Category Archives: recording

Country, Steroids, Soul: Zach Lunsford

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Zach Lunsford of Exquisite Noise Records

Country-Artist-Zach-Lunsford

Cleveland, Georgia native Zach Lunsford has been singing since he was 13 and has subsequently criss-crossed the southeast performing live. If he had one request for this press release, however,  announcing that he has become the latest Exquisite Noise signing, it was that we kept it short, simple, and to the point. So we will do our best to oblige him. In keeping it brief, let us just say that when we stumbled onto his ReverbNation profile (fast becoming a black hole of time consumption for us, that site), we immediately liked his style. Zach himself says his music has been described as “country music on steroids with a touch of old fashioned soul,” and as we would be hard pressed to top that statement, we’ll just leave it stand.

Currently, Zach is recording his debut album for us, with a release slated for sometime this summer. In the meantime, please listen to some cuts on his Reverb profile and show some support for this newest addition to our family!

Mike The Punk Pulls A 180, Finishes Album

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Mike-The-Punk

Mike The Punk At Sabine’s (Statesville, NC) January 2013

When Exquisite Noise artist Mike The Punk entered a professional studio last month, he had some hand picked musicians in tow, a batch of fully written songs, and positive expectations. Weeks later, he was pulling the plug on the entire operation – and yet would soon discover this was the greatest thing that possibly could have happened.

The album was in fact fully finished, but the results were not what he’d hoped for. So he returned home, downloaded a free recording program, plugged in just a pair of microphones, and cranked out ten songs, all on the first take. The resulting effort, Michael Adams, is a refreshing ode to simplicity. Proving once again Tom Petty’s maxim that if you’re having trouble getting a song right, the solution is to strip it down rather than become more technical, recording these songs in this manner brings their hooks and fine lyrical edge closer to the surface than they otherwise might be.

Mike isn’t quite sure what he plans to do with this album, or if he wants a formal release at all. For now, you can listen to the entire project on SoundCloud here. So give it a spin, download some tracks, leave some commentary and by all means share with your friends. We at the label think it’s a great story that illustrates our overriding philosophy here. Another Exquisite Noise band, The Judas Cow, once saved up $1200 in anticipation of knocking out a complete CD professionally, blew through that entire budget with nothing to show for their time but a handful of drum tracks, which were scrapped when they too decided to go the lo-fi home recording route. In this day and age, going high dollar and high tech is simply no longer an absolute requirement, and it has prompted a question we’ve been asking our artists of late: is it really worth spending thousands of dollars just to sound maybe, at best, 10% better, if at all? Our opinion, demonstrated again by Michael Adams, is a resounding no. Let us know what you think.

Mike The Punk’s Bold New Strategy

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Mooresville, North Carolina’s Mike The Punk recently announced plans to issue one single a month for the next twelve months. A relatively recent signee to our roster, Mike (that’s Michael Robert Adams II, formally, if you’re keeping score), as his moniker might imply, combines something of a gritty Social Distortion-esque vocal delivery with catchy pop hooks…but then these are delivered, predominantly, with an acoustic guitar as his sole accompaniment, and yet the entire package does somehow manage to sound like, well, punk rock. Understandably, the instant we heard Mike’s recordings, we knew he was a must have for our lineup.

His first offering in this Single Of The Month club, Don’t Tell Her, is streaming before you can buy it at select online radio stations now, last.fm (http://www.last.fm/music/Mike+The+Punk/Don%27t+Tell+Her) and Rdio (http://www.rdio.com/artist/Mike_the_Punk/album/Don%27t_Tell_Her/) the major ones among these. You can also check out a YouTube clip the artist himself has posted himself here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMDoe_tsnv4

As always, stay posted for future updates. Mike The Punk seems poised to deliver a string of quality tunes, which update and expand his core sound without straying too far from his punk roots. We’re excited about what the future has to offer for this exciting new performer, and look forward to sharing this with the world – be it our label’s small yet rabid niche following, or the mainstream audience (we hope) at large.

