Podcasts and marketing music - free!

Recently I got an ipod nano and started checking out podcasts. I almost never listen to the radio any more because as Brian Tracy recommends - I've turned my car into a rolling university! Sounds corny but it's really cool and here in the Atlanta area where traffic is hell, it makes the drive so much easier when you feel like you're learning something instead of just wasting time crawling down the highway.

One of my favorite recording podcasts is the Project Studio Network. Sort of like Car Talk for recording geeks. Great reviews, interviews, and links to free stuff, which they somewhat annoyingly always announce with a freeeeee exclamation.

Car talk has a podcast and so does Garrison Keillor with the Prairie Home Companion. All free!

CD Baby has one - covering marketing, recording, performing, touring. CD Baby is a great company by the way for distribution of your CD or arranging downloads on iTunes etc.

recording to a loop instead of a click track

In the studio I have quite a few singer/songwriters come in to do projects. Often we will start with them and add the band later so there is the need for a click track. I abandoned the straight click track idea a long time ago and have been using a drum pattern with a kick, snare high hat or some combination of those - maybe a shaker or whatever. Somewhere along the way it occurred to me to add a person-played shaker to humanize it a bit.

The biggest revelation came when a guitar player was having a difficult time with the machine rhythm and we tried the Akai E2 Headrush looper. He played a few bars of the tune and when he had the tempo, he muted the strings and I looped a bar or two with the E2. Just like that we had a very human track to play along with - in fact he was playing along with the most natural rhythm possible - his own. We used the same method for all the tracks and not only did it work well, it was way faster than programming a machine and deciding on a temp etc.