I have to stick with linear just long enough to give the payoff on the Hip Clips Music story, because it was awesome.
In Spring 1995, as Hip Clips was failing to take the world by storm, Paul was being a good internet citizen, participating in various discussion boards (not astroturfing, just being online) and wound up chatting with a certain celebrity about Windsurfing. And after a while, the two became net-friends, and Paul was invited out to Half Moon Bay California to do some Windsurfing, and some talking...
And that was how it came to be that Thomas Dolby asked Paul to join him at his Silicon Valley startup company Headspace. As a part of this, Hip Clips was "acquired" by Headspace. No, there wasn't any actual money in this, but at this point I was just happy for Paul, so I signed away the rights. And Paul and his wife Melissa up and moved to California. JUST LIKE THAT.
Working for a man who I had somewhat idolized as a synth god in the 1980s... It just seemed so wonderful.
Of course, in those early days, Headspace was sort of struggling to find a place in the world - for a few years it got by being "Thomas Dolby's Company" - Paul did some soundtrack work for videogames under the Headspace banner... but it was more of a services company than a big product idea.
In early 1996, that changed when Headspace acquired a pretty cool browser plug-in called "Igor": The idea of Igor was to be a standard midifile player with a twist: You load in your own sounds. So we were approaching MORE bandwidth, but still nowhere near as much as if you were streaming actual music. A Midifile is maybe 4k in size, and the initial Igor download was I think 4 meg, which was as much memory as most professional synthesizers were providing as standard. So you could start with a good basic sound set, and then if you "sonified" your website with Igor, you could also specify custom samples to be downloaded into the player for your own sound. They called it "Rich Media Format" RMF files.
So after you bit the bullet and installed Igor (and it was available on those CD-Roms on the cover of magazines, don't forget), you could get a pretty good sounding bit of music going with a less than 100k download (10-20 sec on dialup), music and samples. It was a cool concept, which was ultimately doomed by the ever cheapening bandwidth that allowed for real streaming music without the gimmick, but for a few years, it was pretty unique. They refocused the whole company around this plug in, renamed themselves "Beatnik", and ran with it.
I know I know - we'll get to the ME part of the story now.
As they were preparing Igor for launch in Summer 1996, they wanted some demo files to show it off. They had the music licenses to Hip Clips already, and Paul knew I had the source files. So in what I'll call "the easiest money ever" (as long as you don't factor in the hours and hours of work that went into the ORIGINALs), Headspace paid me $100 per file to deliver the source midi files so they could repurpose them into Igor.
The catch is that I did need to do some prep work on the files: A lot of the drum tracks weren't mapped to traditional voices, since they were triggering my ancient strange pieces of equipment, not standard midi boxes. But once I got into the "cleanup" mindframe, the whole project was done in a few weeks, and they cut me a check for $4000.
But that's not the good part. The good part is that in Summer of 1996, I finagled a visit out to Headspace in San Mateo and got to hang out with Paul in Silicon Valley in the middle of the Tech Boom. As we walked the streets of San Mateo, there were shiny BMWs lined up like it was a dealership - every 25-year old in the area was flush with money, and were spending it as quickly as possible...
And while I was visiting, I got to spend a few minutes talking with Thomas. I tried to geek bond on a few technical things, but as it can be with professionals who lived through a time, he seemed mildly relieved to NOT have to be using some of those old synths, and was especially pleased with his brand spanking new Yamaha QY700 all in one synth/sequencer/groovebox. I grinned and rolled with it.
I did, however, get to pet his not-turned-on Fairlight CMI Series 3. That was some legendary tech.
And I heard tell that it was around 2003 when he finally got around to trying out his Fairlight again, and started playing some of his old tracks again, rediscovering his love for the gear once more. But that's his story, not mine.
By 1998, just about everyone was getting DSL, and the need for a tool like Igor (now the Beatnik plugin) was pretty much non-existent - the people who cared about a quality audio experience were buying the bandwidth, and the people who didn't stayed with dialup and didn't care about having music on their websites. Beatnik did a few re-focusing moves, partnering with Nokia to port the technology to mobile phones, and somehow getting into the custom ringtones market, but by then Paul had moved on...
