Through a process unimaginatively named “sonification”, engineers at CERN have converted the vibrations of the long-sought Higgs boson into audio.

It’s not bad, actually; too bad Richard Wright isn’t around to hear it.

Here.

One of my oldest and closest music-biz pals is the great jazz guitarist Steve Khan. Here’s an interview he did recently for the new Inside Musicast website.

I note with heartfelt sorrow the death of the great recording engineer Walter Sear, who died on April 29th from complications of a fall. (Somehow I missed his obituary notices at the time, and have only just heard the news.)

Walter occupied a very special place in the New York recording community. Having never joined the digital revolution that transformed our industry in the 1980′s, he was our foremost exponent and archivist of analog equipment and techniques — and his legendary studio, Sear Sound, was, in equal measure, laboratory, museum, and shrine. He had an incomparable collection of “vintage” equipment: a Neve 8038 console, half-inch vacuum-tube Studer tape machines, hundreds of rare microphones, original Moogs and Theremins, and much, much more.

I did many sessions at Walter’s studio over the years — it was one of the best places on earth to make recordings of music — and Walter was always a welcoming, avuncular presence. He always took an interest in what the engineers were doing, and loved to talk shop. Often he’d invite me to stay behind after a date to try out some new mike or piece of equipment he’d just added to his collection, and many times I used, on his recommendation, some exotic antique or other that he had recommended for a particular application — always with happy results. (I also have, somewhere, a file he sent me containing hundreds and hundreds of “musician jokes” that he had collected over the years.)

Walter Sear loved music, loved audio, loved recording, and loved engineers — and there isn’t a single one of our little brotherhood that didn’t love him right back. He was sui generis, and irreplaceable. His death leaves yet another aching hole in the hearts of those of us who remember what it used to be like to record music in New York City, and we will miss him very much. My sympathies go out to Roberta and the staff.

Thanks for everything, Walter. Rest in peace.

I realize that the recent flooding in Nashville has imposed a frightful toll of hardship in all the many ways that such disasters always do, but as a musician and recording engineer I find this particularly poignant.

When I was a young man I played the drums, and was pretty sure that one day I would be a Great Big Rock Star. To advance this project, I went looking for a job at a New York City recording studio, on the theory that I’d then be right in the thick of things, allowing my incandescent career to develop along a natural course.

In 1978, I got the job. Indeed, I didn’t just get a job, I got a job at The Power Station (now Avatar), the hottest place in town. That was about it for playing the drums, though, because a) I had moved to a tiny studio apartment, with nowhere to keep drums or play them; b) I was working long and random hours at my new job, and had no time for a band; c) the best drummers in the world were trooping through the place every day, and it soon became cruelly apparent that I was not even close to being in their league; and d) I was learning the art of record-making from some of the industry’s foremost producers and engineers, realized that I had a knack for it myself, and saw that this was clearly where I should be concentrating my efforts.

So I stopped playing almost entirely, save for the occasional jam session at the studio, or the odd percussion overdub. (I did, however, play the propulsive eighth-note floor-tom pattern on the Rolling Stones song Going To A Go-Go, from the 1982 album Still Life — my foremost accomplishment as a batteur.)

I missed playing the drums, but I still had a couple of guitars to play at home — and as an engineer I always got along well with the drummers, and got a lot of satisfaction from making the best recordings I could of the fabulous variety of drum kits and players that I worked with over the years.

Fast forward several decades (note the clever studio wordplay there), past the fin de siècle decline of the recording industry, and you find me all but retired from record-making, and plowing a new furrow as a software engineer. With my son turning into a formidable guitarist in his own right, I decided it was high time I got back to drumming, and bought myself a set of Roland V-Drums: an electronic kit that I can play at home without the neighbors calling the cops.

Which brings me, at long last, to the point of this solipsistic ramble.

About twenty years ago I was a guest at a lawn-party wedding in Easthampton, Long Island. The hired jazz band was led by a simply amazing drummer, many years my senior. I was supposed to be mingling and making chit-chat, but I cared about nothing besides watching this maestro play. When the band took a break, I introduced myself, and complimented him effusively. It turned out his name was Jim Chapin, and that among other things he was the father of the late pop-star Harry Chapin. (Little did I know at the time that he was a legend in his own right.) He was an charming, affable fellow, and we chatted pleasantly for a little while about music and recording.

