Songs can come out anywhere, anytime. I think they gestate inside of me for a while until they find the right time and way to come out. I wrote this bass line while I was on the floor of Bass Player Live out in Los Angeles in October. I was fiddling with the new Source Audio Programmable EQ and apparently thinking about The Who. Some of the musical motifs in it have definitely been trying to fight their way into existing songs but not quite fitting.
I’m not sure where this one is going to go, but I love how it sounds. For the time being, I’ll be listening to it and writing melodies on top of it. Since I’ve got the blog rolling again, I thought it would be pretty cool to share this one with you right from the absolute beginning of its creation.
The cool thing about Source Audio is that this clip will be in my bass demo video for the Programmable EQ. That’s where a lot of my song ideas have gone to die though…gotta be careful with that early gratification.
What does this song sound like it’s about to you? What should the lyrics focus on?
By the way…How EXCELLENT does that sound file look?
About two months ago I met with a guy named Nathan Navarro on behalf of Source Audio to put a new pedal in his hands. He had sent in some videos that he had done with the Hot Hand and we loved his work. He’s a great dude, a solid player, and he’s dedicated to putting himself out there. He’s a real tastemaker; someone whose choices influence others. Essentially, we figured that the cost of giving him the pedal was worth the potential upside of him, well, using it.
We had a lot of faith in Nathan, but apparently we underestimated him. About a month after our meeting, he came out with a video using Source Audio pedals that went viral, passing the 1 million view mark in less than three weeks after its release. Within days, our web traffic increased by about 25x and demand for our pedals skyrocketed to levels we’ve never seen.
In a previous post on this blog, The Discoverability of Brilliance, I tried to identify the key traits behind something that goes viral. My conclusion was that something needs to be remarkable and poignant to go viral. Nathan’s video fits that criteria perfectly.
The video is a live band cover of Skrillex, the white-hot dubstep talent who has made 2011 his year. No one had done live band dubstep before. It’s a branch of music based in electronica that in a sense uses the sounds of speakers and audio equipment as instruments. It’s designed to be played LOUD so you can feel the sound in your chest. Big distorted bass scoops known as bass wobbles make your stereo sound like a poltergeist jumped inside. Those bass wobbles are a genre defining sound that has for a while seemed impossible to create using actual instruments.
Fortunately for Source Audio, the Hot Hand that sat floundering for years became the solution to a problem that didn’t exist at the time of its creation: creating ‘organic’ bass wobbles. The problem was vexing enough to merit regular discussion on forums and even to spawn its own popular Facebook group.
All of a sudden, the necessary flair of using the Hot Hand that had once been thought of as a bit silly, is now rippling over the internet. YouTube videos of Hot Hand bass wobblers have started to appear en masse in just the last month. Here are a few:
So we went viral! Cake for everyone! Now what?
There’s all this talk out there about making something viral and not enough talk about what to do after something goes viral. I’ve learned from experience that it can be a bit of a let down to go viral and not be prepared to do anything about it:
So here we are with the big question: What do you do when you go viral? How do you capitalize it?
1.) Have an infrastructure in place ready to seize the excitement.
We were fortunate at Source Audio that we had already put a slew of videos in place that served to either ramp up excitement even further or to inform people on the nitty gritty details of each pedal. We had these videos because we were trying to chip away our place in the crowded world of effects pedals. Think of that as our running game and viral as our passing game. You can’t just lean on the possibility of an 80 yard touchdown pass to score. When Nathan’s video went viral, we had a slew of videos right there in the YouTube search results and related video fields ready to answer people who were asking, what is that thing? Even better, all of our videos pointed to a website that was designed to guide someone from ‘interested’ into ‘gotta have it’ into ‘bought it’.
Tip: Make sure to adjust the keywords and descriptions of all the content in your ‘infrastructure’ so that it tailors to whatever piece of content went viral. You’ll already have an advantage over competing search results if something about you went viral, but even the slightest change can make the difference of hundreds of views per day. Literally.
2.) Interact aggressively.
We spend a huge amount of time every day responding to comments on YouTube videos (not just on our own, but on any related to us), fielding questions in forums, generating conversation on our own Facebook page and in Facebook groups related to us.
We’ve found that people tend to have lots and lots and lots of questions before they make a final decision on buying anything. By tracking down their conversations and going to them, we not only get our message out there, we amaze them with our attentiveness.
