Rob Rose's ThinkSpot

Recording and Mixing complete!

2007-01-01T16:03:00.000-08:00

Hi all. The New CD is complete from a recording/mixing persepctive. It's now at the mastering lab at CBC Studio 14 for the mastering process, where "sweetening" occurs - final EQ and compression and a host of other tools at the studio's disposal to creat the final sound of the CD. It's also where the "gold" disc gets made -- the master that the manufacturer uses as the template for making copies, complete with song order and pauses between songs and volume consistency across them.

As soon as we get the master back, we'll post some samples to our website.

We're finalizing the packaging as well now. We have the art, it's the inforation that needs to be there to get Canadian Content status and all of the copyright stuff in place, as well as to make it look as good as possible. I'm doing most of the work on design and Armand is providing French content to ensure the package is a blingual as possible - always a goal of the band, as I am the token Anglophone in the group. It's slow going as I am learning new software to do the design as the production house prefers print-ready files in a certain format.

My hope is that before too long (end of January) we'll have the material ready to go to manufacturing. We're sorting out retail and digital distribution deals this month and next as well.

We'll also have a new look to our website and online store with new merchandise designs.

More soon.

30YRSL8 on BullsEye Records!

2006-08-04T08:39:00.000-07:00

Copies of the new BullsEye Records unsigned compilation CD arrived last night! Our song, "Frunk" is the grand finale on the disc! All of the hubbub for this disc will coincide with our new CD!

Here’s what’s happening with the disc:

Distribution:
Retail distribution in Canada (Sept 26) and the US (October 10)
UK distribution in early 2007
Amazon.com and Amazon.ca and the usual online CD shops in August and September.
MP3 downloads on usual download for pay sites.

Radio:
Distribution to all College and University radio stations in Canada and US.
Distribution to major corporate radio stations in Canada and US that are receptive to indie talent
XM and Sirius satellite radio – Sirius Canada.

Media:
Primary newspapers in Canada
Cultural Newspapers (Xpress, Voir) in Canada
Primary Newspapers in US
Major music magazines in US
Major music magazines in UK

Industry:
A&R reps from all major labels in Canada and US
Publishers in Canada/US
TV/Film Music Supervisors

Cover Art selected for New 30YRSL8 CD!

2006-08-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

We've negotiated worlwide rights for an excellent image by Dutch artist Jochem Van Wetten for our new CD cover art. Jochem's art is fantastic. You can check it out at www.jochemvanwetten.nl.

Recording Update

2006-08-04T08:07:00.000-07:00

Recording is essentially finished! Now comes the hard job of drum mixing (our main engineer, Phil Colborne is handling those duties with Armand Vienneau, our drummer) and the main mixing, where I'll do the job there with the help of the great ears of the rest of the guys in the band.

Next comes mastering and production.
Stay Tuned.

Recording Diary - Update #4

2006-06-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry. It's been a while. Primary recording (Drums, Bass, Guide Tracks for Keys and Guitars) is finished for every song but one for the new CD. There's some terrific material so far.

I would say that influences you can hear in much of the music include Porcupine Tree, Gov't Mule, Deep Purple, Planet X, and a little Santana for good measure.

We're currently negotiating with an artist for our cover and will be trying to fininsh up the recording as soon as possible to get to final mixing, mastering and production.

We'll try to get some teasers on the website as soon as we can.

Can't wait to gig with this material. Much of it is a lot heavier and will make for a very exciting live experience. We'll be working at lining up gigs and distribution in July...

Cheers.

30YRSL8 Review on Unsigned Mag Website

2006-04-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

Our first CD, "elemental" was reviewed in this month's issue of UNSIGNED, a major U.S. indie magazine. There are lots of reviews in the magazine but from what I could tell, only a minority of CDs get a 4 out of 5 rating. Here's what they had to say about us:

Artist: 30YRSL8
Album: elemental
Score: 4.0

I needed help trying to classify this band. We finally settled on acid rock jazz because they jam like the best of the best live jazz bands, but several of their tracks are pure rock and roll without the vocals. This is a band that I would love to see live. Every track blew me away and you can just hear the joy and passion these very accomplished musicians bring to the table. Like the elements, the tracks on this CD shift, but each exhibits the glory of a force of nature.