Getting Tunes On Facebook

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Now that you have a cleaned up version of your file saved as a .wav, it is time to get it converted to an mp3 and get that song online. Either Cakewalk or Audacity will work for converting the .wav to an mp3, but for the sake of simplicity (there’s a separate program you have to search for and download online with Audacity), go ahead and open up your Cakewalk program. Import the .wav, and then under Tools, click Mixdown Audio, and select Export As Mp3. When it asks you to fill in the IDE tags, it’s important to go ahead and do this – these represent the song title, album name, year of release, etc, and will forever be linked to your track.

If you are the paranoid type, and are worried about copyright, you may want to find an online site and/or application that you can instantly upload your song to for sale. One relatively hassle free site that I know of is greatindiemusic.com, where in the space of about 5 minutes you can get your songs uploaded and have them available for sale. And while it’s not a bad idea to get your songs uploaded here anyway, I personally feel perfectly comfortable with emailing myself the track (this comes in handy down the road, too, for various other reasons), and then getting it immediately onto the much more crucial and prominent sites.

One site that appears low budget at first glance with which is absolutely essential would be ilike.com. Go ahead and set up a profile for your band here, and upload your songs, as well as a profile picture. This step is your springboard to getting music on Facebook, a must in today’s online landscape. Enter at your own risk, however: actually getting this stuff onto Facebook is reminiscent of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. One false move and you are back at start, game over.

Start by logging into your Facebook account as usual. Then, turn around and enter facebook.com/pages into the address bar. Once there, you will see a grey button a short distance down with a plus sign and the words “Create Page.” Click on that. On the next screen, under Official Page, mark the tab for “Artist, Band, or Public Figure,” and scroll down to select “Band” of course, then type in your band’s name in the box provided. Don’t forget to check mark the box saying you are an authorized representative of the band, then click “Create Official Page.”

Congrats! Your band now has a Facebook page. This is the easy part. You can upload a photo, edit your information and so forth, and then comes the really confusing, maze like corridors of actually getting some tunes on here.

In the search box, type “songs.” One of the first results that comes up, if not the very first, should be the bright orange ilike icon. Click on that, and once you’re on their Facebook page, over at the left select “Add To My Page.” At this point a pop up box should emerge, showing your band’s page. Click to add them.

Now, up in the search box, type the name of your band. Go there, to its Facebook page, and now find the blue “Music” tab in the top middle of your page. Under that, you will find a pink tab that says “Artists – bind your tab here.” Click on that, which will take you to another page. Type your band’s name in the box, and click Save. Now, where it says “Back to (your band’s name)’s Profile Page,” when you click on that, it will take you back to your band’s Facebook profile. Under the Music tab, you should now find all of your songs that you had uploaded to ilike! Voila!

For good measure, you may as well get yourself off and running by clicking on the “I Like” thumbs up icons for each of your songs, as well as your band itself. Now, you are off to the races, and the trick now becomes promote, promote, promote.

Up next: getting your music on internet radio, and every music store in the known universe.

The Clean Up

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Now that you have one or more audio files imported into Cakewalk and saved, now it’s time to briefly move that file over to Audacity. With these two programs having so much in common as far as what they can do, it might seem a bit redundant to have to use both. However, in over a decade of using this exact same Cakewalk program, we have yet to find or figure out any sort of static cleanup function on there. Conversely, Audacity does this simply, but there are other functions (more on that later) that are a lot easier to figure out on Cakewalk. With both programs, you’re going to figure out everything you need to know basically on the first day you are using it, and the rest you can forget unless you graduated from MIT or are extremely bored. The Cakewalk program for instance comes with a book that is huge and is actually written in plain English, which would make it seemingly easy and convenient to use, except that seriously in ten years of having it, it has not come in handy even ONCE, because everything you try in that book does not work. As it is quite thick you might soundproof your studio wall with it, but that’s about it.

Ok, enough about that, now onto the fun stuff. Opening up your file in Cakewalk, you will want to export the song to your desktop. Click on Tools, then Mixdown Audio, then Export To File(s). Type in the song name, then click Export. Make sure it is a Wave file for this step of operation, by the way. You also do NOT want to cut out any clicks or scrapes or static just yet from the beginning or end or for that matter the middle of the song – for the time being, these are your friend.

