There's a new online kid on the radio block.

Our city. Our music. Our stories.

Radio tells stories better than almost any other medium. Take it with you. You don't need to look, just listen. 

It's been that way for close on a century. But now, the rules and the tools have changed. 

It doesn't break the bank to get started. Anyone can get on air. So there's tons of internet stations. Some want to turn the clock back - big mistake. Some are vanity vehicles. Others have specialised agendas; I approve. And all the time, mainstream media shrinks its offer, cuts costs and shuns local. The gap between large and small is now a chasm, a yawning gulf, financially and creatively.  

Can this gap be bridged? I'd like to think it can. And here's one way we might find out. Welcome to Birmingham and the world, Brum Radio. 

Get Up, Stand Up, for your airplay rights!. A chat with Sam Redmore

“I handed Craig Charles a CD at a gig. The next week, he played something from it on 6 music”.

A year or so back, I looked at how the meaning of the word DJ has changed over the last 80 years or so. At radio, DJs have largely become 'talent', 'personalities', or 'presenters'. And they rarely play discs any more. Today's DJ is a club and studio beast: producing and mixing. Music knowledge, taste, imagination and production skills are now essential to craft a seriously good mix.

Sam Redmore is one such beast. He's increasingly picking up national airplay for his mixes. In particular, there's a fruitful relationship with Craig Charles at 6 music, who has given his work several airings. Sam is due to guest on the show next Saturday, 20th September. 

That moves Sam into a new position. He's recognised as a creator, an artist in his own right. He's releasing mixes on vinyl. Here's the latest in his own name – a limited edition vinyl pressing on specialist dance label Felt Tip.

Here's the thing: if you're an artist, you should get royalties for airplay. And mix artists should in turn pay royalties to musicians whose work they sample. That's the principle. It's also the law of the land. So, how does that work? 

Sam, what's the deal with rights to the original source material in your mixes, once they get a commercial release or proper airplay? Just curious....

There's no deal on them as such - I don't have the rights to the material, but the stuff on vinyl is pressed in such small quantities (500 copies) that we're unlikely to be taken to task over it. I've never received any money for 6 Music airplay.

 Wow. I figured that nobody's going to mess with small circulation material. But does that places a limit on ever making serious money? What is the route – is there a route - for mixer guys like you?

There's certainly not money to be made on sales in small quantities like this. Usually a reworking of a high-profile artist comes about for me with the intention of tailoring something to fit in better with my DJ sets (rather than creating a version to sell). If I get DJ bookings of the back of putting out these edits though, then I think that could ultimately be a way to make money from them. There's a DJ called Reflex. He has a huge re-edit release back catalogue. I don't know what he's made from sales, but his DJ fees are now a very decent amount. He's getting at least two bookings a week, so I guess it's working out fairly well for him!

The other route and the one that I'd like to move more in the direction of is making more original material, although obviously something that has 'Bob Marley' on the sleeve is more likely to get listens in the first place...

The interesting angle for me is that there are two copyrights in recorded works - composer for the song and mechanical for the recording. Both attract royalties. So, while you are sampling existing works, and so should cut a deal for commercial exploitation of these works - remember all that fuss over James Brown samples 25 years ago? - a creative mixer such as yourself is making work which needs both of these rights cleared. Especially the mechanical right, which is your creation, even if the building blocks come from somewhere else. 

I think that's why there's not too much of a fuss made over something which might get a play or two or get a limited run of 500 on disc - it's just too much trouble to go to court when the returns would be pennies. But airplay money on a national station is not to be sneezed at, and the mechanisms exist to collect royalties once you're in PRS. A lot of recorded work earns airplay fees that don't get to the creators. Money for one or two plays goes unclaimed for various... and flows into a general pool which is sliced up among existing members. And the big boys get the lion's share.When it's all your work, matters get much more lucrative, of course...

That's interesting, I hadn't really given it too much thought to be honest. I will be getting PRS registered very soon though, especially as I finally have some of my own material nearing completion.

As of publish date, the latest Sam Redmore remix on Soundcloud

It's pretty rare for a DJ mix to be picked up by mainstream radio. How did you get noticed by the likes of Charles and Stevens? 

Very simple - I went to a night Craig Charles was DJing at, and handed him a CD. I had no idea whether he would listen to it, or even remember to take it with him, but the following week he played something from it on his show. There were quite a few tracks on that CD that he went on to play, and then his manager got in touch (the CD obviously had my contact details on) asking if I could send him some more stuff. With most of the other 6 Music DJs like Huey Morgan and Rob Da Bank, their producers got in touch with me asking if I could send some stuff through. I guess they had probably heard some bits on Craig's show.

So it can work! Excellent. As you move more towards using real instruments to add texture to your mixes, is the role of mixer/creator becoming more important? 