Production 4.0

Lyrics n/a

Music 4.0

Vocals n/a

Musicianship 4.0

All in all, a very flattering review. I wonder which element I am?

30YRSL8 Recording Diary #3

2006-04-09T07:43:00.000-07:00

I now have drum and bass tracks for 4 songs for the new 30YRSL8 CD at my home studio, where Marc and I will be adding keyboard and guitar tracks over the next little while. We have at least three other songs ready for the same treatment after that. The first that Marc and I worked on is called "Tuxedo Swamp". It's aptly named because it borrows heavily from Southern Rock traditions (think Gov't'' Mule or Allman Brothers - all hail Warren Haynes!) as well as some big band and romantic waltz touches along the way. I know it sounds impossible but trust me -- it works. This has become one of our favourites to play. It's challenging to be sure and highlights Armand Vienneau's tremendous drum work.

I've been working hard on guitar tones for the CD and I have made a big decision: I really, really like my Schecter PT Custom guitar (PT, by the way stands for Pete Townshend, as he chose Schecter to make his guitars for the first of many farewell Who tours.). It's not an expensive guitar at all but it plays tremendously well and feels so damn good in my hands. So much so, that I do believe that I will part ways with my Les Paul and my Gibson Custom shop CS-336 which cost me more than the GNP of some island nations. Here's a pic of me playing the PT Custom :
I fully expect to use it for much of the CD, where its tone warrants, which is everywhere. When 30YRSL8 plays live, I really can't play it because the music takes so many twists and turns that I really need a guitar that can dramatically change tones on the fly, which is my custom-made (thank you, Joe Valente) Honeybee guitar. Joe ripped the guts out of a Line 6 Variax and placed in a terrific tele-shaped body and custom neck. It's pretty much the only guitar I'll play live with and is a treat to play. Here's a Honeybee pic from a CBC studio session:

The other guitar that made its recording debut yesterday was my Taylor Autumn Limited acoustic guitar. When I play it, I'm inspired to play differently. And I've been playing it a lot lately, so you'll hear its influence on the new CD.

There's a ton of more work to do in recording. We'll be placing teaser snippets of the progress on our website. I'll link to them from here.

Stay tuned.

Watch this space

Cognos and Search

2006-03-27T06:56:00.000-08:00

Today, Cognos announced the Cognos 8 "Go!" Search Service. It's a real breakthrough. We all use search engines and business users in large companies are becoming accustomed to using "Enterprise Search" to find documents, web content and other artifacts floating around their organization. One of the big blind spots for enterprise search has been the performance management content managed by their business intelligence and management process applications such as their business dashboards, scorecards and planning data.

It's a problematic blind spot for search because this is the content that management self-identifies as being most directly related to how they view the health of their business.

Until now.

The Cognos Search Service unlocks all of that content to be accessed using free-form searches by business users, and even passes search parameters to modify the content to tailor it to the original search. For example, a search on "revenue for SUVs in Illinois for Q3" can search for and find a revenue report for all models, filter it to Illinois and SUVs and for Q3 and offer it up as a search result, mixed with the rest. The user doesn't know any of this has happened. It's just search.

More importantly, this can relate the management process content (like reports and scorecards) with other search results, driving the long-awaited convergence of structured data content and unstructured information, using the most ubiquitous method of accessing information: search.

Just to be clear. The Cognos Search Service is real search for BI information. It's not a text-based sleight of hand or pre-configured "English-like" query metaphor, that other vendors may trumpet in its wake.

This is big. Stay tuned.

Pics 2 - From the CBC

2006-02-14T20:09:00.000-08:00

Band and production engineers. Awesome, professional guys.
L to R: Mike Ramond (Bass), Marc Parizeau (CBC), Marc Bélanger (Keyboards),
Armand Vienneau (Drums), Robert Péladeau (CBC), Rob Rose (Guitar)

Another shot of CBC's Marc Parizeau at the console...sweeeeet!

Pics 1 - Live from the CBC!

2006-02-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

Armand Striking a pose.

Marc in mid-chord.

