One of the world’s most distinguished studio designers opens up about his life and career. Unscripted. Unframed. Unfiltered.

An outtake from Filter magazine #3.

Following his design of the famous Electric Lady Studios in New York in the late sixties, John Storyk has become one of the music industry’s most famous and celebrated studio designers. However, becoming an acoustician and studio designer wasn’t on Storyk’s radar when he was a young man. In 1968, he had just completed his architectural studies at Princeton and Columbia Universities, and started work at an architecture office in New York.

“It was a relatively typical architectural job,” recalls Storyk, “for a wonderful firm, though not terribly interesting. But I was getting paid and it was what seemed to be the start of a design career! When I graduated from college as an architecture student, I actually thought I was going to be a musician. I grew up playing piano, clarinet, and sax, and by 1968 I was in a 12-piece blues band, and we were pretty good. We were performing three times a week, and I was having the time of my life. It was the late sixties in New York City, and you can connect the dots: it was very exciting!”

“Then my life suddenly changed, in a very short amount of time. It really was a fluke set of events that led to a small commission designing an experimental night club in lower Manhattan. The club, Cerebrum, became quite well-known very quickly. It made the cover of Life magazine within a few months; and was visited by almost everyone in the art scene at that time in New York.”

“Once Jimi Hendrix visited! He loved the design and wanted to know who was responsible. The next thing I know, he asked me to design a club for him. But Eddie Kramer, his engineer and producer, convinced Jimi to scrap the club and build a studio instead. I wanted to strangle Eddie, as I watched this amazing project disappear as fast as it had arrived.”

“Eddie had talked Jimi into building a recording studio, reminding him and his manager that his recording bills for the year were over $300.000, which was a lot of money in 1968. So Eddie suggested that instead of designing a club, I could ‘stay on and do the studio.’ I commented, ‘Guys, I’ve never even been in a studio!’ But they replied, ‘You’ll figure it out. Maybe you can learn.’ So I quit my job, became an intern for an acoustician who was designing radio stations, and tried to learn from him.”

“Electric Lady was built with just six hand-drawn pencil drawings! I’m not sure you can build a kitchen with just six drawings today. I borrowed the isolation details from my internship mentor. He was particularly good, and he knew a lot about masonry and sand-filled walls. So we decided we were going to build masonry sand-filled walls, which gave tremendous isolation. We needed that between the two studios.”

“It took one and a half years to build, and before it was finished, I was already asked to build four other studios. Then I went back to school for a year. I don’t think I was doing any kind of serious acoustic calculations until maybe studio number 10 or studio number 12 that I built.”

Electric Lady became an extremely successful studio, and more than fifty years later it continues to be among the most iconic studios in the world. Storyk went on to enjoy a stellar career as a studio designer, and in 1987, he founded the Walters-Storyk Design Group with his wife Beth Walters, an interiors and textile designer. They had met a few years earlier, and quickly became partners in life and in business.

WSDG has supplied architectural and/or acoustic designs and consulting for close to 4000 projects all over the world, ranging from audio and video studios to theatres, educational facilities, railway stations, airports, football stadiums, and more. Storyk and WSDG have designed countless private studios — for legends like Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, and many more — and many commercial studios, including new facilities for Spotify, Sony and RCA, plus iconic places like the Swiss Parliament, Maracana Stadium in Brazil and the Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.

Today, at the age of 76, Storyk is the world’s eminence grise of acoustic design, and he shares his knowledge in various educational centres around the US, for example as an adjunct professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He also has lectured on this subject at numerous schools in the USA and abroad.

During the more than six decades that Storyk has been active, he has been instrumental in extending the scientific knowledge base that is the foundation of studio design today. His admission that he had little technical acoustic knowledge when he built Electric Lady therefore is a little surprising. With hindsight, what did he get right 53 years ago?

TECHNICAL DRAWINGS BY HAND

“The iconic Studio A live room is basically still the same room, apart from that they’ve painted it a little bit and so on. Why is that room still working after 53 years? Some people say it’s the river that runs under the studio, or Jimi’s vibes in the wall, or the subway 300 meters away, which they say can occasionally be heard on records. Although all of these ideas may be true, I am not sure about the science associated with them. In fact, one of the reasons why the room works is because the reverb time goes down at low frequencies rather than up. That’s the primary acoustic signature in that room.”

“Why did that happen? It was a little bit of luck. The ceiling has a spiral shape that I had fallen in love with in architecture school, and we made it with very thin plaster. We used commercial eggbeaters to make it very, very thin, and then we troweled that onto this shape. I knew very little about membranes but inadvertently we had made a giant low-frequency membrane absorber in the ceiling, which squashes the low frequencies. It took another 25 years before I even had the knowledge and tools to measure this.”

“This story illustrates why one of my favorite words in life is still serendipity. It is a privilege to continue to be able to visit Electric Lady Studios, which remains successful due to its amazing leadership, particularly its manager for many years, Lee Foster. Studios serve musicians and nobody understands that better than Lee. A fluke moment in life leads to a club design leads to meeting Eddie Kramer, leads to Jimi and morphs into a lifetime’s work… seriously?”

Storyk explains that the industry only started to develop reliable technology that could predict acoustic behavior in a particular space by the late 20th century, and even that was only for the frequencies above the Schroeder frequency, and not for low end. So how has studio design and acoustic science developed over the years?

“Well, of course we kept getting smarter every year,” says Storyk, “and the knowledge has increased. There has always been architecture, acoustics and audio, and there’s also the art of building a studio. In all this, there’s a fundamental agreement that rooms basically need to be acoustically neutral. So over the years there’s been a process of intuition, guessing, measurements, using your ears, and then you improve with the next studio you build, to achieve this aim.”

“You have to remember that all the great cathedrals we know today are the ones that did not fall down. Half of the cathedrals that were built collapsed. People learned from their mistakes, and got better. In our case, some studios we made did not work, so we made them better next time. One general mistake in studio design is making control rooms too dead, possibly making them non-musical. And for years, people, myself included, were designing what became known as compression ceilings.”

“You put the speakers up high, encapsulate everything in wood and hard baffling, and then you have the ceiling come down, also in wood. The result was that you got 3 to 6dB more gain in the room. It was a very clever way of getting extra low frequencies, which was good news. The bad news was that you got horrible comb filter reflections from the horns in the listening position. For years people did this, even while knowing it wasn’t sounding good. This was in the late seventies and early eighties.”

COMPRESSION CEILINGS

“Then, all of a sudden, half a dozen people realized that the compression ceiling design concept was wrong. What should really happen is an expansion ceiling, and it should be baffled and soft in the front, and probably be diffusive in the back. From that idea somebody one day came up with the live end, dead end concept, and gave it an acronym, LEDE.”

“When LEDE came along in the early eighties, it became popular because it was an easy acronym to grasp. It was the same with the importance of reverb time. Other concepts emerged as well, like the reflection-free zone, initial time delay gap [ITDG], and more. Nobody ever said small, critical listening rooms were easy to design!”

“Although everybody jumped onto the LEDE concept in the eighties, I always thought that it should be called FDLEDE, which means Frequency Dependent Live End Dead End. LEDE is only for certain frequencies. People say things like, ‘the reverb time of my room is 0.3s.’ However, that means nothing. You have to know for what frequency it is 0.3s. You need to know the reverb time over the entire frequency range.”

“Moreover, the reflection-free zone idea states that in the listening position there’s no energy arriving in the first 15ms that’s within 10dB of the direct sound. That’s an aim that’s not so easy to achieve, and led to new developments in acoustic design.”

“More recently, two important trends have impacted studio design. One is that people have become more and more interested in low-frequency content. It’s to do with hip-hop and urban music. Our musical interest in low end in 2022 is not the same as it was in 1950. Just listen to a Buddy Holly record!”

“The other is that studios are getting smaller. Real estate is expensive, and most people are mixing on smaller consoles, or not on a console at all. More and more studios are private, because the great era of commercial studios has stopped growing. Chris Stone, who founded The Record Plant, predicted over 20 years ago that there would be motherships and satellite studios. He said that there would always be a handful of large iconic studios, and thousands and thousands of smaller studios, privately owned and producer-oriented. It’s exactly what has happened.”

“For the studio design community it means that we are busier than ever before, but it also poses challenges. These smaller studios, now paying more and more attention to low-frequency information and accuracy, are harder to design. As counter-intuitive as this might seem, the science bears this out.”

“The Schroeder frequency gets higher as rooms become smaller, so there’s a larger low frequency range that’s problematic to predict. The combination of stronger interest in low end, and rooms getting smaller, has created a perfect storm for us. It was another reason why we developed the NIRO software, to try to predict how the low end behaves.”

Returning to the topic of the predictive tools that have emerged over the last 25 years, they include the ODEON Room Acoustics program, and the CATT Acoustic [Computer Aided Theater Technique] program for frequencies above the Schroeder frequency, and very recently WSDG’s NIRO program. Overall, it means that today there’s not only a multi-disciplinary approach, but also a multi-concept approach to studio design.

“We have half a dozen industry standards and design parameters now,” elaborates Storyk, “like reflection-free zone, reverb time across the frequency spectrum, frequency response, which needs to be as flat as possible, ITDG, and so on. And we have improved predictive software to help us deliver rooms that are as acoustically neutral as possible. However, there’s no such thing as a completely flat room, nor should there be.”

“For starters, our clients do the final tuning to their own preferences. Every room will have an acoustic signature – it is the nature of music and it is the nature of design. Engineers in broadcast studios often like to have their rooms a little bit dead, particularly at the high end, so that content that leaves their studio is a little bit on the hot side. We had one well-known artist who doesn’t hear the same in both ears, and asked to have one side of the room tuned differently to the other. The client obviously has the final word on how we tune their studio, and this is a subjective judgement.”

“Good engineers put something up, and when they say, ‘Yeah, it’s translating,’ it’s a nice moment for us. That’s as good as we need to get. Some engineers think our rooms are a little bit on the bright side. I guess that’s a little bit of a signature of ours. Generally speaking, most people appreciate that. The rest is vibe, aesthetics, making sure that everything works, and that the place is comfortable. We should never forget that studios are work places. They are like workshops – they are supposed to be a bit messy and ready for change at all times.”

“There will always be moments when intuition trumps science in the design process. We’re always going to have people disagree with our software: ‘I don’t care what it says, this is where the door has to be.’ You’re dealing with building codes, construction realities, and the fact that studios are also living spaces. If you ask me, ‘what interests you now at age 76?,’ it’s to improve the predictive side of acoustic design. At the same time, I don’t want to ever lose sight of the intuitive, artistic part of studio design.”

