------ ---------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | .......METALSCENE CENTRAL PRESENT'S........ | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ ----------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- ------ _______ ______ _____ _____ ___ ___ |\ ___ \ ___ \ | __ | | __ \ | __ \ / _ \ | | | \ | | | |__) / | |_\| | | \ \ | |_) ) | |_| | | | | \| | | __ < | / | | | | | __ < | ___ | | | | | | | \ \ | |_/| | |_/ / | | \ \ | | | | | | | |\ | | | /_/ |____| |____/ |_| /_/ |_| |_| |_/ |_| | | | / \ | |/ \| Issue 03/2000 http://metalscene.tsx.org galahad@netppl.fi / gregjesko@clds.net Contents: *News *Interview with Nemesis Cathal *Articles -Underground of the Underground -Courtney Love Does the Math: Part One -Tracked Worx 2000 -Commercial Tracking: Is It Posssible? -Electronic Magazines *Poem "I Have Lived" --------------------------------------------------------------------- EDITOR'S NOTE --------------------------------------------------------------------- Due to some problems reviews will not be found in this issue. They will be back in the next issue. --------------------------------------------------------------------- NEWS --------------------------------------------------------------------- * TOP METAL TRAX Finally back online. After some troubles in the beginning the site seems to work correctly now. First Metallurgy magazine has also been released. Not very good, but as I checked first RR issue I can't complain that much. * NEW REVIEWER Murhaq has joined RR reviewing team. * AHEAD ON THE WAY R.E.D. released Ahead On The Way collection disk to annoy the big scene a bit. Singles from it are available here and there and URL to the whole disk has been said in billion places. * NEW ARMAGON DISK Armagon is making a new music disk. Warlord reports the release date to be by the end of the year. No accurate date yet. AEUK and Violator are also working on their solo disks so lot of new stuff coming from there. * AMANOJAKU OUT Amanojaku has been fired from MC staff. * REVIEWS There has been an idea again that we could review every tune that is released on the scene events board. I want your opinion about this, so send it to galahad@netppl.fi and tell us how the things should be. * MAIN REVIEWER Dragon offered his services and I accepted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- INTERVIEW WITH NEMESIS CATHAL --------------------------------------------------------------------- As usual, tell us about yourself. Very well, I am norwegian as someone might know. Born in the damed year 1980, with bad haircuts and so on. Have been into the blackmetal scene for about 6-7 years. When you started tracking? Hmm, got question. I started primitive tracking on my Amiga 500 when I was only 13 or 14 years old. Ah..real veteran then :) Nah, Those were shitty tracks=) I guess amiga didn't have much metal mods, when you got familiar with them? I got into BM-tracking when I joined The Goatworriors. Actually, it was by pure coincedent. Tell us the whole dirty story :) With the Goats? yeah Ok. I came over their homepage one night when I was surfing the Net. I thought their music sounded great so I made Ragnarok and sent it to Cadaver. He found it great and "transfered" me over to Kuunvarjo, the dictator. With that tune I became one of them. Skarf joined them at the same time. You and Skarf were the first Goats outside of Finland. Did it cause any difficulties between you and other members when you were working on Virginal Black Blood? Hell no. We communicated very well at that time. It was in my opinion a cool time. Me singing in norwegian, Skarf in english and the others in Finish. No wonder. Goatwarriors were the most famous group at that time :) I think it was a good mix. Yeah...too bad it ended so soon. To bad we "died" hehe. Have you considered of joining to any other group? Right now I run my own solo-project called "Nocturnu Septima". I will probably not be joining a group for a long time. Do you think that there should be more blackmetal trackers? More? Of cause! But the danger as I see it can be that it could give the scene a clice-image. But I have noticed that there are not as many pure blackmetal-trackers. Where are all the other norwegian trackers? Hehehe. Are there anyone else is my question. I havn't met anyone else but me. Heh, I knew one a long time ago, but he wasn't metal tracker :) You make your own samples right? The guitar and vocals are mine. The drums and the other things I use are from others, but I don't rip. Eighter I have their promision or I give them credit in my tunes. What kind of equipment you use for guitar samples? I have three guitars, one accustic Ibanez, one Ibanez rx170 and one Eqiphone Flyin' V. And I have two Fender amplifiers. I just jack'em into my computer and then it's done=) Alright, I had to ask since some folks are always interested :) Hehe, I can say that you don't have to have expensive eqipment to make good music. Do you think there's anything to be improved on tracked metal scene? Hmm, I've noticed that there are some who still don't sample in their riffs, they just use one chordsample. In my opinion that makes the music more