Chris Shaw

Producer Mixer Engineer

For Booking information contact:
Adam Katz  | Next Wave Mngmt.
adam@nextwavemanagement.com

Disk Cataloging - Find Files on Any Drive

Sometime last week was International Backup day. If you're anything like me you're pretty religious about backing up all of your session data but do you know which backup disk holds the data for that session you did three years ago?

I don't like to hawk software in general but this program has been a lifesaver. NeoFinder (formerly known as CDFinder) catalogs every file on every disk you throw at at it - including network drives. It sits on your menu bar and you can search for any file on any disk you have whether it's mounted or not (as long as you've cataloged it of course). The other thing I like about it is that it will also catalog the contents of ZIP and DMG files; very handy when searching for an installer for an old plugin that you're looking for.

NeoFinder has been pretty invaluable for me. I'm constantly shuffling around ProTools sessions from my current work, backup, and archive drives. Before deleting anything I always do a search in NeoFinder to make sure that it is backed up on at least two other drives. Cataloging a drive is easy. Once installed you can select a drive from within NeoFinder itself or you can right click the drive and under "Services…" select "Catalog Folder with NeoFinder". The cataloging process only takes a minute or two. If you want, it can also catalog all of your CDs and DVDs. I'm only scratching the surface of what this program can do.

The downsides: The initial cataloging of all your disks will take a while. You also have to remember to periodically catalog all your drives to keep up with and changes you've made. If you have a lot of "deep" storage drives this shouldn't be an issue as you probably never change their contents but updating all of your drives  periodically is a good idea because you should always spin up and mount your drives to keep them from locking up from long periods of inactivity. It's also a bit pricey - $39.99 for a single private license. But if it saves you ten or so minutes every time you go looking for a file it will pay for itself in lost billable time pretty quickly. If you catalog a client's drive before sending it back to them you 'll come across as a genius when they call you looking for a file and you tell them exactly which folder on their drive it's located.

Do yourself a favor and just get it.

NeoFinder

 

George Martin

A giant of music both behind and in front of the glass has left us us. 

I won’t go on about how he influenced me and others but I’d like to share a short story.

I was working at AIR Studios Lyndhurst a while back with Guillemots. One afternoon our assistant got off the phone and said that George would like to show someone the studio and would we mind a short interruption. Coincidentally, moments before, we stumbled upon a dry erase board that was used on the Paul McCartney record that had just finished recording a few weeks prior.

Sir George walked in the room and introduced himself to everyone with that large distinctive voice of his, shaking everyone’s hand. The assistant introduced me to him and he said “Ah yes, Chris, I’ve heard your work.” (In my head I was thinking “no, you haven’t, NO. YOU. HAVE. NOT!) Outside I was projecting as calm a demeanor as possible given the fact that I was meeting one of my biggest influences.

He proceeded to show a couple of people the control room and walked them into the live room and after about two minutes he pardoned himself for the interruption and left. The band was besides themselves and after a few moments they looked at me and said “How could you be so calm after that?” I asked the assistant “Do me a favor, go outside in the hallway and let me know if George is close by”. “No, he went back upstairs to his office”. Me: “Good…………… HOLY SHIT THAT WAS GEORGE MARTIN!!!!!”

Thanks George…

Nada Surf "Cold to See Clear"

Hey there. Check out Nada Surf's new single from their upcoming album "You Know Who You Are". Mixed by the guy who writes this blog… Love these guys. They're about to go on tour soon so do yourself a favor and go see them (after buying their record of course).

The official video for Nada Surf's "Cold To See Clear" from their album 'You Know Who You Are'. Available on Barsuk Records (US/Canada) and City Slang (Europe) on March 4, 2016.


Baby Spiders EP

Check out this EP I mixed for my friends Baby Spiders. Tony and Rob are former members of Lotion. This is a cool little EP. You can buy it (pay what you want but please pay something).

I really like how Summer Triangle came out. Lots of grindy organ sounds via a gtr running through a POG.
 

Thanks too Stephen Ceresia at Stonyfield Mastering for the great mastering job!

Listen here…
 

Electric Lady article in WSJ

Electric Lady Celebrates it's 40th anniversary this year. In this WSJ article the first Weezer album that I recorded and mixed is featured as one of the records made there.

Electric Lady will always be a special place for me. I made a lot of records there. Former studio manager Mary Campbell introduced me to Ric Ocasek which was a significant turn of events for my career. Lee Foster the current manager is doing a great job keep the studio current and on the top of the list of great studios. Can't wait to return…
 

Fidelity and Feeling

I wrote the draft for this a last year when the imminent release of Neil Young's HiRes PONO player was all over the interwebs. I didn't want to throw more fuel on the fire that was raging about the importance of HiRes Audio so I sat on it for a bit. This is just my two cents on the matter.

