missiles: “We used a string bow across a copper bowl to make these weird metallic sounds,” Mr. Rydstrom said. “I was in a weird artillery missile frame of mind. There is a classic artillery whistle that we did put in, but Spielberg is such a connoisseur of classic movie sound, there’s a classic artillery whistle that he remembered from ‘Paths of Glory’ that we had to emulate.”

Horse stampede in a cavalry scene: “There’s such a rumble on a mass of cavalry, it’s hard to record literally that. The first thing you do is record things like horses on racetracks. We’d put recorders on jockeys – there’s a local racetrack here in the East Bay that’s sort of horses with carts. You could go in the pace car or something, you could get a real straight-on recording of a group of horses galloping. We also recorded cattle being moved. For the really low end, we can use deep, almost rumbly explosive stuff – I’ve had a sound for years of glaciers breaking apart. It was useful as horses galloping and as a distant artillery sound.”

Incoming shell: “That’s one of the scariest sounds in war to me, knowing that a shell is coming in to explode near you. I recorded my vacuum cleaner. I was vacuuming my stairs and if you vacuum in the crack of the stairs in the carpet, it makes this crazy whoosh. This happens to sound people all time, you’re doing something mundane one day and you hear this great sound. My wife has long thought I’m crazy; she probably had to be quiet for a few hours while I recorded a vacuum cleaner. The cracks of my stairs are so clean now.”

The star horses, Joey and Topthorn: “Our first instinct as a sound man is, if I just take a walrus and an otter, and speed them up, it’ll make a great Joey vocal! Spielberg tried to warn against that. He wanted the horses to sound like horses. We recorded many, many horses to find the voice for Joey. My favorite was miniature horses. They sound different, they have a different emotional range – they’re a little closer to dogs. We have to make a library of different horse vocals and start categorizing them into different emotions. We had to record horses in veterinary hospitals that were sick or coming out of anesthesia. My wife has a horse, her horse makes this weird teeth grind, we used it all through the movie. I use it as a tender friendly sound between Joey and Albert,” the boy played by Jeremy Irvine.

The sound editor Teresa Eckton specializes in creature vocals, Mr. Rydstrom continued. “She cut Chewbacca. She and I would look at a scene and we would talk about it as if working with an actor or working with an animator. So we would talk about what was going on in the horse’s mind. It’s like ‘Inside the Actor’s Studio’ – what is the horse’s goal? You need action verbs to describe what the horse is going through. It was good to decide separately Joey and Topthorn, where their minds were at. We started to build piece by piece, breath by breath, to make a horse vocal come alive. It was the most intricate and difficult thing to do, to make the horses believable and have character.”

Tanks: “I have the old-fashioned push mower with no engine. I’m mowing the lawn and I hear this clattery thing – you slow that down and record it really close, it’s perfect for a tank.”

Trenches: “Trenches for World War I are key. I tried to find the claustrophobic sound of being in a trench. If you take one of those big water bottles and you blow over the top of it, and you loop it and you slow it down, it makes this steady howl. So we used that. Again, the sounds of your household can be immensely satisfying.”

For those wondering how Mr. Rydstrom got his start, he said he went to film school: “The fundamental irony of my career is that I got interested in film because I loved silent film.”

HTTP://CARPETBAGGER.BLOGS.NYTIMES.COM/2012/01/03/WAR-HORSE-SOUND-TRICKS-OTTERS-STAND-IN-FOR-HORSES-AND-OTHER-TRADE-SECRETS/?HPW

• Copyright 2012 The New York Times Co

Looking for an Internship????

I think this would be a great opportunity for any student that would like to get their foot in the music business. Working in publishing would open many different doors for someone interested in having a career in the music industry. If this sounds interesting to you click on the 'read more' and apply.

There is also an opportunity for those who would like a more technical internship, dealing with podcast and webinar production, and this is a paid internship! Click here for more info.

