Collaboration: Better Than The Sum

In my article, So far, the promise of digital music falls short, I discussed the mixed blessings of the digital revolution in music. The revolution began with great promise, leading many of us to believe it would be a silver bullet empowering unknown artists and bands, freeing them from the tyranny of the record industry. Though I place part of the blame on a shift in power from the record companies to major technology companies like Apple and Google, I also much acknowledge my own contribution along with those of my fellow musicians.

The technological progress that has empowered home recording and a project studio in your garage has intoxicated many of us. We have become so engrossed in what the technology does for us that we've forgotten the power of the music itself. All of us are familiar with the sight of ourselves and those around us, shuffling downtown sidewalks, hunched over our mobile phones, tablets and game devices. We no longer talk to each other because we're too busy keeping up with our 100s or 1000s of Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

So what's that have to do with music? Well, as musicians we've caught the same disease. We hunch down in our bedrooms, closets and garages. We write, arrange and records songs by ourselves, leveraging technology to fill the void left by the musicians that would have been essential a few decades ago. In the process we've deprived ourselves and our listeners of the real magic that is music.

Until very recently, music was a binding force in the community. It served to communicate a cultural history, shared experiences and catalyzed community gatherings. Musicians joined together to perform, sometimes spontaneously. Without those musicians there would have been no music, given that recording technology and music distribution are very young technologies relative to human history.

This realization hit me hard over the last few years. My struggles adjusting to my new home in Bozeman led me to realize that my own actions have been a big part of my own isolation. I built a recording studio in Redwood City, and proceeded to spend hours and hours alone in it, with the Christmas Rhapsody and Danger, Ltd. sessions standing out as the only real exceptions. That realization has been a major contributor to my vision for the Music Tech Center, but even that vision could veer off track and lead to isolation.

In truth, my most satisfying creative projects have always been working side-by-side with other energetic, highly creative people. Whether in software or music, it's the collaborative energy that has fueled the most interesting and satisfying results. Unfortunately, the displacement of many commercial recording studios by home recording technology has eaten away at the collaborative opportunities in music. I am saddened to see musicians forget the power of collaboration. Much like the commuter with a mobile phone, we tune out our surroundings and write, arrange and record our music alone, place aural and creative blinders around us to shut out the distraction. We forget that the distraction from, and interaction with other musicians is the secret ingredient to most musical creations.

By working with others, we end up with a creation that could not have existed based on the work of one. And, at least in my own experience, not only are the results more interesting but the process is more enjoyable. Being stretched beyond our own comfort zones, trying new things based on suggestions from our collaborators, that's where the real magic begins.

Personally, I need to revisit the role that technology plays in my music. It's a tool, meant to facilitate the process of creating and recording music. It's not an excuse to avoid other musicians, or hide from the audience. Music is notes, chords, rhythms, timbres; it's an aural phenomenon. No matter how it's sonic qualities are generated, in the end, it just matters how it sounds and how it makes each of us feel. The more we remember the joy of experiencing music together, the more we'll experience the power of music.

I encourage you to think about how technology has influenced the way you listen to and create music. Are the tools getting in the way? Have you forgotten how to collaborate with other musicians? What steps can we all take to wrest the musical process from the grip of technology and return it to the people that experience it?

Amaranthe - Why are they stuck in my head?

Honestly, I don't remember the exact moment when I discovered Amaranthe. At some point in the last year, as I was wandering around the Internet, I ran across them. At first I viewed them as an interesting new band from the Nordic part of the world that generates much of the music I love. They have the unique twist of 3 separate vocalists, a female clean lead (Elize Ryd), a male clean lead (Jake E) and a male guttural specialist (Andreas Solveström). And, they have a great melodic death metal rhythm section (Olof Mörck - guitar & keys, Johan Andreassen - bass, Morten Løwe Sørensen - drums).

So, that explains why I like them. I like heavy, melodic music and just about any metal that has some reasonable amount of pitch variation in the vocals. But that doesn't explain why they get stuck in my head so readily. I find myself whistling the melodies from their songs at the strangest times. And once I start, it's hard to make it stop.

Fortunately, I figured out why. Oddly enough, it's just like ABBA, a band I never listened to in depth and yet I still hear "Waterloo" in my head, clear as day. It always amazed me how catchy and universal ABBA's melodies are. They churned out a string of hits that bore into your head and never leave. The songs I know are all upbeat and musically motivating, and only in later years did the song themes become more introspective.

