Earlier this year, I was given the opportunity to take a shot a digitizing and restoring a Post WWII archival recording of piano virtuoso and Polish holocaust survivor Maryla Jonas. Her family wanted to preserve and share her music once again.  

Sounds easy enough.. 

Not in the slightest. These recordings were made in the "direct-to-disc" era, which meant that A.) there is no master tape and B.) The master I worked from is an actual record that was printed in the 40's.

That is another way of saying there were scratches, pops, clicks, and noise galore that no amount of record cleaning (yes I actually bought a special cleaning solution with special brushes/towels and manually attempted to scrub off 70 years worth of dust) could fix. 

As you can hear for yourself in the posted Before/After, the surgery was a success.  I can do this for your old records that are probably in better shape than this was.  

Pricing will vary on commission, but again, this is Sturbridge Sound. I'm gonna give you a  lot more than anyone else at this price point. 

So I finally decided that having a .weebly in the address bar just didn't give off the sensation of professionalism that I'm trying to convey. Not that my effort to accelerate the race to zero with my pricing didn't do that enough, but whatever. 

Im not embarrassed that I don't have the web programming know-how to make my own site through legit coding means. Weebly is an awesome resource and I'm very grateful that they've made such an incredibly easy to use interface so that people like me can kickstart their dreams of inter-web  audio domination with a professional looking site. I'll recommend their services to anyone that asks.


But yeah, this site is now www.sturbridgesound.com. That's what it is. If you go to the old url, it will take you to the new one automatically. So that's nice. 

I'll update this much more frequently nowadays I promise. 

I'll leave you with this. Kind of feels good.

Admittedly, I myself am admittedly not what one would call a hip hop head. I really only know how to mix and master this stuff, so all of my knowledge of the genre comes directly from looking for audio references. However I certainly do have appreciation for outstanding lyricism wherever it comes from. And Brooklyn Rapper Chrominati is legitimately special.

The guy has got one heck of a vocabulary to begin with. And when the english language runs out of words, GnarlyNatti has no trouble just inventing new ones. You won't find profanity here, mostly because he doesn't seem to need it.  I could go on for hours about this, so I'll just let you listen.

So check this track out when you get the chance! This is the first of many songs that I'm excited to be working on for this artist, so when the full release is ready, you will see it here first!

You can find Chrominati on Twitter @NardleyNati

So it's been a while since I've been able to work on this site. Unfortunately I've been really busy with school and whatnot. But I figured it would only be right to update the track of the month. 

This song is by my old band, The Knockouts. I played drums on this thing, and actually recorded it in my basement back before I had any clue of what I was doing. Which is another way of saying recorded horrendously.

I then mixed, mastered(Another way of saying pinned the master fader in Logic Express 7) and put this and two other tracks on the Internet 6 years ago. Fortunately, thanks to the supreme talents of songwriter Lew Bibler, the actual songs were(and still are) so good that nobody really cared how bad they sounded. This song, 'What I've Done' was actually kind of popular when I showed it off to various people my freshmen year at Quinnipiac University.

So 4ish years later, I was looking for new projects to work on and started to go through my old project file folder. And there they were, just as I'd left them. So I spent the next few days remixing and remastering them without any intention of showing them to anyone. But now that I knew what I was doing, they actually came out really well, especially considering the quality of the actual recordings.

So anyway, check this out.

And shoutout to the rest of The Knockouts!

Lew Bibler/Gtr, Vox, Bells
Matt LiVigni/Bass
Jeremy Siegel/Lead Gtr
Me/Drums

So I have an outright refusal to use stock images on this site. I just find it to be extremely dishonest, especially for pro-audio sites. It's just way too common in the cut rate audio market that I'm trying to battle it out in. I'd like for my actual work to be what I'm judged on, but pictures and videos of "stuff" seems to be what proves credibility. Not that access to specialized equipment is the end all-be all of pro audio. It isn't. The most important tools an engineer can have are his or her ears. And I can assure you that my ears are phenomenal. 

But unfortunately, ears aren't exactly that cool to look at. So I had to choose really the only cool piece of hardware that I have.

So Internet, meet my Silvertone guitar amp!

It was actually my dad's (The policy is that when he comes and visits, it is his to use at his perogative), and he generously gave it to me a year ago. And it sounds incredible! 

And yes, like everything from the Silvertone brand back in the day, it was in fact made and sold by Sears. Unfortunately I don't have the matching guitar. 

Now, a regular Silvertone amp is no doubt cool. But this one is special because It has the output transformer from a Mesa Boogie.

