The Parkdale Hookers » Staff Memos

Noise @ the Montreal Jazz Festival

noise — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 03:41:53 +0000

Studio dayz

noise — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:43:31 +0000

Vespa Music: day two

noise — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:50:46 +0000

Been great so far. The engineer is great and we’re getting some great sounds. It’ll be fun to top off the night with NXNE!

Guns N Roses are back?

markcollins — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:16:09 +0000

Well,
The Axl Rose solo band have finally decided to start paying some of their bills, rather than continuing to live with the distinction of most downloaded, and watched on YouTube, for free. As a fan from the days before Appetite for Destruction was a hit record, let me be straight. All those who have decided Chinese Democracy is not “Guns and Roses”, you are all correct. However, for those that saw them in the beginning, and watched them deteriorate into a bloated Vegas, Rolling Stones wanna be act, complete with back-up singers, and keyboards, Use Your Illusion, was not Guns N Roses either. Guns N Roses, was a great bar/club act from L.A. that made one great record with a raw passion that can only come from a group of artists that have nothing to lose.
So, since the authenticity of Guns N Roses died with the 80’s, I guess it comes down to: does the name the band goes by matter, or is Chinese Democracy somethings else. Knowing it was finally coming out, I wanted to hate it on principle. Knowing Axl Rose insists on using the name of the old band to prop up sales made me want to hate it even more. Now that I’ve given it a listen, I have to admit, if it showed up in my mailbox, wrapped in a blank paper bag, I’d have to say, it’s a pretty good bunch of songs. This is closer to Use Your Illusion, than Appetitie for Destruction, of that there is no doubt. Sans Slash et al, it had to be different, and after so many years, and having passed through so many engineers hands, no doubt it had to be overproduced.

BUT, this is not Def Leppard, and this is not Guns N Roses either. It’s Chinese Democracy, and I like it.

The Website Grader – Free tips on improving your lawn on the world wide web…

noise — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:15:03 +0000

Any musician or band worth their salt these days needs to have a web presence and a good understanding of what brings people to their site and how people can find them on this ever growing world wide web.

A great resource on such topics and well as others in the Social Media Driven Marketing World is one of my favourite podcasts called “The Marketing Edge“

Today (well, at least thats when I listened to it) the host Albert Maruggi had a great talk with a friendly fellow from a company called Hubspot about a free website tool they’ve built and offered to the world called “Web Site Grader“

This tool, along with the great advice given in the podcast, can really help with ones efforts to move your website higher up in the rankings in Google and other search engines.

Our site ranked a respectable 78%, and the report came with a few pointers on how to improve our score. Not bad for free.

Put your site in and see where you rank. The team here at Parkdale Hookers International will be working overtime to implement some of the reports’ suggestions.

Once all the paperwork and approvals are in that is…

10 things all musicians should carry in their gig bag…

markjr — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:15:45 +0000

…even if you’re not a drummer.

9V batteries
a power cable and adapter
a drum key
pliers
a roll of toilet paper (don’t ask)
guitar strings of the proper gauge for every member of your band
drum sticks
duct tape
blank CDW’s (most sound boards can burn the stage sound straight to disk these days)
….the current gig’s set list

Theatre Music – not rock and roll, but close

noise — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:43:20 +0000

One of the side interests I have when the Hookers aren’t kicking out the jams, as they say, is writing music for films and theatre.

This week, I’ll be providing music for another RJ Downes / K. Malek production Death to Dating appearing in Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival. (Death to Dating opens tonight Mar. 14th and runs for 5 performances till Saturday, March 17th)

The New Ideas Festival is a 3 week festival of short plays exploring everything from Shakespeare to dating. It usually has a good mix of the comedic, tragic and the experimental.

Death to Dating is a light, fun comedy powered by the unstoppable Lynn Zeelenberg playing the ever determined “Lorene” , a woman who will do anything to meet the man of her dreams.

Unlike RJ Downes’ Modern Rituals, I won’t be performing on stage, but sitting in the control booth setting up the tracks for the right cue (well, that’s the plan at least).
I chose an orchestral approach this time, mostly plucky strings playing “Lorene’s Theme” as well as the odd sound effect added in for good luck. I’ll post some mp3’s here after the show.

Dealing with the brave new world

Since moving to a new iMac and OSX, a lot of my old midi software is now obsolete, and getting the upgrade to the new version of Cubase is still a few dollars away, it was a bit of a challenge to get into audio what was in my head.

I would up using my trusty old Mac G4 Quicksilver, running OS9 and Cubase to trigger my ESi-32 sampler, and recording the audio into GarageBand. Not elegant but it worked – it did make the inevitable changes a bit more tricky though.