It was a wonderful payoff to the Hip Clips adventure to finally get some money, some schmoozing with a hero, and some impossibly good Thai food as well. Paul never did come back to Minnesota, and I never did move out to California to find a pot of gold.
Showing posts with label Paul Sebastien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Sebastien. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Fall 1994 - Hip Clips
You kids may not believe me on this, but in the early to mid 1990s there was an explosion of rich content playing on computers - animated menus, interactive stories, cool video clips on demand, funny animations... But it wasn't on the internet. No, there was a big market for interactive CD-Roms back then. Magazines were putting CDs on their covers. There were CDRom magazines you could subscribe to. Of course Games were on CD, but so were corporate presentations.
And the backbone for a lot of this development was a product called MacroMedia Director. Director has since been wrapped into the thing we all now know as Flash, and is sold by Adobe. But in 1994, if you wanted to be a king of new media, you dropped the $1200 on a license of Director, and you needed a pretty powerful machine to run it - we're talking at LEAST 40mhz CPU, and preferably 8 meg of ram. Yes, that is MHZ not GHZ. And it's MEG not GIG.
By 1999, almost all of this type of content was being delivered by the Web, with Broadband connections growing in popularity. But in 1994, one of the best selling CDRoms was from the San Diego Zoo, a virtual tour with short, tiny, embedded video clips.
Cards on the table: I was not a visionary here. I came along for the ride. All credit goes to Paul Sebastien, who called me up and asked me to help him with a project. Paul spotted the trend and connected some dots: People are making interactive CD Roms. No matter what your content is in there, you are probably going to have a menu or two or three, plus a splash screen. And what says "multimedia experience" better than music? GOOD sounding music?
CDRoms were the breakthrough over Floppies because they offered a crazy 650meg of content - bigger than many hard drives at the time. And games delivered on floppies were limited to 2 meg or so. The music on games and presentations at that point was "Midi Files" - this was basically a musical score that the sound card in your computer would play back. They usually sounded tinny and terrible, and never sounded the same from computer to computer. But storage wise, they were very economical. And the Web of the era was also limited to these Midi files too, and forget about video!
Paul figured with the huge storage size of a CD Rom, people could actually put REAL music on there. But few people in 1994 would have access to high quality license-free music. And at the time, the competition was very high priced "industrial music" companies, who did canned music for corporate films - each track would cost between $10-100. Paul's vision was FIFTY great, loopable pieces of music in 5 different styles for $150 (I think) - $3 a track, in high, medium, and low quality versions for inclusion in your project, license free.
But Paul needed some help: This was still in the days of Psykosonik, and he was having some degree of writer's block on their third album... any music coming from his brain would need to be dedicated to his actual BAND. So he asked me to join him and be "the music guy", and Paul would be the Macromedia Director guy, plus the marketing. That division of labor worked for me: We did some basic numbers modeling, and hopefully this would bring me somewhere around $10,000 in the first few months if all went to plan. The upside could be incredible. Of course there would be no up-front compensation, but I had a day job, so that wasn't that big of a hurdle for me.
For 3 months, I wrote music like a madman, laid it to DAT, and drove to his townhouse in Plymouth to play tracks and see how the project was coming along. The styles were Slow Groove, Midtempo, Upbeat, Ambient, and Hyper. In the end, I think we scaled back from 50 to 40, because I was beginning to burn out a little and the user interface looked good with 8 buttons per style. 40 completely distinct 1 minute pieces of produced music is a bit much for even a maniac like me. And I was obsessed with making each one really sound DIFFERENT, unlike some libraries we had found where it was really only 4 actual compositions, but sliced and diced 5 ways each. So for each track, it was a blank slate: I picked a tempo/style, and started writing.
Paul learned more and more about Director, but the application had mysterious crashes, and despite having a simple interface, would crawl to a halt on many systems. Again, this was new territory - CD Roms were hard to make compatible with every system, and you had to put a lot of "sensing" code in to see exactly what hardware landscape it was to interact with... Things we take for granted in the web world now.