This article, written and edited by me, is an exclusive outtake from Mix With The Masters’ Filter magazine.

The post JOHN STORYK appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

Below Chapter 1 from my book Miles Beyond, the Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991. In a review, Allaboutjazz.com wrote: “The chapter, ‘Listen,’ is captivating and charismatic. It’s like an elevator, taking the reader up to the 26h floor where the rest of the story will be told.”

“I was put here to play music, and interpret music… I might do a lot of other things, but the main thing that I love, that comes before everything, even breathing, is music.” – Miles Davis.  

“Listen.” Miles, The Autobiography, opens with this word, immediately hitting bull’s eye. It goes straight to the heart of Miles Davis.

Listen before breathing. Miles had a different way of listening. To music. To sound. To people. To the rhythm of the times. To time and space. To understand Miles, we have to listen to the way he expressed himself, in music, words, life-style, and life-choices. Listening is central. It’s what he taught the musicians who played with him. It’s what he taught his audiences as well.

Bassist Gary Peacock described Miles as “by far the greatest listener that I have ever experienced in a musical group.”  His colleague Dave Holland observed that Miles had “the best understanding of time, space, and movement of anybody I have ever worked with.” Keyboardist Adam Holzman stated, “It may be a funny thing to say for a musician, but Miles taught me how to listen.” Percussionist Badal Roy said that the main thing he learnt from Miles was “to play from the heart and to listen.”

Miles used to tell his musicians, “When you play music, don’t play the idea that’s there, play the next idea. Wait. Wait another beat, or maybe two, and maybe you’ll have something that’s more fresh. Don’t just play from the top of your head, but listen and try to play a little deeper.”  Miles also advised his musicians, “Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.”  He might have said: “Don’t listen to what’s there, listen to what’s not there.”

Aside from during the second half of the ‘80s, Miles rarely rehearsed his bands, instead instructing his musicians to practice on the bandstand. He got angry with them if they practiced at home or in their hotel rooms, saying, “How are you going to rehearse the future?”  He wanted them to be fully present with, to listen to, the music in the present moment. “Of all of those in the band, Miles is the most easily influenced by outside events. He reflects everything he feels in his playing immediately,” remarked an unnamed band member.

Miles wanted his sidemen to enter into a relationship with music with what Zen calls “beginner’s mind,” never on auto-pilot, never just following habit energy, but always alert, ready for the unexpected, right here, right now. “Miles did not want me to come to the rehearsals,” guitarist Pete Cosey recalled. “He wanted to keep things fresh. Part of that is knowing what to play and what not to play. The way you do that is to be able to listen what is going on around you. When you come into any situation, it’s the best thing to do: to listen. That is how you learn.”

Listening requires awareness, paying attention. Miles taught both by example. A word used by many musicians who worked with him is “focus.” Dave Holland said, “There was a tremendous sense of focus coming from him that influenced everybody. We were all drawn in by it, it was almost like a vortex. Once you were in its sphere of influence, there was a certain magic that seemed to be happening.” Drummer Jack DeJohnette remarked, “Playing with Miles was about being focused. And about being open to where the music takes you. His sound focused your attention on him and the music. Sometimes this meant leading and sometimes this meant following. He just had that magic, he had that power, that special gift.”

Miles’s unique listening awareness rubbed off on the musicians around him. In his presence they often found themselves raising their awareness and playing to new and unexpected heights. In doing so they exemplified Miles’s adage: “Play what you know and play above what you know.”  Guitarist Sonny Sharrock only played with Miles one day in 1970, but this was enough to change his approach to the guitar, making him realize that playing music is about “really listening, the way Miles listened; to hear the piece to the end right from the first note, and to see what the space is going to be in the piece.”  Guitarist John McLaughlin commented, “Miles has the capacity to draw out of people things that even surprise the musicians themselves. He’s been a guru of sorts to a lot of people. He was certainly a musical mentor to me.”

Miles stated that when listening to his music, “I always listen to what I can leave out.”  He listened to what’s not there, to the space behind the notes, the silence from which music emerges and in which it is framed, trying to find the best balance between that space and the notes that furnish it. One of Miles’s big discoveries was that this often requires fewer notes, rather than more. As a result, his economy of playing and usage of space became legendary. Miles always played between the lines, implying notes, suggesting a mood with minimal material, stretching the “less is more” maxim to new levels.

Early 1985, when working on the album Aura, Miles told a Danish interviewer: “I don’t believe in wasting any phrases, no matter how small, how soft. With phrases comes rhythm. I don’t waste rhythm either. The rhythm can throw off the melody and it gets lost. So you have to know what the phrases mean, what the notes mean. A lot of musicians don’t! They play a note, and they don’t know what it means, they just know ‘that’s a raised 9th, that’s a…’ whatever. You should tell them what it means, then musicians won’t go to sleep. That’s very important.”

Guitarist John Scofield said, “He expressed himself in a virtuoso way, but not with a lot of notes. He had this ability to strip things down and to make it profound. When most people play just one note, it’s not so hot. But he found the right one to play. It was impossible for anybody else to do what he did because he was so unique. He was a teacher for us all.” Jack DeJohnette, Gary Peacock, and Keith Jarrett wrote, “Miles was the authentic minimalist (where, although there are so few notes, there was so much in those notes). No matter how much noise there was around him, Miles always came from silence, the notes existing in a purity all their own.”  Producer and arranger Quincy Jones, concurred, “Miles always played the most unexpected note, and the one that is the perfect note.”

By contrast, many musicians tend to overplay, and Miles joked that because “they play too many fucking notes,” they need to go to “Notes Anonymous.”  He spent much of his life teaching musicians the virtues of space, of silence, of phrasing, of waiting, of economy of notes and ideas, and most of all, of focus and listening. He remembered about percussionist Airto Moreira, “When he first came with me he played too loud and didn’t listen to what was happening with the music. I would tell him to stop banging and playing so loud, and just to listen more.”   According to Moreira, Miles just instructed him with the one-liner, “Don’t bang, just play,”  leaving him to figure out what this meant. Moreira concluded,  “He wanted me to hear the music, and then play some sounds.”

Illustrating how his listening awareness was always present, not just in music, but in everyday life, Miles once remarked, “Rhythm is all around us, even if you stumble.”   An anecdote from his time in Malibu in the late ‘80s illustrates the same point. One day Miles was stopped for speeding. “My speedometer isn’t working,” Miles proclaimed. “So how can you know how fast you’re going?” the police officer asked. “I can hear it,” Miles replied.

***

“Listen. The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first heard Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1944… Music all up in my body, and that’s what I wanted to hear… I’m always looking for it, listening to it and feeling for it, though, trying to feel it in and through the music I play every day.”

Throughout his life, Miles’s main focus was unearthing the meaning of music, delving for the feeling of that moment in 1944, which is the ultimate a musician can experience. Guitarist Robert Fripp described it as the point at which “we are fully alive in the present moment and totally alert to the musical impulse.”  Miles was single-minded and ego-less in the pursuit of this aim, saying, “You gotta get rid of your ego,”  and, “Men have the biggest egos! … All of them will listen, but if they do it, they’ll do it once. Then the ego comes back. A man’s ego is something else.”

Jo Gelbard, the artist who worked with Miles when he got into painting during the ‘80s, and who was also his life partner from 1986 to his death, commented, “He had no ego in music. That’s why he had his back to the audience, because he could hear the band better and direct them. As opposed to, ‘This is Miles Davis, and who cares who’s behind me.’ It was never just about him and his horn. He was always part of the group that was with him.”

Lydia DeJohnette, wife of Jack, knew Miles well. “In music there was no arrogance to his ego,” she remarked. “Being on stage was never about him, but always about musical inspiration, no matter where it came from. It made him happy to feel that inspiration. Sometimes he’d look at Jack and said, ‘You know?’ and Jack would go, ‘Yeah, I know.’ There was a knowing that they shared about the musical field, and it is where Miles felt connected with other people.”

Jack DeJohnette added: “People were often worried about their personal contributions and their egos, but Miles was thinking of it as a team. He also knew that whatever was going on, the sound of his horn could galvanize everything. Miles heard the finished thing.” Keyboardist Herbie Hancock made a similar point: “Miles is an incredible team worker. He listens to what everybody does, and he uses that and what he plays makes what everybody does sound better.”

Miles’s talent to focus and raise the level of awareness and of his bands was perplexing. Countless musicians who worked with Miles recounted stories of how he had a life-changing impact on them, and many talk about him in near-transcendental terms. DeJohnette, Peacock, and Jarrett called Miles “a medium, a transformer, a touchstone, a magnetic field.”  The interviewees in this book used words like “mystical, “guru,” “sorcerer,” “shaman,” “teacher,” “magician,” “Merlin,” and “Zen teacher.”

“Miles gave me myself,” bassist Michael Henderson said. “He gave me something that belonged to me. When I came to play with him, I became ‘me.’ Like everybody else who was with him. We all found ourselves. We found exactly who we were and what we should be doing as far as being in the music industry, and in life.”

“I found my musical identity through playing with Miles,” echoed Henderson’s colleague Marcus Miller. “The first time I played with him, in 1980, I was scared like hell. We were recording a track called ‘Aida.’ He played me F# and G and said, ‘that’s it.’  So I asked, ‘that’s it?’ ‘Yeah.’ So I played only F# and G. Miles stopped the band and said, ‘What are you doing, man? Are you just going to play these two notes, is that all you’re going to do?’ So I started to do all sorts of variations. He stopped the band again, and asked, ‘man, why are you playing so much, just play F# and G, and then shut up’. So I thought: ‘Oh, he’s just playing with me, this is a test.’ I realised I just had to play and not worry about him. That’s what I did and this time he let the whole take go by. Miles had great people skills in the sense of bringing out the best in you as a musician. He was great precisely because he wasn’t communicating that much verbally. He made you find it on your own. Just like those martial arts teachers who point you in a direction and tell you a puzzling story that you have to analyze yourself. Or like those student-master relationships where the student can’t understand why the master has him painting fences, and later on realizes, ‘Oh yes, it’s because…’ It was the same thing with Miles.”

Miller’s analogy with fence painting is taken from the movie The Karate Kid, in which a Zen-like Asian martial arts teacher has his pupil painting fences as part of his apprenticeship. John McLaughlin drew a similar parallel, saying, “Miles in the studio directed very closely, but with very obscure statements. He was like a Zen master. He would give you very strange directions that were very difficult to understand, very obscure. But I think that was his intention, as it is with a Zen master. They will say something to you, and your mind will not be able to deal with it on a rational level. And so he made you act in a subconscious way, which was the best way. He had this great gift of pulling the best things out of people, without them even realizing.”