The control room during playback. Racks and boards and screens, oh my!
On the left is Marc Parizeau, on the right is Robert Péladeau, CBC Studio Wizards

Mike waiting patiently for the headphones to work.

Some guy who showed up.

Here are some pics from the CBC sessions last Friday. I'll provide the names of the pros from the CBC studio once I get them.

30YRSL8 Recording Diary - Entry # 2

2006-02-14T18:08:00.000-08:00

This is a recording musician's dream: I got an email from Marc, 30YRSL8's keyboard player, saying that the CBC has build a new state-of-the-art studio (Studio 14, to be exact) in their shiny new downtown Ottawa facilities -- and that they need a band to come in and do some recording to help work out the kinks and show the CBC management what it can do. Oh, and they can keep the recorded music, and the band gets paid.

So, last Friday the band moved into the studio for the day to record several of our new songs. The songs were recorded live through their Pro Tools based system, with no overdubs. I'm thinking that with very little clean-up we could have at least two candidates for the new CD out of the sessions:

Le Spot "G" -- A song that swaps between a playful but heavy section and a rip-roaring, syncopated solo section, where Marc just lets loose on a wild electric piano solo. The song is so named because our Canadian Retail Distributor, APCM would like us to name more songs in French to promote ourselves more accurately as a bilingual entity in Canada... As with some of our best songs, we just played this song one day. There were no pre-written parts, just spontaneous composition at the practice.
Chaotic Bottom -- So named because it's the preset name for the ultra-noisy guitar sound I use on this song. Mike Raymond, brought this in with visions of an ultra-heavy bass- and drum-driven song. It all started with a simple bass figure and mutated into all of that plus some cool 11/8 time signature work. A wholly masturbatory solo from me and very tasty synth solo in a lush prog-rock setting for Marc.

Pics, and people's names to follow.

Arizona - Good Eats

2006-02-07T21:09:00.000-08:00

Whenever I travel to a new city, I like to ask the locals where to eat. Now, this can be a little awkward, because I'm looking for gems, not just restaurants. Calvin Trillin wrote a lot about traveling and eating and he wrote that he never wanted to go to the place you'd take your in-laws for their anniversary (which he referred to as "La Maison de la Casa House"), but the place you went to when you returned home from 3 years overseas with the armed forces. Arizona has a wealth of those great places that the locals really don't want to share with you. On this trip, Maureen and I enjoyed several of them.

The Roaring Fork - Robert McGrath's homage to cowboy food with an amazing foodie twist. Imagine campfire food that's designed by the best chefs and with the imagination of a true culinary master. Very unique. Braised beef short ribs with Dr. Pepper barbecue sauce on cheesy grits....sigh. www.roaringfork.com
Alice Cooperstown - Yup, THAT Alice Cooper. He's created the perfect sports bar, rock memorabilia, BBQ joint mash-up that somehow just works. Sure, it's a little touristy, but it's a great place to go on game night. Just don't expect to see a hockey game ("You mean ICE hockey?!?"). This is a place that's decorated with Alice's own memorabilia, so you'll get signed guitars by the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Who. Signed photos of Alice with Salvador Dali and Frank Sinatra. Not the signed drum skin for some flash-in-the-pan one-hit wonder you never heard of, like at the Hard Rock Cafe. Oh, and real food, also not like the Hard Rock cafe. www.alicecooperstown.com
Crazy Ed's Satisfied Frog - This is in Cave Creek, a great town north of Scottsdale. This is one of those places that you have to temporarily suspend your amateur health inspector's license for the day and just go with the flow. This is a JOINT. This is THE JOINT, in fact. Real southwest BBQ. In an authentic western town. There are so many additions to the original building, it's hard to figure out what the place used to look like. The best appetizer - whole, fried, green chilies. And they brew their own beer - chili beer. It's a crisp lager with a chili pepper in the bottle (slogan: "Limes are for wimps!"). It's refreshing and the heat makes you thirsty for another -- brilliant. http://www.satisfiedfrog.com.

Tonight we ate at Roy's. Hawaiian fusion. Great fish. This is NOT a joint. There are a few throughout Texas, Nevada and Arizona. A very nice place for a romantic dinner for two. A bottle of bubbly, a very nice piece of fish, and their famous chocolate souffle for dessert, makes for a very different kind of happy mouth. http://www.roysrestaurant.com/

Not really a restaurant review, but places that folks in the know should know about... Yum.

