Know your audience. This golden rule of communications is perhaps more applicable to the music business today than ever before. Social media tools and customizable digital distribution platforms have closed the gap between artist and audience. We’re back to fans being the currency, and the challenge facing artists is how Read more...
MIDTOWN, MANHATTAN: It’s a New Year — Instead of finding a yoga instructor for inspiration, check out Elie Maman. Equally adept at the business side of the biz, this fast-emerging producer/composer shows us just what kind of head you have to have on to fly fast forward off the city Read more...
HELL’S KITCHEN, MANHATTAN: New York City is a place where stars shine, but it can also be a land of long shadows. Just ask Rich Pagano, a world-class drummer who routinely shares the stage with the Earth’s top performers.
Besides being the pulse of champion Beatles tribute band The Fab Read more...
I typically wouldn’t review one of my own gigs, but in the case of the recent The Four Corners Songwriter’s Round (December 28th, 2009) at Googie’s Upstairs, I felt I had to share the experience with someone – most notably you. If you haven’t been to The Living Room in Read more...
While Quantum Leap Silk is not the newest sample-based virtual instrument (VI) out there, you can take this as a kind of year-end shout to one of my favorite tools of the year. Silk encompasses traditional acoustic instruments from the Silk Road trade route first established during the time of Read more...
Rope, an up-and-coming psychedelic roots-rock band from Brooklyn, began as producer/engineer Josh Clark’s studio side project. The co-owner of Seaside Lounge Recording in Park Slope, Clark began recording some of his own songs in between sessions with bands like Beirut, The National, Dark Horse & the Carousels, Antietam and Hopewell. Read more...
BRIDGEPORT, CT: Producer/engineer Peter Katis has a gift for distilling a band’s sound, using instinct, technology and personal invention to help bring out the sonic temperament of a song in all its complexity. For example, The National, Interpol, The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit … all bands whose distinctly weighty Read more...
EAST VILLAGE, MANHATTAN: Why did The Strokes album Is This It change the world? Raw aggravations and melodic mastery were set free by five wizened Manhattan youths whose instincts were apparently dead on about…everything that had anything to do with music.
Rough rough rough when so much else in 2001 Read more...
Kerry “Krucial” Brothers is Alicia Keys’ right-hand man — her longtime production and business partner in KrucialKeys Enterprises and The Oven Studios, and one of the Executive Producers on The Element on Freedom. As with As I Am, Brothers and Chief Engineer Ann Mincieli form the start-to-finish production nucleus that Read more...
Manny Marroquin came out from sunny Cali to mix Alicia Keys’ new record in-house at The Oven. This was his second such Long Island residency, having mixed Keys’ As I Am in similar fashion in the summer of ’07.
Just in the last year and change, Marroquin’s mixed Kanye West’s Read more...
