Rico Belled's Blog

It’s funny how people expect things sometimes. I love making music more than anything, and coming up with songs, composing, producing gives me great pleasure. At the same time, just like everybody else, I need to pay rent, health insurance premiums etc. So why, oh why, do so many people, who make 5 times as much as I do, expect me to work on their songs for free?

You see, I grew up with a healthy dislike for money and the pursuit of it; my mom never sold anything to friends, she would give it to them if they need it more than we did. I never charged friends for anything, fixing their computers, working on their music, you name it. When I first moved to the US, poor as a student, I was able to help many with their computers, but as more people found out how good I was at fixing them, I HAD to start charging. It was never more than 5% of my income, but it started taking up a lot of time.

Fast forward to 2012, and I’ve paid my dues, put in the hours, to become a real producer; I’m quick and competent, can play everything except horns and drums, and can make a kick ass track faster than anyone I know. Yet, some of my friends get literally offended when I want to charge them for studio time, at a seriously discounted rate mind you, less than JUST STUDIO would cost, without any players or producer, to work on their songs. I love writing, and usually interested in doing with others, but right now I simply can’t afford to do anything on spec! Last year I made $29,000 before taxes, and my rent and health insurance together totaled $18,000! Mind you, every time I go on the road, I have to pay for parking at the airport, and there are significant costs to being a musician, so my AGI for 2011 was something like $8000……so, is it really normal for someone making $150k per year to not pay me $150 for a day’s work that would normally cost ya $1000+?

Big cities are just dangerous places for givers; there’s a never ending supply of takers, unscrupulous ‘suckers’ that’ll suck up anything you are willing to share. Craig’s List is filled with ‘offers’ for people willing to work for free. When I went to audition for a band that was looking for a keyboard player for a paid recording session, they offered me $200 for an entire day’s work! After taxes and expenses, believe me, that’s not much above minimum wage, and that’s the best gig advertised on there in years. When I told them they weren’t even in the ball park, that $1000 would be normal, but I’d do it for $500, they looked at me like I was crazy. These are guys that are ‘serious’ about their band! They have no idea…….

Here are the new rules: if you have bought expensive pre-amps, Macs, iPhones or other overpriced stuff, you DON’T get a discount. No more $50 favors if you choose to send your money to China instead of supporting your own damn friends! I hate to keep score, but I don’t owe anyone any favors, except the couple of bass tracks I owe Karasony and Heller for their contributions on XR7.  From now on, like the Bad Lieutenant said: “You do something for me, I do something for you!”; at least until I start making more money than I spend! In the meantime, I’ll be putting out some of the best shit you’ve ever heard, under my OWN name; I love working with others but they have to make it worth my while!

Philip over Joshua? Really? If he wins the whole thing…… I guess it just proves that American Idol is not really about singing; if you do it badly, it can cost you, but the best ‘artist’ never wins this thing. And then there was Adam Lambert…..OUCH, what a horrible song! Joshua took his loss in stride, and as long as he gets some good songs to make his own, he’ll be just fine, thank you very much!

I can taste it now! So far today, I finished up ‘Chester’, tightening up the mix and rerecording the piano which had WAY too much noise in the track, and ‘Hooka’, riding some volumes, giving it a little more booty per Dave Karasony’s request! I also added some more horns to the first, and three tracks of claps on the second. Both of these are monster projects, with over 60 tracks each, believe it or not…. Ashley’s car sounds so damn good, providing a great setup for the whole project.

With ‘Five Of Eight’ done as well, ‘Song For Buster’ is up next. I have to rerecord the acoustic guitar; the ones I have are really nice, but since they were just scratch tracks, I did them right next to the computer and there is just too much noise. I’m gonna set up a special quiet place in my apartment somewhere tonight and do it on the Martin D15.  I should be able to get to ‘Flexibility’ as well, for which I have to finalize the piano melody and touch up the mix. ‘The Robot Song’ is done too, so that’ll be 5 in the can tonight!