Tickets are $12 for the show – and it’s good fun!

Don't forget your podcasting trunks at PodCamp Toronto

noise — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 18:18:33 +0000

Podcasting has been good to us and we here at Parkdale Hookers International enjoy the many podcasts streaming into our iPods everyday. No sorry, that’s inaccurate we’re ADDICTED to podcasts.

And I thought books were bad…
I just checked my iTunes podcast count and I have about a day and a half of podcasts lined up for listening. Everything from The Advertising Show and the The Marketing Edge, to The Mac Observers Mac Geek Gab, to the incredible Insomnia Radio Podcast. It’s almost as bad as my book addiction — ‘cept they’re free and even easier to get a hold of. Good thing I have my iPod on most of the time!

Radio over the last few years has gotten pretty stale, whereas the quality of Podcasting just keeps on getting better. And not just the sound quality – the quality and choice in the music programming itself has surpassed anything I’ve heard on radio for a long time. Take a listen to Insomnia Radio some night and see what radio should be, and should start to pay attention to if it knows what’s good for it. We even use a private podcast stream to share work in progress between the guys in R&D to the steering committee. Such wonderful things, these podcasts.

The Podcamp
This coming weekend (Feb 24–25) there is a conference here in Toronto for Podcasters of all stripes called, intelligently, enough, PodCamp Toronto

It looks like it ought to be good –– even a night of Rock down at C’est What, an old haunt of mine back when I produced a radio show at CIUT.

Stop on by, I plan to go down and see what’s what – although I’m more of a consumer than a producer, podcast wise.

For more information on conference schedules and events click on through to the PodCamp Toronto Wiki.

Canadian Heritage on "The Future of the Canadian Music Industry"

markjr — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:59:48 +0000

Canadian Heritage has just released their Report on the Canadian Music Industry and finds (surprise) that things are quite a bit different from the imminent collapse of civilization routinely predicted by the major label sock puppets at the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

It is nice to feel vindicated by this report. Although being a nobody in the music industry, I take a certain pride in having made certain calls about where things are going and being right about it.

A long time ago I said:

The fact of the matter is this: as long as musicians, record labels, and the RIAA keep thinking in terms of discrete "units" called "recordings", be they CD's, cassettes or carrier pigeons transporting guitar tabs, they are going to suffer disappointment and be inexorably ground into unprofitability by what I call The End of Copyright Relevancy.

I have gone on to elaborate in one way or another that in this day and age the website is the product. But on reading the report, I think they may articulate it better in that “derivative works” are found to be important emerging revenue models:

Let’s recall our ground rule:

This is about the music industry, not the CD industry.

The music industry, for those of who have been fortunate enough to have been around long enough and to have been engaged at various times in different aspects of the industry, is much more than the retailing of produced music.

Strangely though, there has tended to be more of a focus on the production/distribution/retail side of a finished good as the center of the universe. The music industry, as many will remind you, is way more than just that. Publishing and live performance, for example, are two large and profitable pillars of this industry. Lately, so are other revenue streams like calltones, ringtones, as well as derivative products and services.

The problem with the current view is that it looks at the tip of the iceberg and considers it whole.”

Well guess what, with RSS, podcasts, mashups and creative commons, it’s all derivative, baby, welcome to the digital age, where the difference between software and data is merely order of execution and the difference between content and delivery becomes client specific. Maybe this is what MacLuhan anticipated in his famous “Medium is the message”, but in any case the dinosaurs keep ranting about unfair erosion of their market share and it’s certainly refreshing to see our tax dollars produce such a clueful rebuttal.

Michael Geist posted a overview of the report this morning, calling it “required reading” for any involved in the Canadian music industry.

2.5 Billion = American Idol?

noise — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:15:41 +0000

While walking around town I usually have my ipodShuffle crammed into my ears. Either I’m working on some new TPH tunes (a great way to write lyrics – if you can’t remember them between walking trips, then they usually are worth forgetting) or listening to one of the many business, advertising, marketing or music related podcasts available for free.

On the Advertising Age podcast “why it matters” the host was mentioning that American Idol made 2.5 Billion (yep folks – that’s a billion with a “B” – I just checked the podcast again).

Ad sales, licensing (they actually have a Idol braned candy bar) record sales – geesh.

Personally, I think that show is a prime example of everything that is wrong with the present day music industry. They just end up with the contestant with the least personality.

The world’s going to hell in a handbasket…

So, with all that, keep an eye peeled for The Parkdale Hookers new hit TV show: “So you think you can eat a sandwich….”

what’s your take?