Also recall my writing style during this era: Twirl the knobs, hit record, and move ON. I was still using Performer, and the sounds on this project were heavily weighted to the Jupiter 8, The SY77, The Oberheim OB8, the Juno106, LinnDrum, Simmons SDS7, and TX816 So each of these songs was truly a moment in time captured. There was no easy way to go back and recreate one if we wanted to change it a little... I delivered these "AS-IS", and Paul was very accommodating, really. And sitting with him in his austere, beautiful studio listening to my tracks was a very fun experience, because he wasn't shy about handing out the compliments. I felt very good about this project.
When the CD was finally ready for market, it was months later... and you probably don't need to be told it didn't sell all that well. I think several dozen all told. But it was alone in its genre, so it could actually be said to be the "best selling" of its type, which helped Paul down the road....
This experience was also my first encounter with... astroturfing. Since we didn't have much money, we couldn't take out a full page ad in the back of Mondo2000 magazine. We tried to spread "word of mouth" via various internet bulletin boards and usenet forums. But even back then, there were pretty strict "no selling" policies in these user communities, so Paul and I logged in as "normal people who had bought Hip Clips and really liked it". Of course, how suspicious is it that you have a user just join the forum and the first and last thing he posts is mention of a product he likes? Yeah.
I confess I only did a few of them because I felt guilty about it. But Paul went to town on it - I think he had 3 dozen different AOL accounts at one point, posting accolades for our product. Not that it worked THAT well, but hey, we sold a few.
In the end, I never got any actual cash from the venture: Paul went into debt getting the CDs printed with cases, and he had to pay off the Director software as well. But he did give me one of his pieces of gear as sort of a "sorry this didn't work out" sort of gift, and music junkie that I was, that was actually JUST FINE with me. Plus, I got 40 pieces of music done. I only wish I had thought to make each one a full piece of music, because I really really like these pieces even today, and want them to go longer than 60 seconds. Plus it proved that Paul and I were a pretty good team, which would come in helpful in our ventures in the in the new century... but that's another story.
And the backbone for a lot of this development was a product called MacroMedia Director. Director has since been wrapped into the thing we all now know as Flash, and is sold by Adobe. But in 1994, if you wanted to be a king of new media, you dropped the $1200 on a license of Director, and you needed a pretty powerful machine to run it - we're talking at LEAST 40mhz CPU, and preferably 8 meg of ram. Yes, that is MHZ not GHZ. And it's MEG not GIG.
By 1999, almost all of this type of content was being delivered by the Web, with Broadband connections growing in popularity. But in 1994, one of the best selling CDRoms was from the San Diego Zoo, a virtual tour with short, tiny, embedded video clips.
Cards on the table: I was not a visionary here. I came along for the ride. All credit goes to Paul Sebastien, who called me up and asked me to help him with a project. Paul spotted the trend and connected some dots: People are making interactive CD Roms. No matter what your content is in there, you are probably going to have a menu or two or three, plus a splash screen. And what says "multimedia experience" better than music? GOOD sounding music?
CDRoms were the breakthrough over Floppies because they offered a crazy 650meg of content - bigger than many hard drives at the time. And games delivered on floppies were limited to 2 meg or so. The music on games and presentations at that point was "Midi Files" - this was basically a musical score that the sound card in your computer would play back. They usually sounded tinny and terrible, and never sounded the same from computer to computer. But storage wise, they were very economical. And the Web of the era was also limited to these Midi files too, and forget about video!
Paul figured with the huge storage size of a CD Rom, people could actually put REAL music on there. But few people in 1994 would have access to high quality license-free music. And at the time, the competition was very high priced "industrial music" companies, who did canned music for corporate films - each track would cost between $10-100. Paul's vision was FIFTY great, loopable pieces of music in 5 different styles for $150 (I think) - $3 a track, in high, medium, and low quality versions for inclusion in your project, license free.