Palle Mikkelborg, the Danish trumpeter and composer who worked with Miles on Aura, wrote on in his cover notes, “Musically, Miles is to me what a Zen teacher is spiritually.” Mikkelborg explained, “I have talked to a lot of people who have been to Japan and who have studied Zen. They say that sometimes in Zen you’ll be told things which you don’t understand, but you just have a feeling that what they say… is right. The same with Miles, he often said things that were very cryptic, but had a deeper meaning. During our first rehearsal for the performance of Aura in December 1984 he said to me about the drummer, ‘Let him play as if he plays to a tap dancer.’ We were working on ‘Violet,’ the last piece for the album, a very very slow piece. I told the drummer what Miles had said and he asked me: ‘What does he mean?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ We thought about it, and we guessed that Miles wanted him to keep some energy back, and play with a mental awareness of a hidden, faster energy. It changed something in our attitude, and made the very slow rhythm lift off. I don’t see it as anything else than a way of getting the best out of the present musical situation. I think it was an intuitive feeling he had for getting where he wanted to go. He once said to me, ‘When you conduct an orchestra, you have to smell good.’ At the time, I thought, ‘What the hell does he mean?’  Later on I understood that it means to be ‘on’ all the time. ‘Smell good’ means ‘be aware,’ awareness. He was ‘on’ all the time.”

By being “‘on’ all the time,” Miles exemplified the unsurpassed dedication and concentration with which he approached music. His attitude expresses a deep reverence and respect, demanding his total, ego-less, here and now presence, almost as if music was sacred to him. Pianist Chick Corea touched on this when he said,  “Miles set an example by the way he loved to make music. He was about making music. That kind of attitude created an atmosphere in which we all joined, because we all wanted to make music in such a very concentrated way.” Guitarist Robben Ford recalled, “His presence created such an edge. I’d never been with anyone who could be so demanding just by his mere presence.”

Twenty-five years after working with Miles, saxophonist Sonny Fortune’s voice dropped to a whisper when he said: “The whole time I worked with him I was in awe over the magic he had. I walked away from the experience of playing with him feeling that it was something that I would never forget. I can’t explain it at all. Because of this magic, he didn’t have to say much, and he didn’t say much. He was one of the persons that I’ve met who expressed the least amount of trivia. He didn’t talk about much, he didn’t gossip, he didn’t seem to be affected by a whole lot of things. He was a cat that only said one or two phrases, but it would summarize what you were trying to get to. And he had a knowing about music that you could sense and feel, even as it wasn’t necessarily visible or describable.”

These quotes all describe the same essence, the same attitude, from different perspectives. The analogy with Zen, alluded to by Miller, McLaughlin, and Mikkelborg, is a good way of portraying this. It makes it possible to draw together the perspectives from many observers, and create a comprehensive framework for understanding the many characteristics that made Miles such a great musical teacher and innovator. The importance of minimalism, of here and now presence, of being awake, of awareness, of going beyond habit energies, of ego-less service to a greater purpose, of teaching by example, are all at the heart of Zen. Miles’s love of boxing also has parallels with the martial arts  aspects of Zen. And like Miles, Zen teachers are traditionally men of few words, whilst Miles’s penchant for cryptic one-liners has parallels with Zen koans.

The listening sense, especially inner listening, is often associated with Zen, and spiritual awareness in general. “Be still, and know that I am God,” is a central phrase in Christianity. The original title of The Tibetan Book Of The Dead contains the word hearing, and its most used invocation is “Listen, ye man of noble birth.”  In his book The World Is Sound, the German author and jazz critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt elaborated on many aspects of the listening sense in a widely known chapter called “The Temple In The Ear.” Behrendt argued that our TV-obsessed culture has become overly focused on the visual sense, reducing the ears to an “auxiliary organ.”  He quoted scientific evidence suggesting that the listening sense is more pronounced in women, and reasoned that it reflects feminine qualities of receptivity and awareness, whereas the penetrating and projecting visual-spatial sense is a masculine trait. According to Behrendt, re-valuing our listening sense is crucial if we want to rebalance and heal our off-kilter culture, and he saw Zen practice as one way of achieving this, since it is about “wakefulness,” and “listening to silence.”   With his focus on the listening sense, Miles contributed to this re-balancing process.

***

The aim of introducing spiritual perspectives and making the analogy with Zen is not to put Miles on a spiritual pedestal. To his great credit, Miles undermined any attempts by others to turn him into a guru. “I stood next to him in Japan when somebody began kissing his feet, literally,” Lydia DeJohnette remembered. “Miles was like, ‘Stop it!’ Miles was aware of levels that other people aren’t, he understood the vibration of music, what Jack called the ‘essence’ of music, so he could have been a guru if he wanted to. The ‘60s and the ‘70s were the era of gurus. But he didn’t want to be a guru. I think some of his obnoxious side came from that.”

The era of gurus may be over, but the spiritual and transcendental aspects of Miles’s being are hinted at too frequently to be ignored. Things transcendental get dozens of mentions in Miles’s autobiography, for example in how he believes in “mystery and the supernatural,” in “superstition” and “numerology,” and can “predict the future.” Miles also stated, “I do believe in being spiritual and do believe in spirits … music is about the spirit and the spiritual, and about feeling, ”  and repeatedly referred to his clairvoyant side.

Eric Nisenson related how Miles often knew who called before picking up the phone and could sense someone walking towards his house when they were still a block away. “Real Twilight Zone stuff,”  Nisenson commented. Quincy Troupe claimed in miles and me that Miles had a “spiritual, mystical” effect on him, and related how Miles talked to Gil Evans, Coltrane, Parker and others after they died. “He saw and understood things differently,” Troupe wrote, “and he seemed to feel and know things spiritually, almost to the point of having extrasensory perception.”

Miles always seemed to know much more than he articulated, and his often short expressions were so enticing because they always hinted at a much larger, hidden awareness, an intuitive “knowing,” as Sonny Fortune and Lydia DeJohnette called it. Miles’s nephew, drummer Vince Wilburn Jr., said, “It was innate, a ‘knowing’ gifted people have. With Miles it was almost a clairvoyant thing.” And Miles’s partner of 1969-1971, Marguerite Eskridge, remembered how he always gave the impression of knowing much more than he expressed. She added “I honestly couldn’t say whether this was because he was searching for the right words, or didn’t want to talk about it, or maybe thought something like, ‘doesn’t everybody also know these things and understand them?’”

Spirituality does not necessarily overlap with organized religion, for which Miles had little time. “He was not one for God,” Jo Gelbard commented. “But he was convinced that all the concerts and all the sounds he’d ever made were still there, floating around somewhere. That, for instance, his concert on November 12th, 1956 was intact somewhere in space, and that they would one day invent a machine to play it again. He loved that idea!” Miles’s idea of music floating around in eternity conjures up associations with the notion of “music of the spheres,” and has a striking parallel with the idea of the “Akashic Records” (an alleged huge cosmic database of everything that ever happened, and a popular concept in New Age circles).

***

Robert Fripp, who, like Miles, has a predilection for cryptic but captivating statements, wrote about the difference between the “understanding musician” and the “knowing musician.” “Knowing is an ordering of experience on the outside of our perceptions; understanding is an ordering of our experience on the inside of our perceptions.”

In this sense, Miles was a “knowing musician.” When listening to the essence of music, Miles had the capacity to hear things that eluded others. He heard “meaning” in notes other musicians missed. He was the aural equivalent of a visionary. This made Miles a great teacher and a great musician. It gave him the ability to spot potentially great musicians, and also to play the kid in the story of the emperor’s clothes, ruthlessly pointing out when music or musicians were out of touch with “the musical impulse.” Yet crucially, his strength was not in musical conception. He didn’t conceive of the many musical innovations that he spearheaded. Instead he recognized the unique creative possibilities in what was being done by his contemporaries, appropriated and developed these in highly imaginative ways, and communicated his findings to a world-wide audience.

Miles’s role was reminiscent to that of the English writer John Aubrey, who, one day in 1648, walked up a hill next to the English village of Avebury, looked down, and saw something that no one had ever seen before. As long as people could remember, Avebury had included a mysterious circular earthwork and a collection of huge stones. On that day Aubrey suddenly saw the meaning of the stones and earthworks: they made up a pre-historic site — a larger sister to Stonehenge. When his contemporaries went up to have a look they invariably recognized it too, and could hardly believe that they had never noticed it before.

A shift in perspective like this is often known as an “aha” or “eureka” experience, we suddenly “get” something. Moreover, insofar as the new outlook also changed the view the villagers had of themselves and of their world, it can be called a “paradigm shift.” The scientist Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of “paradigm shifts,” defining paradigms as sets of fundamental assumptions and concepts on which particular views of the world are based. For most of the time, human knowledge is deepened by working from a particular set of generally agreed premises. But periodically new paradigms emerge. For example, at one point describing the movements of the sun and the planets became too complex from the premise that the earth is the centre of the universe, and a new scientific paradigm was accepted that sees the earth as circling around the sun. What made this into a paradigm shift, rather than just a shift in perspective on a particular issue, were the enormous ramifications for the way mankind looked at itself and its place in the universe. Another, very literal, example, is the discovery of the law of perspective in the early Renaissance. Suddenly, all earlier drawings and paintings with their wrong perspectives appeared hopelessly naïve. Human evolution progresses through these kinds of paradigm shifts. The term can apply as much to new ways of looking at the world, at art or music, as to, on a smaller scale, new ways of looking at our village, or our personal life. To discover, say, that we have a different father than we thought we had, can be a paradigm shift for an individual.

Paradigm shifts are usually preceded by a prolonged period of personal, political, or cultural turmoil, signalling that the old paradigm doesn’t fit anymore. We tend to forget about these wider cultural contexts in which paradigms shifts occur, only remembering the individual pioneers. Their names are familiar. Einstein brought about a paradigm shift in our thinking about the universe, at a time when the natural sciences were feverishly trying to find new solutions to emerging problems. As part of the rising political awareness in the ‘60s, Martin Luther King Jr. helped shift the American psyche on race issues. Darwin changed our thinking about our origins in a society that was trying to make sense of the data provided by numerous fossil finds. The Beatles, embedded in the historic events of the ’60s, brought about a paradigm shift in the music and culture of their era.