Below are some really concrete tips from experience that can help you out on this:
Tip 1: Most forums give you the option of subscribing to threads, which is a great way to have updates on key conversations sent straight to your inbox. Make sure to not just push an agenda. You’re not just trying to make a sale, you’re participating in an existing culture and trying to foster your own.
Tip 2: Use Google Keywords to get notifications on any blog that picks up a story related to you. When they do, send them an email and thank them for giving you coverage. Keep in touch with them, interact on their site, and if you support them, they’ll be there for you when you’ve got a story to push.
Tip 3: If you’re serving as a face of a brand, decide ahead of time if you want your personal online accounts like Facebook and Twitter to be open to relationships formed through marketing. I’ve kept mine open and it’s been a really cool way to meet some awesome musicians. But that’s my passion so I’m happy. If you’re marketing toothpaste on the other hand…
3.) Don’t stop at the sale. People don’t exist to buy and sell things, they exist to share ideas.
Nike isn’t just shoes and sportswear. It’s the concept of pushing your boundaries and not letting yourself give up. ‘Just Do It’. Their sales may keep the lights on now, but its the idea their sharing with the world that gives them longevity and legacy. In the case of artists, generating a sincere following is the lifeblood for your entire career. So how do you define what your idea is and how do you spread it after the glow of going viral wears off?
Source Audio has an old-school feedback system built into the sales process. Sure, Facebook and Twitter are sexy right now, but you’ve got to have your blocking and tackling too. In our case, we’ve got a card included in every one of our pedals that offers a free ‘wired hot hand’, an obsolete version of the Hot Hand before it went wireless. To get the ring, all you have to do is email us and we’ll send you one for free.
The key here is that the person handling those emails is either going to be me or one of the other guys in the office here and not a computer or automated process. Even more important is the message we’re sending in our response: Here’s a hot hand. Use it and we’ll promote what you do…and in the meantime, tell us a bit about yourself.
The result is a growing community of constant sharing that exists beyond the realm of Facebook or Twitter. It’s a community full of evolving relationships not just based on Source Audio selling to customers, but based on the question, ‘How can we use the Hot Hand to create awesome music?’
So when Evan Marien, whose video I posted above, puts out that slick in-studio drum and bass video using the Hot Hand, he gives me at Source Audio some ideas for what I can do for the next fun video that we release. I’m sure Nathan is watching too. And so are guys like Paul, Dan, Christoph, Andres and all the other bad-ass bass players who are getting down on the Hot Hand. What can we do next?
Head over to the SOURCE AUDIO WEBSITE to see the videos, pedalboards pics, and quotes that define the evolving Source Audio community.
All of my recent work with Source Audio is available for download from this Soundcloud player. Get ‘em while they’re hot!! Plenty more musical goodness to come. I’ve got some fun projects in the works.
This is the latest video out of life at Source Audio. Slurple Gurp! I gave it that name because that’s exactly what the bass line (the second bass line to be exact) sounds like. It’s all made with Source Audio pedals for the purposes of showcasing their sounds.
The most challenging part was the dubstep bridge near the end. I don’t listen to dubstep, but we’ve noticed that a lot of people have been looking to the Source Audio pedals to get that dubstep wobble sound. So, I opened my head up and YouTubed the shit out of dubstep and came up with that bridge. As it turns out, that’s my favorite part of the song. It’s such a different kind of music…meant to be played loud and open air so you can physically feel the movements of the sounds.
I really enjoyed writing this tune though. I hope it does a lot for Source Audio and for me. Let me know your thoughts on it!
We recorded this video a long time ago, but we had it spliced up into three separate videos with these goofy talking introductions. Now we are trying to see how a video of straight music stands on the interwebs.
This is all in preparation for a big jam session that we have planned at Boston big-time studio, Q Division. It will be a big investment for us and we’re not quite sold yet on the idea that these types of videos will garner a lot of attention for Source Audio. I for one, think that these videos are awesome, but that’s because I love having the opportunity to jam my pants off.
Made a new video with Source Audio. Ickle-Picklestein got herself a little cameo in this one too. Hope you enjoy!