Amaranthe touches me in the same way and has the benefit of being right in the middle of my wheelhouse. The music is clearly edgier than ABBA but at the same time revels in sweeping melodies, and layered vocal harmonies that are infectious. They capture exactly what I love about heavy music - this deeply moving energy that gets your heart pumping no matter whether the lyrical message is incredibly upbeat (e.g. power metal) or immersed in death (e.g. goth metal).

If you've heard Amaranthe and love them, you know what I mean. If you haven't, be sure to check out their self-named debut album (Amaranthe). And for those of you that have heard them and found they don't do much for you, I dare you to listen to the album a couple times. See if you don't wake up in the morning with "Hunger", "1,000,000 Lightyears" or "Automatic" stuck in your head. I dare you...

David, what's the deal with your Ph.D.?

I get the question here and there, not often but on a fairly regular interval. Yes, I did get my Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Folks ask me, "What's up with that? What're you doing working as a software engineer, shouldn't you be designing drugs?". Yep, seems like an odd transition and yet it was a pretty easy and a somewhat obvious one at the time.

First off, in graduate school I spent my time studying the relationship between protein structure and function using mostly computational techniques. In laymen's terms that added up to spending about 5 straight years writing computer programs and scripts that looked for structural similarities between different proteins. In the process I learned C, C++ and Perl and got to be a bit of sysadmin for Macs and Unix systems.

Also, when I was wrapping up my studies, there were only limited positions that were interesting and a good match for the skills I'd developed. It was fairly early in the days of using computational approaches to design drugs. Sure, there were jobs, but only a few of them in the Bay Area at the time, and it become clear that I wasn't a first choice for any of them. I could have moved elsewhere in the country but Nancy and I both have family in the Bay Area that we're close to and at the time felt strongly about staying nearby.

Now, it's time to remember that my first love (without question) is music. It's the one thing that's fundamentally "me". There are other things I do well but only one that is at the heart of who I am. It's also important to understand that during my time at G.I.T. in Hollywood about a decade before, I had become fascinated by multi-track recording (in those early days using a 4-track Fostex cassette recorder). During my years in graduate school, I had become an early adopter of a promising but at the time somewhat fickle new computer-based recording system, namely Pro Tools. From the first day I saw it demoed, I felt sure that it was going to change everything about recording, it was only a matter of time. So I started with a 4-track Pro Tools system and then eventually expanded it to 16-tracks. We used to cross our fingers, take a deep breath and very gingerly click the onscreen UI in fear that we would trigger the relatively common crashes that resulted from using Pro Tools in those days. But despite that, it really was a game changer and I was infatuated.

So when I realized I was having a tough go trying to find suitable work in pharmaceutical chemistry that I was excited about, I figured "what the heck?", I'll see if I can get work in the music software world. I sent my resume to Digidesign (now Avid) and waited. Then I followed up with a phone call and after a brief game of phone tag was able to speak to the vice president of software development. He explained that my background wasn't right for their needs (typically they hired DSP engineers out of a handful of strong programs around the country). However, he said that he'd passed my information on to the QA manager at "Digi".

Shortly thereafter, I got a call from the QA manager, and his response was quite different. He was eager to have me come in and interview for a testing position that would include both black box and white box QA. The rest transpired pretty quickly. I came in, went through the interview process, was offered the job and took it. Nancy and I agreed that we'd stay in San Francisco long enough for me to finish off my thesis (roughly 6 months), working during the day and writing at night. Once the thesis was done we hightailed it out of the foggy Sunset District in San Francisco and just far enough down the Peninsula to get out of the fog (Redwood City).

At Digidesign my responsibilities shifted a bit over time, eventually leading me into release engineering and configuration management but what I really wanted was to write code. It was clear after about 3 years at Digidesign that my path into software development would be a slow slog in that organization. Fortunately, around that time I was cold-called by Adobe about a white box QA position. I interviewed for that gig, but the hiring manager and I agreed it wasn't the best fit for me. However, within a few months I got a second chance, this time to join a previous manager of mine and take on the white QA responsibilities for a new web-related app. It was the opportunity I'd been waiting for. Adobe was positioned well in the market and in the industry and was hiring people like crazy.