Demo '06 - Impressions

2006-02-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

I'm in beautiful Phoenix Arizona at Demo '06, which is the perfect conference for a tech trends/industry watcher/tech investor types to look at up-and-coming tech companies who have a nail-biting 6 to 8 minutes to sell the audience on their value proposition and give a high-impact demo -- it's kind of like "speed-dating" for VCs. Of course, there's a pavilion where the presenters can set up a booth and be more interactive with interested parties.

While the technologies span every market, from ice-cream vending machines (admittedly out-of-the-box, but cool!) to enterprise security offerings, there are some unifying themes that seem to be prevalent at this year's conference:

Trend: convergence of business and consumer tech. Users are spoiled by elegant and functional applications in their personal life and are left wanting by overly complex and cumbersome enterprise tech. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Trend: corporate computing is too complex. Moving to the point of diminishing return. One more feature in enterprise software among thousands? A better search algorithm to bring back 50 more needles among thousands in the haystack?

Trend: people trust other people before they trust an algorithm. This is the power behind Google's search approach (ranking search results based on people's use of the results) and is fueling a new trend that uses social networks as the engine for a variety of purposes, like recommending products, sharing streaming photo diaries, validating plans and decisions.

Trend: The most exciting new thing to come out of the Enterprise Software Space is (yawn!) security. Among the plethora of security offerings and better application mousetrap (there's a BRAND NEW CRM company here (snooze!), there are only a smattering of unique offerings. To my fellow enterprise software insiders: we need a shake up! IMO, we are failing to capture the imagination of the market, our customers, our engineers and our shareholders.

Cool companies/products:

1. MooBella: technology after my own stomach...er, heart. They've gone and built a vending machine that serves ice cream, but not any old ice cream - the machine will start with a flavor of your choice and mix in various goodies and other flavors, ultimately producing a bowl of your own custom flavor in seconds. Of course, I tried it. Very, very good ice cream and very, very simple to use. This could turn any business into an ice cream provider in one simple step... http://www.moobella.com/

2. Blurb - this company can "slurp" (their term) a bunch of different content into their desktop app and let you publish a beautiful hardcover book with excellent layout control and very attractive templates. They can smartly import content from files and documents, blogs and other stuff you have laying around. They also will sell books on their web store and publish to an audience of one. http://www.blurb.com/

3. DigiSmart - how often does this happen: You want to show people on your cell phone or PDA screen and it's awkward and difficult to ensure that you can operate it and people can see it? DigiSmart is from an Aussie company that has a small add-on that projects the image from the device onto a surface that all can see. No fuss, no muss, and no fancy footwork. http://www.digislide.com.au/consumer/digismart.htm

4. Grass Roots Software - FreePath. This is a meta-content assembly product for people who give presentations. This lets people embellish their PowerPoint presentations with richer media and more dynamic content. As a presenter, I like this idea, because I think PowerPoint comes up way short as an effective communications tool if users simply use the prescribed PowerPoint formats. For more on this, check out Andrew's blog on Bad PowerPoint at http://power-points.blogspot.com. On the other hand, as an audience member I can envision "death by powerpoint" being new and improved with light, sound and video and imagine being bombarded with bad multimedia along with bad slides. But if used for good instead of evil, I have high hopes. http://www.myfreepath.com/

5. Ugobe Pleo. Ugobe is a company making artificial life forms. The CTO is the inventor of the Furby, but I won't hold that against him. The fuzzy and somewhat creepy Furby was a toy that reacted with its environment and its owners. Instead of being cute and engaging, it was annoying. Thieves crept into our house late one night and stole ours. At least that's what my children were told at the time. Well, Pleo is different. Pleo is a baby dinosaur that's very cute and has enough variety in its actions and reactions to be interesting for a long time. Looks like a winner if it can be mass produced. In contrast to the Furby which sold for less than $50, Pleo is in the $200 dollar range. http://www.ugobe.com.