Lest you come away thinking that I don't think fidelity matters, rest assured I do; I am a recording engineer after all.


      Quite a few friends of mine are champions of high sample rate playback: MP3s are verboten, 16 bit / 44.1k files are the barely acceptable, and Neil Young's PONO player is going to save music quality. Being an audio professional this should be no surprise - that is our job: to produce high quality recordings for the artist who hire us. Unfortunately, once we deliver the finished masters to our clients we relinquish all control of the final delivery format. An artist wants to reach as wide an audience as possible and to that end the lowly MP3 winds up being the de facto digital delivery medium. Yes, the physical CD has a better quality bit/sample rate but for the past few years the MP3 has vastly outpaced the CD (I won't even bother delving into the mysteries of streaming services since most of them obfuscate the quality of the stream you are listening to).
  I've had hundreds of conversations with my audio peers on this subject (both on and offline) and while we bemoan the death of audio fidelity and how it seemingly negates all of the painstaking work we do to make great sounding records I increasingly feel like we are missing the greater point: the average music fan doesn't care.  And this is where I sometimes break ranks with my audio friends. 
    You can point to studies regarding the dynamic range and frequency response of any format and argue their merits but in the long run I have always felt that the focus should always be about the music, not the medium. The incredible thing about music (and most forms of artistic expression) is how it strikes an emotional chord with the listener. Much like internet hashtags, every major moment in my life - my first kiss, the death of a loved one, etc - has a song associated with it (In this example, embarrassingly enough, The Fixx's "Red Skies" and Rush's "Subdivisions"). Whenever I hear these songs I'm transported to these moments from my past with an almost technicolor vividness. I'm in my parents house, my hand fumbling clumsily over my girlfriend's shirt, in my bedroom sobbing after hearing a beloved cousin has passed away. When I hear these songs as MP3s am I thinking "man, where has the top end gone?" (maybe), or "wow, could the mixer really limit that mix any harder?" (perhaps),  or more importantly "I'm gonna interrupt reliving this memory right now so I can find a better format to listen to because that will make this experience *that* much better"? (most definitely not).
   Sweet nothings from a loved one will resonate with you if it was written as an email, a handwritten note,  whispered in your ear, or sent as smoke signals from a mountain five miles away. When a young child scrawls "I LUV YOU DADY" with crayon on piece of brown paper torn from a grocery bag are you going to criticize her penmanship, lack of  spelling capabilities, and poor choice of stationary? Of course not. If a consumer is moved by a song she heard on Spotify hasn't the artist's intent been realized? It'd be hard to say no. 
  In an odd way, audio imperfections have been an integral part of my musical / emotional life. I got a copy of the Beatles' White Album in the late 70s when most major labels were pressing LPs on cheap, thin vinyl. The spindle hole was cut slight off center on the first disk and everything had this slow, fluctuating pitch to it. What I remember most was that the last chorus of "Julia" had a skip - "so I sing this song of love for Juuu - tick - uuuuu- tick - uuuuu- tick - uuuuu- tick - lia". To this day I can't hear that song without that skip and a visualization of me walking up to my Dad's  turntable to gently tap the side to get past it. When I got my first tape recorder I used to make mix tapes by playing records (with the mono button engaged on the receiver) and putting a mic in front of the speaker. So many songs of the 70s in my head are peppered with various ambient sounds from around the house that spilled into the mic; my sister talking, doorbells, phone rings. More recently, when Rage Against the Machine released their covers album "Renegades" a friend gave me a copy on a CD-R. I ripped it to my iPod and had it on heavy rotation for a few months as I commuted on the subway. I was seriously impressed with Rich Costy's mixes - they were powerful and just full of grit and saturation. Bold. Crunchy. Raw. Come to find out that my friend had gotten the record from a torrent (128kb no less), then ripped it to a CD-R which I then unwittingly re-ripped to mp3. (I'm sure a few friends have just spit their coffee reading that). I've since bought an official label release but deep down I still prefer my extreme lo-fi version. 
    So I guess this is the point in the conversation where audio purists (sorry to use such a generic, condescending sounding term) will chime in with their argument: "but shouldn't a listener's first experience with a song be at the greatest fidelity possible so that they hear the artists true intention"? I wholeheartedly agree but unfortunately it is rarely possible given how hard it is to obtain Hi-Res files let alone getting people to pay for them. Should a person's first experience with Van Gogh's "Starry Night" be only at MoMA where it now hangs? I don't thinks so. I saw it in countless books and magazines growing up until I finally gazed on it in person. I almost cried when I did. It was beautiful. But it was surprisingly smaller than I imagined. In my head it is a huge landscape the edges of which you can't see if you're two feet in front of it. That  sense of size and proportion was conveyed even in grainy pictures in magazines and textbooks. Even though those pictures were horrible the beauty of the painting was staggeringly obvious. Would you rather have people not be allowed to see it unless they made the journey to New York to see it at MoMA? How unenriched peoples lives would be if that were the case. Fortunately after seeing a beautiful piece of art in a poorly rendered photograph people will almost always want to see it in person and most likely the experience will be greater than what they expected. 
    Much like fine art, a musician can't completely control how an audience will first encounter his or her's work. You might hear a song for the first time on the radio, streaming service, in a scene of a movie or television show all of which compared to studio or Hi-Res playback are substandard conditions; yet the listener will make a connection to the music in some way or another and assign some kind value to it - audio fidelity is almost inconsequential. Play a song to an average person on a great audio system and they will be blown away by how good it sounds but that is not what will make them buy the record. The song itself is what sticks. The auditory experience is something completely different. As a kid my dad's music system was a mono HeathKit pre amp and amplifier connected to a JBL cabinet with Klipsh components (I'd kill to have that in my possession now) but he replaced it with a stereo system made by Lafayette (the precursor to RadioShack) after hearing his first stereo playback of "Listen to the Music" by the Doobie Brothers. The first guitar starts in the right speaker followed a bar later with another in the left. A bar later the drums execute a tom fill that pans from one speaker to the other and the band comes in in glorious stereo. In 1972, to a person who listened to jazz in mono all his life this was truly amazing. My dad played that record for days on end to anyone who'd listen but it wasn't until a couple of days later that he realized he wasn't that impressed with the song. With a shrug of his shoulders he'd say "but it's pretty cool sounding, listen to that !". I feel the same way about most CGI driven movies I see today - all style and no substance. 
    So in a roundabout way that's how I feel about Hi-Res recording ; unless there's substance to the song, the recording is of no consequence. I've never heard anyone gush about a technically great recording of a bad song or performance. A great recording falls flat without a great song/performance but a great performance/song trumps a bad recording every time. Most of the world's most beloved songs were recorded with technically substandard equipment but that never invalidated the performance. As a producer / engineer / mixer capturing the performance is all that really matters. I'll always use the best gear I can find to do it with and take as much time as possible to set up and make adjustments to achieve this end but I will always stop short of getting in the way of the magic that happens when gifted musicians breathe the same air and play together in a common space. As audio professionals we relish getting compliments from our peers for the work we do but it should never be the only reason why we do what we do. Our sole job is to capture the artist at his best - sample rates and bit depth be damned. On the consumer level we should try as hard as we can to expose high quality audio to as many people as possible but it won't make everyone run out and buy a PONO. They'll be impressed and nod their head in agreement "wow, that sounds great!" but most people will be happy with an MP3. People just want to hear the song they want to be transported emotionally to another place; the vehicle that gets them there is secondary. A Porche is a great car but if all you want is a car to commute with then it's a bit overkill. 
    So let's ease people into the concept that the music they are listening to can sound better without having to fork over hundreds of dollars on a new playback system. How about at least convincing people to try simple uncompressed 16 bit audio? Music players have much more capacity now then they did 10 years ago. You can easily fit 20 or so records on an iPod this way and the bandwidth is in place to deliver music in this format on a large scale. The problem I have with Hi-Res enthusiasts is this "all the way or nothing", "96k or bust" attitude. Consider that this is is also coming from a generation of people who grew up in their formative, taste making years listening to music on cassettes and Walkmen; the standard for portable music listening and copying at the time. Compared to cassettes, MP3s arguably sound like reference masters (I'll duck behind this table now until the smoke clears from saying this). I'd argue that the kids today have it better than we ever did.

