When clients describe in words what they want their show to sound like, certain key words come up and immediately give you a direction in which to go with the sound. Words like “hard hitting” or “family-oriented” automatically trigger certain notes and musical patterns that can be used. In time, you will develop a musical short-hand with descriptive words. Then you add in your skills, your art and your science to convey the client’s image the way they want it conveyed … but do so through music.

When it comes to news music specifically, each station is different but often has a similar goal in terms of sound.  For this reason, music packages need to span a range of moods while working throughout the broadcast day. Each package must have morning, breaking news, sports and weather themes that appeal to the same targeted demographic, but does so dynamically. For example, a good news package for NBC would effectively appeal to people all over the county in multiple markets, but not have a generic sound.  It should be appropriately fitted to the needs of the NBC station it represents, as well as the demographic which it wishes to reach.

The question that remains is how do you convey an emotion to a certain type of person through music? What one person may see as emotional and heart wrenching, another person might see as sappy and cheesy. They go hand in hand, which is why it is so important to not only know what mood or overall feel each client is going for, but whom they are trying to reach. This is what good music does. It manipulates the emotions – but only works if the intended audience is targeted properly.

So the other day when my workstation simply refused to boot and I had to begin the arduous task of reinstalling the OS & all my apps, restoring all my data from backup, and recreating all my preferences, I began to lament my inability to contribute anything musically to the company for the next day and a half.  During one of the many progress bar purgatories of the day, I picked up this month’s issue of Electronic Musician, and lo and behold, there was this article by renowned producer/engineer Nathaniel Kunkel:

Okay, it’s happened. Knowing about network protocols and their implementations is now as important as mic placement. “Crazy fool!” you say. Not this time, not this time.

My TC Electronic System 6000 will only run on a 192.168.1.x subnet. My Drobo hard drive connects with iSCSI to the second port on the Mac Pro tower, and I am running that network without any DHCP leasing. I need to forward UDP Ports 6000 through 6002 and TCP Ports 80 and 5222 to the machine that hosts my Source-Live broadcast. My Aviom uses a form of POE, and I regularly run my computer remotely from mastering sessions to print and deliver file changes to myself while I’m more than 100 miles away.

Does that sound much like dialing in a guitar tone on a Fairchild or getting a slamming drum sound? Not to me either, but without knowing how to do that other stuff, my sessions might not ever get off the ground in the first place. And I think we can all agree that some of the first luxuries to go during these hard times are unlimited tech visits . . .

And it suddenly dawned on me:  I’m not alone in the world!  Every engineer, musician & producer in today’s music industry has to deal with tech issues all the time now.  In order to be creative today you have to know more about computers than a top-level programmer knew twenty years ago.  And the amazing thing is, it just kind of . . . happened.  As computer technology has advanced, so has its usefulness to the music industry.  And the industry has just soaked it up.  Twenty years ago, a 1GB hard drive cost several thousand dollars, was the approximate size of a Yugo, and there was really no way to use it for creating music.

Yes, that's a 4GB SD card in that dude's hand.

Two months ago, I bought 4.5 TB (or 4500 GB !!!) of hard drive space on three hard drives, spent around three hundred bucks, and filled up half of it with BWAV files in a little under four hours.

The times, they are a’changin’, indeed.

So the next time you find yourself in IT Hell, do what I do:  When that seemingly-without-progress progress bar comes up, place your mouse over it as a marker, run to the nearest guitar, and strum a few chords.  When you come back, it may just be done . . . and you’ll definitely feel better.