David Das

Straight No Chaser: Under the Influence

ddas — Tue, 07 May 2013 07:05:42 +0000

The superstar a cappella group Straight No Chaser’s new album Under the Influence is released today on Atlantic Records. I had the privilege of working on the project as engineer and editor.

Under The Influence sees the acclaimed a cappella group reimagining a selection of their all-time favorite songs alongside many of the superstar artists and undisputed music icons that made them famous. Produced by Mark Kibble, founding member of the legendary a cappella group Take 6 and one of Straight No Chaser’s primary influences, the album includes unprecedented collaborations with some of popular music’s best and brightest — including Phil Collins, Dolly Parton, Rob Thomas, Seal, Sara Bareilles, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Jason Mraz — as Straight No Chaser put their distinctive and inimitable spin on songs known and loved the world over.

Recording a group like Straight No Chaser presents unique challenges because of the many layers of vocals — leads, backgrounds, basses, percussion, and textures — that have to be performed, recorded, and synced properly. Also, blending each the original vocals (such as Phil Collins’ original 1984 vocal of Against All Odds) with the newly recorded vocals of Straight No Chaser and making sure timing is perfect, is no small challenge.

Check out the brand new album on iTunes or Amazon. Here’s a little behind-the-scenes video shot during the sessions:

Drone Strike: Tension Beds and Hits

ddas — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:14:11 +0000

The latest release for my trailer company, SonicTremor, has just been completed. Drone Strike: Tension Beds and Hits is specially created for editors and sound designers. It’s a collection of fifty cinematic drones along with accompanying sound effects, across a wide variety of acoustic, electronic, organic, and synthetic styles.

For maximum flexibility, each drone is presented in multiple versions. Every piece is offered as a 30-second drone, with some containing multiple mix variations. A selection of sound effects are also included for every drone: a drone-impact (the drone coupled with a impactful, ‘big’ boom), an impact-only (boom with no drone), and a riser-impact (drone crescendoing to big boom). Drone Strike offers an extensive sonic palette of dramatic options, specifically crafted for the demanding world of motion picture, television, and video game advertising campaigns.

Drone Strike is available for licensing directly from SonicTremor. Video editors can request download codes by filling out a quick request form.

This release is the second title in the SonicTremor series. The third and fourth volumes are in the latter stages of production and will be out by this summer.

The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins for Musicians

ddas — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:23:13 +0000

WordPress has become one of the web’s dominant web site design and content management systems. Freely available, widely supported, easily extendable, and entirely web-based, more than 70 million web sites use it (including this site). Originally created for blogging, WordPress is now far more than a blogging platform, and it can be used for nearly any type of site across the web.

This article isn’t meant to be a primer on WordPress. If you’re new to the platform, you may want to visit the home pages at WordPress.org and WordPress.com (the former is for those who’d like to host it themselves, the latter for those who would like it hosted for them; further advice here). But if you’re already up and running with WordPress, there’s a nice group of plug-ins that are of special interest to musicians, bands, and artists. All the plug-ins mentioned on this page are free.

MANAGING TOUR DATES

ArtistDataPress: For users of Sonicbids’ ArtistData, ArtistDataPress displays your ArtistData feed on a page, post, or as a sidebar widget.

ConcertPress: An events management plugin specifically designed for classical musicians.

Event Organiser: Create and maintain events, including complex reoccurring patterns, venue management (with Google maps), calendars and customisable event lists.

Events Manager: Fully featured event registration management including recurring events, locations management, calendar, Google map integration, and booking management.

Gigs Calendar: This plugin is geared toward bands and musicians to manage and display a calendar of their gigs within WordPress. It’s meant to be as easy as possible for both the musician and the fan. It even manages venue data complete with mapping and ticket links.

GigPress: GigPress is a powerful live performance listing and management plugin designed for musicians and other performers. Manage all of your upcoming and past performances right from within the WordPress admin, and display them on your site using simple shortcodes, PHP template tags, or the GigPress widget on your WordPress-powered website.

PLAYING MUSIC ON THE SITE

Degradeable HTML5 Audio and Video: Shortcodes for HTML5 video and audio, with auto-inserted links to alternative file types, and fallback options. (I highly recommend using an HTML5-compatible audio and video player.)

GrooveShark for WordPress: The Grooveshark plugin allows you to insert music links or Grooveshark Widgets into your site.

HTML5 MP3 Player with Folder Feedburner Playlist: WordPress and standalone HTML5 MP3 Music Player with Playlist for MP3 Folder URL or Feedburner XML.

ReverbNation Widgets: This plugin lets you embed music players, video players, tunewidgets, email collectors and other ReverbNation widgets on your WordPress blog.

