• Should Studios Advertise Their Rates? (And How Much Should They Charge?)

• Some of the biggest hits and misses from Crossover Artists.

• Our Best Articles of 2012.

• The Can You Be a Conservative and a Liberal at the Same Time? (Or: The End of Senseless Argument).

• Our Scoop articles, including Plugin Reviews, Fixing Common Audio/Video Sync Issues, and the Past, Present, and (Digital?) Future of the Empirical Labs.

• Plus: A whole lot more.

The new December issue of Scientist is just a couple of days away. So read the November issue while you still can!

In it, you can: Win your own Scientist t-shirt, help music spaces recover from Sandy, declare an end to the War on Facts, rediscover Shuggie Otis, tour recording studios in Brooklyn, get the most out of a studio piano, explore new music gear of AES and more.

The new American Masters documentary on music mogul David Geffen is very much worth watching. I suggest you drop everything now and stream it at the bottom of this page if you haven’t already.

When I was a teenager, it seemed that just about every cool record that came out on a major label did so on an imprint that had something to do with David Geffen.

On Geffen Records alone there was Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Beck, Neil Young, John Lennon, Slayer; And that’s not to mention all the amazing and sometimes life-altering albums that came out on Asylum, Elektra, Def Jam and Interscope under his guidance.

This was back when strong copyright enforcement protected artists from mega-corporations, and companies like these had to invest in musicians for the privilege of making money off of their work. A very different world, to be sure.

It could be a corrupt and ugly industry as well, that is certain, but it was also an industry that shared profits, or even paid out handsomely to artists when it took heavy losses on their work. In many cases, that was just the cost of doing business.

This was especially the case with David Geffen. He began his career as an agent, negotiating on the behalf of artists, trying and succeeding at getting them better deals than anyone else could, or otherwise would.

When he wound up on the other side of the table, Geffen still believed in paying out large sums to musicians and spending years on artist development. This is mostly because he wanted the best artists he could get — not the cheapest. He spent a lot of money. But he made more.

It was this deep-seated devotion to investment that made Geffen’s career, perhaps more so than anything else.

When he moved on to help launch Dreamworks with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, Geffen recognized that every other startup movie studio in recent memory had failed because it was underfunded.

Geffen would reverse both those trends. He helped secure $2.3 Billion dollars for the new company. It took heavy losses for years, but just when they had tapped out nearly 75% of their resources, the company turned around and started making much more than it spent.

It had long been this way with art and film and publishing and music. Historically, they’ve been high-risk, high-payoff fields that have employed a lot of people. On the average, it paid them well. But now that the payoffs have gone away, so has that willingness to takes risks, that willingness to invest and to nurture.

Granted, some of the corruption has disappeared along with the payouts, but only from one side of the industry. It pops up again now all over the internet instead. Now pirate websites make deals with advertisers, selling the eyeballs and the data of those who come for stolen work.

In the past, the artists had to get some kind of a cut, even if they lost the companies money. But today, the artists are the only ones being cut out of the profits completely.

So few have stepped up to protect musicians. Perhaps that’s because those who might be able to help feel they have so little to gain. But for so many of us, this is also thanks in part to the fact that we have bought such a line.

The promise of the 21st century was that we’d have more middle class musicians today than ever before, all thanks to the internet. The harsh reality is that we have fewer. It’s a simple and well-established fact that is not up for debate.

What is open to question and discussion however, is just how many working musicians we’ve lost, whether we should do anything about it… and if so, what?

You can never predict the future until you’ve seen the past. And even then, it’s no easy feat. People like David Geffen got paid a lot to do just that once. He had a pretty good run, and for all the flaws, we heard a lot of great music:

Want to see music in motion? Here’s a physics experiment from Harvard University that also happens to serve as a near-perfect visual analogy for the harmonic spectrum of sound.

The effect is hypnotizing.

This, essentially, is how instruments work.

What you’re seeing here is the visual equivalent of a single, very pure note in action. The longest of these pendulums is like the fundamental pitch, while the following pendulums are scaled proportionately shorter and faster, just like the overtones of any given pitch.

For instance, any instrument that plays a pitch at 440Hz will reproduce subtle overtones at 880Hz, 1320 Hz, 1760 Hz, 2200 Hz, 2640 Hz and so on. What we see in this clip is a visual approximation of these relationships, if equal amounts of energy were put into each of these overtones.

Of course, on real musical instruments, things aren’t quite so perfect. And that’s what makes musical instruments sound so interesting. What makes the timbre of a violin playing “A 440″ sound different than that of a cello or a bass or a distorted guitar playing the very same pitch is a difference in the proportions and durations of these overtones.

