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The Sampler — October 26, 2005

Oct 26, 2005 12:00 PM

Rockin' SFX

I was driving down to our local pumpkin patch on a recent Sunday with my wife and kids, trying to get in the Halloween spirit by listening to a new CD of songs from the late '50s and early '60s about monsters and ghouls. Who knew there were 28 songs from the early rock era about Frankenstein, The Mummy, Dracula, and so on, each more formulaic and insipid than the next? Really bad stuff, I'm afraid. But there at the end of the disc was the granddaddy of them all, "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers—a number one hit (or "a graveyard smash," if you prefer) in the fall of 1962. Hearing it loud in the car, I was struck by the creative use of sound effects—no doubt plucked from one of the several albums of scary FX on the market back then—and then got to thinkin' about other pop songs that have incorporated SFX.

My totally unscientific survey tells me that two British bands were the kings of using SFX: The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Now, it's a fact that The Beatles, who were fans of comedian Spike Jones (who did incredibly funny things with ordinary effects), used some BBC FX library material on several songs—most notably perhaps "Good Morning," with its odd sonic menagerie filled with everything from chickens to hounds to a lion. Pink Floyd recorded some FX themselves, but also relied on libraries on occasion. Over in the United States, it was a library owned by a Memphis jingle company that ended up providing the waves on Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay."

Alas, I don't know where most of the FX on the songs below came from, but it's amazing to think of the impact they've had. Can't you just hear them in your head?:

An FX top 20 (in no particular order):

1. "Monster Mash," Bobby Pickett amd the Crypt-Kickers (lab sounds, etc.)
2. "Leader of the Pack," The Shangri-Las (motorcycle)
3. "Summer in the City," The Lovin' Spoonful (traffic, horns blowing)
4. "Living for the City," Stevie Wonder (urban soundscape)
5. "Yellow Submarine," The Beatles ("submarine" sounds)
6. "Good Morning," The Beatles (many animals)
7. "Back In the USSR," The Beatles (jet engines)
8. "Money," Pink Floyd (coins, etc.)
9. "Granchester Meadows," Pink Floyd (country soundscape, flies, footsteps)
10. "Time," Pink Floyd (clocks, bells, etc.)
11. "Dock of the Bay," Otis Redding (ocean waves)
12. "Riders on the Storm," The Doors (rain, thunder)
13. "Sky Pilot," The Animals (plane dogfight)
14. "Don't Step On the Grass, Sam," Steppenwolf (police raid, toilet flushing)
15. "Modern Times," Al Stewart (clinking glasses, party sounds)
16. "Straight Outta Compton," NWA (machine gun)
17. "Love is the Drug," Roxy Music (key starting car)
18. "Hell In A Bucket," Grateful Dead (vicious dogs, motorcycle)
19. "Lather," Jefferson Airplane (war sounds)
20. "On With the Show," Rolling Stones (party, street, and many other noises)

I can think of many others, too. Care to add any to our list? "Piggies" by The Beatles, perhaps? Send your favorites to blair@blairjackson.com. And if you happen to know where the sounds came from, please include that info.

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Canary In A Goldmine: Philly Production Music Company Scores Big

Andy Mark has always been prolific. The jingle house he started in 1972, Philadelphia Music Works (PMW), produced more than 10,000 jingles for local, regional, and national radio and TV clients. Eight years later, he founded the Canary Production Music Library to expand his client base and get into some new areas of music writing and production. Then, in 1990, he started the Broadcast Results Group (BRg) "to produce and barter production music libraries to radio stations." It retooled its catalog to become the Canary Collection, and enjoyed considerable success with it nationwide. Ten years ago, both PMW and BRg were bought by Premiere Radio Networks (a division of giant Clear Channel) and fused into a single entity known as BRg Music Works, with Mark as its president. Today, the buy-out Canary Collection can be found in more than 2,500 radio stations across the United States, as well as numerous TV stations, corporations, and educational institutions. I caught up with Mark on a recent afternoon to chat about the library biz and his very successful company, which is based in Wayne, Pa., outside of Philadelphia.

B.J.: You've been in the library business for a long time now. How has it changed as a business over the years?
A.M.: I've been in it since 1979, and, strictly from a numbers standpoint, the number of libraries that have sprung up is massive. Every day there are new libraries. And I think for the most part we can attribute that to technology. In the old days, I can remember the first CD I did for Canary, I had a Tascam 80-8 with literally a metronome—not even a click-track—that I would hang a Neumann mic in front of, and I'd get the drums all miked up and then I'd run around behind the drums and go start the machine, do it that way. Now, this weekend at Musicplayer Live in New York, I was given this RiffWorks thing [from Sonoma Wire Works] that goes for $189 and it's like a baby Pro Tools. It's almost like you can plug your guitar into the thing and master a CD while you're watching television! [Laughs]

B.J.: What does it actually do?
A.M.: It's a recorder, not a sequencer; a multitrack recorder you put on your laptop. For $189! It's ridiculous! The problem with that is that every kid with a guitar now thinks he's in the music business. Technology has certainly allowed many, many more people to get into the game. Doing library music probably looks like something a musician could do alone, or with just a few other people, on a home setup. And that's exactly what is happening out there.

B.J.: How has the market changed through the years? Certainly there are many more outlets for production music than there were when you started out.
A.M.: Right. The bad news is, there's lots more competition; the good news is, there's a lot more opportunity. There's tons of opportunity. Back in the '80s, you didn't hava gazillion cable channels. You didn't have people doing webcasting and podcasting and all the other things that have come up on the Internet the last few years. So, thankfully, as the number of music libraries has grown, so has the number of places they can potentially be used.