SoundCloud Shortcode: The SoundCloud Shortcode plugin allows you to integrate a player widget from SoundCloud into your WordPress Blog by using a WordPress short codes.

Spotify Embed: Easily embed Spotify playlists, albums and tracks into your posts through the new Spotify Play Button.

Stratus: The SoundCloud Stratus is a jQuery powered SoundCloud player that lives at the bottom (or top) of your website or blog.

Topspin Streaming Player: This plug-in provides a widget to output a Topspin streaming player.

Here’s an older link to 14 Free Music Player Plugins for WordPress. I would personally recommend sticking to HTML5 players and not Flash ones, in order to insure maximum compatibility and accessibility.

PHOTO GALLERIES

NextGen Gallery: NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.

PhotoBucket Widget: PhotoBucket Widget works as a widget, making very easy for you to embed in sidebars from your PhotoBucket account.

FotoBook: Fotobook is a WordPress plugin that will link to your Facebook account(s) and import all of your photo albums for use in your WordPress site.

SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION

It goes without saying that it’s wise to have Facebook Like buttons, Tweet This buttons, and Google Plus icons on each page of unique content of the site. Numerous plug-ins already offer that in various configurations. Beyond that, here’s some plug-ins that offer unique additional capabilities:

Facebook: The new, official plug-in from Facebook.com that allows all kinds of Facebook integration. (Note: I highly discourage the use of the other popular plug-in called Facebook Comments for WordPress, which is older, and has been abandoned by its author after an outcry of dissatisfied users.)

LifeStream: Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

Official Topspin WordPress Plugin: Quickly and easily integrate your Topspin Offers into customized, sortable and dynamically generated Store Pages.

Tweet2Download: Tweet2Download allows you to require a tweet and a follow in exchange for a download.

Here’s a very helpful and definitive article from Smashing Magazine on How to Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in WordPress.

PODCASTING

Blubrry: Blubrry PowerPress brings the essential features for podcasting to WordPress including full iTunes support, web audio/video media players and more.

PodPress: PodPress lets you host audio files, then output a podcast feed and manage the stream from the WordPress admin area.

OTHER

Chords and Lyrics: This plugin assists in the creation of staffless lead sheets, also called chord sheets.

Easyfileshop: If you’d like to sell files directly (for example, offering a ZIP file of your album), this is one of the very easiest ways to do it. It lets visitors buy using PayPal and receive an instant download link to the file they’ve purchased.

Easy Digital Downloads: Similar to EasyFileShop (above), this makes it easy to sell digital downloads from your site.

Instant Band Site by Nimbit: Easily create a complete artist-band website with fan signup, gig listings, storefront and more.

Music Affiliate Pro: Search and insert affiliate links for music in seconds. Works with major digital music outlets like iTunes, Amazon MP3, Spotify, and eMusic.

Music Store: Music Store is an online store for selling audio files: music, speeches, narratives, everything audio.

Musopress Discography: Created for Bandcamp users, this plug-in creates a Discography Custom Post Type and allows you to import your albums from Bandcamp.

PalDrop Dropbox Shop: Offers an easy way to sell files that are hosted in your Dropbox account.

Sell Digital Downloads: All in one WordPress plugin for selling digital downloads. It allows you to sell digital downloads via PayPal and manage orders from WP dashboard.

WP Artists: WP Artists Lite is a music solution for WordPress. Perfect for a band or label directory website.

WP Bandcamp: Embed the Bandcamp Player into your website pages using a widget or the post editor short code.

WP Vibedeck: For Vibedeck users: Play and sell your music online for free. Embed the VibeDeck audio player and store using a simple shortcode or widget.

NON-MUSIC PLUG-INS THAT EVERYONE SHOULD USE

Finally, here’s a quick list of plug-ins that, while not music-specific, I highly recommended for all WordPress sites: Broken Link Checker (automatically scans your site periodically and e-mails you if any links are broken), Google XML Sitemaps (lets Google know about everything on your site), W3 Total Cache (speeds up your entire site by caching it), WP-DBManager (manages your database and allows you to back it up), and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (intelligently chooses related posts to display at the bottom of the current post – always give your visitors something else to read if the current page hasn’t whetted their appetite!).

MORE RESOURCES

There are uncountable numbers of WordPress resources on the web, but just to list a few of my favorites, visit Smashing Magazine’s WordPress section, SixRevisions’ WordPress section, and Webdesigner Depot’s WordPress section. If you’d like to delve deeper into WordPress for musicians via a webinar, check out the Music Marketing Webinar hosted by my friends Michael Brandvold and Brian Thompson. Also check out my article The Entrepreneurial Guide to Being a Musician in the 21st Century, which contains numerous ideas on promotions, marketing, and more.