Over the weekend, Russ Freeman gave us a CD of the new upcoming Rippingtons record, which will be called “Built To Last” and it was pretty cool actually. It’s like movie music, very orchestral, and even features none other than Zakk Wylde on one track! He had it mastered by Bernie Grundman, probably the most famous guy in the field. Guess what? The thing was messed up! I can hardly believe it, but the only possible way for it to turn out this way, is if they did it, then sent it out WITHOUT LISTENING. Mind you, the guy is probably one of the most expensive in the world; this probably cost thousands! He has since admitted that there was a “faulty compressor”, but this is still unacceptable in my book.. The good news is, that after looking at the mixes in my beloved spectrum analyzer, it looks like he did what I would try to go for. A lot of stuff is mastered in such a hyped way these days, with exaggerated amounts of lows and highs, but his looks just like what I’ve strived for: pretty much a 3db per octave drop, with nice balance across the spectrum. It makes me feel alright about doing all of this myself one more time.

The USA is a very polite and civilized country; at least, it tries to pretend it is. The head-in-the-sand mentality that humans are prone to is largely at fault. From ‘pretending’ that no one under 21 drinks alcohol, to mammaries made of plastic, from that phony smile on a commercial, to the honest politician, this is a place of make believe. Many really would love nothing more than to live in Disneyland, where everything’s clean, everybody smiles and a woman’s private parts are hairless, just like the little girl she’ll stay forever!

Whether it’s a good strategy or not, it’s interesting to see how this translates into the law of the land. My simple Dutch mind wonders why in the world you would want to make a law that 99% of all people are going to break; I mean, how many people do you know who didn’t have a drink before reaching that magical age? Besides, how in the world is it possible to tell a 20 year old, with 2 kids, coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan that he can’t buy a beer?  Believe me, he’s a bigger man than most of us that stayed here in our comfortable little lives.

Now we get to making more and more things illegal; strangely it’s mostly the ‘get-the-government-out-of-my-business’ Republicans that are driving this one. At the same time, the Police have a lot of discretion on whether to make a big deal out of catching someone with a joint. It’s fully within their right to let you go and many times they do. Ideally, you want smart officers that know when there’s a real problem, and focus most of their energy on that. In our quest to make the world even safer than Disneyland, we tell people to slow down, don’t drink after 2AM, certainly don’t drink outside unless fenced in like a bunch of toddlers, don’t gamble etc. etc. This country really has become a lot less fun in the last 30 years….and remember: stress kills! There’s a reason the vast majority of people, all over the world, consume alcohol.

Personally, I find it frightening when I hear the ridiculous, over-the-top friendliness of the typical Customer Service Rep. It’s just as fake and forced as people on commercials, and it’s not good for us. For one, it creates an atmosphere in which people hide their emotions, and when you get too good at that, chances are you’ll start repressing them more and more.  It is of utmost importance, if you want to be happy, to learn to let them out in a healthy, controlled way, and the usual end result of saving them up is not pretty….

In the end, isn’t it ironic that the place that calls itself the ‘land of the free’ has the most people in jail?

Facebook is about to go public and people are going nuts! It’ll probably be the third largest IPO in history, behind Visa and GM, expected to put the ‘value’ of the company at $100 Billion. If we get technical for a second, that means it would have a Price to Earnings ratio of 60; in other words: it would take 60 times the amount of money it currently earns per year, to buy all the shares. To put that in perspective, here are some other P/E values for well-known companies: Apple=13.5, Microsoft=11, Ford=2.3, McDonald’s=17……

It’s obvious that the social networking site’s value is based on expected growth; it needs to make 4 times as much money to put it on the same level as Apple, and that’s a real problem. GM just announced it’s pulling its advertising off Facebook because its users ignore it and monetizing the site will really be a problem. You see, the actual operating cost of the providing the service it does is about 3 bucks per user, per year! With just shy of 1 billion users, and bandwidth and server costs only going down in the future, it’s just too easy for another competitor to come in and deliver a better experience sometime in the future. If Facebook starts putting too many ads up, people will go somewhere else, in great numbers!

Time will tell, but I think it’s foolish to buy into this IPO; thankfully, we little guys, don’t even have the option, as almost all shares will go to the big investors. Just in case you’re thinking of getting in on this one, my advice is to ‘Just Say No’!