This one is an all-bass Multitrack Videosong (a la Mystery Guitar Man or Pompaloose) that we filmed in my old apartment in Brighton. There’s a decent chance of this music becoming a more developed song with vocals later on, but we’ll see about that…
A veritable Ghost Trap a la Ghostbusters, the Soundblox Classic Distortion houses eleven recaptured spirits of prevalent distortion sounds resulting from a five-year listening study of stomp boxes and tube amps. Sounds from the Big Muff Pi, Fulltone Distortion Pro, Tone Bender, Fuzz Face, ProCo Rat and Octavia can all be selected at the turn of a knob on the Soundblox Classic and then further tweaked by a graphic equalizer, two drive knobs, midrange knob and an output knob.
In addition, Source Audio has provided the option of tweaking the old sounds even further via an expression pedal morphing function, MIDI input connection and a jack for the Hot Hand motion-sensing controller.
Source Audio, now in it’s fifth year as a company, is a true nod to the marriage of music and technology. Having formed as a spin-off from the well-known semi-conductor company Analog Devices, they were able to request a customized state-of-the-art Digital Signal Processor, the SA601 chip, to pursue their music-centric interests. The two sets of ears in the listening study, VP of Engineering Jesse Remignanti (former audio systems and software engineer at Analog Devices) and Chief Scientist Bob Chidlaw (former senior engineer at Kurzweil Music) sat down to discuss the listening study, the process of creating the Soundblox Classic Distortion and a few other topics for the audiophile at home.
The need for a pedal that housed multiple quality distortion tones was clear to Jesse Remignanti, a veteran guitarist of the New England music scene. One of his challenges for the creation of the Soundblox Classic Distortion was to design an interface that could work seamlessly on-stage. He muses, “I’ve seen some guys who have anywhere from six to ten pedals on their board which are just distortion…jumping from one pedal to the other and doing a toe-tapping dance to get one sound to another sound.” He continues, “It’s easier to just have it called up on a preset or use the expression pedal. It’s useful for anyone from the pro musician to the guy who’s doing cover tunes and needs a different sound because they’re doing Metallica and then The Cars.”
For Chidlaw, a collector of tube amps, the challenge was to create digital sounds from scratch that matched his standards for analog sounds, which were quite high at the beginning of the project. “When I started at Source Audio, I was a real tube amp snob” states Chidlaw matter-of-factly. “The only distortion I would use was real distortion from a tube amp. I would sometimes modify amps to get more gain. Turning up the gain on a Marshall JCM-800 was one of my little moves.”
To truly capture some of the most notable distortion sounds in the fuzz pantheon, Bob and Jesse would have to explore the world of stomp boxes and as they dug deeper, Chidlaw’s tastes began to open up. “I had built solid-state distortion devices before. I really had just rejected them all by this point 5 years ago.” He reflects, “But then we bought a distortion pedal, the Fulltone Distortion Pro and I thought, ‘wow, this actually does sound quite nice.’ Then when we really started getting into the Classic Distortion we started acquiring a lot more pedals. I personally bought far too many for my growing collection. I really came to see the charm in solid-state distortions. It really gives you something that a vaccum tube can’t. You can’t get that sound from a vacuum tube amplifier. It can’t be done.”
In mapping the digital sounds to be placed in the Soundblox Classic Distortion, Chidlaw had to create each algorithm from the ground up, attempting to capture the essence of each distortion tone. “An algorithm is a recipe of how the sound is processed…There’s a lot of trial and error; a lot of tweaking… I just have to use my ears to try to compare what the digital system is doing with what the real analog pedal is doing.”
He continues, “You can’t really point to a sound as it goes by. Try to hear just what it is that makes a particular fuzz have it’s own sound. What is in the sound? All you can say is ‘doesn’t that sound kind of harsh in the high end?’ and maybe it does or maybe it doesn’t strike you that way… If you’re making something analog, you can say ‘I’ll use some of these transistors that were very cheap back in the day when this thing was built’ but what is the digital signal processing equivalent of a cheap transistor? Not at all obvious…”
The aim of the Soundblox Classic Distortion is a near precise match for the needs of the modern performer in that it can call up the guitar tone from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ in one moment and then in the next, it can create a never-before-heard sound.
“It gives you some really interesting effects” explains Remignanti, “because you could get an in-between sound from two completely different pedals. You could switch from the Rat Tone to the Tube Drive or something just by rocking the expression pedal.”