artificial. But hell, there are many good trackers on the Net, and I will assume we all have some sort of improvement. It has been said that tracked metal scene is back to underground. Do you think that this is a good thing? Making tracked metal underground again...hmm... That makes it harder for the "Uninvited" to find our work, but on the other hand, it makes perhaps more exlusive... it makes it even. We haven't been shown very much on the big scene lately since MDO died, but this will propably change when R.E.D. begins to make disks again. What are your future plans? On the musicfront my plans are to release a mod-cd. I have as some know some studies to get finished with. Is this CD for sale like Cadaver's Reaper CD's? When I have it finished I will sell it the same way as Cadaver does. But hey, first I will have to finish it=) In short terms, I will sell it through the Net. Heh.. ok. When we will hear a new tune from you? hmm, I've finished one and one only needs lyrics, so perhaps this month two songs will be for the public. I will say I am not the most productive tracker on the scene=) Alright, we are near the end of this interview and it's time for one free comment :) The Goats shall rise throu the ashes of Sodoma!, or something like that=) Hehe. heheh..thanks for the interview man No bother. --------------------------------------------------------------------- UNDERGROUND OF THE UNDERGROUND --------------------------------------------------------------------- Galahad / MC galahad@netppl.fi In some interview I came up with the question about "what is the current situation of tracked metal scene". Answer was interesting as "we are back to underground, but that's really a good thing". I wondered if we ever were up there somewhere and is it possible for tracked music scene in general to be anything else but underground. With this idea tracked metal scene must be underground of the underground, a real basement floor of the scene structure. For some reason we are still relatively small and quiet if compared to the so called big scene. There is one very clear and obvious reason for our size being so small. Many or even the most of us play some instrument in real life instead of just fooling around with tracker. For many this scene has been just a practice place to increase their musical skills before they go out with their bands hunting record deals. I see this as a very good thing. Lot of new people enter the scene every year keeping it fresh and ever changing. Unfortunately it also causes it to remain very small, but at least it's very active when compared to others. Quality of tracked metal scene is far above anything I could even dream of back in 1997. It reached the highest possible level and went far further than that earning the respect of the big scene (though they never admit it). I think this is the direction we are moving in the future too. I don't think anymore that we can ever become very popular on the big scene and I don't believe that there is actually any need for it either. R.E.D. keeps striking in there from time to time just make them aware of us and giving new people better chances to find our scene. Now that we are talking about R.E.D., let's talk a little bit of music disks too. New music disk project will start in autumn 2000 and planned release date is around January/February 2001. This leaves two years between previous and new R.E.D. disk if we don't count collection disks. I'm quite sure that the increasing quality will show much if compared to the old disks. Why wouldn't? There was a amazing quality increasing detected already with The Gathering and Virtual Decay music disks if we compare them to for example Infernal Lore. Fact is that new disk can't be started before Modulica is out. I promised that and I will keep my promise to Hakan. I will reserve a lot of time for the disk so everybody can contribute. If it becomes big and there's still lot of good tunes it will be a double-disk (in two separated packs). This will happen only if the size goes over 15Mb. That's all I think. Let's keep the scene alive and kicking! --------------------------------------------------------------------- COURTNEY LOVE DOES THE MATH - PART ONE --------------------------------------------------------------------- Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts. I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math: This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide. What happens to that million dollars? They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager. That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person. That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released. The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.) So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties. The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable. The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records. All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band. Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company. If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record. Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero! How much does the record company make? They grossed $11 million. It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support. The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties. They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry. Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million. So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven. Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn't have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit. Worst of all, after all this, the band owns none of its work ... they can pay the mortgage forever but they'll never own the house. Like I said: Sharecropping. Our media says, "Boo hoo, poor pop stars, they had a nice ride. Fuck them for speaking up"; but I say this dialogue is imperative. And cynical media people, who are more fascinated with celebrity than most celebrities, need to reacquaint themselves with their value systems. When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says copyright 1976 Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever. The system's set up so almost nobody gets paid. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Last November, a Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier, with the support of the RIAA, added a "technical amendment" to a bill that defined recorded music as "works for hire" under the 1978 Copyright Act. He did this after all the hearings on the bill were over. By the time artists found out about the change, it was too late. The bill was on its way to the White House for the president's signature. That subtle change in copyright law will add billions of dollars to record company bank accounts over the next few years -- billions of dollars that rightfully should have been paid to artists. A "work for hire" is now owned in perpetuity by the record company. Under the 1978 Copyright Act, artists could reclaim the copyrights on their work after 35 years. If you wrote and recorded "Everybody Hurts," you at least got it back to as a family legacy after 35 years. But now, because of this corrupt little pisher, "Everybody Hurts" never gets returned to your family, and can now be sold to the highest bidder. Over the years record companies have tried to put "work for hire" provisions in their contracts, and Mr. Glazier claims that the "work for hire" only "codified" a standard industry practice. But copyright laws didn't identify sound recordings as being eligible to be called "works for hire," so those contracts didn't mean anything. Until now. Writing and recording "Hey Jude" is now the same thing as writing an English textbook, writing standardized tests, translating a novel from one language to another or making a map. These are the types of things addressed in the "work for hire" act. And writing a standardized test is a work for hire. Not making a record. So an assistant substantially altered a major law when he only had the authority to make spelling corrections. That's not what I learned about how government works in my high school civics class. Three months later, the RIAA hired Mr. Glazier to become its top lobbyist at a salary that was obviously much greater than the one he had as the spelling corrector guy. The RIAA tries to argue that this change was necessary because of a provision in the bill that musicians supported. That provision prevents anyone from registering a famous person's name as a Web address without that person's permission. That's great. I own my name, and should be able to do what I want with my name. But the bill also created an exception that allows a company to take a person's name for a Web address if they create a work for hire. Which means a record company would be allowed to own your Web site when you record your "work for hire" album. Like I said: Sharecropping. Although I've never met any one at a record company who "believed in the Internet," they've all been trying to cover their asses by securing everyone's digital rights. Not that they know what to do with them. Go to a major label-owned band site. Give me a dollar for every time you see an annoying "under construction" sign. I used to pester Geffen (when it was a label) to do a better job. I was totally ignored for two years, until I got my band name back. The Goo Goo Dolls are struggling to gain control of their domain name from Warner Bros., who claim they own the name because they set up a shitty promotional Web site for the band. Orrin Hatch, songwriter and Republican senator from Utah, seems to be the only person in Washington with a progressive view of copyright law. One lobbyist says that there's no one in the House with a similar view and that "this would have never happened if Sonny Bono was still alive." By the way, which bill do you think the recording industry used for this amendment? The Record Company Redefinition Act? No. The Music Copyright Act? No. The Work for Hire Authorship Act? No. How about the Satellite Home Viewing Act of 1999? Stealing our copyright reversions in the dead of night while no one was looking, and with no hearings held, is piracy. It's piracy when the RIAA lobbies to change the bankruptcy law to make