SLMC

Zak Claxton · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 2008 Location: Podul/33/243/154/

Well, MacWorld Australia, but that's better than a sharp stick in the eye. Laughing

A writer who'd seen me perform in world and heard me refer to the fact that I use a Mac for SL and for streaming audio contacted me, and is sending over some interview questions. He has a regular column on using Macs for music, and found SL live music to be an interesting application (which I agree that it is), so I'll do the interview and let you know how it comes out.

I obviously plan on using the opportunity to help promote the SL live music scene, as I always do when given the chance, and will try and get them to put in a link to SLMC, as I did in my last couple of articles.
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Cher Harrington · Joined: 13 Sep 2007 Posts: 191

Awesome, congrats and YAY Smile

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Doubledown Tandino · Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 5:34 pm Post subject:

Congrats Zak.

And for the bigwigs around the world doing google searching:
thats Brad Reason, and i still have a working commodore 64, Amega, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Sega Genesis.
And I use SL....

If anyone from any of those mags wants an interview, I'd be happy to discuss. I also wear Hanes when I use SL, drink Maxwell House, and frequently discuss my hamsters in SL, and the cages are CritterTrails.

:O) I also like eating candy made by Willy Wonka while I use SL, as well as Blo-Pops.

lol, so, the above is for the google spiders lmao.

WTG zak!!!
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elvisduffy · Joined: 31 Mar 2008 Posts: 192

Yer getting press without a publicist. WTG!!! Very Happy

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Zak Claxton · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 2008 Location: Podul/33/243/154/

Um... I am a publicist. Laughing

Hey, it's helpful sometimes. Smile

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Sally Silvera · Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 6:45 pm Post subject:

when I read the thread title I thought it might have something to do with hamburgers Embarassed

Very cool your Zakness!
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Zak Claxton · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 2008 Location: Podul/33/243/154/

elvisduffy · Joined: 31 Mar 2008 Posts: 192

dood, yer a rl publicist? That's a pretty smart career choice for the indy musician.

When I was losing tons of money on my indie label in the 90's we were about to retain a publicist for 2K/month. Couldn't quite pull the trigger cause we were spending like drunken sailors on all kinds of things. Truly, I think the publicist is the missing link for a lot of indies. We're recording, blogging, selling, gigging. But folks gotta know we exist.
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Zak Claxton · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 2008 Location: Podul/33/243/154/

Well, here's the COMPLETE, unabridged interview. You will probably never see this entire thing in print, or even online; I wrote way too much, and they're probably going to chop it to death. But if you have trouble going to sleep and would like to read this mini-novel, you're welcome to. Laughing

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MacWorld Australia Interview: Jeff Klopmeyer

1. You've been involved in the music industry for many years on both the performance and marketing sides of the equation - when did Macs enter the picture for you?
In terms of integrating computers with music, from the very beginning. It was in 1989 when I started as a music major at Cal State University, Dominguez Hills. To be honest, the only reason I went there is because it was the most local four-year university near my home, and at that point, neither my parents nor myself had the financial means to send me to a more prestigious local school like USC or UCLA, so a state U would have to do. But I was very fortunate that by happenstance, CSUDH had a very progressive music program there. Even though I had enrolled to get into their audio recording program as an engineer, the program also included music synthesis, and I was lucky to have had a gentleman named David Bradfield as my instructor. Dave was a big evangelist for using the Mac in music and audio, and from the get-go, I was using early sequencers and sampling applications on the Mac.

Around the same time, my friends and I saw the inherent creative power of the Mac, and we we scrounged and saved and begged and eventually had 8Mhz Mac Classics of our own. The first application I used to create music on my own was Master Trax Pro, though at school I’d also been using early versions of MOTU Performer (later known as Digital Performer), Opcode Vision, and even nascent audio editing applications like Alchemy and Sound Tools (which grew up to be Pro Tools).

2. What applications do you use to make music?
There was a time where I was experimenting with a lot of different software, but one thing that’s not discussed much is the effect of genre on your choice of software apps. When I was younger and doing arrangements that were very synth-oriented, I was very reliant on MIDI sequencing, and my DAW of choice was Digital Performer. But right around the same time as the revolution of plug-ins and virtual instruments -- many of which I think are amazing, by the way -- I shifted to a more organic, singer-songwriter vibe. Still, the Mac was the center of my music setup, but I used it more as a capture device than anything.