Open up the Audacity program.  Here you will want to click on Project, then Import Audio. Choose the song you want to import, which will now show up as a Wave in Audacity. Now, find a stretch of pure static and/or unwanted noise in your song – chances are this comes at either the beginning or the end. With one finger of your left hand, hold down the Alt button on your computer keyboard. With your right hand, left click your mouse and drag across the entire section of static. Let go.

Now go up to and click on Effects, then Noise Removal. Click on Get Noise Profile. What this is doing here is analyzing the section of music you’ve just highlighted and saying, okay, this unwanted noise, we are going to delete this. After this is finished – and it only takes a split second – now left click into the little tan box to the left of your track. It should turn grey, which means the entire song has now been highlighted.

Click on Effects again, and Noise Removal once more as well. This time, however, you’re going to move that slider over to the left a little (this step of the process will take some tinkering, so don’t obsess over exact placement) and then either “Preview” or “Remove Noise.”  If you click on “Remove Noise” it is somewhat time consuming, so “Preview” is probably better until you get what level of static you’re trying to wipe out dialed in. However, even if, after going through the “Remove Noise” process and finding that you don’t like the way the finished product sounds,  you can simply click on Undo up top, make an adjustment to the slider, and try again.

Once you have a static/noise free track that you are happy with, go under File and Export as WAV this file to your desktop. Your work is done here for now. Next up: converting the file to MP3, tagging it to be recognized in cyberspace, and all that fun stuff.

Recording From Cassettes

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Today’s offering will cover your back catalog, which may or may not be your only catalog. Assuming you are like we  are and probably most other amateur hacks out there, whether recorded onto tape or even the early days of computer (Windows 95! And we still rock this unit occasionally!) chances are your songs have a bunch of background static that you’ll want to wipe out before you move on and get serious about putting this stuff out there for the public.

Assuming you’re dealing with a cassette, the first step is to run a 1/8″ cord from your stereo’s “headphones” outlet into the back end of your computer. The hole you’re looking for back there (these used to be uniformly color coded, which helped. I’m not sure why computer manufacturers got away from it) is the line-in slot, which was always color coded black in the past but now you’ll either have to figure out which one that is, or get out the magnifying glass and check for some etched hieroglypic telling you this is the line-in input. At any rate, it’s right by where you plug your speakers in, if this helps. 90 percent of the time this is where you’re running the cord from your stereo to; for the remainder of you, and this has to do with your computer’s sound card I suppose, you’ll be running the cord instead to the “microphone-in” input, which was always color coded red in the past but at any rate is right beside the speaker (green) and line-in inputs.

Now here’s where your Cakewalk program comes into play. Open the program. Ignore the “tips of the day” when it pops up, at least for the time being, and click on Open New Project. Then select 8TR Audio as the type of project you’re opening. Your first step, oddly enough, is going to be clicking Options, then Project, then Metronome. At least on every computer I’ve installed this program on anyway, for some reason these projects open with the annoying click of a metronome automatically loaded onto them. I’m not sure why. You want to unclick all of the check marks here,  then save your project (Ctrl + S, or click File, then Save) as whatever the title of your song is.

Now, a test run. What you should be looking at here is the 8 different channels of your mixing board. Click the “R” button on one of them (big and grey, about halfway down), it doesn’t matter which track you pick. Now, go over to your stereo and hit play, and at this point you should see the volume meter jumping up and down on your computer monitor, on the track you clicked the “R” on (it means you have armed the track to record, but it’s not actually recording just yet). What you want to do here, generally, is adjust your stereo volume now so that it plays as loud as possible without causing the volume meter to go into the “red” – you want it to peak out near the top of the “green” on your volume meter.

The rest is simple. Rewind your song back to the silence before it starts. Go up to the top right on your Cakewalk program and click the Record button, which is a black square with a red dot in the middle of it. Now click Play on your stereo. When the song is finished playing, click the Stop button on Cakewalk, which is the black square up at the top right. Save your file again.

You will likely want to edit out some clicking sounds at the beginning and possibly end of your song, which again is a breeze. Click on View, then Audio, otherwise known as the “Track View” option (it has an icon about four rows down, near the left of the screen, big black wavy lines that look like Charlie Brown’s sweater). 

