The following warnings occurred:
Warning [2] Undefined array key "lockoutexpiry" - Line: 94 - File: global.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/global.php 94 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 28 require_once
Warning [2] Undefined array key "lockoutexpiry" - Line: 550 - File: global.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/global.php 550 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 28 require_once
Warning [2] Undefined array key "avatartype" - Line: 811 - File: global.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/global.php 811 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 28 require_once
Warning [2] Undefined array key "avatartype" - Line: 811 - File: global.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/global.php 811 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 28 require_once
Warning [2] Undefined variable $awaitingusers - Line: 34 - File: global.php(872) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/global.php(872) : eval()'d code 34 errorHandler->error
/global.php 872 eval
/showthread.php 28 require_once
Warning [2] Undefined array key "style" - Line: 937 - File: global.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/global.php 937 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 28 require_once
Warning [2] Undefined property: MyLanguage::$lang_select_default - Line: 5196 - File: inc/functions.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions.php 5196 errorHandler->error
/global.php 937 build_theme_select
/showthread.php 28 require_once
Warning [2] Undefined array key "additionalgroups" - Line: 7360 - File: inc/functions.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions.php 7360 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions.php 5216 is_member
/global.php 937 build_theme_select
/showthread.php 28 require_once
Warning [2] Undefined array key "mybb" - Line: 1997 - File: inc/functions.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions.php 1997 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_indicators.php 41 my_set_array_cookie
/showthread.php 665 mark_thread_read
Warning [2] Undefined array key "additionalgroups" - Line: 7360 - File: inc/functions.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions.php 7360 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_user.php 813 is_member
/inc/functions_post.php 416 purgespammer_show
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "profilefield" - Line: 6 - File: inc/functions_post.php(484) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php(484) : eval()'d code 6 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_post.php 484 eval
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "canonlyreplyownthreads" - Line: 672 - File: inc/functions_post.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php 672 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "showimages" - Line: 757 - File: inc/functions_post.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php 757 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "showvideos" - Line: 762 - File: inc/functions_post.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php 762 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "posttime" - Line: 9 - File: inc/functions_post.php(887) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php(887) : eval()'d code 9 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_post.php 887 eval
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "avatar_padding" - Line: 19 - File: inc/functions_post.php(887) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php(887) : eval()'d code 19 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_post.php 887 eval
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "additionalgroups" - Line: 7360 - File: inc/functions.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions.php 7360 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_user.php 813 is_member
/inc/functions_post.php 416 purgespammer_show
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "profilefield" - Line: 6 - File: inc/functions_post.php(484) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php(484) : eval()'d code 6 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_post.php 484 eval
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "canonlyreplyownthreads" - Line: 672 - File: inc/functions_post.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php 672 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "showimages" - Line: 757 - File: inc/functions_post.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php 757 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "showvideos" - Line: 762 - File: inc/functions_post.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php 762 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "posttime" - Line: 9 - File: inc/functions_post.php(887) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php(887) : eval()'d code 9 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_post.php 887 eval
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "avatar_padding" - Line: 19 - File: inc/functions_post.php(887) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/inc/functions_post.php(887) : eval()'d code 19 errorHandler->error
/inc/functions_post.php 887 eval
/showthread.php 1114 build_postbit
Warning [2] Undefined array key "invisible" - Line: 1555 - File: showthread.php PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/showthread.php 1555 errorHandler->error
Warning [2] Undefined variable $threadnotesbox - Line: 33 - File: showthread.php(1587) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/showthread.php(1587) : eval()'d code 33 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1587 eval
Warning [2] Undefined variable $ratethread - Line: 41 - File: showthread.php(1587) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/showthread.php(1587) : eval()'d code 41 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1587 eval
Warning [2] Undefined variable $addremovesubscription - Line: 82 - File: showthread.php(1587) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/showthread.php(1587) : eval()'d code 82 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1587 eval
Warning [2] Undefined variable $thread_deleted - Line: 107 - File: showthread.php(1587) : eval()'d code PHP 8.0.30 (Linux)
File Line Function
/showthread.php(1587) : eval()'d code 107 errorHandler->error
/showthread.php 1587 eval




A Top-40 Radio "smash" could be a challenge for Haley
03-27-2012, 09:28 PM, (This post was last modified: 03-27-2012, 09:30 PM by Miguel.)
#1
A Top-40 Radio "smash" could be a challenge for Haley
The New Yorker just published an intriguing article titled, "The Song Machine."

It explains how most "smash" hits are created today.

A very lengthy excerpt follows.

Quote:Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers...and “top line” writers. The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song.

...A relatively small number of producers and top-liners create a disproportionately large share of contemporary hits, which may explain why so many of them sound similar.