You might also say that different “timbres” of this visual pattern could be created by launching different pendulums at different times, or from different heights; by messing with the mathematical purity of their length; by selectively repressing some pendulums and not others; by introducing unrelated “inharmonic” lengths into the fold; or by making some pendulums more visible than others through changes in illumination.

There’s a strong parallel here as to what creative audio engineers can do with music.

But this harmonic series isn’t just where tone comes from. In it lies the very foundations of all music. Play these overtones together at equal intensity and you would basically get a chord like this one:

(On piano, it would sound something like this.)

Keep in mind that whenever we play a single note, we’re actually hearing all of these harmonically related notes above it, albeit far quieter than the fundamental pitch.

But that’s not where it ends: These first 8 overtones are the building blocks of the western 8-tone scale. And if you were to take just the first handful, and you have the raw ingredients to re-create the near-universal pentatonic scale.

Or: you could just watch the clip. It’s pretty damn cool.

If you’re into the science behind music and tone, you can read more about the harmonic series here.

And if you want to explore how deeply these relationships are embedded in our minds, Bobby McFerrin is happy to show you:

Yesterday was the first Monday of the month, which means we launched the October issue of Trust Me, I’m A Scientist, the “music magazine for people who make music.”

In This Issue:

• Just in time for Halloween, Steve Macfarlane offers a history of the Theremin along with classic music clips that are not to be missed. Read: “Theremin, A Mania“

• Blake Madden wears his opinions on his sleeve in “An Appreciation: Grizzly Bear’s Shields“

• Watch our first-ever video as TMimaS editor Justin Colletti teams up with SonicScoop’s Janice Brown and a panel of producers and engineers famous for their work with Bjork, Bob Dylan, The Flaming Lips, Weezer, The National, Public Enemy, Interpol, Arcade Fire, and more. Watch: “The Studio as an Instrument”
  

• Listen to a new episode of Input|Output Podcast in which Geoff and Eli put the new Universal Audio Apollo recording system up against a world-class studio equipped with a vintage Neve console and Studer tape deck. Can the two possibly compare? Hear for yourself and decide.

• Our Scoop articles, including Plugin Roundups, New Gear, and a special “Behind the Release” with Grizzly Bear and Michael Brauer.

• Plus: A whole lot more.

By now, most musicians have heard that Amanda Palmer has gotten into some hot water over her refusal to pay string and horn players on her current tour. She has instead asked “professional-ish” musicians to volunteer and join her for free on each stop of her tour.

To be fair to Ms. Palmer, I have to admit that I am a big fan of volunteerism. I volunteer for public radio stations like WNYC and WFMU, and I volunteer for an alternative arts venue called Vaudeville Park. I even run a volunteer music production magazine called Trust Me, I’m a Scientist.

But there’s a meaningful distinction at play here: These are not-for-profit entities, while Ms. Palmer’s tour is a for-profit expedition — And a cash-rich one at that.

On top of her $1.2M Kickstarter campaign (which was a full $1M more than budgeted for) Ms. Palmer’s CDs and downloads have been selling briskly. So have her concert tickets at $30 and $60 a pop.

I’ll be the first to admit that there are certainly times when volunteerism is noble. Many of us should do more of it. But where does volunteerism end and exploitation begin?

Is it noble to volunteer for a cash-rich for-profit enterprise? And what about when taking the gig means that you’re taking food from the mouths of people whose day job it is to play these kinds of high-pressure, high-profile concerts and ensure that the audience won’t be let down?

Is it noble to devalue the role of musicians by suggesting that their years of training and their tens of thousands of hours of practice is worth little more than a beer and a high-five?

Is it noble to support musicians only with “exposure”? Exposure for what? So that they might be selected to play the next cash-rich tour for free as well? Or are we talking about the kind of “exposure” that musicians will be subject to when they can’t pay their rent?

Let’s not make false equivalencies in this debate. It’s important to remember that we’re not talking about a friend of Ms. Palmer’s jumping up on stage to play a guitar solo or sing backup on a song. Rather, we’re talking about working or aspiring musicians who are expected to send in an audition tape, learn the material in advance, arrive punctually for a high-pressure rehearsal, and then arrive punctually again for a high-profile performance in which they will be an essential part of the emotional and aesthetic impact of many of the songs.

This kind of work deserves compensation — even if its just a token sum from an artist who cannot afford to pay a more traditional rate.

But at this point, it’s worth remembering that Ms. Palmer can afford it. Remember her $1.2 Million, which was a full $1 Million above her budgeted goal? And do you remember all the Amazon downloads and ticket sales in the past two days alone? She’s shot up near to the top of Amazon’s charts, and that’s taking all of her Kickstarter pre-sales out of the equation.