There's certainly a creative element needed with most of the work I do now that wasn't there a few years ago. The first tracks I did were mash-ups, taking a vocal from one song and an instrumental from another. Everything was pretty much there to begin with, and it's about trying to find existing material and parts that work with each other, rather than composing anything new. Most of the tracks I work on now involve building things from the ground up, and that can include writing original parts. On the other hand the stuff I did with The Bluebeat Arkestra was based around taking a song that they had written and moulding all the different parts so that they worked together as one. This involved much less creating, but lots of mixing to make everything fit. 

What about incorporating new studio techniques live? Or is live always a matter of live sequencing of pre-recorded material, as opposed to flying in your own instrumentation? Are you turning full circle, or meeting bands with DJs halfway? 

I think that the studio work influences how I play live in so much as I tend to listen to the arrangement of the tracks I play and look for that perfect moment to mix from one tune to the next a bit more closely than I used to. I don't imagine that I'll ever move to playing any live instrumentation, simply because I'm not proficient enough at any instrument to be able to do so. There are lots of options out there today to make your sets more live, but if the end result is that the music doesn't sound as good, then it's not necessarily the right way to go. 

Combining live performance with DJ techniques can be wonderful and highly creative when done well – Fingathing, for example, mix turntablism and sampling with live double bass to tremendous effect. One of the things I like about DJing is having the freedom to play any tracks from any artist, any genre and in any order depending on how the night pans out. Playing my own music for an hour or so seems a bit... tedious. I have worked with a very talented local beatboxer called Ed Geater, where he's provided live beats to pre-prepared beatless tracks that I was playing. It went down really well. It made the set more interactive, more of a spectacle, but it's not something I'd be keen to do for a full set. 

Links
Sam's facebook page

See more posts on music and musicians on Radio To Go

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Cultivating precious talent in Gavin's Garden

Gavin Monaghan's Magic Garden recording studio has quietly grown into a powerhouse production centre, simply by concentrating on doing things well. Really well. 

When you visit a recording studio for the first time, more often than not finding the place is a bit of an adventure. Studios are tucked away in basements, shoehorned into warehouses, carved out of unlikely spaces in industrial estates, squeezed into odd bits of residential homes… It’s all very hidden and exceptions are rare. It’s only in colleges and, sadly, now rarely at radio - like the old Pebble Mill BBC studios - that you’ll walk into something open, airy, shinily well maintained, and above all, obvious for all to see.

So it was with Gavin Monaghan’s Magic Garden, arguably the most consistently successful outfit in the West Midlands. It took me half an hour of driving around odd bits of industrial north Wolverhampton, and even then Gavin had to come out and find me – he’s not on anywhere you’ll find on Google maps or your satnav, and that’s the way he likes it. 

Gavin presides over an operation which has turned out some magnificent work in his 21 years as studio manager and producer: The Twang, Scott Matthews, Editors, Robert Plant, Ocean Colour Scene, Carina Round, Nizlopi, and a host of local names including Khaliq, The Destroyers, Guile, Paul Murphy, and Ben Drummond – who was recording when I dropped by, and who will be the subject of a later post on this blog when everything is mixed.  

Vintage tech lust object

There’s not a whole lot of of room in Gavin’s place, and that’s partly because he collects kit - rather a lot of it - and lovingly refurbishes it. His pride and joy is a 1938 Neumann microphone, which he dug up on eBay; but there are classic pieces of kit everywhere you look. 

Vintage kit fetishists can get their kicks reading the kit list on his Myspace blog. 

Notwithstanding all the appeal of gorgeous old equipment, the heart of Gavin's system is a Protools rig. Above and beyond the love of kit, there’s a love of the creative process. And in the teeth of a howling recession, things are looking good

First question, Gavin: How’s business?

Booming. It’s very busy. There’s always been a steady flow of really talented people coming thought here, I’m pleased to say.

And this comes to you how? Word of mouth?

Yes. I don’t advertise. I’m also quite selective of who I work with. It’s hard to put your finger on what makes that happen, but I’m glad it has. It’s nice that current artists come in as well – we’ve still got stuff on and off the radio all the time - I see that as a continuation, and I try to embrace change as it comes along. But… a good song’s a good song. 

I talked with Jon Cotton at Artisan about six months ago, and he pointed out that the tiny studios have now simply disappeared, because people can work with multi-track software on their laptops, and the big studios are scrapping for movie business. So that kind of means that reputation counts for an awful lot.

Yes. You’re only as good as the people you work with. If I get a great band to work with, I’m at my best. If I get somebody… not so great … they there’s not a lot you can do with that. I do a lot of research. I listen to a lot of brand new music. I try to uncover gems. I’m always all over the internet. I approach bands that I hear and like. If I hear something than inspires me, I get in touch. And I try and put as much effort into a job like that as I would with a major album.

That can’t be cost-effective, Gavin…

I don’t care. I’m not doing this for the money. Never have been. 

On the other hand, we’re sitting here, surrounded by squaziliions' worth of vintage kit, which doesn’t come cheap… 

Gavin (chortles)

… but you’ve got Protools up there as your main system.

I like classic sounds, but you’ve got to embrace what’s going on now. So we’ve got all the modern stuff that you’d want. But it’s a good combination. In an ideal world, everybody would still be recording to tape, and perfecting their craft to the point where you wouldn’t need to endlessly edit your stuff to get it on the radio. Having said that, I’m more than happy.

But I think new cheap kit has made a big difference for a lot of bands. They can get their ideas sorted at home, working on their laptops, and recording acoustically where possible…

Sometimes we’ll work with what they’ve already started in their home studio. We end up keeping some of it – I love that. It brings interesting textures into the recordings.

Capacity is a problem here, isn’t it?

Well, we’ve had all 18 of the Destroyers in…

The chat moved on through technology, music quality and sound quality.

I work with music fidelity for a living. My job is to capture the best possible signal. But if it’s going to be reduced to mp3, and that’s how people are going to hear it, then I’ve got to make the best possible mp3 I can possibly make. 

I had a very interesting conversation a while back about distortion in mastering. Most people want to capture the maximum possible volume, with the minimum possibly dynamic range. So part of that process is to distort it, to clip it, so it’s as loud as it can be on radio.

But radio compresses everything anyway…

They use Optimod, yes. A lot of bands and record companies, if you give them something with dynamic range, will say ‘It’s not as loud as the Arctic Monkeys’ – it’s part of the culture. It’s part of the trend, Music is a fashion-based industry. So if that’s the trend, I’ve got to make my masters the best distorted masters I can!

So once Ben Drummond’s mixed and finished up, who’s next?

We’ve got a band called Arrows – a brilliant band. We’ve just done a Radio 1 exclusive with a Birmingham band called Jaws. I’m doing an album with Johnathan Day, a brilliant singer-songwriter. Paul Murphy’s coming in to do his next album. We’re slated to be working with – don’t want to jinx it, but I’m hopeful – with Dry The River. Hope so. My management’s talking to them and various other people.

Management? How does that work?

I have a manager for my production work. I’m a studio owner, but my job is music producer. There are agencies similar to artist management, who manage producers, My manager’s Sandy Robertson from World’s End in Los Angeles. He’s got about 40 producers and engineers on his books. 

How did that relationship come about?

He liked some of the albums that I’ve worked on. The first Twang album – he loved it. He wanted the Twang for another one of his producers, but they wanted to work with me. And after he heard it, it went from there – he’d been listening to my stuff for a while.

But does he understand you and your range of production chops and styles?

I think he works with such a variety of producers… so, yes. I just want to be working all the time. For me it’s important to work with new bands, just as important as working with major label acts who can line your pockets. If I was in it for the money, I’d be a hell of a lot better off!

Gavin's Magic Garden Myspace page

Creative Networks, Thursday 27th, Millennium Point, Brum

Creative Networks is a monthly gathering of... Brum creatives who, er, network. The Birmingham Music Network meeting precedes this event in the same venue, and I’ve attended one or both of these monthly gatherings for some time. Last Thursday in the month at Millennium Point, and you get a meal thrown in - what's not to like?


I’m the Keynote speaker this month.  It’s an interesting prospect. I am going to, of course, talk about local radio and local music. But that may just be a sidebar to some of the other areas, as we look at 21st century ‘radio’ on its many possible platforms. After all, there’s not a huge amount to say about radio that hasn’t yet been said....


...or is there? 

Well now… Of course there is. I would say, that, wouldn’t I? But it remains a fact that ‘radio’ is ignored as a creative area by most people, and is especially ignored by other media unless they can print or screen something juicy or damaging.  Mass media loves finger-pointing tittle-tattle, and radio has more than its fair share of unbalanced egos who can provide a steady stream of gossip fodder.

I still think, thought that there is a world of possibilities out there around radio. So what sort of things am I going to talk about?

How about the explosion in alternative sources of radio – community radio, college radio, blogging, mixes and mashups? And how come there has been an explosion in the first place?

What sort of tools do you need to get started? And, er how much do they cost?

And what sort of things are out there that you can listen to or otherwise discover?

What about… sound with images? Not, I stress, video, but SOUND. With added images.

And is this still radio? Hell, I don’t know. I do know that when you get to this point, you’re still using the same tools that you’d use to make conventional ‘radio’.

Maybe it’s the whole definition of radio we need to look at. After all, when we think about radio, it’s almost always in connection with music, maybe with a voice to link it all. Maybe, if you’re on a Spotify, Pandora or Last-FM ‘radio’ stream, a 'radio station' with no voice at all.

But I kind of think that radio is still all about connecting, ideally live.  But how can you do that with a podcast?

Lots to talk about then. I’d be delighted to get some ideas from you ahead of Thursday next, by the way. Might even namecheck you on the night.