it more difficult for musicians to declare bankruptcy. Some musicians have declared bankruptcy to free themselves from truly evil contracts. TLC declared bankruptcy after they received less than 2 percent of the $175 million earned by their CD sales. That was about 40 times less than the profit that was divided among their management, production and record companies. Toni Braxton also declared bankruptcy in 1998. She sold $188 million worth of CDs, but she was broke because of a terrible recording contract that paid her less than 35 cents per album. Bankruptcy can be an artist's only defense against a truly horrible deal and the RIAA wants to take it away. Artists want to believe that we can make lots of money if we're successful. But there are hundreds of stories about artists in their 60s and 70s who are broke because they never made a dime from their hit records. And real success is still a long shot for a new artist today. Of the 32,000 new releases each year, only 250 sell more than 10,000 copies. And less than 30 go platinum. The four major record corporations fund the RIAA. These companies are rich and obviously well-represented. Recording artists and musicians don't really have the money to compete. The 273,000 working musicians in America make about $30,000 a year. Only 15 percent of American Federation of Musicians members work steadily in music. But the music industry is a $40 billion-a-year business. One-third of that revenue comes from the United States. The annual sales of cassettes, CDs and video are larger than the gross national product of 80 countries. Americans have more CD players, radios and VCRs than we have bathtubs. Story after story gets told about artists -- some of them in their 60s and 70s, some of them authors of huge successful songs that we all enjoy, use and sing -- living in total poverty, never having been paid anything. Not even having access to a union or to basic health care. Artists who have generated billions of dollars for an industry die broke and un-cared for. And they're not actors or participators. They're the rightful owners, originators and performers of original compositions. This is piracy. This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't work with us to protect us. I'm on [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich's side, in other words, and I feel really badly for him that he doesn't know how to condense his case down to a sound-bite that sounds more reasonable than the one I saw today. I also think Metallica is being given too much grief. It's anti-artist, for one thing. An artist speaks up and the artist gets squashed: Sharecropping. Don't get above your station, kid. It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'. Recording artists have essentially been giving their music away for free under the old system, so new technology that exposes our music to a larger audience can only be a good thing. Why aren't these companies working with us to create some peace? There were a billion music downloads last year, but music sales are up. Where's the evidence that downloads hurt business? Downloads are creating more demand. Why aren't record companies embracing this great opportunity? Why aren't they trying to talk to the kids passing compilations around to learn what they like? Why is the RIAA suing the companies that are stimulating this new demand? What's the point of going after people swapping cruddy-sounding MP3s? Cash! Cash they have no intention of passing onto us, the writers of their profits. At this point the "record collector" geniuses who use Napster don't have the coolest most arcane selection anyway, unless you're into techno. Hardly any pre-1982 REM fans, no '60s punk, even the Alan Parsons Project was underrepresented when I tried to find some Napster buddies. For the most part, it was college boy rawk without a lot of imagination. Maybe that's the demographic that cares -- and in that case, My Bloody Valentine and Bert Jansch aren't going to get screwed just yet. There's still time to negotiate. Destroying traditional access Somewhere along the way, record companies figured out that it's a lot more profitable to control the distribution system than it is to nurture artists. And since the companies didn't have any real competition, artists had no other place to go. Record companies controlled the promotion and marketing; only they had the ability to get lots of radio play, and get records into all the big chain store. That power put them above both the artists and the audience. They own the plantation. Being the gatekeeper was the most profitable place to be, but now we're in a world half without gates. The Internet allows artists to communicate directly with their audiences; we don't have to depend solely on an inefficient system where the record company promotes our records to radio, press or retail and then sits back and hopes fans find out about our music. Record companies don't understand the intimacy between artists and their fans. They put records on the radio and buy some advertising and hope for the best. Digital distribution gives everyone worldwide, instant access to music. And filters