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This page: Sharing Music in the Electronic Age
Sharing Music in the Electronic Age
'I think maybe the music industry and bands are a little bit more scared'
You titled your previous record www. pitchshifter.com, so you're obviously web-friendly. Where do you stand in the debate over downloadable music?
Pitchshifter's Jim Davies |
I think there's a lot to it [the debate for and against Napster]. If you're a young band and you're trying to get some exposure and trying to get somewhere, I think it's good to have your music easily downloadable -- it can only help. If you're a massive band, like Limp Bizkit, then I'm sure you don't care. Which is why I think Metallica's stance is quite good. Because they're such a massive band, they don't have to care about the fact that people are downloading their stuff, but they're actually sort of making a stand for other bands.
But I think if you're in the middle category like Pitchshifter -- where you're not the small band, not the massive band -- then it's not good, really. It's got its advantages: People can download a song and see if they're going to like it before they go and buy it, or they might be able to get it before it comes out, and just increase their excitement for getting the album. I'm not convinced that a lot of people would want to download an entire album. I love deftones; I can't wait for their new album to come out, but I have no intention of downloading it onto a blank CD. I want the inlay card and the actual thing itself, and I think a lot of people actually think like that. So I think maybe the music industry and bands are a little bit more scared of Napster than they should be.
You've offered free samples at the end of your albums and have encouraged listeners to take them.
That's been on every one. The album before www was called Infotainment, and that had free samples, and obviously www did, and the new one has them. We have used a lot of other people's samples in the past and it's just a way of giving something back, really. On Deviant they're on the enhanced CD parts. [To get to these samples] you just have to stick the disc into your PC's CD-ROM.
Are you as interested in the new computer technology as you were a couple of years ago?
Oh, absolutely. The whole album was written on computers. We've got loads of laptops, and we're going write new songs on the road with a mobile laptop studio. Anything that makes it easier to write -- software synth, the [Line6] POD. …
Did you use the POD to record anything on Deviant?
We actually didn't. When we were demoing this album I was miking up my cabs really loud and having them in a separate room. Looking back now, it's like insane, because a year later we got this POD thing, and we just go directly from the POD into the computer, and that's it! Anything that makes it easier, we're up for.
How did a computer make the recording of Deviant easier??
At home, we use Macs with [Emagic] Logic Audio, and all the guitars are recorded into the computer. We brought the parts that we wanted to use for the album over to L.A. on a hard disk, and in the L.A. studio there was a massive Pro Tools setup. We use Pro Tools a lot -- it's the way forward, really. There are a lot of guitars on this album that I recorded in the studio in Nottingham and ended up keeping -- like the wah-wah riff in "Dead Battery." That's the same thing I played in Nottingham. We just took the audio file over to America and just used that.
How does your home studio benefit the music-making process?
Oh, it just makes things so much easier. These days, you don't have to have a massive studio. We write everything on sort of minimal gear. Having something like the POD means I don't have to have loads of Marshall cabs miked up; with plug-ins in Logic Audio like Amp Farm, I can affect the guitar in the computer after I've played it. You can get some insane sounds -- you can even record a clean guitar and use Amp Farm to emulate any sort of amp ever made
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