The way Palmer is playing her cards here, it’s hard for even a well-wisher like myself not to be convinced that she is falling deep into hypocrisy.

Palmer is paying her promotional team and her management team handsomely, but not the musicians? In doing this, she is becoming the very thing that she has told us she is railing against.

If a concert stands to make no money at all, or if it does stand to make money but the proceeds are meant to go to a humanitarian cause, then playing for free can be a very noble thing to do. But it’s important to remember that Amanda Palmer is not a charity. She is now running a significant for-profit entertainment business. And she’s doing a very savvy job of it. Other entertainment entrepreneurs would be well-advised to learn a lot from her. But not this.

When I did sound for Ms. Palmer’s Kickstarter party, I was paid, and deservedly so. It was hard work with long hours. I accepted the gig, even though I knew the pay was far lower than it should have been. I did this because I believed that she was trying to do an interesting thing, and because I was told she had a “DIY” budget (Although in the end, that term turned out to be a little misleading.)

But I was paid. I’m an audio engineer, and a pretty good one. But compared to a good musician, I’m practically a leech. It’s the musicians who make my job possible. And even more than that, it’s the musicians who make my whole life possible. Without them, I would be lost emotionally as much as I would be lost professionally. If I’m worth my keep, then so is a reliable, capable and spirited violinist, cellist or trombone player.

So, Amanda Palmer: Compensate your musicians like you compensate your publicity team, and your managers, and your tech people, and your accountants. The musicians are the ones who are doing the most important work of all. The rest of us are just in the “support” business.

I’ve heard you do a lot of talking up until now, and I’ve worked hard to be supportive of you in the past. I’ve even written articles about your work that have been read by many tens of thousands of musicians across the globe. But now is the time to put your money where your mouth is.

Do what’s right.

A final note:

Currently, the counter-argument from Palmer and her fans has been that if the musicians know what they’re getting themselves into — then hey — no harm, no foul, right?

Well, not exactly. Indentured servants and sharecroppers and sub-minimum wage workers and poor families signing on to sub-prime mortgages all tended to “know what they were getting themselves into.” These are all complicit arrangements. But that doesn’t make them right.

It has taken hard work to end these abuses, and that hard work has paid off, bringing us things we take for granted, like the weekend, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and until they were repealed, financial regulations that were pretty darn good at preventing catastrophic financial collapses like the one we’ve just been through. Hard work and advocacy ended the kinds of devastating factory fires that killed hundreds of young girls, who were often about the same age as many of Ms. Palmer’s fans.

Whenever we fail to properly compensate and care for working people, we’re on a very slippery slope. I don’t say this to be sensational. I say it to be accurate.

Hello fellow Scientists of Sound! In observance of Labor Day, we released the new September issue of Trust Me, I’m A Scientist on Tuesday this week. If you haven’t already, please have a read of the critically acclaimed “music magazine for people who make music.”

• Have you ever found yourself mired in the middle of a high-stakes recording project, only to wonder if you were doing things all wrong? Get a 12-step strategy for making better, freer recordings: “In Defense of Pre-Production.”

• Join Blake Madden in evaluating whether or not Bandcamp works for independent musicians (Spoiler Alert: he says “Yes.”)

• Alex McKenzie presents the importance of Myth in Music, and looks at what effect today’s charts will have on tomorrow’s artists.

• Listen to a new episode of Input|Output Podcast featuring special guest Bob Power [Tribe Called Quest, Erykah Badu, D'Angelo,  De La Soul]

• Check out “Letters From Smart People.” 137% better than a comments section.

• Our Scoop articles, including Quirky Tips from Great Mixers, Record Producers on Kickstarter Budgets, Free Pro Tools Plugins

• Plus: A whole lot more.

As always, a new issue of Scientist came out on the first Monday of this month. Check it out if you haven’t already!

In This Issue You Can:

• Get reliable new streaming numbers and a few predictions in “How To Fix Spotify.”

• Find out how your evolutionary programming can be used to help you make better art, or to manipulate you to the point of paralysis in “Are You Superstitious About Your Sound?“

• Join Blake Madden in his tribute to on-stage “Hype Men,” the music industry’s towel-waving cheerleaders who make you say “um… yeah?“

• Meet the hosts and hear episodes of Input\Output, the new podcast series from TMimaS and SonicScoop.

• Read reviews of Extreme and Unusual Compressors, SSL-Emulating Plugins and Next-Gen Drum Replacers.

• Learn how to avoid the common causes of premature deafness.

• Plus: A whole lot more.