are replacing gatekeepers. In a world where we can get anything we want, whenever we want it, how does a company create value? By filtering. In a world without friction, the only friction people value is editing. A filter is valuable when it understands the needs of both artists and the public. New companies should be conduits between musicians and their fans. Right now the only way you can get music is by shelling out $17. In a world where music costs a nickel, an artist can "sell" 100 million copies instead of just a million. The present system keeps artists from finding an audience because it has too many artificial scarcities: limited radio promotion, limited bin space in stores and a limited number of spots on the record company roster. The digital world has no scarcities. There are countless ways to reach an audience. Radio is no longer the only place to hear a new song. And tiny mall record stores aren't the only place to buy a new CD. [Continues in next issue] --------------------------------------------------------------------- TRACKED WORX 2000 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Maz has announced that Tracked Worx 2000 (TW2000) project has begun, and as before, he needs your help to make it a reality: For those of you who may not have heard about Maz' "Tracked Worx" project, he offers this explanation on the web site: "A short description of the project for those one or two people who never heard about 'tracked worx': it's a project to bring tracking musicians together and their music to the public. People contribute their songs, and if they pass the preselection they will be released at the 'tracked worx' CD. Everybody with 5 songs or more will get the CD for free, as known from 'tracked worx 97' (sold out, limited to 1000 copies) and tracked worx '98 (around 80 copies left). Last time around 200 people got their free (double-)CD." In order for any project like this to be a success, it requires the help of the musicians. The great thing about the Tracked Worx projects is that they help you when you help them. Although not yet announced for the TW2000 project, there are prizes that are given away to the artists that are voted to be the best by the people who listen to the CD. For TW98, some great artists received some great prizes. Also, as mentioned in the description above, if 5 of your songs are accepted for the CD, you get a copy for free. At the very least, you get to have your music published in a professional project, and that is always something to be proud of. Maz is asking for submissions for TW2000 now. There are some guidelines that need to be followed in order to give your song(s) a chance at being on the CD. The first rule is rather bold, but I for one agree with it. No MP3 files will be accepted for inclusion on TW2000. "Surely the most weird point of the rules, initiated by the Takeover 2000 organizing with their no-tracker-compo decision (which had been revoked later). If a demoparty doesn't hold tracker compo's anymore, this is my contribution to boycott the mp3-only trend. The source format is what people attracts to trackers." Maz will accept any file that can be considered to be a 'source format'. " In plain english, this includes all classic tracker formats such as MOD, S3M, XM, IT, [etc. and] all softsynth-tracker formats such as AXS, Buzz, Dreamstation, MadTracker, NoiseTrekker, Orion, [and] Psycle. If your song uses non-standard Buzz machines or 3rd party (VST-)plugins, please submit them together with your song. Commercial crippleware (beeps every minute in demo-version, or something alike) are not allowed, every user must be able to playback the song without buying the plugin." The final portion of the guidelines is concerned with remixes, both commercial and otherwise. "Remixes of commercial songs or songs which mainly base on samples ripped from commercial songs will not be accepted due to potential copyright problems." Maz has a policy regarding remixes of other trackers' works as well, which I suppose is sadly necessary, although everyone should know this to begin with: "Generally, remixes will only be accepted if the songtext or the external text description clearly shows the name of the original author and song. Before you submit a remixed song, please contact the original author and ask for permission." In case these guidelines are not followed, Maz will be continuing the blacklist from the last project, whereby those who do not give credit where credit is due are discredited. If you think that your songs are ready for inclusion in TW2000, there are two ways of submitting them - by a form on the project web site, or via email. Be sure to read all of the information about song submissions on the web site so that your song is not disqualified for something as silly as an improper submission. So, why does Maz do this project, and why should you help? He offers the following: "Why another 'tracked worx'? Because I *love* the project, no matter how sick it is financially (for me, that is). Your great support over the past years is what motivates me! Last years CD's offered a nice collection of inspiring songs of different styles. Famous