For Some, Free Music Is an Investment That Pays Off

What’s the value of a career’s worth of Internet buzz? Approximately 175,000 albums sold in one week — then look out below from there. On Wednesday the Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller topped the Billboard album chart with his debut album, “Blue Slide Park“ (Rostrum), selling about 144,000 albums. The week before, the Washington rapper Wale made his debut at No. 2 on the chart (behind Justin Bieber’s Christmas album) with “Ambition“ (Maybach Music Group/Warner Brothers), which sold about 164,000 copies. And last month J. Cole’s first album, “Cole World: The Sideline Story” (Roc Nation), made its bow atop the chart with about 217,000 copies sold in its first week. (All figures are from Nielsen SoundScan.)

First, the good news: A new generation of rappers is actively trying to build a new business model in which releasing oodles of free material online builds a fan base that paves the way for revenue streams: touring, merchandise, even something as old-fashioned as a record deal.

Read More...

Vital Vox Festival

This Saturday in Brooklyn The Vital Vox Festival explores the myriad power of the human voice in it's solo and ensemble forms in a multitude of genres! Performing Saturday will be Gelsey Bell, Judith Berkson and Bloomfield's own Dafna Naftali! Dafna, who teaches music theory and sequencing, will perform a work for solo voice and live electronics and processing (Wii controllers). The Vital Vox Festival will be held downtown Brooklyn at Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, November 5 at 8pm. For more Information click here

Redundancy at it's Best

I survived many internships over the coarse of the years and have taken away many good habits and learned a good deal, but one of the best habits I garnered was the importance of backing up your work. Part of my duties when interning with the Souldiggaz, a production group, was to back up the hard drives of the recording rooms onto DVD. They kept a meticulous record of what was backed up and where. They had CD books filled to the brim with DVDs that were carefully labeled and verified. In my house I keep a smaller version of my own recordings and session backups.

Over the years I have witness the horror of a hard drive crashing and the person freaking out because they didn't back up their drives regularly. My girlfriend was a victim of not backing up and almost lost a whole year (2 full semesters) of writings for her graduate studies. She was very lucky that I could recover the majority of her hard drive. If I wasn't able to achieve that small miracle she would have had to spend upwards of five hundred dollars to have a service recover the drive or potentially loose all of her work and start over. For myself I have been contacted by old clients that needed backups of old sessions or wanted to revisit old sessions that they didn't back up themselves. It's painful enough to loose your personal work but it's crippling to misplace clients work over a hard drive failure.

I came across a great article that emphasizes the art of the backup that I felt would help make this point and maybe prevent someone from making a simple mistake that could be avoided.

click here for article

Ascensionist - Beautiful Catastrophe

Bloomfield CAT students Chase, Truth, Lova-Gurl, Ave, Brian Battersby, Ill Will, Daniel David, Nomad, Adam Cruz, Eder Vernet and Justin Pauls form Ascensionist. Their debut album is an apocalyptic concept album fusing experimental hip-hop, R&B, and indie rock. Stream it here or download it free.

INTERNSHIPS!!!! for the the Fall Semester

I hope everyone had a great summer just like I did! So I officially welcome you back with a great internship post from MTV! Internships are a great stepping stone to a permanent position. Even though we would all love big fat pay checks( I still don't see those!), working an internship definitely has it's own payoff. Like most things in life it may not seem apparent at the time but if you put in 150 percent, are pleasant, helpful, show initiative, and network that internship may be the flashing light on the map of the road to success. I had a completed 3 internships by the time I graduated and took on another post-graduation when I was laid off, two years after graduation. The internship after graduation afforded me the opportunity to hone my craft, work under an industry heavy weight who now calls me for freelance gigs. The intern usually empties the trash, refills snacks, and take on all the tedious jobs around the workplace. The cash may not equal the workload but the social currency you take with you and the knowledge gained is invaluable!

Check out the link below

http://www.mtvnetworkscareers.com/internships/