Well, when I started playing drums again a couple of years ago, I decided to take up the study of drum technique more seriously than I ever had in my youth, with particular focus on “rudiments”: the tricky sticking patterns that are the foundation of traditional drumming expertise. I started looking around online for some pointers, and lo and behold: there was Jim Chapin, explaining the practice of drum rudiments (as well as the “Moeller method” of wielding the sticks) in a series of video clips. I was thrilled to see this great master play once again, and delighted to have his instruction.

So, dear Reader, having slogged through this wandering and diffuse post, here’s your reward: Jim Chapin, working his magic on a practice pad. See here, and here, and here.

Jim Chapin died on July 4th of last year, just shy of his 90th birthday. Peace be upon him.

Last night, unable to decide what I wanted to listen to, I stuck my hand into the CD cabinet and pulled a record out at random. It turned out to be one I hadn’t listened to in a while, and one that brought back quite a few memories — some very sad, and one that was rather amusing. Here’s the amusing one.

About twenty years or so ago I was out doing errands with the lovely Nina. She wanted to poke around in some clothing store or other — which is, to put it mildly, not my idea of fun. Having noticed that there was a high-end stereo shop next door, I suggested that she could find me in there when she was done. We parted.

I wandered in; the place was empty. I began a desultory inspection of the merchandise. Within a few seconds, a salesman had shimmered into existence at my side. He asked what I was interested in; I said I was just looking around.

We passed a silent moment together.

“Want to listen to some speakers?”

I really had very little interest in listening to any loudspeakers. Like most recording engineers, I regard speakers as little more than a necessary evil. They are all different, and they are all vile deceivers. All an engineer can do is to settle on some speaker or other, and spend years getting used to its idiosyncracies.

But realizing that I had no hope of scraping this limpet off my hull, I allowed him to lead me into a listening chamber.

“What kind of music do you like?”

I replied that I had no particular preference.

“Do you like jazz?”

I told him I did.

“Well, let me see…”

He rummaged around amongst some CDs on a shelf and pulled out a copy of a jazz-fusion album called Time in Place, by the guitarist Mike Stern. (This was the record that I pulled out last night.)

As it happens, I had been the mixing engineer for this record, back at Skyline Studios, in December 1987. I thought this was an amusing coincidence, but I said nothing.

He selected some speakers or other, and started playing the record. The speakers sounded like typical home-stereo speakers. You know: artifically bright on top, a little too plump down below.

“What do you think?”

“Gee, they’re OK, I guess.” (They were awful.)

More speakers. More of the same. I hate speakers.

Finally, having set me up for the pièce de résistance, he said:

“Well, I can see you’re hard to impress. OK, then, check these out.”

He selected the biggest, ugliest-looking pair of speakers in the room. God knows what they were. He pressed Play.

To my surprise, they actually sounded pretty good: bright, with very good transients, but without sounding brittle; plenty of clarity in the midrange, but not harsh; impressive low end without the usual mud. The imaging was fairly precise, with little of the smearing of the center that you often get with multi-element speakers. All in all, not too shabby.

“How about that, huh?”

I said I thought they were very nice. He beamed. Then he said:

“That’s the way it sounded IN the STUDIO!”

This was too much for me. What we were hearing was nothing even remotely like the way this record had sounded in the studio; I had mixed the album using a pair of Yamaha NS-10s, which are rather crummy little bookshelf speakers. (Read about them here.)

I had to clue him in.

“Actually, I hate to tell you this, but that’s not the way it sounded “in the studio” at all, and you shouldn’t go around telling people that. As it happens, I’m the guy who mixed that album, and I did it on a pair of Yamaha NS-10s.”

He was absolutely struck dumb. I could see that his whole world was swirling and dissolving, that everything he thought was real had become a cruel mirage. I knew this must be hard for him.

After a few moments, he collected himself.