Once you are on that screen, hold down the “Alt” button on your keyboard. Move you mouse cursor into the colored band of the track you just recorded (green on most computers, purple on some). Now hold down your left mouse button and drag it through the entire section that you wish to cut out.  Let go. It should now show a highlighted black area of material (blank space, clicks, whatever) that you wish to delete. Up top, click on the icon that looks like a pair of scissors. A box will pop up. Checkmark “Split audio events” and “Delete hole” and just like that, you’re done. Save.

There are more complicated issues ahead, such as getting rid of unwanted static, adjusting spots that might be too loud/quiet, and so forth. But for now the primary focus is to repeat this process for every song that you wish to transfer from cassette to the digital era. Or, even if you’re only wanting to get this stuff on CD, it’s a really valuable process to know. In theory, you could record one entire side of a cassette at once instead of song by song, but this generally creates more headaches than it solves. For one, if you get the dreaded “Dropout,” you’ll have to start over at least to the beginning of the current song, and for another, it’s much more irritating to edit.

Anyway, that’s it for now. On my next post I’ll cover all aspects of improving your audio, be it from this cassette “uploads” or from a disc, the final step before getting this stuff out there to the world.

Having the Right (Low Budget) Gear

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In this post I will officially begin my series by discussing some of the programs/tools we have stumbled across, all either free or fairly inexpensive, that will make getting your muisc out there tremendously easier.  As I’ve alluded to before, this isn’t to say there aren’t better and more modern solutions out there. But the whole point of what I hope to accomplish with  these posts is to provide some terrific low-tech and/or low budget options for those of you who are like we are, either cash strapped or not exactly computer proficient.

One constant I have found that seems to hold true when dealing with computers or the internet is that you are almost always better off finding the OLDEST program you can that works and is compatible with your computer. This would seem to fly in the face of common sense, but it’s a mistake to think that to keep up with a hyper modern landscape, that you need the most cutting edge tools.  The reality is that a software update often only makes for more confusion, or provides a bunch of bells and whistles you don’t need, when an earlier version would provide exacly whay you’re looking for without the distractions and hassles.

Unless you’re Mac users, most of you have operating systems that come factory loaded with the Windows Media Player program. This is an okay accessory that does have its uses, but for the most part is a prime example of exactly what I’m talking about – unnecessarily complicated and surprisingly little use in getting your music released.

Which brings us to the point now of discussing what I feel are some absolute essentials. Again, if you are living high on the hog with top shelf gear and Pro Tools and are a computer whiz, you would surely laugh at the  advice given here. And lord knows if you are one of those fortunate souls and are reading this and have some SIMPLE input to offer, we’re all ears. But this isn’t really aimed at such an individual, and chances are few of you are reading this.

Start by downloading a free program called Real Player. Again I would recommend finding the OLDEST version you can, and even better, if you can download it onto a computer that you don’t need for internet access and can thus disconnect it from the internet, even better – fewer distractions and a lot faster load time. Real Player is an easy to use and handy device for converting “mp3” files to “wav” files and vice versa, which you will need.

Next up I would recommend finding a Cakewalk Pro Audio program. The one we’ve been using for literally a decade is the same old Pro Audio 9 disc, which has been copied probably onto a dozen different computers at our various members’  households through the years. Either you are recording music onto a computer program, or you are recording music onto tape and thus need a means of importing it – either way, you can use this program, and you should be able to find it dirt cheap on e-bay at this point.

Lastly, I would recommend trying to find a free version of a program called Audacity, available as of this writing at audacity.sourceforge.net. It’s still the best thing we have found for cleaning up  static. We’re kind of in the middle in that we record directly from our p.a. onto the hard drive these days, but at the same time have a bunch of old tapes we’ve slowly begun importing and cleaning up with this Audacity, and it really is a breeze to use.

Armed with these three, and a normal 1/8th inch cord, a flash drive and a couple rewriteable CDs, you bascially have every tool you need to make your music sound as good as it can on this end of the equation, and with almost no headaches at all. In my next post, I will discuss what to do with all of this.