Miles Davis, surrounded by the cascading musical and political developments of 1945-75, was one of the select group of 20th century musicians who initiated several paradigm shifts. He had a remarkable capacity for capturing and transforming the zeitgeist, for pointing his finger at the stone circle at a time when people were ready to recognize it. It was this that made him into one of the great artists of the 20th century, rather than an obscure visionary remembered only by music historians.

Miles’s cool jazz, hardbop, and modal jazz experiments each changed the musical perspective of the jazz-community, leading respected jazz writer Leonard Feather to proclaim, “He has manifestly changed the entire course of an art form three or four times in twenty-five years—an accomplishment no other jazz musician can claim.”   Miles’s explorations into jazz-rock and ambient jazz were paradigm shifts that did not only affect the jazz community, but also those beyond. In the context of a visually-orientated culture, his listening awareness can also be described in paradigm terms.

In addition, being the first black jazz musician who consistently crossed over into other music genres, other cultures, and other countries, Miles transcended the paradigm of musical, cultural, and racial segregation. He was one of the first truly universal musicians, who went beyond categories, boundaries, and borders of any kind. The effects of his musical and personal odyssey rippled into the whole of 20th century music and culture, and are still with us today.

And finally, Miles instigated a paradigm shift on his musical instrument. Before Miles, the trumpet was mostly played with a bright, brassy sound, rich in vibrato. But through Miles’s stylistic developments we today hear the trumpet very differently, sounding more vulnerable, soulful, like a cri du coeur. Trumpeter Olu Dara observed, “He’s singing rather than playing the trumpet. He was using it like the human voice. He transformed the mechanical aspect of the instrument. He made it sound like a breath.”  Saxophonist Wayne Shorter remembered simply, “They called him the guy with the strange sound on the trumpet.”

The absence of vibrato was the most characteristic aspect of Miles’s style, resulting in an unadorned, introverted sound, often with a crack at the beginning of his notes, giving the impression of vulnerability. Miles also tended to play in the gentler, rounder-sounding middle and low register, because he couldn’t “hear” the trumpet’s high notes. And in 1954, Miles popularized the sound of the trumpet played with a Harmon mute without the stem. Combined with the lack of vibrato, and played closely to a microphone, it allows for an intimate, tender, but very expressive sound.

There is a widespread misunderstanding that Miles conceived of these approaches because of limitations in his trumpet technique, but he already displayed awesome chops on some recordings in the ‘40s.  It is more likely that his innovations emerged from his astute listening awareness, which made him recognize the significance of sound. “Sound is the most important thing a musician can have, because you can’t do anything without a sound,” Miles remarked. “If a musician is interested in his sound, then you can look for ward to some good playing.”

Miles kept developing as a trumpeter until he reached his technical peak in the late ‘60s, playing a more extroverted and virtuoso form of power trumpet that included its high register. He also established a very personal, wah-wah inspired electric trumpet style in the ‘70s. Both his power and his electric trumpet styles retained recognizable elements of his characteristic, cracked, voice-like, vibratoless sound, but neither was as influential. In the ‘80s Miles returned to his original trumpet style, often sounding more cracked and vulnerable than before, because his technique only occasionally rose to its previous heights.

It was Miles’s “strange” cri du coeur on the trumpet that had the most universal resonance, and added another color to the palette of human experience. Even if he hadn’t spearheaded several musical revolutions, his place in posterity would be secured purely for introducing this horn sound. It was the focal point, the pivot that drew everything he did together, the common thread at the heart of all the disparate musical styles and experiments that he traversed during his epic 46-year long recording career. In an echo of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the charismatic sound of Miles’s horn made millions follow him into the undiscovered territory he probed.

“When Miles played his horn, everything fell into place… [and] he spoke to the whole world,” Jack DeJohnette remarked. His wife Lydia added, “Miles spoke more with his horn than with his mouth. His inner life came out in his music. When you listen to his horn you can hear sadness, you can hear pain, you can hear everything else. This is where he revealed himself.”

Miles’s touching, deeply human trumpet sound is so moving and compelling because of its apparent contradiction with the tough, inscrutable, macho persona that he displayed to the world. The poignant irony of the hard man with the legendary rough, raspy, almost demonic voice –the aftermath of a throat operation in the ‘50s—playing his instrument with voice-like lyricism, has inflated this contradiction to almost mythical proportions.
Miles’s many contradictions, his fierce independence and his leadership abilities, his sensitive, vulnerable sound, his awareness and his listening capacities, and his violence and drug addiction, epitomized some of the extremes of our human nature

Marguerite Eskridge recounted how Miles expressed aspects of these extremes privately. “Miles was the epitome of the Gemini, Jekyll & Hyde personality. The positive one was golden; would give anybody anything that they needed, open his door and take in guys who were out of work, or homeless. The opposite one was just as extreme, had a very violent temper, and could be very violent.”

A sense of unfathomable darkness and imminent danger often surrounded Miles. It is hinted at by the more ominous epithets that he received, such as “dark magus,” “prince of darkness,” and “a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.”   But the melancholy and vulnerability always shone through. In Miles’s horn sound we can always sense the delicate sensitivity that was also there. We sense his spiritual qualities, the fire of his creativity and the light of his honesty and “knowing,” as much as the surrounding looming shadows. We sense his deep humanity, which makes us feel for him and sympathize with him, and we sense the “unexplainable,” larger-than-life qualities that urged him to go into places where most of us wouldn’t dream of going. He was both one of us, and a stranger in a strange land. He was someone on the brink of several paradigms conveying mysterious tales to which we can not but listen.

© 2001, Paul Tingen.

The post Miles Beyond – Chapter 1 appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

Mention in the overview of the most important events of 1984 in Panorama magazine, January 1985

The concert was so unique, outrageous and attention-grabbing, that pretty much every Dutch person who was on the day of the concert in The Netherlands and old enough to read the press would remember it years, and even decades, later. Today many older Dutch people will still recall the event. I organized the concert, in six weeks, starting with absolutely nothing but an ambitious, outrageous, seemingly unattainable vision.

Dutch prime time TV crew on stage during the concert

I already posted a brief blog about the Beethoven Marathon on this site on April 24, 2022,  describing the main details of the event itself. That blog only scratched the surface of what really happened. In fact, I have two stories to tell about the Beethoven Marathon. One is the story of how it came into being. This story traces what I was doing from the moment I first had the idea for the Beethoven Marathon, early May 1984 at 8am in a cafe in San Francisco, sitting at a table with someone who looked and talked like a madman, claiming that he was a reincarnation of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (no less), a genius (obviously) and had done two Beethoven Marathons, one in Philadelphia, and one in Nevada City, northern California.

Goldschneider during the marathon

The other story partly overlaps with this one, but is far longer, and more personal. The Beethoven Marathon was the culmination of an epic one and a half year journey, both inward and outward. I’d spent that time hitchhiking around Europe and the US, encountering many more people who said and did things that were at prima facie completely pretty bonkers, but who also had slivers of truth and genius. Many of the dreamers, poets, and madmen I met on my journey, including one house-hold name rock star, seemed as sane if not saner  than most of the Dutch people I knew back home, and while they often told me things that seemed completely bizarre, some of it made perfect sense.

Add many meaningful coincidences, similar to the ones I encountered while organizing the Beethoven Marathon, and it led me to dramatically re-evaluate the deeply materialistic worldview I had until that point. I realized that I knew far less than I had hitherto assumed, and that I had to re-asses pretty much everything I had taken for granted. It taught me the value of ‘I don’t know,’ and to suspend judgment. Beginner’s Mind is the first requirement when hanging out with dreamers and poets, and particularly seeming madmen.

Altogether, the experiences were life-changing. For one and a half years I lived in a reality that was completely different to the one I came from in The Netherlands. I was exploring undiscovered territory and along the way discovering many inexplicable things that nonetheless seemed to be valuable. In some respects my journey was similar to that described in Joseph Campbell’s seminal book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

An essential part of a journey into the unknown, is having something to show for it when returning. In my case that was organizing the Beethoven Marathon. It gave substance to all the strange discoveries I had made, and to what otherwise would just have been a set of improbable stories and wild ideas without any consequence.

I have long thought of writing a book about my journey, and how it culminated in the Beethoven Marathon. Instead I wrote a book about Miles Davis, and was for a long time busy writing, playing music, and raising kids. Now, as the kids are about to leave home and I have more time on my hands, it’s time to write down my story. It’ll be in the form of a series of blogs, with photos. Do return here soon if you want to read these blogs, and my story…

The post Amsterdam Beethoven Marathon 40 Years Ago Today appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

Goldschneider and I just before the concert

I had met Goldschneider in California, on May 13, 1984, and when he told me about the Beethoven Marathon on that day, I immediately had the Leidseplein in mind. I returned to Amsterdam early July 1984, with the plan for the marathon, but my friends in Amsterdam thought I had gone completely crazy and just laughed. And they worried about having to pick me up once the disappointment of a failed venture would sink in.

The story of how the Beethoven marathon came into being, to the complete bewilderment of my friends and pretty much everyone who saw it come into being, warrants an entire article, perhaps even a book. The concert ended up being sponsored by KLM Airlines, all cafes on the Leidseplein, and several other local organisations.

Despite widespread skepticism and eyebrow-raising, the concert was an astonishing success. The Dutch quality press was full of interviews with Goldschneider before the event, with major features appearing in NRC Handelsblad, Trouw, Haagse Post, and other news outlets.

On the 19th, the Leidseplein was full, and an estimated 10.000 people attended the free concert. Twelve page turners and dozens of press photographers were in action. Some people arrived from other parts of Holland early in the morning with fold-out chairs and books with the score for all 32 sonatas.

The concert was called a cross between a classical recital and a rock concert

The concert was broadcast live by the only Amsterdam classical radio, the Concertzender, and at 5pm, to my utter surprise, a crew arrived from the prime time Dutch television news. They interviewed Goldschneider and myself, and the footage was broadcast on prime time TV several times that evening.

Dutch prime time TV crew on stage

In the evening there were stage lights, and as Goldschneider continued playing, with trams passing by 30 yards away, and thousands of people watching with open mouths, the atmosphere turned truly magical.

The next day, there were reviews and reports in pretty much every single Dutch newspaper, and later in the week in every single weekly magazine. Some reviews were critical, but most praised the event, and Goldschneider’s playing. At the end of 1984, the concert was mentioned in many year-overviews in the Dutch press. The marathon had a huge impact on Dutch cultural life, and to this day, if you meet a Dutch person who has not heard of the event, you can be sure it’s someone born after 1974 or so, or who was on holiday on August 19th, 1984.