...The producer runs the session and serves as creative director of the song, but the top-liner supplies the crucial spark that will determine whether the song is a smash. (When I asked Tricky Stewart to define “smash,” he said, “A hit is just a hit; a smash is a life changer.”) As Eric Beall, an A. & R. executive with Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., a music publisher, puts it, “The top-line writer is the one who has to face a blank page.”

...Dean has a genius for infectious hooks. Somehow she is able to absorb the beat and the sound of a track, and to come out with its melodic essence. The words are more like vocalized beats than like lyrics, and they don’t communicate meaning so much as feeling and attitude—they nudge you closer to the ecstasy promised by the beat and the “rise,” or the “lift,” when the track builds to a climax. Among Dean’s best hooks are her three Rihanna smashes—“Rude Boy” (“Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up / Come on, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?”), “S&M” (“Na-na-na-na COME ON”), and “What’s My Name” (“Oh, na-na, what’s my name?”), all with backing tracks by Stargate—and her work on two Nicki Minaj smashes, “Super Bass” (“Boom, badoom, boom / boom, badoom, boom / bass / yeah, that’s that super bass”) and David Guetta’s “Turn Me On” (“Make me come alive, come on and turn me on”).

...Dean’s preferred method of working is to delay listening to a producer’s track until she is in the studio, in front of the mike. “I go into the booth and I scream and I sing and I yell, and sometimes it’s words but most time it’s not,” she told me. “And I just see when I get this little chill, here”—she touched her upper arm, just below the shoulder—“and then I’m, like, ‘Yeah, that’s the hook.’ ” If she doesn’t feel that chill after five minutes, she moves on to the next track, and tries again.

In advance of Dean’s arrival at Roc the Mic, Stargate had prepared several dozen tracks. They created most of them by jamming together on keyboards until they came up with an “idea”—generally, a central chord progression or a riff—around which they quickly built up a track, using the vast array of preprogrammed sounds and beats at their disposal. Hermansen likens their tracks to new flavors awaiting the right soft-drink or potato-chip maker to come along and incorporate them into a product.

Their plan with Dean was to finish one or two songs at each session. Given their record of success, they dared hope that one of these would be a smash.

...Dean carried her iced coffee into the recording booth, which adjoined the control room. She was dimly visible through the soundproofed glass window, bathed in greenish light. She took out her BlackBerry, and as the track began to play she surfed through lists of phrases she had copied from magazines and television programs. She showed me a few: “life in the fast lane,” “crying shame,” “high and mighty,” “mirrors don’t lie,” “don’t let them see you cry.” Some phrases were categorized under headings like “Sex and the City,” “Interjections,” and “British Slang.”

The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—“taking control . . . never die tonight . . . I can’t live a lie”—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been “writing” in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.

After several minutes of nonsense singing, the song began to coalesce. Almost imperceptibly, the right words rooted themselves in the rhythm while melodies and harmonies emerged in Dean’s voice. Her voice isn’t hip-hop or rock or country or gospel or soul, exactly, but it could be any one of those. “I’ll come alive tonight,” she sang. Dancing now, Dean raised one arm in the air. After a few more minutes, the producers told her she could come back into the control room.

“See, I just go in there and scream and they fix it,” she said, emerging from the booth, looking elated, almost glowing.

(The producers) went to work putting Dean’s wailings into traditional song structure. As is usually the case, Eriksen worked “the box”—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, while Hermansen critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bits of Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped and rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the space bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more. The studio’s sixty-four-channel professional mixing board, with its vast array of knobs and lights, which was installed when Roc the Mic Studios was constructed, only five years ago, sat idle, a relic of another age.

Within twenty minutes, Dean’s rhythmic utterances had been organized into an intro, a verse, a pre-chorus (or “pre”), a chorus, and an “outro”; all that was missing was a bridge. (Friday, the final day of the sessions, was reserved for making bridges.) Delaine, the engineer, who hadn’t said a word thus far, sat down at the computer and began tweaking the pitch of Dean’s vocal. Dean went back into the booth and added more words: “Give me life . . . touch me and I’ll come alive . . . I’ll come alive tonight . . .”

Hermansen listened, his bald head bobbing to the beat. “You don’t want ‘I’ll come alive at night,’ ” he said, over the booth’s intercom. “That’s too zombie.”

“I’ll come a-LI-I-IVE,” Dean tried, drawling out the syllables.

Once the hook was finished, Dean wrote a couple of verses on her MacBook Air. In a little less than two hours, they had a finished demo.

Was this the one? Hermansen wasn’t sure; they would listen to it again tomorrow. Big Juice seemed to like it, though. After hearing the final playback, he spoke for the first time.

“That’s dope,” he said.

---------------------------------------------

...Shortly before Christmas, Polow da Don helped broker a deal with Jimmy Iovine, at Interscope Records, who signed Dean and plans to bring out an album of hers later this year. “Jay be, like, ‘I know what to do with you,’ ” Dean told me, “and I’m, like, ‘Yes! Finally somebody who sees me as more than a check!’ ” There is talk of calling the album “UnderESTAmated.”

---------------------------------------------

“I’ll Come Alive,” the best song from Monday’s session, wasn’t sounding as dope on the following day. Before Dean arrived, Hermansen listened to a playback and delivered his verdict: “That’s not the one.” He added that Ester, in creating top lines for songs she wanted to record herself, seemed to be suppressing the overtly sexual lyrics that emerged when she was writing for other singers, and which were, for better or worse, her trademark.

Dean arrived, dressed in a floppy knit hat, leather jacket, jeans, and boots—her usual “casual but fly” style. Stargate began the session by playing one of their craziest tracks. It started with a snare drum layered with handclaps, with an evil-sounding, distorted guitarlike synth moving in and out of the foreground. Dean listened to the track for about twenty seconds, until she began humming a melody softly. “O.K., got it,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

She went into the booth, got out her phone, and as the music started she began vocalizing: “How do I get it . . . walkin’ in the cold to get it . . . you gotta, I’m-a wanna.” She had the core of the melody, but it needed words. About a minute in, she hit on the main hook, “How you love it,” in which the words played syncopated rhythm with the beat. It was classic Dean, freestyle and suggestive-sounding. This was followed by a secondary hook: “Do you do it like this, do you do it like that, if you do it like this can I do it right back.”

In the control room, the Stargate guys sensed something special was happening, and they worked quickly to capture it in song structure.

“Let’s loop the first half.”

“Do the synth chords and then use the arpeggiator to set the rise.”

“I love the straightness of the beginning. Put a couple more notes in the pre.”

In the booth, Dean, feeling the chill, put her hands in the air and did a snaky dance, testing the effect of the hooks on her hips.

Back in the control room, Dean wrote a verse, which Eriksen looped. He copied parts of the vocal and stacked two or three copies on top of one another to create a choral effect, a technique known as double-tracking. Now they had half of a great song, but it “runs out of ammo in the middle,” as Hermansen put it. Then Eriksen remembered a rap that Nicki Minaj had written for another Dean-Stargate song that hadn’t made it onto Minaj’s début album. He stripped out Minaj’s vocal and added it to their new track. “Let’s see if it fits,” he said, and it did. Another playback, and it sounded sensational.

“It’s a smash!” Hermansen declared.

Everyone was giddy, like children on Christmas morning. Blacksmith and Danny D. came into the control room and listened to the playback, whooping raucously at the choruses, perhaps the very first of countless revellers who would bounce to the song. Dean danced. Delaine bobbed his head and smiled. When it was over, everyone cheered.
Then Danny D. said, “Let me just interject one word. You know who’s looking? Pink.”

“I’m keeping that one for myself,” Ester said, firmly.

“I know. I’m just saying. Pink’s looking for an urban song with a contemporary beat.”

“No!”

“Kelly Clarkson’s supposedly looking. And Christina!”

But wait, there's a glimmer of hope at the end of the article:

Quote:Dean had never been to the Grammys, although she has received multiple songwriter nominations and has been invited each time she’s been nominated. This year, she was nominated for her contributions to Rihanna’s “Loud,” which was up for album of the year, but she still wasn’t planning to go. “I don’t have anything to wear,” she said. “Anyway, Adele’s going to win everything.”

“You never know!” Blacksmith declared, trying to be positive. But with the mention of Adele the air pressure in the control room seemed to change. Stargate knew well from their experience in London how quickly fads come and go in the pop business; a massive smash such as Adele’s “Someone Like You,” with its heartfelt lyrics, accompanied by simple piano arpeggios—no arpeggiator required—could be the beginning of the end of urban pop.


It's a lengthy article and I omitted many details, including how Dean got into the businesses in 2008 and an interesting bit about how "Top 40" radio came to be.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/...z1qNVlV1On

Reply
03-29-2012, 12:25 AM,
#2
RE: A Top-40 Radio "smash" could be a challenge for Haley
Wow, just finished that article (typical long New Yorker article). Definitely worthwhile. I recall reading about Stargate a couple months ago while I was attempting to better understand the urban sound that characterized some of the producers. Stargate was touted as the prominent player. I included them in a post -- somewhere. It is amazing how often Jimmy Iovine's name comes up in articles about the music industry.

The fact that Adele dominated the Grammy awards is definitely a hopeful sign that Haley can be successful with sound that includes natural vocals and music that (mostly) comes from instruments played by human beings.
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)