trackers and groups, such as Charlie Brown Records, Elwood, Hunz, Level-D, Maniacs Of Noise, Mystical, Scaldor, Tokyo Dawn Records or Vibrants, met 'rising stars of the scene' (term is (C) by UT ;) ), demostyle met solo piano, metal met drum'n'bass, chillout met hardcore." As for why you should help - "Publicity, friends, connections: many people told me that they got more feedback since the CD release than ever before in years. The chance that people listen to your song may be way better compared to uploading it into the millions of songs at mp3.com or to your own www-page, especially if you're not a member of a big and already popular group. Most CD-owners (buyers and those who got it for free) will check every subdirectory once, at least. The CD is a connection between tracking musicians and also a chance to get hired by multimedia- or game-companies - some of them bought this CD too in the past. In short: that's your chance to get girls, money and fame! :o] Or just a free CD + new contacts, in [the] 'worst case'. Prizes: last year I gave away prizes worth $2500 for the 3 winners of the 'best song @ tracked worx '98 voting', have a look at the prizes and winning artists here." Whether your motivation be for fame and glory, prizes, or just to lend a hand to a great project, TW2000 is an excellent place to submit your best works. --------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMERCIAL TRACKING - IS IT POSSIBLE? --------------------------------------------------------------------- By Mick Rippon Tracking, put simply, and as many of us know, is taking digital samples and sequencing them by hand, creating music. No expensive synthesizers, no 32 channel mixers taking up table space. Just the composer, his or her computer, and the samples they use. Pure sound organization with every little detail under your control. No quantizing (perhaps a bit of humanizing), no retakes, and in a matter of days a seasoned tracker can produce a piece that sounds extremely close to a commercial one. Sounds amazing, doesn't it? Well, stop drooling, because excellent music, done with expensive studio or tracker, takes a lot of work. I don't wish to discourage, since CDs have been produced with tracked music, but there are a lot of little things to learn before a composer can emulate real instrumentation using tracked music. Let us begin with the foundation of any piece: the samples, or the instruments and sounds you plan to use in your work. Say you want a 12 string accoustic guitar solo in your song. What do you do? The easiest thing to do is to sample an entire solo by attaching a pickup to a guitar and plugging it right into your soundcard, breaking the solo up into pieces, and pasting it into the song. With Impulse Tracker and Fast Tracker II (both available on ftp.cdrom.com) this is possible, and the best way to get a realistic sound. However, you do this and your song will be very large (if your samples are 16 bit >22khz the song will be over 2 megs in size). A better idea would be to sample single guitar strums. With 300k of different samples from a guitar one could create a solo almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This applies to nearly every instrument save for synthesized sounds and organs. This is where tracking seriously lacks in ease of production. What one could play on a guitar and record right into a piece takes hours of offsetting, volumizing and fine tuning numerous samples of that same guitar. Samples can be obtained from audio CDs, data CDs, or even your favorite albums if you don't play an instrument. 600 or more samples professionally recorded will cost you up to 100 dollars though, so choose wisely. Using the samples is the next step, and the trickiest one, since only delicate and careful control of your instruments can yield pro sounds. This is covered in numerous articles found in the newsletter "TraxWeekly", written by some of the best trackers out there: Necros, Basehead and Spyder to name a few. To sum up, all it takes is your instruments, a tracker (such as Impulse or Fast Tracker II), imagination, inspiration, and practice. Those articles contain some real important tips... give 'em a read. The point is, "can I make a REAL album with tracked songs?" This is the ultimate question, since many are in production right now, but I am not aware of one previously released that has sold in overwhelming numbers. This is due to either lack of marketing funds, lack of talent and practice (no offense intended), or lack of a big label altogether. Hopefully this will change in the near future, because some of my favorite music has been tracked, and I hope the audience for tracked music will one day be as many and varied as those who listen to the Top 40. :) Note: This is rather old article I wanted to put here because it has some interesting points concerning tracking. We all know that at least Zack has made tracking profitable and from those trackers Mick mentioned in this article, Necros got a job by tracking. He works at Origin Systems Inc. (company that has done games like Ultima and Wing Commander). --------------------------------------------------------------------- ELECTRONIC