Billboard on the Leidseplein

The concert also had an enormous impact on Goldschneider’s and my life. A year later we did the same feat again, with a Mozart marathon in a rain-drenched Vondelpark in Amsterdam. This time Goldschneider stayed in Holland, as he had fallen in love with the well-known culinary writer Berthe Meijer, and he ended up marrying her. I was best man at the wedding.

Goldschneider and I continued to work on getting his own music out to the people, and I organized several more concerts, and was involved in recording sessions at Yamaha Studios and Power Plant Studios in London. They led to a multi-million dollar contract offer from A&M Records, that was withdrawn at the latest moment for reasons that never really became clear.

Goldschneider and I after the concert

Later, in 2001, I produced recordings of Goldschneider’s music with a full orchestra and him on piano, in Bulgaria. But by this time Goldschneider had become more known for his best-selling The Secret Language of Birthdays book, which ended up totally overshadowing his musical activities. I always thought this was a pity, as Goldschneider was a brilliant composer, and his Beethoven and Mozart marathons were genuinely boundary-breaking.

I plan to write at more length on the crazy and surreal events that surrounded my association with Goldschneider in 1984, and the years after. I’ll also publish many more press cuttings, including English translations, and many of the photos that I have. For now, below a few scans of the countless press cuttings that I have in my possession.

Interview in de Haagse Post

Interview with Goldschneider in Keyboard magazine, 1985.

Review in NRC Handelsblad

Mention in the overview of the most important events of 1984 in Panorama magazine, January 1985

The post Gary Goldschneider’s Amsterdam Beethoven Marathon, August 19, 1984 appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

HERE’S A GEM FROM THE EARLY DAYS OF MY WRITING CAREER.  IT’S A COVER STORY IN THE MARCH 1988 ISSUE OF EQ MAGAZINE ON SELF-DECLARED “NON-MUSICIAN” JJ JECZALIK, WHO WAS A MEMBER OF THE ART OF NOISE AND PROGRAMMED THE FAIRLIGHT CMI SAMPLER ON MANY BIG 1980’S HITS, BY YES, ABC, AND MOST NOTABLY ON FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD’S “RELAX.” THE HILARIOUS STORY EPITOMIZES THE HEADY DAYS OF THE 1980S, AND HOW EMERGING MUSIC TECHNOLOGY WAS ALREADY ROCKING THE VERY FOUNDATIONS OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY. SMALL WONDER, GIVEN JJ’S BAD-TEMPERED STATE OF MIND AT THE TIME, THAT HE EVENTUALLY (RE-)TIRED FROM THE MUSIC INDUSTRY AND WENT ON TO TEACH IT AT OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL.

The glossy pics were taken by Barry Marsden, and presumably commanded a hefty fee. Those were heady days for music mags as well!

The post 1988 – from the archives:JJ Jeczalik fumes about Fairlights and Lawsuits appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

CANADIAN PRODUCER AND GUITARIST ‘DOC’ MCKINNEY HAS WORKED WITH MANY BIG NAMES. ONE OF HIS MAIN ACHIEVEMENTS WAS CO-WRITING AND CO-PRODUCING THE WEEKND’S STARBOY ALBUM. FAMOUSLY MEDIA SHY, MCKINNEY LIFTS THE LID ON HIS WORKING METHODS IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Once upon a time—well, it does seem like an alternate universe these days—people wrote songs with pen & paper, and a guitar or a piano. As a general rule, songs were written by one or two people. However, it appears that with each development in music technology this number has gone up. The introduction of drum machines and samplers in the 1980s allowed non-musicians to write music, and to sample and/or reconstruct existing songs. This led to longer song writing credits as both the creators of the original sample and of the new work had to be credited.

The 1990s saw the rise of the DAW, which seemed tailor-made to create whole swatches of one-man bands and should have heralded an era of bedroom songwriters flooding the world with each song written, recorded and arranged by a single individual. Strangely, the total opposite has happened, in the pop/R&B genre at least, where songs are credited to ever-lengthening lists of song writers. The reason is that DAWs allow users to send each other files and work on them at the press of a button, with a crucial bit of help from that other bit of modern technology, the Internet.

These days the most common approach to writing pop, R&B, and hip-hop tracks is that someone comes up with a ‘beat,’ usually a combination of a drum pattern with some characteristic, hooky musical ingredient, which can be a sample, a chord sequence, or a melody. This is passed on to someone else who adds another musical bit, and so on. At some stage in the process the artist, or a topline writer, will add melody and lyrics. A sign of the times is that topline writers now form an entire subsection of the music industry. Meanwhile, the entire process is pulled together by a handful of producers, who sometimes, but not always, are the original beatmakers.

A scan of the vinyl version of The Weeknd’s Starboy

A typical example of the ever-lengthening lists of song writers is The Weeknd’s third album and worldwide megahit, Starboy. Not one song on the 18-song album is credited to less than five writers, and a quite amazing 40 song writers are credited on the album in total. There also are between two and five producers per song, including well-known names such as Daft Punk, Diplo, Max Martin, Labrinth, and Benny Blanco.

A downside of this modern way of working is that quite a few pop/R&B albums with long lists of writers and producers end up as a disparate patchwork. By contrast, Starboy sounds remarkably coherent, like it was all cut from the same cloth. This is almost certainly due to the two creative people who were at the heart of its making. First and foremost there is The Weeknd himself, aka Abel Tesfaye, who is not only the album’s executive producer, but also is credited as a co-writer on all songs and as a co-producer on thirteen. At his side throughout most of the album’s making was Martin ‘Doc’ McKinney, who also acted as executive-producer, and who has a co-writing and co-production credit on 11 of the 18 songs.

On the phone from Los Angeles, McKinney confirmed that he played a central role in the making of Stargate, even as he was at pains to make sure that Tesfaye and the other contributors were given their due. “Abel is really hands-on and super-creative, and always working, and when I came into this record, there already were quite a few song ideas. Abel is a close collaborator with Max [Martin], and they had already recorded most of the two songs that were to appear on the album [“Love To Lay” and “A Lonely Night”]. Abel had also worked on the basics of the song he’d written with Benny [Blanco] [“Attention”]. Plus he’d been in Paris working with Daft Punk. So the making of this record was very different situation to that of the other records I have worked on with Abel.”

Cover of The Weeknd’s debut mix tape

Doc McKinney’s relationship with Tesfaye goes back to the beginnings of the latter’s career. McKinney co-wrote and co-produced, with Carlo Montagnese, aka Illangelo, five of the nine songs on The Weeknd’s debut mix tape, House of Balloons (2011). The two also co-produced all songs on The Weeknd’s follow-up, Thursday (both 2011). McKinny, unlike Illangelo, was not involved in the third mixtape, Echoes of Silence (2011), nor in the making of the Weeknd’s first two big label albums, Kiss Land (2013) and his international breakthrough Beauty Behind the Madness (2015).

“I first met Abel very early in 2011,” recalls McKinney. “He had already been writing and recording with various people, and had put four songs on the Internet a few months earlier. Henry ‘Cirkut’ Walter and Adrien ‘AG’ Gough has been working on one of these tracks, as part of a production team that I was mentoring called The Dream Machine, and they told me to check Abel out. I invited Abel into my studio on January 1, and we very quickly established the kind of natural connection that occasionally happens in music between an artist and a producer or writer. I’m quite a bit older than him, I have two kids and a family, and his third mix tape had more sexual content and we didn’t seem to be able to get that right, so I dropped out of the making of that. We also didn’t manage to connect for his first two albums, but then he asked me to come on board and produce the new record.”

McKinney currently is 45 to Tesfaye’s 27, so there’s a generation difference between the two men. It meant that Tesfaye could lean into 25 years of music writing and production experience on the part of McKinney, who has therefore in places been referred to as his mentor. At the same time McKinney has throughout his career always been at the vanguard of music, and working with a younger artist like Tesfaye came and still comes very natural to him. He has said in another interview, “What people don’t understand about me is that I don’t give a fuck. I grew up punk rock as hell. I squatted on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when I was 13, 14.” And as a result, “I’m not motivated by money, so the music for me means everything. My main thing is developing artists.”

Doc McKinney in his Toronto studio. (Click to see full-size. Photo credit: Zoe Prinds-Flash)

McKinney was born in Canada, but grew up in Minneapolis, where he started his music career playing guitar in punk-rock bands. It was during his first tour at age “13, 14” that he squatted in Manhattan. Growing up as a black kid playing guitar elicited sneering responses, but at least he could point to nearby guitar-slinger Prince as another example of music not being bound by skin colour. In 1994, in his early twenties, McKinney decided that there wasn’t much space for him to grow as a musician in Minneapolis, so he moved to Toronto. It was here that he began the duo Esthero, with singer Jenny-Bea Englishman—their debut album Breath from Another (1998) became a trip-hop classic.

From there, McKinney went on to work as a co-writer and producer with artists like Kelis, Raphael Saadiq, Stiffed, and Santigold. Because of his background as a musician and a guitar player, he says, “there’s a lot of room for me to be creative when I’m working with new artists. I definitely have a lot of ideas and like to be involved in every aspect. I collaborate on every aspect with the artists I work with, at least in the beginning stages.”

Although McKinney wasn’t involved in the beginnings of the making of Starboy, he was involved in all levels of its making: song writing, engineering, playing, programming, producing and executive producing. Some of the song writing with Tesfaye took place at McKinney’s own studio in Toronto. But for seven months they were based in Conway Studios in Los Angeles, where they had a lock-out of the entire studio and beatmakers and musicians were coming in and out and working in all rooms.

“Abel and I had not worked together for a long time, so we were initially just fooling around with ideas and playing with different sounds and from there beginnings of songs started to come together. He loves doing music, and he was also preparing for a world tour, so things were a bit crazy and we really had to work hard to make sure all the material was really strong. The modus operandi of how we wrote changed all the time. Some of the stuff he and I wrote from the ground up, some of it was built on ideas that he or I had previously, or we’d expand on ideas from other collaborators.”

The Weeknd and Daft Punk

Delving a bit more deeply into the song writing process, McKinney began by elaborating on the point as above, namely that song writing in pop and R&B is a very collaborative process. “Writing in pop and traditional song writing are very different now. Producers and beatmakers have turned into writers and anyone who contributes a musical idea gets a credit. It’s not like in country music, where one person comes up with the lyric and melody and chords and is the sole writer of each song. In contemporary pop many different producers add things to the production. If someone comes up with a cool two words, he’s a writer. So you now see many writers per song. The situation on Starboy is typical.”

