the dotmatrix project

Dan and I just finished remixing the live albums for both Sorry About Dresden and The Radials. Both bands gave us similar feedback on our original mix — vocals dominated while the instruments faded at times — so we took a few hours tonight to make the changes. It was worth it, as they both sound much fuller now.

We’re using the Mackie Tracktion 3 music production software that came with the Onyx 1620 board w/ Firewire output. It’s basically left us marveling over the fact that unlike the old days — when bands had to navigate their live play around one centrally located ribbon mic to land a decent recording — we have the luxury with out-of-the-box software to record multiple channels directly to a rather standard MacBook Pro and get amazing results.

I love me some technology.

Here’s the channel breakdown for how we setup the first show:

• Red: Backup vocal mic one
• Orange: Backup vocal mic two
• Yellow: Lead vocal mic
• Green: Guitar mic (The Radials only)
• Aqua: Reverb channel
• Sky blue: Band mic, left
• Dark blue: Band mic, right
• Purple: Audience mic

Based on the bands feedback, we’re going to move in the left and right side band mics closer to the amps for this Thursday night’s show. They were directly behind the FOH monitors and didn’t get quite enough oomph with their default output. We might even play with running extra lines directly out of the amps to capture the sound clean.

We’re recognizing patterns on a bunch of levels these days at HQ, and not only within the production environment.

A Different Kind Of “Label”

If we keep up this show & recording pace, we’ll probably put out somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 live albums per year — all acts local to Greensboro and the surrounding region — with quality standards moving towards being just a few degrees below a studio recording. All at no cost to the artists.

So what’s in it for us? Straight up and down, the answer is quite simply, “the attention.”

No, I’m not referring to attention as in the, “Check us out, we’re fucking cool,” kind of attention. We’re not shooting for gold stars, free drinks or ego boosts — we’re talking about harnessing the attention economy of the internet age.

This is an information age business in the planning.

While we’re building community in the real world with live, original music productions in downtown Greensboro, we’re simultaneously creating synapses in the intertubes with media reproductions of each evening — live recordings, photographs and music videos.

Once the media has been generated, edited and uploaded, we’re applying a pretty intense metadata schema to each media object for enhancing findability and to grow online community around all of the participants — the musicians, filmmakers, photographers, sound engineer and, yes, our brand.

At the core of this entire approach is the notion that this is all free for people to engage with — from going to a free show to ripping track recordings for iPod plays to participating in the tagging of online media which helps promote your favorite artists or songs.

More important to the core position of the dotmatrix brand — built around the idea that many individuals coming together will convey a unique experience in the aggregate — is that whether the participants of the dotmatrix project are musicians, filmmakers, photographers, audience members or online fans, each participant can be promoted to one degree or another due to the structured nature of web object data and metadata aggregation.

Bands building community around media of their performances; people building community around similar tastes in music, videos, photos and shows. And hopefully, a business that can present compelling interface representations of these relationships — both in the real and online.

Down the line, this 2.0 focus on already valuable semantic concepts like free, open, read/write and aggregation will most likely vest with future implementations including notions such as Data Portability.

All we have to do in the short-term is make sure we don’t hard code our business plan into a corner where it can’t be tapped by the never-ending “things to come.”

Oh, yeah. And to make sure we don’t get crappy instrumental channel recordings.