I haven’t touched on WordPress themes in this article. There are hundreds of WordPress theme developers out there and the quality of design, browser compatibility, and support varies widely. I did, however, come across an interesting developer named Foxhound that has three interesting premium themes specifically for bands, and here’s a ManageWP article with links to a few more.

Writing Music for The Africa Channel

ddas — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 01:53:37 +0000

I just finished writing a massive quantity of music destined for The Africa Channel, a cable channel which airs African English language television series, specials, documentaries, feature films, music, soaps, biographies, current business analysis, cultural and historical programs. Together with composers Jeff Aulich and Michael Elsner, I wrote and produced almost 400 pieces of music designed for underscore use. The styles varied widely, from folk, acoustic, and tribal to electro, dance, and pop, and all had to be done with an African flavor. This took extensive research into native African music and instruments to come up with musical ideas that could easily fit in to the character of the channel and the shows on the channel.

Here is a sampling of a few of the cues:

Songblog: Elvis Costello’s Veronica

ddas — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:00:02 +0000

I’ve long been enamored with genius songwriter Elvis Costello’s single Veronica, an upbeat catchy drama with an incredibly profound juxtaposition of irony between its sentiment, lyric, and feel. Co-written with Paul McCartney and released on his 1989 album Spike, Veronica proved to be one of Costello’s most enduring songs.

The song, Costello says, was written about his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease, and the lyrics vividly explore the reality of dealing with the past and present of a loved one in varying degrees of normality, abnormality, heartbreak, and helplessness. Musically, the upbeat, catchy feel is a startling contrast to the tragedy in the lyrics, which swing from the verses wistfully remembering the person she was:

Well, she used to have a carefree mind of her own
And a delicate look in her eye
These days, I’m afraid she’s not even sure
If her name is Veronica

Veronica sits in the favorite chair
She sits very quiet and still
And they call her a name
That they never get right
And if they don’t, then nobody else will

To an angry scene in the nursing home (in the chorus of the song, at 1:01):

Do you suppose that waiting hands on eyes
Veronica has gone to hide?
And all the time she laughs at those
Who shout her name and steal her clothes

Musically, the verse is a perfect storyteller’s setting, with a quick pattern of cyclic chord changes and lots of syllables which enable Costello to spin the tale. But the chorus is emotionally extraordinary: the first three lines hang high in his vocal range, producing a strident, charged tug of war of emotions. When he finally resolves it on the words “Veronica, Veronica” (1:13) there’s a beautiful and striking major 7th interval, followed by a rich inverted 9th chord that alters slightly to a diminished before we hit the V chord and then get back to the tonic for the verse.

Interestingly, the song has a bridge, but it comes in a very unusual place: between the second verse and second chorus. Both lyrically and musically, it’s a tangent — as if the Alzheimer’s patient is temporarily lost in a train of thought trying to recall an affair on a cruise from her past:

On the Empress of India
And as she closed her eyes upon the world
And picked upon the bones of last week’s news
She spoke his name out loud again

And then after this tangent, we plummet back to the rocky chorus. I think a crafty move like this is an example of Costello’s genius. The bridge is completely unexpected, and almost feels like it could derail the song, but instead it lets him lead us on a beautiful tangent that reconnects the verse and the bridge.

As an interesting aside for Beatles and McCartney fans, much was made in the late 80′s of Costello and McCartney doing some co-writing together. While John Lennon had been McCartney’s songwriting partner for a good part of the 60′s, McCartney never formed another enduring co-writing relationship with an equal after that, and when he got together with Elvis Costello in 1987, Veronica was the first of several songs they co-wrote together. Some of the others ended up on McCartney’s 1989 album Flowers in the Dirt (You Want Her Too, My Brave Face, Don’t Be Careless Love) and on Costello’s Spike (So Like Candy, Playboy to a Man, Pads, Paws, and Claws), while others were never released but are prized by bootleg collectors.

For additional reading, check out American Songwriter’s take on this song.

This post is part of the Songblog series, a series of essays dissecting a selection of popular songs from a songwriting and production perspective. Please contribute to the discussion by leaving comments below. Keep up with future Songblogs by following me on Twitter.

Tech Tips for MOTU’s Digital Performer 8

ddas — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 04:32:23 +0000

MOTU‘s flagship digital audio sequencer, Digital Performer 8, is the main program I use for both composing and mixing. While I own and use most of the other major programs, such as Pro Tools and Logic Pro, I’ve found DP to be perfectly suited to my workflow. I’m often asked which platform is the best, and the answer is always: the one you know the best. The Beatles made legendary music using technology that’s far superseded by today’s most basic smartphone. Today’s tools are so advanced that it’s all in how you use it, not which one you use.