“In the beginning, it was just Abel and myself working at my studio. He’s a very strong song writer, but he likes to collaborate with many different people. So at Conway we had a core team, of Abel, Ben [Billions, aka Benjamin Diehl], Cashmere, Cirkut, and then other people dropped by, and they’d be writing and doing production in different rooms. Sometimes all three rooms would be filled, but a lot of the time it was very empty. Abel is very private. But most of the production took place at Conway, and then obviously Daft Punk did their thing in Paris, Max Martin at his compound, Benny in New York, and so on. But many of them also came to Conway at some stage.”

Mckinney elaborated on how a number of the most striking songs on Starboy came into being, like for example the guitar-driven and punk-like “False Alarm.” “That was one of the first ideas Abel and I developed when we got back together and were writing. We were just talking and listening to music and then we got a vibe we’d start wailing away on guitars or keyboards or drums. That song in particular started out as a punk jam session, with me on guitar. So yes, many songs resulted from actual playing, rather than programming, and musician friends of ours would drop by and play along, vibing with us. We were not serious about trying to create a pop song or a punk song. We were not trying to fit things into genres. Instead we just tried to make great music and create something that made us feel something.”

Another guitar driven track, sporting a number of guitar solos, is “Sidewalks.” “That’s me playing the lead guitar! I also play some of the guitars in ‘False Alarm’.’ I rarely credit myself for instruments on records. I don’t like these credits that go like, ‘hi-hats programmed by X, bass in the bridge by Y.’ It’s too much. But ‘Sidewalks’ started with an idea I laid down maybe a year earlier, together with a producer called Bobby Raps, and I did the drums and guitar and Bobby killed the bass line. Abel liked it, so we worked on getting it to the next level. We got Ali Shaheed Jones-Muhummad from A Tribe Called Quest in who did some cool orchestral stuff on it, and Kendrick [Lamar] did an amazing job. I was stressed out, because he wanted to start tracking so fast, and I was still in Ableton, so I had to cut his vocals in that. Ableton is not an ideal DAW for cutting vocals on, but of course it came out amazing.”

Daft Punk as they appear in the “Starboy” video

Sometimes extraneous elements made it to the album, for example the Ethiopian vocal sample from Aster Awake that connects the songs “False Alarm” and “Reminder.” The sample is a reminder of Tesfaye’s Ethiopia roots, but Ethiopian music is not otherwise an influence on Starboy. Nonetheless, explained McKinney, Tesfaye’s love of Ethiopian music was “another chamber of inspiration. As we tried to create the story of the record we put that in because thought it sounded cool.”

And most of all there are the eye- and ear-catching two tracks co-written and co-produced by Daft Punk, which bookend Starboy. These two songs were the opening title track, which was the lead single from the album, and the album closer “I Feel It Coming,” which sounds like an out-take from Random Access Memories. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Tesfaye explained that on the last song in particular Daft Punk were trying to get as vintage as possible, going as far as using vintage mics and signal chains, similar to the way Random Access Memories was a homage to the funk and soul music of the 1970s.

Many questions have been asked of those who worked on Starboy about the working methods of the secretive French duo, but McKinney said that he couldn’t elaborate much. “Abel had already worked on “Starboy” with them in Paris, and they got the bulk of it down. Cirkut and myself then did some additional stuff on it, and when the Daft Punk guys came over we put the final touches on it. They recorded ‘I Feel It Coming’ in LA with live musicians, but I was not at those sessions. We also then finessed that track together at Conway.”

The Fisman Triple Play, McKinney’s preferred guitar midi trigger

Having already referred to his use of Ableton, McKinney went into more detail on his tools of the trade. “I’ve been primarily working Ableton for the last 10 years, even as I also use Logic and Pro Tools. Ableton is very transparent for writing and production. It’s very flexible when you’re changing things like pitch and tempo. But if I was scoring a movie, I’d use Logic, which is great for midi and composing. Pro Tools is the best for cutting live instrumentation and vocals. Many different people cut Abel’s vocals for this record, by the way. If the spirit catches him, every way works for him. If I recorded him, I used a vintage Neumann U67, which sounds amazing on him, and a Urei 1176 Blue compressor. Sometimes a Shure SM7 or SM57 also works great on Abel. But Max Martin or Daft Punk might have used a different mic and recording chain.”

A very unusual aspect of McKinney’s approach to writing and arranging is that he does everything on a guitar, as opposed to the keyboard midi trigger virtually every other beatmaker uses. “I use a midi guitar to do all the keyboards and even the drums. I also have real drums, bass, and keyboards in my studio, but whether I use them depends on what the project needs. My midi trigger is the Fishman Triple Play, which has the fastest latency of any midi guitar, short of the ones that work with buttons. I’ve been working with midi guitar for so long that I’m used to latency, but the Fishman is totally workable. I used it a lot on this album, as well as playing regular guitars. I’m lucky that Abel is a big fan of guitars, so many of the ideas we came up with started on guitar.”

McKinney continued his exposé of the making of Starboy by explaining that virtually all tracks on went through a process of lengthy and repeated re-writing and re-arranging. “With artist-driven records, like this one, you often come up with you’re the basis of your songs with a core of collaborators. Sometimes it takes five minutes to come up with a melody and a chorus, but then after that you can play around with that for a week or a month or longer. You keep making changes to the vocals and sometimes the song itself, until the very end. Sometimes we’re close to the end, and the bridge still hasn’t been written, or it’s not quite right yet. And then you have that moment of inspiration. We play with pitch, tempo, sometimes we try a melody or a song over a trap beat or a house beat or whatever. You’re constantly playing with the song. The production may change, the key may change, and inspire another change, and so on.”

Antares’ AutoTune plugin, indispensable and ubiquitous on modern pop records

One major production decision was the extravagant use of Antares’ Auto-Tune on Tesfaye’s vocals, despite the fact that he’s an excellent singer whose vocals don’t normally need tuning. “We had lots of conversations about this, remarked McKinney. “Abel’s voice is beautiful and he can sing, so he doesn’t normally need Auto-Tune. Instead we used it to creating a certain vibe. It was not about trying to sound cool. You can be a great guitar player on the acoustic guitar, or you can be a great electric guitar player. They are two different things. It’s the same with singing with or without Auto-Tune. In the case of a song like ‘Sidewalk,’ which has a classic soul type sound, there have been so many soul-type covers with that vocal style, for Abel to have sung that without AutoTune would have made it sound derivative. So yes, it did also help make the record sound more current.”

Making the album sound current was one major brief during the making of Starboy, but by the end of the seven-month gestation process at Conway there was another concern. McKinney and Tesfaye now had whittled the writing process down to 18 songs, often in very different styles, with substantial parts of the sessions recorded in various places across the world. Pulling it all together into a cohesive whole was a substantial challenge.

“Practically speaking we spent a lot of time on what we called pre-mixes, with for most tracks Cirkut doing rough mixes in the box before he handed things over to the two mix engineers, Manny Marroquin and Serban Ghenea. Cirkut likes to work in Cubase, and before things were sent off for the final mix they were transferred to Pro Tools. But 18 songs is a lot of material, and to draw that all together was difficult. There are few other artists, perhaps only Prince and Michael Jackson, who can go from pop to rock to hiphop and be convincing. Fortunately Abel also is comfortable in all these genres, and he has the ability to use different aspects of his voice and different vocal sounds. We also had a great team and we were working in a great facility, , continually chipping away at things, carving things out and so on. But most of all, Abel has the ability to still be excited about songs after five months of working on them and to keep things fresh. He really is a visionary.”

© 2017 Paul Tingen.

Previously published in Audio Technology (Australia) and as the cover story of Sound & Recording (Germany) magazines in 2017.

The post Doc McKinney: working on The Weeknd’s Starboy appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

“DESPACITO WAS THE BIGGEST SUMMER HIT OF 2017.  ITS ENORMOUS SUCCESS WAS MADE POSSIBLE WITH SOME HELP FROM A CERTAIN JUSTIN BIEBER AND HIS ENGINEER AND MIXER JOSH GUDWIN. IN THE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW BELOW, GUDWIN RELATES THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MAKING OF THE BIEBER VERSION OF “DESPACITO,” INCLUDING HOW HE MIXED THE TRACK IN AN AIRPORT LOUNGE.

“Despacito” was the second best-selling single of 2017 (after Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You”) and broke many records as a rare example of a worldwide hit sung in Spanish. The song was a number one in over 40 countries, in many cases hogging the top spot for weeks, if not months. In Australia it spent 16 weeks at #1 on the Aria singles chart, and in the US 15 weeks at the top of the Billboard singles charts. Already last July, “Despacito” was declared the most streamed-song in history, and one unexpected illustration of the impact the extraordinary success of the song has had is that it has reportedly increased tourism to Puerto Rico this year by a staggering 45%!

One of many publicity shots of Louis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee for Despacito

The latter is the result of the fact that the original version of the song was released in January of 2017 as a single by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi, featuring fellow Puerto Rican rapper Daddy Yankee (the two co-wrote the song with Panamanian singer and songwriter Erika Ender). This original Spanish language version already was a big hit in most of South America by the time it received the Midas touch from Justin Bieber, and his trusted right-hand studio man, Josh Gudwin. As has been the case with several other songs during the last two years, Bieber’s involvement steered “Despacito” into the worldwide stratosphere, adding to the singer’s seemingly endless chart presence, with the top of the singles charts everywhere often featuring several songs that bear his name.

Bieber’s astonishingly high-profile run as a featured guest singer started in 2016, after the staggering success of his fourth album, Purpose, released in November 2015, which itself spawned four big, worldwide hit singles—“Where are Ü Now,” “What Do You Mean,” “Sorry,” and “Love Yourself.” Since then Bieber’s involvement helped propel songs to the top like Major Lazer’s “Cold Water,” DJ Snake’s “let Me Love You,” “Despacito,” DJ Khaled’s “I’m The One” and most recently David Guetta’s “2U.” Gudwin was the main engineer, the mixer and the album producer on Purpose, and also was at Bieber’s side for the recording and production of the singer’s vocals in each of the above-mentioned guest appearances. Gudwin called these collaborations “strategic planning,” that help keep Bieber in the public eye.

Josh Gudwin. Photograph by Brian A. Petersen.