It seems to me that what separates the men from the boys in this business right now is marketing. If you don't have some sort of marketing angle ... if you're not in with a network or a production house, forget it. That's just the way it goes.

B.J.: And you're in with…
A.M.: Clear Channel. And that's a pretty good one to be in with, what with them owning 1,200-plus radio stations. We do a lot for them. I can't say we supply all the Clear Channel stations, but an awful lot of them. Actually, the general managers of the Clear Channel stations run their operations fairly autonomously, so some of them rely on [production houses] in their own markets.

B.J.: Do you work out of a specific studio?
A.M.: Well, we have an office in the suburbs here with a Pro Tools room and then we have what we call our mastering suite, which looks kind of like someone's bedroom, and we have Mac and PC platforms in there. But obviously we're getting things from all over. What we primarily do is almost function like a record company. We're the A&R guys, the distribution guys, the masterers and editors, and everything else. Composers submit their music to us on a fairly regular basis. Some of them even have the courtesy to call us and ask us what we need! [Laughs]

B.J.: "I've got 'Extreme Guitar' here…"
A.M.: Exactly! It's funny, because just seconds before you called, a woman from San Francisco called wondering if I'd listened to her CD and I said, "You know what, it's right here in the middle of these 300 discs I haven't listened to this month." [Laughs]

B.J.: One of the trends that I'm seeing is more and more so-called "name" artists are getting involved with production music and that's becoming a selling point in itself; whereas, 20 years ago, the musicians mainly toiled away anonymously, even if they were name players.
A.M.: You're absolutely right. The first time I realized this would be an angle in our industry, I was with the music director at Turner [Broadcasting], talking to them about taking all the tracks they'd bought over the years for CNN and turning it into a music library—which someone ended up doing, though not me; I wasn't willing to move to Atlanta to do it. But I remember the guy saying that Eric Gale was playing guitar on the weather theme. And it turns out Pat Metheny also ended up playing on one of the cuts, and I thought, "Wow, this guy is so impressed that these guys are playing on his cuts that somebody should put something like that together and sell it [based on the names]." And I've sort of done that; or at least I have an interest in it—it's called All-Star and it's all sorts of people like Michael Sembello, Earl Slick, and a bunch of heavy metal guys are in it because a) those guys need the work, and b) the end-users love to talk about the fact that "So-and-so is playing guitar on this cut that I used for my industrial video!" [laughs] The truth is, sometimes the "name" guy isn't as good as regular music library writers and producers, but the name means something.

B.J.: Do you think, in general, library music has gotten less generic?
A.M.: Yes, and I think now you can find pretty much anything you want in a library if it's big enough. Shiite Platform Diving Music! Whatever you need! [laughs] Libraries have become very sensitive to what people are looking for and part of that is a function of there being more competition out there.

B.J.: When I periodically make calls to production houses to see what libraries they're using, they almost always feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff that comes their way from libraries.
A.M.: Some of them won't even open the boxes; they just send them back! If you were to make that call 10 or 15 years ago you would've gotten the same answer at every studio and that would've been "We've got the Network library. Or FirstCom. Or Killer Tracks..."

B.J.: Actually, they still say that.
A.M.: Well, all those are part of BMG now. There are definitely more companies in the mix now, which is good…

B.J.: How do you break through the wall?
A.M.: I think you position yourself as more of boutique kind of library. You've got the big names; people are interested in that: "Gee, Earl Slick from David Bowie's band has written a library disc? I wonder what that's like." These days, with all the stuff that's out there, and that people have to wade though, anything that's going to make a guy break through and listen, that's what it's all about. If it's because you've got a big name on there or it was recorded at the Sound Kitchen in Nashville instead of some guy's bedroom, that's sometimes enough to get someone to listen.

But it is so much more competitive than it used to be. Even with all the outlets and the opportunity, it's gotten ridiculous. And frankly, a lot of these new, smaller companies will not survive; they won't make it. These guys who come out with three or four CDs and think they're in the music library business. ... I get calls from these guys every month asking, "Will you buy me out?"

B.J.: Do you feel a personal obligation to keep up with trends—to know that the Kanye West hip-hop is superseding this other kind, so you have to find a sound-alike?
A.M.: Oh yes, absolutely. Sound-alikes are huge. I had XM installed about a year ago, because I really have to know the difference between Switchfoot and Eve 6, for example. I do try to keep up ... and it isn't easy.

B.J.:Has the Internet leveled the playing field to a degree?
A.M.:It hasn't grown to its full maturity yet, and I think while it's still growing, some of these littler guys will probably give it up and not be able to support themselves...

B.J.: Although it's so cheap to get on the Internet and stay there.
A.M.: That's true, and you take the design out of the equation and having to press CDs and all the costs that are prohibitive to a lot of guys. But I don't think downloads are ubiquitous at this point. I know a lot of people are doing it, but a lot of my friends at the networks—which is where the money is for guys like me—are not going online and downloading music. They're either doing the hard drive routine—like mSoft—or they're still grabbing CDs off the shelf because that's what they're used to and they like it. You go to a place like Turner and they literally have two or three guys who are managing all their libraries. Someone comes in and says, "I need a dramatic piece for an opening on an Iraq special," and these guys know how to find what they need.

But, in answer to your question, I think the Internet has leveled the playing field somewhat, which is a good thing and given more people a chance. But it's the carpenter, not the tools. If you're not writing good stuff, it doesn't matter how you're delivering it. If its crap, it's crap, and there's a lot of it out there. You want to believe that quality will win, and actually I do believe that.

For more go to canarymusic.com.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.