So, for creating demos while I write, I use Digidesign’s Pro Tools LE in the same way I’d use a tape recorder. In the studio where I record, I’m fortunate to work with a Pro Tools|HD Accel system, with a slew of plug-ins. Far too many to mention here, but I’m quite enamored with Elastic Audio in Pro Tools 7.4. Since we don’t record to a click or any timing reference, it’s a simply amazing way to make small corrections to timing issues.

3. What Mac do you currently own?
I am the proud owner of a 2.4GHz 15” MacBook Pro I bought last fall, and I love it. I use it for everything, which includes my music as well as the graphic design, web development, video editing, and communications work I do to make my living. It’s a completely stock machine, with 2GB of RAM and the standard NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, but I decided when I purchased it to only upgrade as needed, and the Mac has worked so well on everything that I’ve never found the need to go beyond what it’s already got under the hood. Additionally, I have an older Mirror Drive Door G4 that comes in handy when I need to be using two computers simultaneously. I’m running 10.5.4 on the MacBook Pro, but have the old G4 locked down at 10.3.9, and I doubt it’s ever going to progress further. That’s okay... it still works when I need it.

4a. I believe you're currently recording an album as Zak Claxton, your Second Life musician persona - tell me a little more about Zak.
As seems to be the case with many aspects of my life, I fell into the Zak Claxton persona quite by accident. My ladyfriend Christina and I heard about Second Life through a friend, and decided to check it out one night in 2006. We thought it would be a neat way for us to spend more time “together”, so we signed up and rather randomly picked the surname “Claxton” from the pull-down list of available names. I became Zak, and she become Kat, which sounded kind of cool with the last name. Keep in mind that at that point, I had no idea it was even possible to perform music in SL, so it certainly wasn’t my impetus to become a virtual rock star of any kind.

Pretty quickly, Kat and I found live music under the event listings in SL, and we started going to shows in world. Well, I have a good background and understanding of music and audio technology, and asked a few people what they were using to do the performances, and it came down to a simple $40 (USD) piece of software called Nicecast from Rogue Amoeba. Nicecast simply takes the audio from your Mac -- live audio, system audio, audio running from an application, whatever -- and streams it to the address of a server where it can be accessed by listeners.

In any case, around the same time, I found myself wanting to do some songwriting and recording. I’d been playing in bands and contributing guitar, bass, vocals, and programming for other peoples’ records for many years, but had never done anything under my own name. Speaking of my own name, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it per se, but it’s kind of long and clunky sounding, and putting on my marketing hat, I knew that “Zak Claxton” was a lot more rock star sounding than Jeff Klopmeyer. By the time I started moving forward on the album, I’d also developed a nice-sized fan base in Second Life who knew me as Zak, so I went with it and haven’t regretted it at all.

As a singer-songwriter guy in his late 30’s, I’m not prime fodder for major labels to beat a path to my door, and in the current environment of music distribution, I’m not sure that I’d want them to anyway. So I decided to release the album independently. Since most people are purchasing music as digital downloads, I needed a way to easily get my music on iTunes, Amazon, and other typical places where music is sold in the late 2000’s. That’s what led me to choose Tunecore as my delivery and distribution service. I will also be doing a relatively small run of CDs once the album is complete, but I really expect most sales to be through iTunes; I’ll have the discs to sell at live performances and for sending out review copies, and the like.

To help promote myself as an artist, I use the same kind of tools that any independent real life musician does. I have a web site at www.zakclaxton.com, as well as a MySpace page, a YouTube channel, and so on. I also do a good deal of networking with other musicians, from SL and otherwise. The only difference is that my name came from a virtual environment. I don’t hide behind the Zak Claxton persona, and treat it in a similar way as any musician with a pseudonym, from Sting to Elton John to Puff Daddy.

4b. How are you recording the album?
This is less of a Mac story than a story of how the personal computer is now a more universal tool, regardless of platform. While I’m a hard-core Mac aficionado, my engineer and co-producer Phil O’Keefe is primarily a PC user. However, in today’s world, we’re running the same applications, both using Intel processors, and can seamlessly interchange files as required. It’s an amazing world we have today, especially remembering the days not so long ago where it took all kinds of conversion processes to get Macs and PCs to work together, with exclusive file types and other compatibility problems.