Chidlaw adds, “You can get some more bizarre things happening in the middle of those morphs. You could say there is only twelve selector positions on the Classic Distortion, but if you use the morph control, you’ve really got hundreds of more possible selector positions by just, sort of, freezing the morph. Sixty percent of the way between this and this and you’ve got this new sound that’s in there.”
The versatility of the Classic Distortion can be traced back to that signature chip, the SA601 Digital Signal Processor. The power of the chip allowed the Source Audio engineers to push the pedal into new territories for a distortion stompbox. When asked about the graphic equalizer, another of the pedals unique features, Remignanti says simply “We had enough room in the processing and in the interface to add a seven-band EQ and it’s programmable for each preset. You could have the same distortion effect with three different EQ settings and get totally different sounds out of it. So, it’s a very nice, flexible feature…[It’s] not something commonly seen on distortion pedals.”
A collection of circuit boards used for Source Audio pedals
Matching the considerable uniqueness of the sounds, the aesthetic and layout of the Soundblox Classic Distortion have a simple and modern feel. Remignanti explains, “Our goal with the overall design was to make them simple in terms of the interface and the overall appearance but also modern looking. We tried not buy into the whole retro thing in our main design philosophy for the housings and the look of the pedals. [As for] the interface, we tried to keep it to as low a number of knobs and controls as possible, but still allow the user to get a lot of features and a lot of different sounds.”
‘Portrait of Tracy’ is a song that I learned back in high school during my independent studies. I was very lucky to have a teacher who was willing to just shut me in a room and let me practice for half of the afternoon every day.
As for the song itself, those high ringing notes, the harmonics, are really what make it speak to me. They truly expand the sonic scope of the bass to create this wide sound that is almost mystical in how soothing it can be. If any bass players out there are interested in learning how to play harmonics on the bass, this is certainly the song to turn to.
Just a couple of days ago, I returned home from lovely Frankfurt where I drank beer, ate sausages, conserved energy and talked too close to peoples faces just like the Germans do! It was great. I was there for Source Audio to show off the new line of pedals at Musikmesse, a stupidly massive international music instruments trade show.
I was parked in the Warwick booth and hitting the stage with Reeves Gabrels, an extremely proficient guitar player to say the least. He’s had quite a strong career thus far and it was an honor to be sharing the stage (little as it may have been) with someone as accomplished as he. He is best known as David Bowie’s guitar player of choice throughout the 90′s. Here is a quick video of him and I doing our thing for Source Audio:
There are a few more videos of our jams and a whole lot more to check out at the Source Audio Blog. Have a look!
So…Frankfurt was awesome. The city itself presented a stunning portrayal of old and modern side by side. I had the best beer of my life in the bar district of Sachsenhausen, a place you simply need to go when you visit (no matter how touristy it supposedly is). The beer in question, by the way, was a Franciscana…brewed by monks for an extra holy buzz.
The work side of the trip was spectacularly fun. Since we were performing as a part of the Warwick booth, I had four days to really hang out with some top-notch musicians. I had especially great hangs with Jean-Paul Bourrelly, Divinity Roxx of Beyonce’s band Suga Mama, DeWayne ‘Blackbyrd’ McKnight of P-Funk and Ryan Martinie of Mudvayne. Each and every one of them showed themselves to be kind, eloquent people with a sincere interest in thought provoking conversation.
On top of that was the always enjoyable sight of Bootsy Collins strutting his bad self back and forth and the moment when TM Stevens came strutting up to our stage to give me a glass full of Jager, insisting that lay down a tasty bass line for him. Amazing! I was more than happy to oblige.
The highlight of the week had to be jumping on-stage at the Warwick after party and shaking my tiny American ass in front of everyone for whom I was supposed to be on my BEST behavior (distributors, magazine editors, artists, etc). You can catch quick very glimpses of my shameless white guy moves in the mainpage video on Warwick’s website (bonus points for good footage of Frankfurt).
Fantastic music, terribly unhealthy food and unforgettable experiences. Great trip. The only thing missing was my lovely assistant to be there dancing to my music
Big thanks goes out to Brett Gildersleeve for being a top-notch travel companion who actually managed to get me out to a Euro-club…and I liked it.
So, I was kind of sticking my nose up at slapping bass during demos for a bit there and then I realized that it’s awesome and I should do it. So I did.
Also a sidenote: I went without my Fodera for this one because there were many who wanted to hear the pedal through a different bass. This is a Mexican-made J-Bass.