There are plenty of others, but these stood out for their creative applications of technology. For the next little while I'm going to spend some time thinking about how these consumer tech trends can be well applied to the enterprise space. Stay tuned...

30YRSL8 Recording Diary - Entry#1

2006-01-30T07:07:00.000-08:00

We've officially kicked off the recording sessions for our next as-of-yet unnamed CD. Hopefully, we can get it complete by the summer. Our sound has narrowed a bit. Still very much instrumental rock fusion, the material tends to not have so may side strips into other genres, such as country or smooth jazz. We've had another year to get the 30YRSL8 sound well-honed.

There are, so far, about 10 songs slated to be recorded. They are a little longer, on average, and some turned out to be quite heavy. You'll hear the songs and know that it's 30YRSL8.

We've recorded drums and guide tracks for 3 songs, and Mike Raymond, our bassist extraordinaire, has probably laid down his bass tracks for the three songs, at which point the tracks will be packaged up for moving to my studio where guitars and keys and final touches can be added. The three songs are:

1. Tuxedo Swamp -- I brought a gritty, greasy, Gov't Mule-esque set of riffs to the group and in developing it we added (inexplicably) a real swingin' big-band style mid-section. A 30YRSL8 classic move - smash polar opposite musical genres together.

2. Crazy Maria -- This is a Spanish-flavoured romp, which happens to be my wife, Maureen's favourite new tune (that she's heard). This songs was totally developed during a rehearsal - we may have a plan for a rehearsal to develop existing or new songs, but in our warmup we'll spontaneously discover new music, and I consider it one of our strengths to be able to put our plans aside and let creativity take it's course. At least 4 songs on the new CD will have emerged this way.

3. Serengeti Dreams -- I wrote this at home on day and played it to they guys and they wanted to try it. Usually, when the band takes on a pre-written piece, we wind up changing it quite a bit. In this case, we play it pretty much as written. It evokes a lush African soundscape and while it sounds great when we play it live, we are really looking forward to what we can do in the studio with this song.

We'll be laying more tracks as we can. We'll be putting the finishing touches on some of our newest pieces as well.

More to come...

Happy New Year! Gear Report...

2006-01-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to Everyone! Hope the holidays were good to you and yours.

I've been playing my brand new Taylor guitar (http://www.taylorguitars.com/guitars/model.aspx?model=814-CE-L10). It was a Christmas present from Maureen, my extremely indulgent wife. If music is an addiction, she is my main enabler! The band is working out new material for a new CD to be recorded later this year, as well as seeking out new dates to play live. The newer material is more complex and more modern sounding than on our current CD. Looking forward to getting it into the studio.

To all of the iPod thrillseekers out there: Got this Belkin TuneStage gizmo over the holidays. This is a Bluetooth receiver that plugs into the RCA jacks of any open device slot on your home stereo.

You then plug a small Bluetooth transmitter into the headphones-out jack on your iPod. The result is a pure clean, streaming sound delivered to the home stereo from your iPod through the Bluetooth connection. Your iPod is the ultimate remote control for your music. The specs say the transmission range is 33ft, but I've pushed it to more than double that and even through walls and floors. This is kind of like a pristine, digital iTrip for the home. http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_ID=202395

'Til next time...

The Text Big Thing?

2005-12-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

Hi Thrill-seekers!

With all of the consolidation happening in the software industry, there’s been a lot happening to fuel the imaginations of industry-watchers who already have finely-tuned high performance imaginations. The impossible becomes unlikely. The unlikely becomes possible. One of the threads among the buzz among industry pundits kind of goes liked this:

“BI (Business Intelligence) and associated technologies focus on extracting and driving business value from structured data and ECM (Enterprise Content Management) enables organizations to manage and exploit their unstructured data and content to benefit the business in a number of ways -- combining the two would provide total data coverage and maximum value.”

Or something like that.

On the surface, it sounds like a good idea; however providing coverage for all data enterprise data assets has little benefit in and of itself.

An Admittedly Structured-Data-Centric Perspective

Rightly or wrongly, we BI folks have historically held certain beliefs to be self-evident:

· Data that has a close relationship to core drivers of the business is more valuable than data that doesn’t.