He was so full of life! That IS the way to live isn’t it? Enthusiastically and passionately, with abandon right up until the universe takes you to the next place. I’m so glad I watched that movie/infomercial about him, even though he’s never done anything for me personally

Rest In Peace Vidal Sassoon!

And then there were four, 2 boys and 2 girls. Joshua Ledet crushed Philip Philips in their duet: it sounded and even looked like a real singer, taking pity on a karaoke wannabe. I know the latter has a legion of little girly fans, but he really should go next. At first, it seemed like Jessica was doing the same to Hollie in their song, but blondie kept it together, and actually showed more strength. In the end though, Jessica killed it! That performance was thrilling, heartfelt, emotional and just plain exceptional. It BLOWS MY MIND how good this girl is, at 16!

It was only a matter of time before the effects of our technological progress would start significantly affecting human abilities. Imagine what better training camps, and access to the latest and greatest have done for athletes. Watching DWDD a week ago, they showed a clip of an old skating champion for won the 10K in a time of 14 minutes 10 seconds or so. The commentator said that time would NEVER be beaten! Now EVERYBODY does it in less than 13 minutes.

Humans are of the ‘monkey see monkey do’ variety, and Youtube alone is responsible for a treasure trove of examples to imitate and learn from. Wanna learn how to play a tune on the guitar? Someone’s on there showing you the fingerings, or something close enough to get you started. Wanna hear 20 different ways to interpret a tune? You got it! It will undoubtedly lead to a whole new class of humans that’ll leave the old guard in the dust. Even 30 years ago, there were NO 16 year olds with this kind of ability, dedication and understanding of music. No way!

It’s in the can! XR7 is completely recorded, it just needs to be mixed and mastered! Believe it or not, I actually recorded my Trombone, Baritone Horn and Tenor Sax today for Chester. It’s not pretty, but it’ll be mixed low enough that it does the trick in livening up the fake horn section. Man versus machine, remember? Song For Buster got some more guitar, including an actual solo, trading with a synth at the end.

We’re going to North Carolina with the Ripps this weekend, but I’m bringing my laptop to work on the artwork for the CD. Gonna shoot some pics of the Cougar tomorrow to take with me. This whole thing should be ready for manufacturing in about a week, so that would put product in my hands before the end of the month!

Anyone watch the finale of the Voice?

It’s May 9th, but XR7 is not quite ready to launch yet! I did my best, but a little more time is needed! Most of the songs are 99% done, with mixes that I could even live with, but it can still be better. You see, I’m trying to do something new here, something with a style all its own, and mixing is an art, especially when you’re talking about a tune with 70+ tracks. In a town where almost everybody chases something that already was, it’s time to move forward, with a solid V8 under the hood…

I never really wanted to be an engineer, of any kind, but I did have a lot of interest in recording from a musician’s point of view. In order to gain experience in the process, I started learning in 1999, and have since done so much: produced many tunes, recorded almost every instrument imaginable, from full live bands to a flute, learned about mixing , mastering, editing. In the beginning, listening to the great things that came before, and comparing my feeble attempts to them was a very valuable tool. How much reverb does a drum set need? How much low end do you roll off the piano? Just like when you learn an instrument, in order to be able to handle stuff in the future, you MUST study the past.

Now it’s time to really let my own sound come through, and make a CD that’s NOT like anything that came before it. Of course it has elements of the past, and many of them. If you want people to relate and ‘understand’ your music, you have to give them something they know. One of the most important things I’m trying to differently from the status quo is this: almost all modern music is super-hyped in its mix and mastering stage. There is, in my opinion, too much high end on lead vocals, too much bass, WAY too much compression. All those things create a sound that grabs you immediately, which is why people do it, but it’s also very fatiguing on longer listening sessions. In addition, when you turn up this music loud, it gets unlistenable. When you hype the low end and the high end, it seems to sound better at low volume, but it’s detrimental at higher volumes. When you analyze older recordings, you realize that all the bass is in there, but at a much more natural slope. If you want more, you turn it up on your amp! I’m really trying to create a sound that’s modern, yet natural, punchy yet smooth… it’s NOT background music, but it should sound pleasant at low volumes, though it really should come to live when you crank it up!