“Bullshit.”

“No, I’m serious.”

I had to take out my driver’s license and show him that my name was the same as the one on the record. I then explained that when you are mixing records, you want to use average speakers at best. If you do your mix on hyped-up “audiophile” speakers like the ones he was hawking, it will sound horrible when played back on anything else; but if you can get the mix sounding great on bad speakers it will sound great anywhere.

“NS-10s?? But they totally suck!!!”

“Yep, that’s the whole idea.”

He needed another moment to digest all of this; we stood together in silence.

After a minute or so Nina walked in. It was time to go. I thanked my new friend for his trouble. He nodded distractedly. We left.

As I said, listening to that record last night brought back some sad memories, too. I’ll get to those later.

With thanks to my colleague Eugene Dushlin for sending this my way, here’s a delightful video clip featuring some very nimble guitar-playing.

We note with sadness the death of singer Mary Travers, of complication from leukemia. She was 72.

I spent some time with Ms. Travers many years ago, in the course of mixing two albums for Peter, Paul, and Mary, and it was a pleasure getting to know her. She was cheery and affable, with a wonderful, lusty laugh and a delightfully pungent sense of humor, but was also passionately committed both to her craft and her vision of social justice. My sympathies to her family, to Peter and Noel, and to her many fans.

In a recent post we celebrated the healing power of music. But often, when a song touches our very plimsoul, the real baraka is in the lyrics. Here, with a hat tip to Ellisson by way of Kevin Kim, is a splendid example.

Regular visitors to these pages will know that, in sharp contrast to the shallowness and frivolity of most weblogs, we concern ourselves here only with serious matters of the utmost philosophical import and urgency. In particular, we know that many of you turn, sometimes in bleak existential despair, to waka waka waka as place where you can join, with like-minded others, in a pertinacious and undeviating effort to get at life’s real meaning and purpose, and to unravel the world’s knottiest enigmas.

Well, friends, I am afraid you are never going to make much progress until you have spent a late-summer Sunday afternoon listening to the Incredible Casuals rattle the rafters at the Wellfleet Beachcomber.

Here’s your humble correspondent following this arduous road to Truth, this estival hajj, earlier today:

The Casuals (peace be upon them) have been enlightening seekers at the ‘coma every summer Sunday for 29 years now, but to receive their special brand of baraka, you’ve got to make the trek to the sandy bluff overlooking Cahoon Hollow Beach; I’m afraid this is one mountain that isn’t going to come to Mohammed.

Back in 1994 or thereabouts, it was my pleasure to spend a few weeks recording and mixing the Bobby McFerrin album Bang! Zoom!. The album, a collaboration with the band the Yellowjackets, has remained one of my favorites — not only because of the high quality of the music, and the fun I had recording it, but also because it gave me a chance to get to know the extraordinarily gifted Mr. McFerrin, who is one of the most likable and intelligent people I have ever met in thirty years of record-making.

Bobby recently participated in a panel about music and neuroscience at the latest World Science Festival here in New York, and gave a unique and memorable demonstration of the affinity of the human brain for the pentatonic scale. Have a look here (fourth clip from the top, just below the dancing bird).

There’s an item at CNN today about a mechanical music-maker called Cybraphon. It’s the product of a few months of work by a Scottish artist’s collective, and I think it’s rather a nifty bit of work.

Automated music-making is obviously nothing new — music boxes, band organs, and hurdy-gurdys have been around for ages, and of course much, if not most, of everything you hear these days is a collection of samples and synthesized sounds actuated, one way or another, by a computer — but this contraption has, to my ear, something particularly appealing and organic-sounding about it.

You can read the story here (and watch the linked video here) — and to learn more, visit the Cybraphon website, here.

With a hat tip to bassist Alex Wan, here’s something enjoyable and instructive: Queen’s Bohemian Rahpsody, arranged for the classical guitar by one Edgar Cruz. Most impressive.

According to an item over at CNN, former Procol Harum keyboardist Matthew Fisher has won a lawsuit seeking a portion of the royalties for the band’s classic tune “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. This certainly seems fair, though I wasn’t present as the song was being written: Fisher’s plangent organ-playing is the soul of the tune, and the intro in which the organ states the theme is one of the most recognizable eight bars in the history of rock music.