Oddly enough, that project was cancelled less than a year after I started. We came in a day after a team building event where we'd all gotten T-shirts and were told that we no longer had jobs. We were also told that we had a few days to look around Adobe for other work, and otherwise move on. After a soul-searching weekend, I came in bright and early on a Monday morning, ready to look for another job. I had 2 or 3 leads, and planned to talk to each of those managers before making a decision. It was a busy time and hard to coordinate meetings, but I managed to meet with one of the managers on Monday and had a promising conversation with him and the rest of the team. We agreed that it made sense for me to talk to the other teams before making a final decision. On Tuesday, I came in first-thing, prepared to explore my other options and gather info to support whatever decision was imminent. Then I checked my voicemail. The manager from the previous day's conversation had left me a message. I had until noon to make a decision or else I'd be out of work. I never completely figured out how the timeline changed but at the time it was clear I needed to make decision immediately.

I managed to squeeze in a mid-morning conversation with the manager of a second team, but not enough to get a clear picture of my alternatives. Under the circumstances, the only obvious choice I saw was to take the position offered by the first team. I let both managers know about my decision and began what proved to be the next chapter in my life. My new manager quickly saw something in my that others had not, within a year I was given a software engineer position and eventually ended up as the lead engineer and manager of my team. I ended up working at Adobe for about 6 years and it was a great place to work and very supportive of family life. My daughter was born near the end of my stay at Adobe, and I have fond memories of bringing her to work with me every so often. She played and napped in her stroller while I wrote code.

Eventually, Silicon Valley took its first economic hit and I lost the job at Adobe. My team was eliminated and I had to tell all of my direct reports. One of them was on vacation in Disneyland with his family. He wasn't due to return until after his mandatory last day. I wanted desperately to save the bad news until after his trip was over, but I had to call him mid-vacation to deliver the news. The two weeks before I walked out of the building were two of the hardest weeks I'd ever had. Adobe had been a home for me; it had been the key transition point for my career and I had many close friends that I would leave behind.

Still, I look back on the time at Adobe with mostly good thoughts. There were a lot of tough times in that six-year period; it was emotionally and sometimes physically stressful trying to keep up the pace. But despite all that, it was a springboard for the rest of my career. I've had the opportunity now to work as a software engineer, not just for a great company like Adobe, but also for Apple. I've also had the chance to work for a number of audio-related software companies, finally closing the book on my struggle to become an audio developer at Digidesign.

I don't often think about pharmaceutical chemistry. Graduate school taught me skills that facilitated my transition into Silicon Valley. The part of my graduate studies I enjoyed the most is still part of my day to day activities as a software engineer. Still, I will always know the effort that went into my thesis and I keep copies on various shelves so I can look up and be reminded.

How many of you have planned to do one thing and ended up with something completely different?

This ain't sports, it's music

Sure, bands have logos and so do sports teams. Some bands have mascots and uniforms just like sports teams. Don't be fooled, though, there's a difference. A big difference...

Sorry all you fans of American Idol, but in music just because one performer wins doesn't mean all the other performers have to lose. We've gotten so used to the Super Bowl, the World Series, the various World Cups and the Tour de France. The winners of each of those events are, at that moment, the best in the world and everyone else has fallen short. You see it in the eyes of a football team that plays in a national championship game and loses. Even though they are that close to the ultimate goal, they're seen as losers and they see themselves that way.

In music, there is absolutely no requirement that we define a "best" band. It drives me nuts how much energy goes into statements like, "Clearly, the Beatles are the best rock band ever." or even the typical "Top 100 Songs of All Time" list. I can't tell you which band I like "best". I can name 100 bands that I like to listen to but I'd be hard-pressed to pin down the "best" band out of those 100, even the best 5 bands. If there's really a best band, why should any of us listen to anything else? Because we don't all agree on the best band and we don't even agree on the best genre, sub-genre or just about any other criteria you can use to subdivide the vast sea of great music on this planet. And, our tastes vary from day to day and over the course of our lifetimes (at least some of us archive the old and welcome the new).

Since this isn't sports, why put so much energy into putting down the bands and styles you don't like? With the internet, there's literally no excuse for complaining that you don't have access to the music you like. Given that, why spend any time listening to music you don't like for long enough to develop even the slightest negative opinion? Sure, it's worth being open minded and trying out different styles and artists, always experimenting with new things, but once you know you don't like it, just let it be. Leave it alone and focus on the positives, the music you love. Enough of the "Emo sucks!", "Metal sucks!", "Country sucks!" comments. None of them suck, you just like some of them and dislike others. We don't need to crown a winner.