So while the album is being recorded and mixed on Windows machines, much of the process involves sending files back and forth that are readable on both platforms. When the songs are recorded and I’m far away from the studio, Phil creates rough mixes and emails them to me, and I’ve often uploaded those mixes to FTP servers so that I can get feedback from other audio professionals. So the Mac certainly comes into play.

5. For those that don't use Second Life, how does virtual performance work?
Like much of Second Life, it’s just a microcosm of the real world. You have an avatar -- a somewhat cartoonish version of yourself, built in however you see yourself, from the realistic to the fantastic to the absurd. You make connections and meet people, and it’s not at all hard to find a venue that hosts open mic events. If you find that you can play successfully in a format like that, you can move up to playing at events where you’re paid by the venue owner to perform, or tipped by your audience. Keep in mind that for the grand majority of people, the compensation is nothing compared to what you’d earn at real life gigs; a decent show for me nets me the kingly sum of $25 for an hour of playing and singing. But keep in mind, you don’t have to leave your home, and if you’re like me and trying to gain a fan base for a specific purpose (like an album coming out), it’s an invaluable way to expose your music to people around the world.

In any case, you teleport your avatar to the location of the venue, you get up on a virtual stage, you stand in front of a virtual microphone, and your avatar goes into an animation that’s built into your instrument so you look to be strumming your guitar, playing your keyboard, spinning your DJ decks, or whatever it is that you do. The important thing to keep in mind is that ALL of that is for visual effect only; the audio is coming from you in the real world.

6. So how do you make that work technically on your Mac and music gear?
I mentioned this briefly before, but it’s actually a very simple process. I put on my acoustic guitar (though any sound source will work, including virtual instruments, GarageBand, and many more). I step up to my microphones in my little studio here in the Los Angeles area, while positioning my avatar on stage in world. Then I start Nicecast on my Mac, and the people in the local vicinity where I’m playing can click a button and begin hearing me nearly immediately. That’s all... very simple. Other people use more complex setups based on the kind of show they want to put on, so they’re streaming the output of their Pro Tools, Abelton Live, GarageBand, or other applications where they can provide a more full-arranged musical performance. In any case, though, the audio is streamed by Nicecast and the Second Life residents hear whatever you choose to stream.

Second Life isn’t very good at coaching their users in applications like this; you’re not going to get a lot of hand holding from the makers of the software. So, if a person needs specific help in getting started using their Mac to do live music performances in Second Life, I’d recommend they visit the Second Life Music Community (SLMC) forums at slmc.myfastforum.org. It’s an independent group of musicians, virtual venue owners, and music fans in Second Life, and there’s plenty of Mac-specific support there.

7. I imagine the feedback isn't as 'in your face' as a real-life gig but do you still get the feeling you're playing live?
Great point. For years, I played live in clubs, bars and various real-life venues, and there’s nothing like that moment of finishing the last note of a tune and hearing the audience scream its immediate approval. It was very disconcerting the first few times I played in SL, for two reasons. First, the nature of the technology causes there to be an amount of latency between the musician delivering the sound and the audience hearing it; it ranges from about 15 seconds on a fast server to upwards of 40 seconds on a slow one, and it’s totally out of your control. So, you finish a tune and have to imagine that the audience liked it. I’m there saying, “Thank you! Thank you so much!” and I have no idea if they liked it at all at that point.

And then, of course, the other side of the equation is that you don’t actually hear applause at all! No clapping, no screaming. Sure, there are a few sound effects that people can trigger, but for the most part, you have to glance down at your Mac to see people typing their approval (“Great job!” “I loved that song!” and so on). Strangely, I’ve become quite accustomed to this, and when I have a big crowd and the whole screen fills up with nice words after a song, I do feel good. Conversely, it’s mortifying if you end a song and you have the virtual equivalent of crickets chirping. So yes, I do feel like I’m playing live, because I am... just from a distance. I sweat as much at a big SL gig as I do at any real life show, even though I’m here in the comfort of my own home. When dozens of people are listening to you play and sing, it doesn’t much matter whether they’re ten feet in front of you or halfway around the globe.

8. What are your thoughts on the musical potential of the iPhone?
I think the iPhone is amazing on many fronts. As you’re probably aware, there are already quite a number of ways to use the iPhone for music, from being an overpowered iPod to using it as a streaming device and for actual music creative work.