According to Gudwin, all Bieber’s collaborations came into being in a different way. In the case of his and Bieber’s “remix” of “Despacito” it involved the epitome of 21^st century album-making, with Gudwin flying around the world with just a laptop, an expansion chassis, and headphones, editing and mixing on them, with files being sent around the world via the Internet. The entire process, from the first phone call on April 11 to the remix release on April 17, taking a mere six days! Via Skype from his mix room at Henson recording studios, Gudwin retraced one of the most intense weeks of his already extraordinarily busy music career, which started with a phone call from Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, just as Gudwin was preparing to go on holiday.

“Last April, Justin was on tour in South-America and heard the song. He really liked it and wanted to do a remix. So when he was in Columbia he called Scooter, and on Tuesday, April 11^th, Scooter called me, saying: ‘have you heard from Justin? He needs you to cut this remix for him.’ I asked whether it could wait until Monday when I’d be back from a short holiday I had booked to go to Parrot Cay, at the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean, but the answer was, ‘please go to Bogota tonight if you can.’ So I took a 3am flight from LA to Bogota, took a nap after I arrived, and went straight to Estudios Audiovision there to meet Justin.”

Back in LA, while Gudwin was on his way to Bogota, Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd, one of Bieber’s main writing collaborators on Purpose, was working on the melody and lyrics for Bieber’s contribution to “Despacito.” By the time Gudwin and Bieber arrived in Audiovision, the vocal producer and mixer had received Boyd’s outlines for Bieber to work with, as well as an instrumental version of “Despacito,” and Bieber and Gudwin were ready to go.

Josh Gudwin looks on as Justin Bieber sings a take at the Record Plant in LA. This picture was taken during the sessions for the Purpose album.

“I always travel with my laptop and an expansion chassis with HDX and UAD cards, which fits in a small duffle bag,” explained Gudwin. “So I plugged my laptop in the studio’s I/O and looked around Audiovision for mics and mic pres. They had some nice vintage mics there, and I picked a Neumann U47, a Neve 1081 mic pre and a Tube-Tech CL1B compressor to record JB with. It’s a chain I also used to record his vocals on Purpose. Justin and I then worked on the parts, with help from Juan Felipe Samper, who coached him with his Spanish pronunciation. After four hours we were done. I went back to the hotel, comped the vocal, did some last-minute bounces for Justin, so he could listen to what we had done, checked out of the hotel, and flew to Miami, on my way to Turks and Caicos.”

The recording session in Bogota was only the start of Gudwin’s work on the remix of “Despacito.” Next up were re-arranging and remixing the song, all of which he did while he continued to be on the road. Gudwin is an eminent vocal producer, who has studied with the great Kuk Harrell (Mary J Blige, Rihanna, Celine Dion), but for logistical reasons he sent his vocal comp of his recordings of Bieber’s vocals to Chris “Tek” O’Ryan, an engineer who also has a stellar reputation as one of the world’s foremost vocal producers, and who specializes in vocal tuning—something which he has done for the likes of Bieber, Katy Perry, Mary J. Blige, Ciara and Mariah Carey. Fitting Bieber’s comped and tuned vocals in with the track also involved some re-arranging work. For this, Gudwin worked with a stem version of the original mix session, which had been conducted by LA star mixer Jaycen Joshua.

American Airlines Lounge at Miami Airport

“I had a five-hour lay-over at Miami International airport before my connecting flight to Parrot Cay,” revealed Gudwin, “so while I was waiting in the American Airlines lounge I completed re-arranging the track and mixed it. I was working on my laptop with the expansion chassis, and on Audio Technica ATH-M50 headphones, which sound great. I did not record any instruments for the remix. I adjusted the levels of some of the instrumental parts and needed to arrange and mute parts of the original vocals to make space for Justin. The beginning of the song belonged to him! I also turned up the levels of some stems, like of the guitars and the timbales. I did this using clip gain, and did nothing else. I did not use any EQ or things like that. I was not going to change a great mix!”

DESPACITO: THE MIX SESSION

An overview of the edit window of Gudwin’s “Despacito” mix session

Gudwin’s “remix” Pro Tools session of “Despacito” totals 67 tracks and is very tidily laid out, with Jaycen Joshua’s stems at the top (37 tracks), then the new vocal tracks Gudwin mixed in (12 tracks), next his vocal aux tracks (13 tracks), and finally his master track. Joshua’s stem tracks break down in the instrumentation, which was realised by producers Mauricio Rengifo and Andrés Torres and include some guitar/cuatro parts played by Christian Nieves. The instrumental tracks consist of 8 percussion stems (yellow), 5 guitar stems (blue) and 11 synth and sample stems (green). Louis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s original vocal stems take up another 13 tracks (red), plus three reverb stem tracks (grey-green), which are prints from Joshua’s Bricasti and Lexicon 480L outboard units. Gudwin’s sonic contribution to the “Despacito” remix centers on the way he treated Bieber’s vocals (light green and light blue), as well as some new English vocal tracks by Fonsi in the third chorus (red), and on his master bus chain.

All Bieber’s vocals are sent to the $JB BUSS$ group track (purple) at the top of the new vocals section. This group track has most of the processing, with six inserts and five effect sends. JB’s vocal tracks are numbered 01-08, with 03 being his main intro vocal part, with a couple of words pulled out to track 04, for a different EQ. Tracks 01 and 02 (in light green) are individual words with SoundToys EchoBoys delay throws, one ¼ note and one 1/8 note, while track 08 is a copy of Bieber’s entire vocal part, which has the Waves REQ4 and Doubler, for a vocal widening and doubling effect in the background: the level of the track is pulled down to -20dB. The plugins on Bieber’s vocal comp tracks, 01-08, consist of just three instances of the FabFilter Pro-Q2 EQ and one Waves RDeEsser. Gudwin explained the nature of the heavy lifting on the group track…

Justin Bieber’s vocal tracks in the Despacito mix session

“First in the chain is the UAD SSL E-Series Channel Strip, doing some light compression [Ratio 3, Threshold -12], and light EQ [approx +2dB @4.5KHz and -3dB@250Hz], then the UAD LA2A Silver to smooth things out [peak reduction is 25], the Waves C6 multiband compressor with some very light EQ with compression, the Pro-Q2 fixes some weird things that were brought out by the C6 [it has a hi-pass with some cuts in the low mids], then the Waves Rcompressor again does some super-light touching [Ratio 2.13, threshold -11.1], and the FabFilter De-esser takes away some high frequencies [at 7KHz and 14KHz]. That’s it on the inserts.”

Effects on Bieber’s voice

“The sends go to a series of aux tracks that are pretty standard. Everyone uses combinations of this stuff. The first send goes to the HALL aux, on which I have the UAD EMT140 and a UAD Harrison 32 EQ. Then there’s the PING SHORT aux which has the Echoboy, Air Chorus and Waves RVerb, the 1/8 aux with the Waves H-Delay, the WIDENER aux with the SoundToys Microshift for some width and Brainworx bx_digital for a bit of an MS effect, and the DIMENSION D aux with the UAD Dimension D chorus, and Waves REQ4 and RCompressor. Other aux effect tracks which I did not use, but which are part of my template, were the PLATE aux, with the UAD EMT 140, the MILLI aux with the Waves Trueverb set to a ‘millennium’ preset, half and quarter note aux tracks both with the HDelay, and a PING MOO aux with the EchoBoy, Waves Enigma modulation effect and RVerb. There are also are SPACE FLANGE and UNDERWATER aux tracks which everyone has who’s worked with Dave Pensado.”

“I actually finalised the mix while I was on the islands, on Parrot Cay, where I was working on a Bose bluetooth speaker. I sent it out for approvals, and then first needed to make some changes, because I got a new vocal by Louis [Fonsi] while I was there, with the English text written by Marty James. Once Louis heard Justin on it, he wanted to add something himself, so I added that at the last minute. Louis’ vocals are called V and VDbl in the session, and they came in tuned. They already had the Waves D3 DeEsser on it, and the RVox, so I kept them. I then added the SSL E-Channel, the C6 and the Pro-Q2. They’re all doing light things, because Louis’ vocals also go back through the main $JB Buss$ again.”

Plugins on the Master Bus

Gudwin’s master bus chain is different from Jaycen Joshua’s, which explains why the remix of “Despacito” sounds slightly different than the original. Gudwin elaborated. “The chain starts with the UAD Neve 33609 compressor. I go back and forth between that and the SSL compressor.  Then the signal goes through the Plugin Alliance HG-2 Black Box, which has two virtual 12AX7 tubes, and adds a kind of tube vibe. It’s a cool box that lifts everything up a bit. The UAD Brainworx bx_digital V3 does some light MS processing to bring some of the elements on the side forward, and spread things out a bit. The iZotope Ozone 7 Stereo Imager also helps to widen the image. Finally there are the FabFilter Pro-L and UAD Sonnox Oxford Inflator for more volume. You also can put the Inflator before the Pro-L, it works both ways.”

“I take the Pro-L off when I send my mixes for mastering, but I sometimes also include it as an option. With the Inflator I set the Effect between 5 and 15 and the Curve between 5 and 10. When you go light on it, it still works. With the Pro-L I start with a preset, and I’ll tweak it if I need to. The song was mastered by David Kutch, who also mastered the original, who told me that he used slightly different settings on our remix than he had on the original.”

End of main article.

ABOUT JOSH GUDWIN

Josh Gudwin. Photo by Sam Agbesi

For a long time Josh Gudwin wrote and played music as a hobby, mostly playing guitar. He spent some time in the Marines, and it wasn’t until after this, when he went to college in Miami Dade and a teacher suggested that he make a career out of it, that he took it serious. He attended Florida’s Full Sail University for a year in 2005/6 and then moved to LA to pursue a career as an engineer and mixer. His first step was to be an intern at Track Record Studios, then an assistant engineer at the Record Plant, where he worked with songwriter Esther Dean. He later worked for two years with top vocal producer Kuk Harrell. A recording session with Justin Bieber in 2010 changed Gudwin’s career path, and he has worked on almost every Bieber release since then.

When he’s not working with Bieber, Gudwin is engineering, (vocal) producing and mostly mixing for others. He currently works from his own room at Henson Studios in LA, where he monitors using ATC SMC25A, NS10 and little Bose Freestyle monitors, and where he has a small but choice collection of outboard, including preamps, compressors, a summing mixer. His recent credits include Diplo, Skrillex, Blood Pop, Carla Rae Jepsen, Pete Yorn, Dua Lipa, Bebe Rexha, and 5^th Harmony.  At the time of writing Gudwin’s mix of Dua Lipa’s most recent single, “New Rules,” was a number one in the UK and a #15 in Australia.