MAGAZINES --------------------------------------------------------------------- Galahad / MC galahad@netppl.fi I decided to say few words about electronic magazines (e-mag from now on), because it seems to be the subject of the day currently. Our tracked metal scene has now two e-mags, Metallurgy and Red Rain. Both are focused mostly on reviewing so far (though this will change with Red Rain soon). Both magazines are very primitive if we compare them to e-mags released by some big scene crews. Red Rain has been developed continously since it was founded in 1998 and it has reached somewhat decent level to be a plain ascii e-mag. I hope Metallurgy will do the same as the crew gets more experience. I can assure to you all that doing a quality e-mag is much harder than it seems. In this article I'm talking about Red Rain. Enough of general stuff. What do you think, what makes e-mag a good one? Is it reviews? Is it articles or is it news? Personally I think it's the good combination of all these parts. 50k file full of just reviews gets quite boring after a while. Remember that these are just my own opinions. All respect to reviewers, because I know it's not an easy job to do. Review should be a good valuation of the song or disk. Just "it rocks" or "it sucks" is not enough. Such review is just worthless. Reader won't get anything, composer won't anything and everybody's unhappy. Good review should contain general information of the style and what kind of song it is overall, then there should be objective valuation of the tracking, samples, tune itself. I don't consider the final score to be even important at all. I prefer reading the whole review and making my own judgement based on that. So if the text just says "it sucks", I can't do that and I'll propably won't download the tune even if it would say "it rocks". Reviewer must tell WHY the song was good or bad. Articles are at least as important as reviews in my opinion. They can give useful information to the reader or they can be just interesting to read without any special message. Articles make the magazine more fun to read because they are not so serious all the time. For example that "Courtney Love Does The Math" in this issue. It's just about how shitty record companies can be to artists, there is not much useful information unless you're going to start a band in USA. I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that at least finnish companies are not quite that shitty. So articles are the spine of a magazine. News are always necessary if you want to keep up with what's happening on scene. I don't think I need to explain the meaning of news to you. Interviews are not needed, but they are good to be there. They give some more detailed information about certain tracker and put him on spotlight for a while. In interview you can get some better info about the tracker than from his homepage's "about me" section. I consider interviews to be the salt of an e-mag. Red Rain contains all this. I still think that RR is quite poor and worthless magazine. I truly believe that we have a great start here, but it could be so much better. Did I say worthless? I'm sorry, I don't mean worthless like really worthless. What I mean that we can be much better and I hope that in the future we will be. I hope we can get more interesting articles for the future issues and especially I hope articles from people on metal scene. What is a really good magazine then? I got the idea for founding Red Rain from old and nowadays dead big scene magazine named TraxWeekly. At that time it contained pretty much everything that I needed to know about scene. It had huge amount of *good* reviews and very interesting articles. There was also lot of compo information and results. It was ascii magazine like Red Rain. I try to continue with TraxWeekly idea of quality instead of quantity. If the magazine has good enough contents, the look of it has no real meaning. If however RR will go graphic someday it will be something like Hugi. Hugi is a big scene magazine with very good interface and it's not all, it also have very high quality contents. Best scene magazine I've ever seen. Our problem is that there are no coders on metal scene. At least not very many. There are many other zines out there, but I think TraxWeekly and Hugi are the only ones truly worth of mentioning which shows quite high criticism from organizer who does ascii mag, but on the other hand as I already mentioned, TraxWeekly was also ascii. If you're interested about Hugi and wonder how good it might be. Check it out. http://www.hugi.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- POEM --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I Have Lived" by Gor I have lived For I have seen the light And have seen the dark I am lost For I have lost the light And cannot see in the dark. --------------- Take the above poem for what you want. I've never said I was a poet and many may not even understand it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Red Rain 04/2000 is out 20.08.2000 (dd.mm.yyyy) (with reviews!) ---------------------------------------------------------------------