After reading an article found on the Maryland-based publication Gazette.net, I couldn’t help but feel a bit envious of the elementary and middle-school students that study digital music production at Patriots Technology Training Center in Seat Pleasant, Maryland. During my childhood, I didn’t have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to school, but I did endure countless private flute lessons and hours with my dual cassette tape deck making mix tapes for long bus rides to school. Kids today have it made.

Per the article:

Adam, 13, of Fort Washington was in his third week of the Making Beats class, where students can create the beats to their own songs using computer software, at Seat Pleasant’s Patriots Technology Training Center. The class runs October through December and meets Mondays and Wednesdays at PTTC, which exposes county youth to math, science and engineering opportunities.

Kevin “K.D” Harrell of Capitol Heights and Vernon Boykin of Washington, D.C., teach students how to navigate the software. Harrell runs the Capitol Heights-based “Dirty Game in The Same” production studio.

Students work with Propellerhead Reason software, which allows them to use digital recordings of electric bass lines and beats from different types of drums, play them in a continuous loop and record piano strokes from a miniature keyboard hooked up to the computer. Adam said he wants to create enough beats to record onto a compact disc…

…Harrell said the point of the class is not only to get the students familiar with the software but also to explain the recording process from creating beats, to production and post-production and what finding fame entails, such as hiring an entertainment lawyer.

With funding for music programs threatened by state and local budget cut-backs, I think that there is a good argument for expanding programs like these in the public school system. While most schools have crossed the hurdle of creating computer labs at their campuses, a minimal investment in MIDI controllers and possible charitable and/or open source music applications would support an environment where music and technology are taught in tandem.

Regardless of the introduction into the public education, kudos to  the program’s teachers K.D. Harrell and Vernon Boykin for organizing the program. I hope the idea spreads.

The 2008 Maker Faire presented a plethora gizmos and gadgetry that had every man, woman, and child looking over at the soldering learning station like it was the portal to a new era of arts and crafts. No popcicle stick bird houses here. If you found any sticks at a maker’s booth, it’s likely they were just for spreading epoxy or simply the discarded remnants of a snack from the food court.

While flocks migrated from the life-size mousetraps, flaming robot marshmallow cook-offs, musical Tesla coils, and Mentos and Coke synchronized fountains, live sound geeks left puddles of drool around Sustainable Wave’s solar stage at the southwest corner of the fair grounds.

The Solar stage is a mobile live sound unit built around the foundation of a re-purposed fire engine. The stage features a upper and lower performance area, full LED lighting system, and dance floor disco ball that floats just above the crowd area via the truck’s hydraulic ladder system. While the features are standard enough for your everyday mobile sound get-up, 100% of the energy needed to fire this baby up is generated on site through various green energy technologies.

Areas that once stored water hoses and fire gear now hold power generation and storage devices, as well as secondary storage for sound and lighting equipment. Solar panels and wind turbines flank each side of the stage and collect enough energy to keep the party going for three days without a recharge. Billy, the stage’s operator for the event (as well as an alumni of Mediatech’s Austin campus), commented that clean energy source minimizes all the pre-event pops, hums, and crackles that he normally fights with when working traditional grid-powered live sound stages.

While Billy mans the audio output from the main sound board, the folks at Sustainable Waves don’t forget to keep the output from their energy source in check. Exhaust from the truck’s power generators is run through water tubes that act as a mini habitat for supporting algae. The live organism absorbs the truck’s CO2 bi-product, releasing only pure oxygen back into the air. Once the tubes become too thick with green algae, crew members can use the green sludge for the creation of biofuels and fertilizer.

“So what?” What do you mean, “so what?”

The entertainment market is flooded with amateur engineers promoting low cost recordings using cracked copies of Cubase at make-shift home studios. Seasoned artists are finding themselves lost among the millions and millions of band listings, half of which still need a good year or two (or five) to home in on their chops. While social media flipped the tables on music and audio engineering promotion, it’s also removed some of the industries best gatekeepers - those that weed out the chatter and surface the best of the best.

So the mainstream industry did get a bit carried away, but the independent music biz has always (and will always) thrive. And thus, years later, you find yourself feeling like a chump while you spend countless hours using MySpace friend adders to grow a potential fan base. Studios have been using auto-friend adding software to ping every band in the entire MySpace network. But do the friend adders work anymore? Even if you make it through the maze of captchas, does this form of advertising have a positive or negative effect on your brand?

Enter MySpace’s new ad network. Using the ad network, you can quickly create a ad to promote your services, music, or events, much like you already do by posting bulletins and add new friends to your space. However, the ad network allows you to select the target demographic for your ad and places your graphic tastefully on the pages of those that are most likely to be interested. The bonus is, you get plenty of exposure for your band, studio, or personal brand, but you only pay when users click on the ad. The payment is usually between 50-75 cents a click, but at least it’s a click from someone that is interested in what you have to offer. If you are on a budget, you can indicate your maximum budget and your campaign will automatically pause once your allotment is spent.

MySpace’s ad network follows the format that was original developed by Facebook (see “ad preview” example), which is another quality network when seeking to introduce yourself to potential clients and fans (and is far better than MySpace’s current offering). If you are a band with a upcoming indie rock event, start an ad that only appears on the pages of indie rock lovers from the city you are holding the event. If you are a live sound engineer, start an ad that only appears on the pages of music venue owners, bookers, and touring band pages.

If you try it out, consider the following when creating your campaign:

1. Contribute to a positive experience for the user by following the rules of design (Google it). Create a graphic that is enticing, not obnoxious.  If your not good with design, find a good image that represents your project and use it in the place of a graphic layout.
2. Be mindful of your demographic. If you are an engineer that works best with country artists, advertise to country artists. It’s likely that, even if you get them on the line, a punk band will  not select you for their recording project, so why waste their time.This is about quality, not quantity.
3. Be honest. “The Best Show of the Year” isn’t an accurate headline… unless you are Robert Plant and about to play a reunion show with Led Zeppelin. If it’s a dance party, don’t be afraid to call it a dance party.
4. If you are an engineer, don’t advertise for services that you are not equipped to support. If you are working at a recording studio, do not advertise mastering services if you do not have a mastering facility. Think about partnering with a mastering studio so you can send business each way.

The 125th Audio Engineering Society Convention is well underway at the Moscone center in San Francisco. Among the thousands of audio engineers, music gadget geeks, and industry vendor, it’s not a surprise to find Digidesign among the madness. The company, after all, does hold one of the keystone software products found in nearly every professional studio facility in the world. But during this year’s AES Convention, Digidesign unwraped some of the new features we can expect from its Pro Tools 8 software, including an redesigned user interface, new plug-ins and instruments, expanded LE features, a score editor, and satelitte linking. Click here to read the full run-down of changes for Pro Tools 8.