Trust me on this one guitar nerds. It is better than the stock 1483. Because it's bigger. Science.

But in all seriousness, I do use this thing for re-amping purposes all the time when mixing, and have even experimented using it to get tube saturation when mastering(I'll explain how I do this in another blog). 

Anyway, here are some more tubes from this thing for your enjoyment. 

Billboard -Overall for the full year 2013, digital track sales fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 billion units while digital album sales fell 0.1% to 117.6 million units from the previous year’s total of 117.7 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. While industry executives initially refused to attribute the early signs this year of digital sales weakness to the consumer's growing appetite for streaming, in the second half of the year many were conceding that ad-supported and paid subscription services were indeed cannibalizing digital sales. While  SoundScan has not yet released its annual streaming numbers numbers, so far industry executives have been reporting that the growth in streaming revenue has been offsetting the decline in digital sales revenue. Overall, album sales suffered an 8.4% decline, dipping to 289.4 million units from nearly 316 million units in 2012. The CD declined 14.5% to 165.4 million units, down from 193.4 million in the prior year, while vinyl continued its ascension rising to 6 million units from the 4.55 million the format tallied in 2012. That means vinyl is now 2% of album sales in the U.S; digital albums comprise 40.6% and the CD is 57.2% and cassettes and DVDs 0.2%. Despite the decline in album sales, million sellers increased in 2013 to 13 titles versus the 10 that passed that milestone the prior year when Adele’s “21” led the way with 4.4 million units followed by Taylor’s Swift;s “Red,” which scanned 3.1 million units. In 2013, only one album sold more than one million units, Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience, with 2.4 million units. The top selling track in 2013 was Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” featuring T.I. & Pharrell, which scanned nearly 6.5 million units, followed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop,” featuring Wanz  with 6.1 million units and Imagine Dragon’s “Radioactive" with 5.5 million units. Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” featuring Kimbra was the top selling digital song with 6.8 million units the prior year. In 2013, 106 songs hit million units mark, versus 108 titles that achieved that feat in 2012. Despite the decline in digital album sales, download stores like iTunes gained market share growing to 40.6% of U.S album sales, while mass merchants like Target and Walmart saw sales drop 16.3% to about 78 million units and now comprise nearly 27% market share; with chain stores like Best Buy and Trans World seeing sales decline by nearly 20% to 39 million album units to comprise 13.5% market share. Meanwhile non-traditional CD merchants like Amazon, Starbucks and concert venues saw album sales increase by 2.4% to 36.5 million units; and indie merchants dropped by nearly 12% to 18.3 million units. Respectively, the former comprises 12.6% of album sales while the latter accounts for 6.3%.

So I fully understand stuff like this can be disheartening. But if you are someone that is looking to make a living in this industry, you need to know what is going on. You need to know where sales are. You need to know if music is even a commodity that people are actually willing to pay for in this day and age.

I'm going to clear some things up first. Pandora and iTunes Radio are not Spotify. They make you listen to pre-selected playlists that you have no control over, except to skip like 3 songs per day. You are at the software's mercy as far as what you listen to goes. And this can be a cool thing, especially when it comes to discovering new music. Plus there are ads that generate money for the artists. It's closer to traditional radio than anything else. Sort of a personalized radio station for whatever you want to listen to.

Spotify is an entirely different animal, because it is a 100% free music on demand service. You can choose out of a library of literally 20 million songs what you want to listen to, at any time and any place. Sure if you are using it for free, there are ads. But for what you are getting for free is more than worth it.

On the record, as a music fan I love Spotify. Being able to listen to pretty much any album for free any time I want is incredible. Sure, the bit rate isn't great, and the ads can get annoying, but the truth is that with the existence of music streaming services like Spotify, nobody has a reason to actually buy music anymore. 

There's a joke that country music still sells well because high-speed internet hasn't reached a lot of its demographic. Well it's coming and fast. I'm sure I'm not the only one noticing the whatever-latest Luke Bryan song that is always creeping into the Top 20 Most-Listened list on a regular basis. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, ect are losing 20+ percent of their market share. If digital music store sales are gaining market share with decreased sales, and traditional retailer sales are going down, that tells me everything I need to know.

And if there is one thing you can be sure of, it is that where there's iTunes, there's Spotify.

Now, I'm writing this blog before the streaming  numbers have been released, but in 2012, Spotify was not profitable. In fact, in the history of the company, nobody has been very profitable. In 2010, Lady Gaga's Poker Face had over 1 million streams, but only made $167! That's insane. 

So, I checked out Spotify's business model, and it seemed a little bit weird to me. Artists make on average 0.6 cents per song play. I think that's a fair valuation. No one can't expect to get the kind of revenue that radio and TV royalties generate. Spotify generates that revenue from "paid subscribers"(who pay $9.99 a month so that they don't have to put up with ads) and advertisements for free users, which play after every few songs(I have a theory that Spotify makes their ads as obnoxious as possible so that people will become premium subscribers, but that's another discussion for another day).

The argument for the free membership is that it monetizes a demographic that wouldn't be monetized in the first place. That it attracts the bit-torrent crowd if you will. I would have to disagree with that. Getting music from bit-torrents is easier than ever, and you can get the music at a much higher quality than Spotify will ever offer. No, it seems pretty clear to me that Spotify is canibalizing  the digital music buying demographic, who was already spending money on music. And I think that this is going to get worse over 2013. As country music fans get high speed internet, they're going to actually bypass the digital music stores, and go straight to sites like Spotify, if they aren't already. So now you lose physical CD sales, as well as digital music sales. 

So Spotify's big bad business plan is that "we drive users to our premium subscription tier, at least doubling the amount that they spend on music, from less than $5 per month (the average spent by download consumers in The US) to $9.99 per month for Spotify." That's directly from the Spotify Artists site. Now I have to ask. What kind of idiot is going to pay $10 a month for something that they've enjoyed for free? You can make your ads as obnoxious as you want. It's never going to happen with me. And I don't think it's going to happen to the vast majority of Spotify's users. 


So what's going to happen in the future? Spotify won't be able to exist if it keeps losing money. Sorry folks, but multi-national corporations (or professional musicians) don't just exist to service you. They need to run a profit. They keep saying that they can pay artists the money they deserve, but I just don't see where that money is going to come from. I can't imagine that the ads are going to generate the revenue required. They would have to cost a fortune for companies to run. Plus, it isn't exactly hard to mute your computer over the time that the ads play(thats what I do).


The hard truth is that Spotify needs to remove their "free-tier" and make all users pay 5-10 dollars a month to use their service. I think that's a more than fair price to access 20 million songs at any time, anywhere. Make a spotify phone app so people can carry all 20 million songs on the go, instead of only being able to use spotify radio on the go. 


It's gonna piss off a lot of people, and Spotify is going to be labeled as sell outs, but as someone that wants to see people make a living off of music in the future, this needs to be done so that artists can be paid what they deserve for their music. Spotify isn't just a service for people that listen to music. It is just as much a service for the actual artists. And people need to remember that. 

Troof is about as danceable a song as you can hear these days. If one was to categorize this into a genre, I'd have to say it's a combo of funk and soul, Brother. 

All jokes aside, this song is fantastic, and includes vocals from Chris Roderick as well as Trumpet by Evan Lane. 

Give this a listen.  You won't regret it when you can tell your friends three months from now when some DJ is playing this at an entirely unsafe dB level at some bar/club that you knew this song before it was cool. To be fair, you're almost hearing this song before it even existed. 

I'd like to give attention to what audio professionals typically charge for their services. 

The industry standard for mastering is 200 dollars per song. The top engineers charge 400, but you can count the number of people that can stay in business with those prices on one hand. They more or less have perennial invitations to the Grammies.

I charge 25 dollars per song. And I can promise you that what I offer can be fairly assessed to be 90% of what you would get from someone charging 200-400 dollars. I may not have the Pyramix rig, the Prism Blue converters, the Ampex 2'' tape machine, or the DunTech soffit mounted speakers. But I learned from some of the best, and my ears are very well trained.  And I'm charging 12.5%.

I'm doing this for the DIY'ers that are the world's best hope for great, new music. The people who want to put out great demos, EP,s and Albums without having to spend all of their money. And that's exciting. 

If you have any friends that may be interested in my services, please spread the word. Like on Facebook. Follow on Twitter. Blah Blah Blah. 

I'll be posting old stuff that I've worked on just to put more of a portfolio on this site. Give this a listen if you haven't. 

So first off, massive thanks to Joan Galanti. Sturbridge Sound now has a Logo. I may consider changing this over the next few weeks, but right now, I'm just playing with what I have, so to say.

Pretty cool eh?  If anyone can guess what song the waveform in the middle of the O is from, they get unlimited mixing and mastering for life.

Hint: It is from one of the best sounding records made in the past 5 years that I use on a daily basis to compare my mixes and masters. It has also never gotten regular radio play in this country, which is a damn shame considering that the singer of the band had to learn english and then re-write all of the lyrics to make his album more commercially viable on request of the label.