Beauty Pill

Posting this from December because I said I would (this album will be released out tomorrow):

Dec 13, 2014
Sadly, I rarely have the time to sit down and actively listen to a record in it's entirety unless I'm working on it in some fashion. Yesterday, Chad Clark, a person I only know through Facebook, forwarded me the new album by his band Beauty Pill (Beauty Pill Describes the Way Things Are) and I spent the past hour listening to it. To say it's incredible would be an understatement. It is sonically immersive, lyrically provocative, and once finished left me feeling way more optimistic about music in general.

You can order it here:
http://butterscotchrecords.net/

Modest Mouse Mix

Here's a track I mixed on the new Modest Mouse record.
Produced by Andrew Weiss whom I've done a couple of Ween records with.
One listen to the song and it'll be obvious why they wanted us to do this track…

 

A Kramer Story

My brother David is  a friend of legendary Shimmy-Disc producer Kramer (just go here to read his extensive discography). Today Dave sent me this email…

Forgot to tell you this. Kramer was in town for a gig last month. I missed the show, but met him for lunch the next day. We were getting caught up, and he asked how you were doing. I told him you had moved to Austin, had the home studio, etc. He said "I've been following him all these years, ever since you told me he wanted to be an engineer/producer. It looks like he ignored every bit of advice I offered. Good for him."