Looking for something to help you find Music Jobs in LA? Want to learn new skills to help get more out of your music?

Top artists and producers share their secrets at The Producers Conference, a broad set of creative clinics and interactive classes for computer musicians. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get the inside track on advanced production techniques, song writing, mixing methods and more.

The Producers Conference, Los Angeles, USA
November 14th, 2009. 1 PM to 6 PM. Doors open at 12:30 PM.
King King
6555 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90028 (map)

Get Your Ticket Now!
Tickets are $30.00.

Conference Schedule

1:00-1:10pm – Gerry Bassermann
Record: Design Concept and Interface – Creating with ‘flow’
Gerry Bassermann lays out the why, what and how behind the development of Propellerhead’s recently released Record software. Discover what makes Record so powerful yet transparent.

1:15-2:00pm – Matt Piper
Unleashing Creativity with Record
Line 6’s Propellerhead Product Specialist Matt Piper will demonstrate how he stream-lines his creative workflow while offering arrangement tips-n-tricks; covering Record’s arrange window contextual tools and navigation, comping editor, groundbreaking tempo control, multiple racks, new devices, Line 6 technology, Reason integration and enhancements, file and audio formats, new authorization paradigm, and more.

2:00-2:50 – Artist Discussion
The presenters discuss topics like: maintaining creativity during production, careers and roles in the music biz, and answer questions from the audience.

3:00-3:50 pm – Kurt Kurasaki (aka Peff)
Signal Flow and Effects in Record
Peff discusses his development work on Record, especially the creation of many of the insert effect combinators and the design concepts behind this part of the Record Sound Bank. He’ll demonstrate the processing power of the mixer channel strip in combination with these insert effects and show how to clarify and enhance music tracks.

4:00-6:00 pm – Artist Presentations

About The Presenters

Gerry Bassermann
Gerry Bassermann is Propellerheads Director of North American Markets and an accomplished musician. He holds several degrees in music composition and performance and currently owns and operates OpusNine ( a project studio in the Los Angeles Bay area). For over twenty years, he has worked for many prominent music companies, as a product designer, demonstrator and musical consultant.

Matt Piper
Matt Piper, author of Reason 4 Ignite, is Line 6’s Propellerhead Product Specialist. Piper is an accomplished musician who makes innovative use of Propellerhead software for music production as well as for live performances with improvisational groups and DJ’s in the thriving underground electronic music scene in Los Angeles.

Peff (aka Kurt Kurasaki)
Kurt Kurasaki, author of Power Tools for Reason 3.0, is a noted Reason user with credits in Keyboard and Computer Music Magazines. He also works with Propellerhead Software as a sound designer and tutorial developer. Known as Peff throughout the Online ReBirth and Reason Communities, Kurt is one of the originators of ReBirth Mods.

Joe Solo
Joe Solo is a composer, producer, and songwriter for his own company Solo Productions, Inc. Previously he served as a composer for BMG’s Killer Tracks, Fox Sports, and worked as a songwriter/composer for Paramount’s Famous Music Publishing. Solo also co-wrote two hit songs, Sweet baby and Glad You’re Here, with Grammy Award winning artist Macy Gray and is currently working on a song for her new album, to be released in 2010.

Michael Elsner
Michael Elsner’s professional career began in 1998 when he moved to Nashville,TN. He began working on projects with such artists as Michael McDonald, Sixpence None The Richer, and Jon Anderson from YES to name just a few. During the four and a half years spent in Nashville, Elsner toured with various artists and in the studio producing and/or playing on countless sessions.

Since June of 2003, Michael Elsner has been living in Los Angeles, CA, where he have played on sessions for Miramax Films, Chrysalis Music Publishing, and various television, album and film projects. Select examples of these include the Ella Enchanted soundtrack, The Ex List, The Young & The Restless, and The Bold & the Beautiful. He have signed publishing deals with a number production music libraries and Elsner’s songs have been placed in various television shows and commercials, including High School Musical 2, Hannah Montana, CBS’s Cold Case, Beyond the Break, ABC’s ‘TV’s All-Time Funniest,’ History Channel’s ‘Modern Marvels,’ Baywatch, ESPN, as well as commercials for Audi, Mazda and Rent Way.