To me, the iPhone is another tool in the direction of having connectivity anytime, anywhere, with all the good and bad implications that come with that kind of power. The idea that someday, I’m going to be on a beach here in L.A. with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and my iPhone, doing concerts that people are hearing in Sydney, is pretty incredible, and not that far off, really. So the potential is there, and I think we’ll continue to see these portable devices gain more capabilities and higher quality for creative musicians. It’s already happening, and it’s exciting.

9. With your industry hat on, where do you see recorded music going in an era of DRM rebellion and diminishing financial returns?
Personally, I’m sick to death of the doom and gloom reaction to these issues. I feel there has never, in the history of the music and entertainment industries, been a better time to be a creative person. What we have is a massive democratization of the process, where anyone can record, anyone can distribute, anyone can sell music using the same tools that were previously only accessible by a tiny percentage of elite artists. The downside is that the music industry was completely based on that system being in place, where a very small number of artists were selling the grand majority of the music, and those sales were 100% based on the movement of plastic discs. They reacted too late, and then felt forced to go with these draconian measures of DRM regulations, and RIAA lawsuits. None of it exactly endeared music fans to the people selling the music. Exacerbating the situation on the other side of the fence was a generation of people who just assumed music should be free, since they could get on Napster and Limewire and grab it from whoever was sharing it at the moment.

I actually feel things are slowly swinging back to a middle ground, mostly due to the convenience and relative inexpensive nature of services like the iTunes store. Given the choice, most people don’t really want to steal music. Now that most of them are at least aware that what they’re doing is wrong, and that higher quality music is available through legitimate sources (as opposed to the low-resolution MP3 that some 13-year-old ripped in his bedroom), I see a return to more music sales.

One note: things are not and will never be the same as they were before. We’re too far past the days of the record store model for it to work again. And the big artists will not see the benefits of these multi-million selling albums as they did in the ‘70s through the ‘90s, but perhaps that’s not a bad thing either. Music can be just fine, even in a smaller, more streamlined model that allows more people to get in the game.

10. What three Mac applications couldn't you live without?
I’m going to probably disappoint you with the simple nature of my answer, but I’m going to have to say Safari, Mail, and iTunes. Keeping in mind I do use a lot of music creative applications, as well as the iLife suite, the iWork applications, and the entire Adobe CS3 Premium collection. They are all important to me and are used every single day. But being able to communicate with people and listen to music are the basic things that I do the most on my Mac. It’s equally important for my livelihood as it is for my sanity.

Of course, Second Life is relatively important to me as well, as you’d imagine. I guess I’m not good at narrowing this down to just three apps. Good thing I’m not on a desert island that makes me limit myself to just those choices.

11. You have an hour with Steve Jobs: what gripes about OSX and / or Macs do you have that you'd raise for Steve to resolve?
Yikes. At one time, I’d have a mouthful for Mr. Jobs. But nearly every complaint I’d have made five or six years ago has been resolved to a high degree. Macs are becoming less prohibitively expensive. File are more compatible than ever before, across various Mac and Windows machines and software versions. And, knocking on wood, my current Mac just seems to work, all the time. the OS is extremely solid, more so than any OS I’ve used on the Mac since the ‘80s.

I suppose the one thing I’d have to say is to be careful about the Mac’s supposed imperviousness to viruses and other security problems. Back when we Mac users represented a 2% share of the PC market, most malevolent people didn’t waste their time targeting us, but that’s changing.

All in all though, and without being an over-the-top fanboy about it, I’ve loved the Mac for over 20 years, and have only seen the platform get better and better over the course of time. Still, I’m not cutting them any slack; Snow Leopard is coming soon, and it had better be everything they say it is. If not, look out, Jobs... I’m coming to Cupertino with some harsh words and stern looks for you!

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Doubledown Tandino · Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 1:02 am Post subject:

DOPE!!! I totally dig the directors cut! Definitely this is the article to read, but yeah, you're right, you'll get maybe 30-40% of that published.... but hey, maybe you'll get the cover and the wham ya with an everyword + centerfold pinup.

Zak, with your permission, and after the mag is published, do you mind if I copy this to my blog, also, linking to whatever the mag link is?
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DJ Doubledown on The Sixty-One ~ SL DJ & Club Scene Blog
Ravelong Productions @ SLMC Info Island