But Paul needed some help: This was still in the days of Psykosonik, and he was having some degree of writer's block on their third album... any music coming from his brain would need to be dedicated to his actual BAND. So he asked me to join him and be "the music guy", and Paul would be the Macromedia Director guy, plus the marketing. That division of labor worked for me: We did some basic numbers modeling, and hopefully this would bring me somewhere around $10,000 in the first few months if all went to plan. The upside could be incredible. Of course there would be no up-front compensation, but I had a day job, so that wasn't that big of a hurdle for me.
For 3 months, I wrote music like a madman, laid it to DAT, and drove to his townhouse in Plymouth to play tracks and see how the project was coming along. The styles were Slow Groove, Midtempo, Upbeat, Ambient, and Hyper. In the end, I think we scaled back from 50 to 40, because I was beginning to burn out a little and the user interface looked good with 8 buttons per style. 40 completely distinct 1 minute pieces of produced music is a bit much for even a maniac like me. And I was obsessed with making each one really sound DIFFERENT, unlike some libraries we had found where it was really only 4 actual compositions, but sliced and diced 5 ways each. So for each track, it was a blank slate: I picked a tempo/style, and started writing.
Paul learned more and more about Director, but the application had mysterious crashes, and despite having a simple interface, would crawl to a halt on many systems. Again, this was new territory - CD Roms were hard to make compatible with every system, and you had to put a lot of "sensing" code in to see exactly what hardware landscape it was to interact with... Things we take for granted in the web world now.
Also recall my writing style during this era: Twirl the knobs, hit record, and move ON. I was still using Performer, and the sounds on this project were heavily weighted to the Jupiter 8, The SY77, The Oberheim OB8, the Juno106, LinnDrum, Simmons SDS7, and TX816 So each of these songs was truly a moment in time captured. There was no easy way to go back and recreate one if we wanted to change it a little... I delivered these "AS-IS", and Paul was very accommodating, really. And sitting with him in his austere, beautiful studio listening to my tracks was a very fun experience, because he wasn't shy about handing out the compliments. I felt very good about this project.
When the CD was finally ready for market, it was months later... and you probably don't need to be told it didn't sell all that well. I think several dozen all told. But it was alone in its genre, so it could actually be said to be the "best selling" of its type, which helped Paul down the road....
This experience was also my first encounter with... astroturfing. Since we didn't have much money, we couldn't take out a full page ad in the back of Mondo2000 magazine. We tried to spread "word of mouth" via various internet bulletin boards and usenet forums. But even back then, there were pretty strict "no selling" policies in these user communities, so Paul and I logged in as "normal people who had bought Hip Clips and really liked it". Of course, how suspicious is it that you have a user just join the forum and the first and last thing he posts is mention of a product he likes? Yeah.
I confess I only did a few of them because I felt guilty about it. But Paul went to town on it - I think he had 3 dozen different AOL accounts at one point, posting accolades for our product. Not that it worked THAT well, but hey, we sold a few.
In the end, I never got any actual cash from the venture: Paul went into debt getting the CDs printed with cases, and he had to pay off the Director software as well. But he did give me one of his pieces of gear as sort of a "sorry this didn't work out" sort of gift, and music junkie that I was, that was actually JUST FINE with me. Plus, I got 40 pieces of music done. I only wish I had thought to make each one a full piece of music, because I really really like these pieces even today, and want them to go longer than 60 seconds. Plus it proved that Paul and I were a pretty good team, which would come in helpful in our ventures in the in the new century... but that's another story.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Winter 1989 - Performing Live
In 1984-85, I played keyboards in a live band. By 1986-87, I started doing studio work, which de-emphasized the live playing element. My revelatory moment was in the summer of 1987 when I worked with my friend Al in his 8-track basement studio: The two of us were sequencing synths using MOTU Performer, and laying down tracks to SMPTE Time Code. I was stacking 3-4 synths on a line, and it was amazing. We actually sounded a bit like Stock Aiken Waterman with our song "DYMF".