I hope that some Music Jobs Blog readers will be interested in this event. Please report back here if you attend!

Lee Jarvis.

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To bring everyone up to speed, there has been an ongoing case in Swedish court that the four owners and heads of Peer2Peer (file sharing) site The Pirate Bay were in mass breach of copyright laws, not just within the music industry but also regarding movies and video games. The case has received a lot of attention and also incredible support from torrent and P2P websites and their users. Roger Wallis, who spoke in favour of The Pirate Bay at the trial, received a colossal amount of floral tributes, sent to his wife at their home.

The verdict was announced today, and all four men (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström) received 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000. The prosecutors were aiming for much higher compensation, although their calculations are often very misguided; 10,000 free transfers of your song does not mean you lost 10,000 times the sale price of that record. Do they take into account the people who downloaded a few free tracks and then bought the actual album? I thought not.

Having said that, I am not in favour of people setting up software allowing the public to trade music and other files for free without artists’ consent. Let alone the people who shoot their mouth off, claiming “all music is free” and the like. Yes, all music is probably available for free if you wanted to find it online, but I am in favour of letting the artists (and the copyright owners) make that decision, controlling and profiting from the distribution of their work in some way, be that financially or by building their contact list. As content creators, that is their choice, and one of the reasons I am a huge fan of Creative Commons licenses.

People are using over-stretched analogies such as ‘if you hold the P2P site accountable then you must also prosecute ISPs’. There are also many, many comments across the web from people claiming it is a sad day and that there is no way this should have happened. I’d like to hear them come up with a solution, as to how artists can retain control of their work, be compensated where appropriate, and how they will be able to fund and market future creations and music projects.

You can’t really go and prosecute the millions of end users who take the music and other files. The RIAA have tried and failed more than 35,000 times, receiving nothing but bad press, fueling angst and probably instigating further file sharing. If there was a system in place by the websites to charge the users a subscription fee, then maybe that could work, and they could then reimburse the labels and artists. But they have not chose this route. So, do you hold the P2P sites and owners viable? Maybe. If their business model does not compensate the artist in any way, then I think they should be charged somehow. Governing bodies should aim to control this cause though, rather than react to the aftermath. The P2P sites could avoid legal wranglings themselves by striking up deals with labels, but as they are sworn enemies, how about independent artists? If the artists can register their music with a site and give permission to distribute and share globally then the P2P sites can still aid the discovery and sharing of new music and building of artists careers, which they are so fond of using as their mission statement.

What will the devastating effect be on the music industry? Not much. For a start there will be months of appeals, more uneducated blabberings in the press, and probably more flowers. ‘Pirates’ will continue to vent and despise the major labels and government prosecutors. P2P file sharing is rampant, and as much a part of a schoolkid’s daily life today as dolls, toy cars and baseballs were decades ago – it’s not going to disappear. Major labels will continue to push in this wrong direction instead of focusing their efforts on restructuring their business models, and to get to the route of the problem, that is that they have mistreated musicians and music fans for many years now. Creating value, authenticity and transparency within their brands should be at the top of their agenda, not ‘hire more lawyers’.

Who wins? Neither side. Certainly not the Pirate Bay owners (lend me $905,000 will you, mate?), and not the labels who struggle to recoup a few million bucks when they have just spent the same amount on forcing untalented acts into their hit-machine mould, only to be forgotten by this time next year. There are some people out there who have a collection of thousands of unpurchased songs that they will hardly listen to who think they are on the winning side. Congratulations, you’re very clever.

Who loses? Artists. Artists may move to gigging like crazy in order to subsidise the record sales gap in their revenue compared to previous years. Which is fine if they are able to do so and the people who listen to their music online genuinely like them and willingly support them when they come to town.

So do me (or more accurately, the music industry) a favour. Find a new, upcoming artist / band / rapper / DJ-producer from your iPod collection who is performing in your town this weekend, and go out to see their show / gig / concert. Use the $15 you just saved from purchasing their album… you will then be giving something back to the industry that you ‘care about’ so much. Heck, you may even have a good time. Yo-ho-ho.

Lee Jarvis.

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