· Data that directly relates to the revenue and cost drivers of the business are most valuable to the business

· Aggregated information that reflects the structure and drivers of the business is particularly suited for effective management.

Software vendors of ECM/Text Mining solutions usually make this argument:

· On average only 20% of the total data in an enterprise is structured, leaving a full 80% unexploited and unmanaged (this is always the first slide after the title slide in their basic PowerPoint presentation. By the way).

· Many of the key indicators for performance can’t be gleaned from structured data. Items like customer satisfaction and warranty claim trends really live in the comment field of systems that are used by customer service clerks and garage floor grease-monkeys who use a variety of terms and abbreviations to describe similar problems.

· The knowledge worker’s connection to unstructured data – their email, documents, comments and web pages is stronger than the structured data because they spend more time with it and relate to it more easily.

While all of the above is true, a combination for its own sake doesn’t do anybody any real good.

The Case for Careful Combinations

There’s a case for careful combinations of these two worlds as applications merit. Many of the applications may start with either structured or unstructured data and extend the other. For example:

Text categorization – use categorization technology to structure text into relational database tables for SQL query tools like Cognos Report Studio and Query Studio to aggregate, sort, and filter the results into easily consumable groupings and trends;
Text mining through Performance Management (PM) artifacts – Enable the growing document, metadata and data assets generated by BI and PM systems to be “search enabled” for relating to enterprise taxonomies;
PM as part of workflow processes – Place PM software on top of document workflow processes to instrument the health of the process. As well as BI and PM assets to support decisions required in the execution of the process;

And one more – the biggie…

Performance Management: The Killer App?

One of the reasons that convergence for its own sake isn’t important is that there are very different buying centers for PM and ECM systems. BI vendors won’t be interested in helping a publisher track down a picture of a kid eating an ice cream cone. ECM vendors don’t care most of the time if the inventory manager can list all out-of-stock items and drive demand trends for them

But…

When a company has a clear sense of strategy and has crafted their objectives to drive towards it, they assign metrics to ensure that they can track progress toward their planned targets. In the Cognos world, business intelligence is used to understand why things are on or off track, or to reveal opportunity to improve the status of the business. The reach of these PM systems ideally drives down to everyone with an area of accountability in the organization.

With that in place, you can imagine a very rich, hierarchical model of business performance that has a high degree of organizational coverage. That set of inter-related plans, metrics and report sets forms the hierarchical enterprise performance taxonomy on which to hang related text mining, content management, community management and high-value workflows.

For example, if you “own” a metric for the company, let’s say “cost per square foot of retail space” for your region, you’ll want to keep all of BI related to the drivers of that metric nearby. You’ll also want all plans, documents and search access to all related content. You’ll make all of this available to everyone in the organization who contributes to the performance of this metric and to all who make decisions using the status of this metric. This is a very real blending of the structured and unstructured worlds with clear, high-value application benefit.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up: Value at every step

Companies aren’t buying software systems they way they bought ERP systems in 1999. The days of the big-meal commitments and sketchy visibility to ROI are over. Way over. It’s unlikely that a whole-enterprise top-down implementation of a system like the one that’s described above will be bought an implemented all at once. Companies need to look for a good starting place. Here are some attributes which might help in selection:

A clear candidate function, department or process for performance turn-around.
A large amount of comment-field data that’s useless to traditional reporting tools.
A clear sense of the metrics that drive a function or process.
Lots of data and lots of documentation.
Disparate data warehouse, content management or collaboration systems.

Cognos and Partners: Completing the Picture

As of now, there’s no one vendor out there that offers the complete story, because of the buying center issue described above. However, each world has a list of converging opportunities as implementations get more productive and look for the next step of value. When you see Cognos picking partners in the ECM/Text space, there’s a clear reason why. Our leading-edge customers get it. They get the value of some of these killer apps and are asking us to work with their chosen ECM/text mining vendor or vice versa.

So, when you hear industry pundits honk about the “inevitable convergence of structured and unstructured data management” ask them about the requirement of senior management to retrieve the ice cream picture, or service companies to report on knowledge assets rather than relate them to projects. It’s not so easy and it’s not so obvious. But there’s room for some killer apps and a ton of customer value in there somewhere.

On your marks…