Gudwin’s gear at his studio in Henson: Avid HD io 8x8x8, Apogee Symphony 16 io, SPL Mix Dream, BURL B2, Bricasti, Neve 1073, API 3124, ALTEC 1566a, Dolby 740, Retro 176, Tube-Tech CL1b x2, Crane Song Avocet, LG 34” Display, Modular Synthesis.

© 2017 Paul Tingen.

Download all Despacito screen shots of both full mix and edit windows and the above plugins, in original resolution

The post The Making of the Justin Bieber “Despacito” Remix appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

1. WHITE HORSES.
I created my first video as an accompaniment to the second track of my May The Rise To Meet You album.

---

2. THE ELEMENTS – MY DREAM WAS.
this is the debut single of my two sons, and thee video, made when they were still 15 and 11. I mixed and produced, and shot the video footage.

---

3. THE ELEMENTS – FULL FLOW.
The second single by my kids, again produced and mixed by yours truly, and this time I also created the video.

---

3. THE ELEMENTS – ABANDON.
And my kids’ third single, same credits as above!

---

4. JOEY STEALS A MARCH ON JIMMY PAGE.
The oldest one was fascinated by music from day one, and here he is, aged 2.

---

5. NIC JONES – PETRONELLA.
In 1981, when I was very young, I made a sound desk recording of the first set of a live performance of the great folk guitarist Nic Jones, in Amsterdam. Sadly, Jones suffered a serious car accident a year later, which terminated his career, and never had the opportunity to record some of the material he played live. One particular highlight of his set in Amsterdam was the virtuoso instrumental “Petronella.” Other then a bad-quality audience recording posted on YouTube there are to my knowledge no other recordings of this track. Jones’ family has expressed no interest in using the material from my recording, and after 36 years I reckon it’s time some of it sees the light of day. So click, sit back, and enjoy!

The post Videos appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

]]> http://tingen.org/elements/ http://tingen.org/elements/#respond Sun, 28 May 2017 20:52:35 +0000 http://tingen.org/?p=2208 Introducing The Elements, an duo of beatmakers in the EDM/pop genre consisting of Joey (15) and Raphael (12) Tingen.

The post +LMNTS appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

]]> +LMNTS, aka The Elements, are a music duo consisting of my teenage sons Joey and Raphael Tingen. The  guys are mostly inspired by modern pop, EDM, and hip-hop/R&B, and have garnered interest and kudos from people working closely with Justin Bieber, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Zedd, Future, Gotye, Adele, Rihanna, Coldplay, and many, many more (see below).

They released their first single, “My Dream Was,” in June 2017. To date they have self-released eight singles on our label In.No.Sense, all with videos, apart from for “Lockdown.” Since 2020 they are managed by Evolved Artists, and a release on a major US label is imminent. The music videos are below, in reverse order. It includes a registration of a live concert they gave in Alyth in Scotland. There’s more music on their Soundcloud page. Enjoy!

Look out for more releases in 2019 by The Elements on our label In.No.Sense.

---

As mentioned above, Joey and Raphael have been mentored and advised by some pretty high-profile guys, who work with the likes of Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa, Zedd, and many more. Here’s Raphael at Tileyard Studios in London, in January 2018, with top producer Paul Whalley, who worked with Ellie Goulding, Little Mix, amongst many others.



Here are Joey and Raphael in June 2018, talking to EDM star Niles Hollowell-Dhar, aka KSHMR.



And here, in August 2017, they are receiving Skype coaching from Josh Gudwin, producer, engineer and mixer of Justin Bieber.

Finally, here’s Joey in December 2016, doing work experience with star mixer and producer Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails, Arctic Monkeys) at Assault & Battery Studios in London…

Plus a collage of some pics from further in the past. Top: Raphael and Joey in Sonic Vista Studios in Ibiza in 2015. On the left Raphael sits in the studio, and on the right both boys, aged 13 and 9 at the time, receive instructions from studio owner Henry Sarmiento (Lady Gaga, David Guetta). Bottom: on the left Joey and top pop mixer Manny Marroquin (Post Malone, Rihanna) are pulling faces while listening to something, and on the right Joey and Raphael with legendary mixer Jack Joseph Puig (Black Eyed Peas, U2). The bottom two pics were taken at La Fabrique in France in 2013, when they were still only 11 and 7.



 

 

The post +LMNTS appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

]]> http://tingen.org/elements/feed/ 0 http://tingen.org/yogacomments/ http://tingen.org/yogacomments/#respond Fri, 21 Apr 2017 09:42:42 +0000 http://tingen.org/?p=2190 Nicola « Elena offre l’une des meilleures expériences de yoga auxquelles j’ai eu le plaisir de participer. Son instruction calme, claire et consciencieuse s’étend sur les muscles que je n’ai jamais réalisés que je les avais et sa belle voix...

The post Commentaires appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

]]> Nicola

« Elena offre l’une des meilleures expériences de yoga auxquelles j’ai eu le plaisir de participer. Son instruction calme, claire et consciencieuse s’étend sur les muscles que je n’ai jamais réalisés que je les avais et sa belle voix apaisante complète la classe avec la relaxation parfaite. Elle est spécialement qualifiée. »

“Elena offers one of the best yoga experiences I have ever had the pleasure of participating in. Her calm, clear and conscientious instruction stretches muscles I never realised I had and her beautiful soothing voice rounds off the class with the perfect relaxation. She is uniquely skilled.”

---

Françoise

« Depuis Septembre 2016, j’en fait une heure par semaine avec Elena. J’aime beaucoup ses cours, j’y vais avec plaisir, et j’en ressors à la fois détendue et pleine d’énergie. J’avais imaginé que le Yoga était une séance “relaxation”; c’est en partie vrai, mais en fait, cela demande beaucoup d’énergie.Cependant, ces séances permettent de s’étirer au maximum, de faire travailler la souplesse, et tous les muscles, même ceux qui ne sont pas souvent sollicités. Enfin, grâce à un système de respiration mis en place, et à la lenteur des exercices, cela permet de travailler en profondeur, et en conséquence, d’apaiser les tentions et les douleurs. Contrairement à ce que je pensais, pour moi, les cours de Yoga sont plus efficaces que la gymnastique traditionnelle, car cela fait travailler le corps, mais aussi la concentration, et de plus cela permet d’apaiser l’esprit. »

“I started doing yoga with Elena in September 2016. I love her yoga sessions. When I leave I’m full of energy and very relaxed. I had imagined that yoga would be for relaxation, and this is partly true, but in fact it requires a lot of energy. It helps me gain physical strength, and flexibility. It seems to me that she makes us exercise every muscle, even those we rarely use! Elena guides us with our breathing as well. This together with the gentle pace of the exercises allows me to excercise my body on a deeper level, and as a consequences any the tension and pain are greatly eased. Contrary to what I had expected, Elena’s yoga sessions are more efficient the traditional gym, because we work not only with the body but on concentration, which calms the mind.”

---

Adam

« Elena est une superbe enseignante. C’est une classe petite et amicale, animée par sa gentillesse et son humeur éclairante. L’ambiance général est tranquille et calme. Elle a la capacité de le porter au niveau de compétence de chaque élève. Au début de chaque séance, elle explique dans quelle partie du corps la classe se concentrera. Le rythme est facile à suivre, mais après une heure ou deux, je me suis retrouvé légèrement suant, mais je ne me sentais pas pressé ni trop exercé. Elle nous rappelle de bien respirer et nous enseigne «la respiration yogique», qui peut avoir un effet physique et mental remarquable après une heure environ. Elena nous montre la séquence et nous suivons au rythme qui est réalisable, même pour les débutants ou ceux qui ont des corps peu parfaits. Elle accompagne La séquence avec des instructions verbales qui sont faciles à suivre. Personnellement je trouve que les niveaux de concentration peuvent être très profonds, mais chaque semaine est différente. Parfois, Elena présentera une nouvelle posture. Les postures sont faciles à apprendre, et elle prendra le temps de rompre celle-ci. ; a ce stade, si un étudiant a besoin d’aide individuelle, elle intervient sur cette base. J’aime la détente à la fin de la séance. Comme le dit Elena, elle veut que les étudiants de tous les niveaux expérimentent le yoga, plutôt que de parler de yoga, alors n’attendez pas beaucoup de «blah blah». Je recommande absolument les cours de yoga d’Elena – pas de stress, seulement des commentaires positifs. »

“Elena is a super teacher. It’s a small & friendly class, animated by Elena’s kindness & light-hearted good humor.  The overall tone is quiet & calm. She has the ability to pitch it to each student’s level of ability.  At the beginning of each class, she explains what part of the body the class will be focusing upon. The pace is easy to follow, though after an hour or so, I found myself lightly sweating but not feeling rushed nor overly exerted. She reminds us to breathe & teaches us ‘yogic breathing’,  which can have a noticeable physical & mental effect after an hour or so.  Elena shows us the sequence & we follow at pace which is achievable, even for beginners or those with less than perfect bodies. She accompanies the sequence with verbal instructions which are easy to follow.  I personally that the levels of concentration can go pretty deep, though each week is different. Sometimes Elena will present a new posture, where she will take time to break this new posture down into easy to learn chunks; at this stage, if a student needs individual help, she will intervene on an individual basis.  I enjoy the relaxation at the end of the class. As Elena says, she wants students of all levels to actually experience yoga, rather than talk about yoga, so don’t expect much ‘blah blah’.  I totally recommend Elena’s yoga classes –  no stress, only positive feedback.”

---

Ruth

« J’ai exercé régulièrement tout au long de ma vie, mais ce sont généralement des entraînements cardio-vasculaires et des courses. Le yoga est une expérience nouvelle pour moi, et j’aurai aimer commencé quelques années avant, c’est incroyable pour le corps et l’esprit. Elena est une enseignante merveilleuse. Je peux suivre la plupart des mouvements par ses instructions sans avoir besoin de continuer à vérifier. La séance de relaxation profonde à la fin est magnifique, sa voix vous envoie comme chaque partie de votre corps se détend. Le paradis! »

“I’ve regularly exercised throughout my life but it’s usually been cardio based workouts and running. Yoga is new to me and I wish I’d started years ago, it’s amazing for the body and the mind. Elena is a brilliant teacher, I can follow most of the moves by her instruction with no need to keep looking to check. The deep relaxation session at the end is wonderful, her voice sends you off as every part of your body relaxes. Heaven!”

 

Home – Yoga – Evénements – Mindfulness – Commentaires – À propos

The post Commentaires appeared first on Paul Tingen - 'zen' guitarist and author.

]]> http://tingen.org/yogacomments/feed/ 0