I understand, as a fan, there's something that drives us to be "balanced" in the sense that every word of praise must be balanced by a word of criticism. To bolster the standing of our favorite bands we need to make the others look completely inferior... I'm suggesting it's better to give that a rest. Be a rabid supporter but be an indifferent detractor.

For those of you musicians out there, in bands, trying to succeed in your local music scene, here's a thought. If every band in your local area sounded the same, why would anyone prefer to see you? Variety in a local scene is a good thing. It gives people the opportunity to focus on the bands they like and skip the ones they don't like. If you're in a band, you want other bands in the local scene to be different, to provide variety, even those sharing the bill with you. The greater the variety of bands, the greater the opportunity that more than one will succeed. As a local band it's in your best interest to support the success of the bands around you; that will grow the scene overall and that in turn will give you a better chance of success.

Regardless of whether you are a fan or a performer, stop putting down others to bolster your own preferences. Can you change your ways? If you do, you'll be rewarded by greater opportunity and better music across the board.

Be a music locaphile!

Unless you've been on Mars for the last decade, not only have you heard the term "locavore" but it's probably become a well-worn term in your vocabulary. Eating locally grown, locally prepared food makes a ton of sense. You'll keep more money circulating in your local community, chew up less fossil fuel in the process and make life better for those in your immediate vicinity. Since food is an essential ingredient of life, it's easy to see how making changes in how you obtain it could have a big environmental impact. But I'm a music guy, why am I going on an on about eating local food?

Over the last three years, I've developed the opinion that it's not just food that should be local. The concept applies in general: just about anything you can acquire locally has greater positive impact on the community where you live than the same thing imported from elsewhere in world. I've reached the conclusion that entertainment is another excellent opportunity to channel money and good will into your local community. If you go to a local movie theater and pay to see a movie, much of that money makes it's way out of your town, out of your state and into the coffers of big entertainment companies many miles away. The candy, soda and snacks you buy during the show also feed big business ventures around the country. Sure, some of your ticket purchase supports the local movie theater and its employees but perhaps we can do better.

Admittedly, movies are a challenging example. It takes a lot of money and time to make the high quality movies that we've gotten used to watching. There hasn't yet been an easy way for a local filmmaker to generate a movie and make a living solely based on local distribution. But music is different...

Despite trends in the last 50-75 years, music can be performed and experienced on the spot. Sure, it's great to have 1000s of songs in the palm of your hand but, honestly, that's no substitute for seeing a great performer in person. And what's even more satisfying is being an avid fan for local bands, watching them mature from a first-line opening act to a guaranteed headliner. As a fan, your emotional investment in local performers will pay back in spades. Unlike the rest of the country, you can typically count on seeing your favorite band often, in a more intimate setting, and you can share those experiences with good friends and family.

If you become a loyal fan for local acts, the money you spend for tickets will at least partially make its way into the pockets of your favorite performers. Even the money you spend on snacks and drinks will help support the local venues, keeping them in business so they can continue to bring you great shows. If you make a habit of buying music directly from your local bands, they have a much better chance of making a living and putting out more music to share with you. And because we're talking about local artists, if they stay in business, you will keep having the opportunity to see them.

That's not the whole scoop either. If you support local acts, they will improve over time, polishing their musical and performance skills. They will move up the rungs to eventually become headliners at the local level, opening the door for another generation of local supporting acts. And eventually, some of them will gain fame outside your local community, drawing attention from outside. Once that happens, they are very likely to start bringing money into your community from the outside. When they play in your town, folks from nearby communities will travel to see them and spend money in your town. When they play elsewhere, the word will spread to other communities, helping to make your town a more attractive stopping point for major touring acts.

So, I'm asking every one of you to think hard about how you spend your entertainment time and dollars. An audiophile is someone that loves high quality audio, a connoisseur of the audio experience. With that in mind, I'm suggesting that you become a "music locaphile", someone that not only loves music but is devoted to supporting music that's written, practiced, performed and distributed locally. By putting more of your entertainment time and money into your local music scene you'll improve the community financially, emotionally and creatively.

So, what's stopping you? Get out there and discover the musicians and bands in your own town and contribute to their success. In the process, you'll contribute to your own success.