I bought my own copy of Performer, got a Midi Time Piece, and hooked it up via Serial Port to my Mac SE (not SE/30, just SE). This was my workhorse computer: My Mac256 made it through freshman year, but by the end of that year, the amount of disk switching necessary to finish a 20 page paper was intolerable. I started sophomore year in 1987 with a Mac SE, with the whopping 20 meg hard drive. This became my music machine.
I bought Performer AND Composer, which was the MOTU Notation software, which I used in my music theory classes to notate my assignments, which would have gobsmacked and amazed my teacher, if only he hadn't introduced me to Composer in the first place. We were geeks together, Carleton Macy and I, swapping Mac tips. But that's not this story.
By my Senior year 1989-1990, my Mac SE had been upgraded to 4 whole megs of RAM, and a 170 MEG hard drive. My home studio had grown to include a sampler (Akai S950), a good synth or two (Roland Juno 106, Roland JX8P, Yamaha TX81Z, and the cream of the crop, the Roland D50 Synth), plus two drum machines - a Yamaha RX5 and an Alesis HR16B. I had a 4 track, but I was proud of the fact that with this setup I could actually run everything LIVE from my sequencer. Somehow this seemed very important, that the sounds be triggered "live" by the computer.
It was all the more important to me because my friend and rival Paul Sebastien had brazenly made the switch to the Tape Show when performing Live. Paul, like me, was a great arranger and studio nerd, but unlike me, he was also a fan of printing things to tape and moving on. His studio was always cleaner than mine - just 1-2 good synths, with a good mixing board and tape machine. He multitracked, he bounced, he acted like a real studio guy. And by 1989 he had arranged with some friends to create a "scene" - his friends opened an 18-up club above another nightclub, and Paul ran the house band, called "Smilehouse".
Smilehouse had a great sound, lots of production gloss, and a full lineup of smiling musicians, all of whom (save Paul) were faking their instruments while Paul's beautiful mix was playing on a tape deck back at the sound board.
I'm going to level with you: given the rear view mirror of 20 years, I can't imagine what the difference would be between a guy pressing play on a tape, versus pressing play on a sequencer which was then triggering the synths. But it meant something to me.
So my response was a fake band called "The Acid Police" and there was a prank involved that I'll go into at a different time, but it was a joke that grew into an actual semi-popular band at my college. We got gigs, we sold tapes, we had fans. And when we performed, we performed "live".
And by live I mean: Keyboard stack in front with the Juno and D50 on it. Keyboard stand on the right (my left) with two slabs of wood on it: On the lower slab was the two drum machines and the keyboard and mouse. On the upper slab was a rack case with the mixer, TX81Z, and Roland Delay, next to a second rack case with the sampler and on top of it all was perched my Mac SE. So between songs, I switched floppies, loaded songs, opened files, switched presets, and updated the mix.
Though I wasn't "Playing", I sure as hell was BUSY up there. I also usually left myself at least one line to actually PLAY on stage as well, while Mike and Erik ran around. Oh, Erik was my Andy Fletcher - he had a non-plugged in Keyboard (the JX) and faked, because he was actually just my roommate. Mike Mattison, now of Scrapomatic and the Derek Trucks Band was my amazing singer.
But as we played, I was always up on a riser, with my gear... and as I danced, the riser would rock, and the equipment rack would sway back and forth, the top arc over a foot of travel. I'd have to stop and grab my computer several times per song. Plus there were always mix issues, so I worked that mixer a lot.... and more than once the wrong patches were loaded, leading to a song restart... and about half of the stage banter was "is it done loading yet, Jim?"
Setup and breakdown was always horrible - because I had to make sure everything was plugged in properly, all midi cables were routed properly, all power was good, no ground loops.... Plus, that stuff was HEAVY.
We did I think 4 gigs like this, before I started to realize that in the final analysis, both the Acid Police and Smilehouse were sending a single stereo signal to the PA system. But Paul got to relax and i sweat bullets with every show.
In winter 1989, I got a DAT recorder... at first to capture my compositions... but by Winter of 1990, I was starting to use that DAT.... for playback. Yes, I started doing Tape Shows.