I’ve worked with MOTU to showcase some tech tip videos that demonstrate some studio techniques I use regularly, as well as some features new to the latest version of DP.

A full list of DP8 videos can be found on this page at the MOTU site, and they’re also available on YouTube. A few of the highlights are also included below.

10 Sequence Editor Power Tips:

Rhythm-based Effects:

Loop Recording:

Pitch Correction:

Film Scoring Features:

Audio Beat Detection:

Comping Takes:

Creating the Vocoder Effect in Digital Performer:

Again, for the full list of training videos, visit the MOTU site or visit MOTU on YouTube.

Interview with Above the Noise Music Industry Podcast

ddas — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 21:33:53 +0000

This past week, I was Aaron Bethune’s guest on his popular music industry podcast, Above the Noise. We talked for nearly an hour about navigating today’s music industry, songwriting, social media, word of mouth, and working with music supervisors to create music that can be successfully licensed.

Our conversation can be heard via SoundCloud:

Disappear with Rachael Yamagata

ddas — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:23:24 +0000

For the past two months, I’ve had my head down, composing the score to the upcoming feature film The Appearing, which is due for release in early 2013. A psychological thriller, the film is extremely dark, and therefore the music I’ve written for it (which will be released along with the film) has been intense and relentless. When I was approaching the end credits, I really wanted a female voice to give voice to one of the characters in the movie and break through the otherwise completely instrumental score, so I resurrected a song fragment I had lying around which fit the theme, and thanks to a recommendation from a mutual friend (the wonderful radio host Michael McCartney of The Time Machine in Hawaii), got in touch with Rachael Yamagata and invited her into the project.

This song, Disappear, is the result of our collaboration. Since Rachael was out on tour, we worked entirely remotely, sending demos and ideas back and forth, and within the course of a week, we were able to get this song written, produced, and mixed. Rachael is an amazing and accomplished singer-songwriter and I highly recommend checking out her latest EP, Heavyweight, her NoiseTrade album, as well as her prior releases.

The film is in the final stages of post production as we speak, and the score is being mastered in hi-res audio (96k 24-bit) as well as 5.1 surround. More information will be posted here as soon as it’s ready. Meanwhile, enjoy a preview clip of the end credits song, Disappear.

Parental Discretion TV Theme for Nick Jr.

ddas — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 05:16:57 +0000

Nick Jr. is launching a new series of shows under their Nick Mom branding, and I’m excited to announce that I wrote the theme for the late night comedy talk show Parental Discretion with Stefanie Wilder Taylor. Parental Discretion is a show that blends studio elements, interviews, video commentary, monologues and panel discussions with hidden camera, mom on the street and sketch comedy. Each episode explores a different element of parenting, all through the irreverent and funny eyes of author and comedienne Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (Naptime is the New Happy Hour, Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay). The series is executive produced by Hugh Fink (The Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Saturday Night Live, The Showbiz Show), Jane Lipsitz and Dan Cutforth from Magical Elves (Top Chef, Fashion Star) and Co-Executive Produced by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor and Jim Jones (Mad TV).

Parental Discretion airs on the Nick Jr. network each weeknight. Check local listings or visit the Nick Mom page for more details.

Jessica Simpson for Weight Watchers Commercial

ddas — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 03:51:54 +0000

I got a chance to score the new Weight Watchers commercial, “Choices,” starring Jessica Simpson. This came from a series of songs I produced and wrote with my friend, guitarist Chris Wrate.

Chris is an amazing guitarist who has worked and toured with David Foster, Daniel Powter, Lee DeWyze (American Idol Season 9 Winner/Sony Music Entertainment), Charice (143/Reprise), Daniel Powter (Warner Bros.), Taiwanese artists Shin & A-Lin (Avex), and Iyaz (Belug Heights/Reprise), among others.

The commercial can be seen below:

David Das

Straight No Chaser: Under the Influence

Check out these related projects:

Drone Strike: Tension Beds and Hits

Check out these related projects:

The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins for Musicians

Check out these related projects:

Writing Music for The Africa Channel

Check out these related projects:

Songblog: Elvis Costello’s Veronica

Check out these related projects:

Tech Tips for MOTU’s Digital Performer 8

Check out these related projects:

Interview with Above the Noise Music Industry Podcast

Check out these related projects:

Disappear with Rachael Yamagata

Check out these related projects:

Parental Discretion TV Theme for Nick Jr.

Check out these related projects:

Jessica Simpson for Weight Watchers Commercial

Check out these related projects: