We here at Lively want you to be able to enjoy your favorite shows and artists whenever and however you want. Which is why we’ve partnered with SoundCloud to make a page that holds some of the best tracks from our favorite shows.
Want to get acquainted with SoundCloud and Lively at the same time? Follow us on SoundCloud and get started!
As we grow, we want to make sure anyone who wants a show can get one. Which is why we are so thrilled to announce that Lively is now available on Amazon’s Kindle! This means that you’ll be seeing the Amazon symbol all over our stuff, and that you can listen to and watch your favorite shows on even more of your devices.
We have even more exciting news around the corner, so get ready. In the meantime, download the app on your Kindle and dance it out.
We are so excited to share some insights on this week’s Behind the Board from local engineer Christian Heilman. Christian is a live sound engineer at Seattle’s Triple Door, sound designer at Teatro Zinzani, and the recording engineer, consultant, and product specialist at Keith McMillen Instruments. Christian is known for his stellar reputation not only as a passionate and experienced engineer, but also as one of the most engaging and accommodating professionals in the Seattle music scene. Artists constantly request his presence behind the board, and for good reason. Christian shares some of his secrets on working in both live and studio environments and what has led to his success with so many artists, venues and producers. Heed his wisdom!
In my 25 years as an audio engineer, I have stumbled across a few key tips and concepts that have stuck with me and served me well. These small nuggets of wisdom I share with you were passed onto me and I will try to credit accordingly. One good piece of wisdom or advice can really change the trajectory of your life and the quality of your work.
In no particular order, my 8 gems of wisdom for audio folk:
1) “Learn to Fail Fast” – Steve Turnidge. Steve is a good friend of mine, and an ace mastering engineer. This is perhaps one of his best and most simple philosophical axioms. When trying things or experimenting, dive in big and quickly and “fail fast!” Especially when you’re working for others, find out as soon as possible if they’re not feeling some aspect of what your are doing. Related to this, I have always felt it takes about as long to try something as it does to argue about its merits. If it’s a good (or bad) idea, it will be obvious after trying it out. Engineer/Producer Oz Fritz has a similar point to add to this concept with this gem: “Be open-minded to what works and is effective, not just what you think will work.”
2) “You are making one sound wave”. Another Oz Fritz nugget, he sees a mix not as a number of instruments playing simultaneously, but as one force working together. Thus the individual tweaking of things should be in service of the net result: the vibe, emotion and message of the artist. Listen holistically as well as surgically. How does the mix make you feel?
3) “Performance is everything, sound is secondary. Spending time on headphone mixes is time better spent than listening to a kick drum for an hour.” – John Cuniberti. Hear hear, this is SO true. Whatever you can do to make the artist comfortable and hear them better will be reflected in the performance both in live performance and studio sessions. Prioritize the artists’ comfort and monitoring happiness above your own desire to move on to something else. If they can’t hear or are uncomfortable, you’ll be way less likely to get that killer performance.
4) “It’s better to sound new than to sound good,” – Dave Pensado. Wow, how true. Being creative is its’ own reward. In my opinion (and Dave’s) if you want to make a hit or something world-shaking, then maybe the best approach is to be bold, be unique and be audacious. Break the mold and avoid safe clichés or habits or trends. I believe modeling someone else’s currently successful style almost never results in lightning striking twice. Find yourself. When I get to produce, I try to steer people to make something unique and fresh but still appropriate to who they are as artists. If you’re creative and true to yourself, you’ll be much more likely to succeed, and when you do, you only have to play stuff you like every night. ; )
5) “Be prepared” – many sources. I always try to have things in order when I am captain of the ship for gigs and sessions. If clients can flow right into music making without seeing any heroic efforts to set things up or solve technical mysteries, it makes everything flow smoother. Be early. Producer Brian Eno always used to whip up a loop or have interesting sonic things going on when U2 arrived to work. I really feel creating a place of creative calm and order, like a temple for music is what really can foster great creation and capture. Have snacks and water and tea at the ready. Get instruments up and ready to use quickly. Be ahead of the artist.
6) “I’m just trying to make my favorite music. That’s how I work; I just do things based on the way they feel to me. I want to be touched by the music I’m making. Luckily, other people have shared that response to my work over the years.” – Rick Rubin. This statement, for me, really hits home. My ideal and vision for why I make music in a producer mode is simply so others can be affected by it like I was touched by my favorite music. A lot of harkening back to my childhood and teen years goes into music for me, we ingest all this great stuff and our tastes guide us. Sometimes standing on the shoulders of giants that inspired us can lead us into new territory as well.
7) “Don’t sign anything.” – Steve Albini. Today’s music business can allow you to do most of it yourself… so do it. Don’t give away publishing, don’t allow others to make business decisions that will influence your creative efforts in negative ways. It’s a new world for bands and artists, and the DIY stories of local artists blowing up such as Allen Stone and Macklemore, show us there’s many paths to success these days. Making great music is still the biggest asset to this goal. Educate yourself on what not to do in the music biz.
8) “Do anything, but let it produce joy.” ― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. While not specifically a music quote this strikes at the heart of things. When we live and work we should be joyful. We should be around those who bring us joy, those who we can relate to. Pick work that brings you joy, life is short so be choosy in how you spend your time. For me, I can think of nothing more joyful than mixing a great show, or seeing an artist smile upon playback of a fine mix. I feel so fortunate to do this for my living.
So that’s a few of the axioms that have guided my career as a musician, engineer and producer. I still feel I have a lot to learn, and I suppose that openness to new things will always be something that is helpful in our “industry.” I hope I can retain that. The music and the joy within is what leads me on. Rock on.
Hey friends! Meet one of our intrepid interns, Maddie. Maddie came to us with a huge love of rap and hip hop, and when she told us that she bought a Ludacris album when she was barely old enough to know curse words, we knew we had to let her tell her story. The music we discover when we are young always makes an impression, and we are so happy hers led her to work with us.
It is the day after Christmas 2004 and I am sitting in the back of my parents car clinging onto my most precious possession. That year I had received matching Hello Kitty headphones and a Discman. This was the greatest gift of my young life because finally I could buy CDs to start my very own music collection. I had my parents up bright and early that day to drive to the store so I could buy CDs . As I sat in the car impatiently staring out the window I thought about what I wanted.
I did not grow up in the Seattle area, I was raised in the south, born in Atlanta before spending some years in North Carolina. This meant I was exposed to a different musical landscape growing up. I remember hearing rap and hip hop on the radio as far back as my memory goes. Not only were the southern radio stations simply playing hip hop, they included local acts and more experimental rap on their stations. The ‘Dirty South’ provided me with my first glimpse into the complexity and creative energy of hip hop. I was intrigued by this music, because unlike many other genres I had been exposed to, it didn’t feel stagnant or boring. It was alive and growing and creating sounds no one had heard before.
I already knew what CDs I had to purchase. The most important one I could think of was The Red Light District by Ludacris. Ludacris would soon become my favorite rapper, and today I still consider him to be one of the best. As a kid I was attracted to his style because it was outlandish, cartoonish, filled with humor, and his music was as catchy as you can get. I mean, have you seen the cover? I thought it was the funniest thing when I first saw it.
As soon as I got home I plugged in my headphones, plopped right down on my bed, and turned on Ludacris. I knew that many of the things he was rapping about were probably not things my parents would love, and of course that added to the appeal. But I was young, and if I’m being honest, I usually had no idea what he was talking about. My first experience with rap was listening to how the words resonated and played off the beat. I heard music in a different way from then on, focusing on how each part of the song connected to create the experience. The song that influenced me most from that album, even though it has an amazing track list, was “The Potion.” The production made it sound like something from the future. It sounded brand new and I loved it.
In 2008, when I was in 8th grade, I moved from the South all the way to the awesome Pacific Northwest, where I experienced some intense culture shock. A lot about the South was different than Seattle, but the biggest shock was that my friends weren’t listening to rap. They were living off a musical diet only of folk and indie rock. I saw that rap was considered incredibly uncool, the opinion being that it was too corporate and not relatable to at all. I was at the risk of not fitting in with the other kids in school, a fate worse than death at that age. I decided to immerse myself in the indie rock scene of Seattle. It was then that I first started listening to bands like The Lonely Forest and The Long Winters, and I saw that rock in Seattle was the same as rap in the South – it represented the community I was in. This was the last time I was going to exclude myself from any genre, and thanks to the musical diversity in Seattle, I listened to as much divergent music as I could find.
Thankfully, the opinion on rap in the alternative mainstream would change in the Pacific Northwest and around the country. Nowadays Seattle is quickly becoming a city with heavy influence in the hip hop scene. Rap is in an extremely exciting place right now. You can experience the best of creative collaborations between genres. You have Danny Brown working with Purity Ring, and Big Boi with Phantogram. You have rappers like Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, out of Chicago’s Savemoney crew, experimenting with live instruments and a plethora of influences in their music. We have even had some first hand experience of this in the Lively Lounge when Aer came to play their blend of rock, pop, reggae. It’s as exciting as it was when I first plugged in those Hello Kitty headphones and had my world changed when I was just discovering what I loved. I can’t wait to hear what happens next.
Hey Lively readers, Kathleen here. I want to qualify what I am going to write, because it will be purely my voice. I am our marketing communications manager; it’s my job to help create, curate, and grow the voice of Lively. It is not often that I will use the Lively blog to write from a personal perspective, because we have many voices here, and it’s my aim to represent all of us.
But I started as a music writer, and on occasions such as these I will step out of the obscurity of our social media feeds and be bold enough to speak, in my own words, for this collective of people I sit with every day.
Many of us at Lively did not grow up in Seattle, but many of us did. We range in age from those of us who danced to Young MC at our proms, to the Backstreet Boys, to Earth, Wind, and Fire. We grew up loving all kinds of music, and our divergent, winding paths led us to fall in love with Lively and the work we do here.
If you talk to any of us, though, you’ll find that no matter our age or our place of birth, we were drawn to or rooted in Seattle in part because of the legacy of Nirvana and the movement it was deeply entrenched in.
Almost everything that could be said about Nirvana and how they lifted Seattle’s profile as the city where rebels ruled and their anthems played on the radio, has been said. Biographies have been written (my personal favorite is Heavier than Heaven by Charles Cross), cover songs have been sung (even Horse Feathers did a very pretty rendition of “Drain You” that makes the macabre lyrics even starker), and countless articles penned from every angle imaginable.
I even felt at a loss when deciding what, if anything, a person who was too young and far away in Nirvana’s era should or could say. I didn’t discover the ’90s until 2004, and it was a really sore spot as I blasted Bleach in my car, feeling like I showed up to the party to find empty Solo cups rolling around on the sticky floor – ghostly evidence of a good time.
But what I am realizing today is that Nirvana’s legacy stretches beyond their time, their records, or Cobain’s sensationalized and tragic death. It gave Seattle a history to be a proud part of, no matter when or where you were born. There is no going backwards from Nirvana. The integrity and spirit of the movement that shook the ‘80s and ‘90s in Seattle crackles on today, and it’s up to all of us who are planted here to keep it buzzing. We have to honor the riot grrrls, the slackers, the losers, the kids who came out from under the overpass to wail poetry over distorted guitar. We find new ways to change the status quo, with innovators like Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl as examples. Not to mention Bruce Pavitt, Calvin Johnson, Kathleen Hanna, Josh Rosenfeld, and so many more. We push forward, because we came from somewhere. And we are proud of where we are going.
Last night Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the performances did a better job of filling a room to the rafters with what Nirvana has meant to music than my words ever could. All I can say is – we will continue to try to live out what was started in our city, as a company full of people who have buried ourselves in the work of giving music the kind of immortality it deserves. Thank you, Nirvana.
We all remember our first show. For most of us, it spun into a lifetime of music loving, not music making. For some, though, it stirred in them a sense of purpose. For the month of April, we’ll be asking some artists we love to write about their first show, the one they saw when they didn’t know what was coming, but they figured out what they wanted it to sound like.
First up, we have The Grahams! The Grahams are lifelong romantic partners, Alyssa and Doug Graham, who lit out for adventure from New York City to make music along the Great River Road. The Grahams will be playing the Lively Lounge next week, and you can win exclusive tracks and other prizes here. Now, Alyssa tells the story of their first show, when they were just kids.
It was the year of, “A Touch of Grey” and my older brother (who was one of Doug’s best friends) reluctantly gave me my first tie dye t-shirt after much begging. I say reluctantly because he made me name 10 Grateful Dead songs before he would relinquish one of his precious T’s. I barely knew who they were, as I was still listening to a lot of Cyndi Lauper and Carol King, but I really wanted to be part of my brothers’ “cool” world. I was miraculously able to ramble off 9 songs but the 10th was a stumper. Finally, it came to me, “Box of Rain!” Well, my brother gave me the T-shirt but he was genuinely angry that I knew that song. “Box of Rain” was his favorite song and he didn’t think a newbie like me deserved to even utter the words “Box of Rain.” Not yet anyway.
However, my brother also wanted me to learn and learn I did. The next month, The Grateful Dead were coming to Brendan Byrne Arena and of course he was attending with his cool group of hippie friends. To my surprise, he offered not only to chaperone my girlfriend and me to the concert but he asked one of his friends (who drove a van!) to take us with them to the show.
Nobody had a ticket, which I found very strange, as this was my first concert and I thought a ticket was a pretty important part of the “attending.” However, once I reached the parking lot (the van experience was a whole other story I could tell) I was thrust into a new world and the concert itself seemed negligible. It was a world of, to be cliché’, Peace, Love & Hippies. I wanted to be in that world forever. The colors, the scents, the sounds, the chaos, and the wonder opened up a new way of life for me and I never left… well, not in my heart anyway.
After a few hours of bliss in the parking lot, I ran into my brother again and he had two tickets for Karen and me. Honestly, we had forgotten about the concert, but we were excited. This was our first experience, and it was already beyond our wildest dreams. That was before the music.
When we entered the arena, we struggled to find our seats through the maze of dancing beauties, drummer boys, and clowns, but soon got settled and were sitting next to a guy we knew from school. He was also older than us but very kind and hospitable as he immediately offered us some Opium. Yes, Opium! Well, why not, we had experienced so many new things already, one more couldn’t hurt. The lights went down, my heart was pounding, the crowd was screaming and, “The Music Never Stopped.”
I can’t remember the set list that night or the thoughts in my head but when the lights finally turned on I was changed. I had entered a world of music that gave me freedom.
When I exited the arena with the masses, I bumped right in to Doug. He had one side of his head shaved those days and was wearing a Rasta tam. He was indeed a sight for sore eyes and as always smiling from ear to ear. It wasn’t Doug’s first concert. He had seen Neil Young several years earlier at Madison Square Garden with his older brother (I learned later that prostitutes tried to pick them up after the show) and this was for sure not his first Dead show.
The last and most memorable moment from that night, the night of my first concert, was Doug (only my friend at the time) grabbing me by the hand and whisking me around the parking lot in a full spin singing out loud, “I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be, you’re gonna give your love to me, I wanna love you night and day, know our love will not fade away.”
Welcome to Behind the Board! A chance for you to get to know the backbone of Lively; our audio team. Lively’s audio team is a small, focused group of experts who don’t get nearly enough time to tell the world what they do and how they do it. We’re here to remedy that! Look out for frequent posts from the audio team about technical process, thoughts about recording, and so much more. Now, get to know our VP of Audio, Zach Varnell
When I was 12 years old, my dad gave me access to his 1/4” 2 track reel-to-reel tape deck from college, and I set to work building a studio in my parents’ basement. I was fascinated with capturing sound on tape, and after a couple of years learning the basics of bouncing tracks I quickly expanded to a Tascam 4 track. I spent weekends in high school inviting my friends’ bands to the house and recording them using whatever microphones I could borrow from my school’s theater department.
What began to fascinate me as I read interviews and articles by engineers who would soon become my idols was this idea of capturing a moment in time that could never be repeated. The moments of brilliance along with the imperfections were interesting and more human than perfectly sculpted albums (not that I didn’t enjoy those too).
I heard stories about “Sky Dog” Allman playing lead guitar on Wilson Pickett’s cover of Hey Jude. Rick Hall, the engineer and owner of F.A.M.E. Studios in Muscle Shoals, was mixing the band live, just like most of the sessions that were done at that time. When the vamp at the end of the song began, Allman reportedly went over to his amp and cranked it, battling toe to toe with Wilson Pickett for prominence in the mix. It completely drowned out the background vocals singing the famous “nah, nah nah” part, but it didn’t matter. The moment was captured on tape, and was such an exceptional sound that when Eric Clapton was with Derrick and the Dominoes recording the Layla Sessions in Miami, Tom Dowd told him that the Allman Brothers were in town and he demanded to be introduced to the guy who played the legendary solo.
There’s something captivating about a group of people who get on stage and make music together. There is synergy; where the total is greater than the sum of each part. There is also a spontaneity influenced by myriad factors that never repeat themselves.
Neil Young left CSNY officially in 1969 and made a record in three days with Crazy Horse in a house that was chalk full of imperfections and mistakes (even technical issues that left the last verse of Cortez the Killer unrecorded). Because of, not in spite of, this, Zuma emerged as one of the most honest and raw of all of Young’s recordings. The studio albums that captivate me are the ones with imperfections scrawled over them – imperfect and completely alive.
A lot has changed in studio recording, and even though I’ve never been the type of engineer who turns up my nose at the likes of AutoTune and Beat Detective, I could sense the change in the way fans responded to recordings. They weren’t impressed. After college I dove head first into both studio work and live performance, working as a production assistant for House of Blues and in the studio, learning how to coach a passable vocal take out of a lifeless lyric and how to load and unload a fleet of trucks before dawn. I kept one foot in each world trying to decide which path to choose.
When I was introduced to Lively, I realized there was a way to be in both worlds.
Lively started as solution to a problem. Go to any show of any size today and the first thing you notice is a sea of hands in the air bearing cell phones with cameras, desperate to capture the same experience I yearned for as a 12 year old in my basement. We all want to freeze a moment in time; it’s why Instagram and Vine and social media are so heavily entrenched in our culture. We want to share the experience.
As a recording engineer, I feel I do my job best when I get out of the way. I try to do whatever I could to make myself transparent. A recording should never be about the engineer, it should be about the song, the performer, and the listener – in that order. We’ve spent the last 7 months capturing multitrack recordings of big shows at big venues, stereo board matrix mixes of small shows, and even mixing backstage on the fly in real time, and it is always an unrepeatable moment. I read an interview with Daniel Lanois where he talked about the walls of a studio limiting communication, creating a barrier between an organic chemistry that can happen when a group of musicians get together in a room. It’s probably the same reason I’ve always loved albums that were recorded on a stage or in one room, as live as possible. It’s never perfect, but that’s the best part. He also left me with the best advice I think any engineer could have: Always be recording, for the moment that’s needed might otherwise slip by forever.
We went to Austin with a very focused goal – record as many wonderful shows as possible, and get them on the app.
But, of course, as life teaches us all, we found something so much more. Or rather someone. Meet our adorable little puppy we found and promptly named Austin.
She was found on the streets, and when we took her to the vet she didn’t have a microchip. So we got her shots, gave her a bath, and now she officially belongs to one of our video guys, but essentially belongs to all of us.
We love her very much, and she made the whole week just so much more snuggly. Because we wanted her to feel a part of the team, we named her the Chief Snuggle Officer, and decided she should tell our story.
Want to read about what we did at SXSW through the eyes of puppy Austin? Click on her adorable face and check it out:
Hey world, Otis of M&O here, fresh off 2500 miles of round-trip-to-Texas legwork*. Spent some quality time with a beautiful rain-drenched Dallas skylines, snowy Missouri plains, and turned-over tractor trailers…oh and four days of awesome Austin fun! Every South-By story is very different, and our virgin experience was determined not to disappoint.
After a long tough drive and not enough sleep, our first day included all three of our showcases back-to-back. Milo was sworn to a diet of silence and honeylemontea to protect her vocal cords from the dry air and a persistent cough. A quick acoustic** warmup at the Chicago
Made booth helped to sooth the nerves and get our musical zone ready for the Lively Manor. Which is good, because a 20 minute drive later we were blown away by the most gorgeous house*** I have ever seen, ever. I mean start saving the dollars I’m moving to Texas to retire. Wow!! Not to mention the band was setup over a pool with mountains in the background #musicvideo #instagramtime haha. It was so scenic that it was easy to have a great time. Shout out to the sound guys who made it work with patience and love!
After leaving the manor, we trekked back into Austin and took part in SESAC’s official showcase. Lambert’s was a great vibe with great sound, good drinks, and an a mazing crowd. Our last SXSW showcase of the trip ended with finally making some new musician friends – an awesome band out of Nashville called John & Jacob. Check them out!
It was a wild day and it was only the first of our four day trip. Day two was largely interviews, brunch, and a good 13 hours of sleep for the whole crew (much needed!!). We also snuck in a trip to a showcase of Chicago rappers in the midst of the SXSW main strip of bars, catching performances by No Name and Saba. Friday was more festival-goer oriented: we attended two artist workshops, caught the renegade craft fair, explored the now-packed main strip, and enjoyed Moses Sumney at Solange’s party. The night went on and on and on, eventually tumbling into just enough sleep to get on the road Saturday in enough time to make it to Tulsa around midnight.
Writing safely from Chicago now****, me and the team are prepping for a busy busy next two weeks as we prepare for our upcoming tour and the release of our new album, Almost Us. Keep an eye and ear out for us, we will be buzzing around as much as possible for the next few weeks
Cheers,
~Otis
* Not as much Leg in the legwork as usual, since we took an automatic instead of a manual vehicle! How, boring…
** Acoustic for us is – Bass guitar and Vocals! As in our song Entire
*** MANSION!!
**** In case you were wondering, yes it is below freezing. It never ends…
We finished up our tour with Graham Colton on January 3rd at the Work Play Theatre in Birmingham, Alabama. Traveling with the same group of people and hanging out every night for 3 weeks tricked my mind into a routine that was not meant to be permanent. Sometimes you become so close with people, the thought of not seeing them every day seems like an impossible alternate reality rather than an inevitable one. All of them made it safely back home to Oklahoma, and we have been continuing our trek playing shows in Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas. As I speak we are on our way to play some unofficial showcases and hangout in the crazy madness that is SXSW.
This is the point where everything blends together. People ask us what city we were in the night before, and I can barely recall. We have been on the road since January 30th, and the always changing scenery and wandering state of being is starting to feel very…normal. It’s starting to feel normal in a way that scares me because I know a week into relaxing at home, I’ll get restless from sitting still. I have a lot of personal goals I am excited to make happen once I get home though, and a lot of great people waiting for me. Home is filling our minds a lot these days.
It sounds so silly, but I really never fully grasped how awesome (and liberal) Washington state was until I found myself spending free evenings in-between Alabama and Arkansas. In Seattle, Sundays mean brunches and all day happy hour. Businesses are open and booming, and the streets are full of people taking full advantage of the weekend up until the very last second. In places like Little Rock, almost all of the business are closed for the day and you can’t even buy a beer from the grocery store until Monday morning. Weekends turn the cities into ghost towns. Even so, our experiences with North Carolina through Texas have showed us even more about the kindness of strangers. Friends of friends, people we have never met, have made sure that we have hot meals and warm places to sleep every night. “Southern hospitality” is a very real thing. Even when there are only 2 people in the audience, they are eager and hungry for new music. They buy records, they give hugs, they send us emails, and I’d like to think they will come back…
Side note:
While hanging out in Huntsville, Alabama we visited the NASA Space & Rocket museum, home of “Space Camp” and every little kid’s dream come true. My cousin who I have not seen in over 10 years happens to work there and gave us a full behind the scenes tour. It was an adventure we will never forget! We also stopped by the City Museum in St. Louis and wandered through hidden caves, slides, and ladders. It is not a museum, so much as a giant, amazing maze. If you have the chance to be a tourist for a day- just do it.
Recent Comments