I bought my own copy of Performer, got a Midi Time Piece, and hooked it up via Serial Port to my Mac SE (not SE/30, just SE). This was my workhorse computer: My Mac256 made it through freshman year, but by the end of that year, the amount of disk switching necessary to finish a 20 page paper was intolerable. I started sophomore year in 1987 with a Mac SE, with the whopping 20 meg hard drive. This became my music machine.
I bought Performer AND Composer, which was the MOTU Notation software, which I used in my music theory classes to notate my assignments, which would have gobsmacked and amazed my teacher, if only he hadn't introduced me to Composer in the first place. We were geeks together, Carleton Macy and I, swapping Mac tips. But that's not this story.
By my Senior year 1989-1990, my Mac SE had been upgraded to 4 whole megs of RAM, and a 170 MEG hard drive. My home studio had grown to include a sampler (Akai S950), a good synth or two (Roland Juno 106, Roland JX8P, Yamaha TX81Z, and the cream of the crop, the Roland D50 Synth), plus two drum machines - a Yamaha RX5 and an Alesis HR16B. I had a 4 track, but I was proud of the fact that with this setup I could actually run everything LIVE from my sequencer. Somehow this seemed very important, that the sounds be triggered "live" by the computer.
It was all the more important to me because my friend and rival Paul Sebastien had brazenly made the switch to the Tape Show when performing Live. Paul, like me, was a great arranger and studio nerd, but unlike me, he was also a fan of printing things to tape and moving on. His studio was always cleaner than mine - just 1-2 good synths, with a good mixing board and tape machine. He multitracked, he bounced, he acted like a real studio guy. And by 1989 he had arranged with some friends to create a "scene" - his friends opened an 18-up club above another nightclub, and Paul ran the house band, called "Smilehouse".
Smilehouse had a great sound, lots of production gloss, and a full lineup of smiling musicians, all of whom (save Paul) were faking their instruments while Paul's beautiful mix was playing on a tape deck back at the sound board.
I'm going to level with you: given the rear view mirror of 20 years, I can't imagine what the difference would be between a guy pressing play on a tape, versus pressing play on a sequencer which was then triggering the synths. But it meant something to me.
So my response was a fake band called "The Acid Police" and there was a prank involved that I'll go into at a different time, but it was a joke that grew into an actual semi-popular band at my college. We got gigs, we sold tapes, we had fans. And when we performed, we performed "live".
And by live I mean: Keyboard stack in front with the Juno and D50 on it. Keyboard stand on the right (my left) with two slabs of wood on it: On the lower slab was the two drum machines and the keyboard and mouse. On the upper slab was a rack case with the mixer, TX81Z, and Roland Delay, next to a second rack case with the sampler and on top of it all was perched my Mac SE. So between songs, I switched floppies, loaded songs, opened files, switched presets, and updated the mix.
Though I wasn't "Playing", I sure as hell was BUSY up there. I also usually left myself at least one line to actually PLAY on stage as well, while Mike and Erik ran around. Oh, Erik was my Andy Fletcher - he had a non-plugged in Keyboard (the JX) and faked, because he was actually just my roommate. Mike Mattison, now of Scrapomatic and the Derek Trucks Band was my amazing singer.
But as we played, I was always up on a riser, with my gear... and as I danced, the riser would rock, and the equipment rack would sway back and forth, the top arc over a foot of travel. I'd have to stop and grab my computer several times per song. Plus there were always mix issues, so I worked that mixer a lot.... and more than once the wrong patches were loaded, leading to a song restart... and about half of the stage banter was "is it done loading yet, Jim?"
Setup and breakdown was always horrible - because I had to make sure everything was plugged in properly, all midi cables were routed properly, all power was good, no ground loops.... Plus, that stuff was HEAVY.
We did I think 4 gigs like this, before I started to realize that in the final analysis, both the Acid Police and Smilehouse were sending a single stereo signal to the PA system. But Paul got to relax and i sweat bullets with every show.
In winter 1989, I got a DAT recorder... at first to capture my compositions... but by Winter of 1990, I was starting to use that DAT.... for playback. Yes, I started doing Tape Shows.
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