Apparently Mr. Fisher had to sue bandleader and vocalist Gary Brooker for his piece of the pie, which seems a pity. Mr. Brooker, M.B.E., is one of England’s most prominent philanthropists, but it seems that when it comes to more personal matters he is somewhat less charitable.

Story here.

So distracted am I, and so out of touch with the world of music just at the moment, that I didn’t know it until I read it in today’s Times: the incomparable Manny’s, midtown Manhattan’s Mecca of musical merchandise, has closed its doors.

This lavish emporium, set in “Music Row” on West 48th Street amongst the theaters and recording studios, was where everyone who was anyone went to buy everything. You never knew who you would see in there, but you were bound to see someone, and on the walls were thousands of signed photographs of the pantheon of music-biz luminaries who had passed through to shop and shmooze over the decades.

I know all things must pass (which, by the way, reminds me of the time I saw George Harrison in the shop, sometime back in the early Eighties), but this is awfully sad news.

You can read the Times article here, and take a little tour here.

From our friend Sarah Zimmerman comes a link to an article by Steven Van Zandt about just what it is that ails the music business.

Readers will know Steve as Bruce Springsteen’s long-time associate in the E Street Band, and as consigliere Silvio Dante from The Sopranos. I got to know Steven myself during the making of the Springsteen album The River at Power Station Studios, where I was a member of the engineering staff, and I later worked on some of his solo projects. He is an enormously thoughtful, passionate and articulate man, and in this essay he examines the etiolating effect on the music of the way records are, by and large, made these days: by solitary individuals working in little private rooms, without any of the social interaction and specialization of responibilities that were, he argues, essential to the process during the golden age of record-making. As much as appreciate the value of the tools that the digital revolution has given us, I think he’s right on target.

Read the article here.

Our friend G. Orcalimbo Jones, during the course of his radio show last Friday, tipped off his listeners to a marvelous Internet resource: a compendious archive of live recordings from the glory days of the old Fillmore and the King Biscuit Flower Hour. It’s called Wolfgang’s Vault, and you can find it here.

A little while back I confessed my infatuation with Porcupine Tree‘s extraordinary drummer Gavin Harrison, who is, I still think, pretty much the bee’s knees when it comes to tapping the tubs. In that recent post I encouraged readers to go have a look for themselves, and linked to a YouTube clip of one of Mr. Harrison’s dazzling performances.

Commenter “Chris G.”, however, soon offered a dissenting opinion. He explained that Mr. Harrison “plays like a girl”, and said that in order to see “how you do it” we should all watch this clip of the tattooed urbanite Travis Barker (formerly of Blink-182) adding a few percussive touches to a haunting little tone poem by the American composer Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em. It was beautiful, sophisticated playing, and we were all duly impressed.

Well, Gavin and Travis, I have bad news for the both of you: there is a new king of the hill. Have a look here.

I’ve mentioned that I have sort of a drummer’s crush lately on Porcupine Tree / King Crimson batteur Gavin Harrison — who, I have decided, may not be human (I’m well acquainted with others of his alien species: Dennis Chambers, Keith Carlock, Peter Erskine, etc.). Here he is again.

One of the enjoyable quirks of the Outer Cape is Provincetown’s own radio station, WOMR (“Outermost Radio”). The station is everything you might expect from a place as full of artists, writers, musicians, eccentrics, oddballs, and misfits as the far end of Cape Cod is, and the playlist is eclectic, and seldom boring.

A particular treat is the show “AOR”, which airs every Friday evening from 9 until midnight. The host, “G. Orcalimbo Jones”, is a connoisseur and collector of lesser-known recordings from the long and ramified history of rock music, and each week’s program is a little guided tour of some of the curiosities in his collection. His show also features a call-in segment in which listeners vie to identify the week’s Mystery Guitarist.

I realize most of you are not within radio range of Provincetown on any given Friday, but take heart: you can listen to a live stream of the show here. Nine to midnight, Eastern time.