Roland TD-4SX V-Compact Electronic Drum Set

Roland TD-20SX V-Pro Electronic Drum Set

I should know. I had a Roland TD3 drumset and actually never set it up in my studio for a lack of space. So I decided to sell it and take the proceeds to fund a smaller, cheaper drum setup using a table-top module.

Roland SPD-S Sampling Percussion Pad

Roland SPD-30 Octapad

Alesis Performance Pad

Yamaha DD-65 Digital Drums

The best part about the pads above is that you can put these drumsets pretty much anywhere. I have mine on a little IKEA laptop stand that I got for $20 or so. A small desk also works well. Just remember that you need something with enough room under it for you to use pedals.

Most of the sets I looked at give you two footswitch inputs — one for a kick drum and the other to control the hi-hat (open/closed). This is key to giving you the feel of a real drumset.

Roland FD-8 Hi-Hat Control Pedal

Roland DP-2 Damper Pedal

Drum software has come a long way in the past couple years and has gotten to the point where the best of them are nearly indistinguishable from acoustic recordings — and are definitely better than anything you could do in a bedroom studio.

Since the sounds in these table-top sets are fairly lousy, you’ll be using the built in sounds (if any) to listen to while you’re playing and recording the midi for playback later. In addition to acoustic drum sounds, there are also plenty of sample libraries of electronic drum sounds that you can load into your favorite sampler.

Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0

Fxpansion BFD 2.0 Acoustic Drums Module

Native Instruments BATTERY 3 Drum Sampling Software

iZotope iDrum Version 1.7 Drum Machine Software

If you’re not one for sticks, you can also try your hands at finger drumming. I used to have a KORG padKONTROL, and while I thought it was a great piece of hardware, I never got into it. That said, the MPC-style pads are a lot more portable, and if you’ve never played a vdrum or acoustic set you may want to try these first.

Akai MPC500 Portable Music Production Center

Native Instruments MASCHINE Groove Production Studio

Korg Black PadKontrol

So there you have it. A smaller, cheaper electronic drumset. Vdrums and the like are better any day of the week, but if you don’t have the budget or the space, these are the next best thing.

The two items I picked up were an MXL V67g mic and an M-Audio DMP3 two-channel preamp (see below). First impressions of both are solid. They’re both made well, especially considering the cost, and I don’t see them falling apart on me anytime soon. They both also have a retro look to them that works well. But since we’re talking about studio equipment, all that comes secondary to how they sound.

In my few tests I noticed that the DMP3 provides plenty of clean gain, especially for the V67g. It’s not as clean or detailed as my Grace m101, and I doubt it’ll power the SM7b, but then again the Grace is about 3x the price of the DMP3. No fuss here. The DMP3 is a solid preamp that sounds great for $160. With the DMP3 you also get two channels (for cheaper than many decent one-channel preamps), phantom power, low cut switches (to avoid overloading when your mic doesn’t have a low-cut), and even a couple cool-looking VU meters. The bad news about the meters is that they operate more like peak meters and the range is fairly wide so they’re less useful than they could be.

I was even more impressed with the MXL V67g, especially since cheap mics often sound, well, cheap. But at $120 the V67g sounds better than pretty much all other budget condensers I’ve heard. Many of the cheaper condensers under about $400 or $500 tend to sound brittle, harsh and tinny, but the V67g has a smoothness that its competitors lack. It’s not as detailed or as rich as my SM7b with the windscreen off and presence boost on, but it definitely holds its own. What the SM7b clearly ran away with, though, is sounding great as recorded. I could tell that the V67g would require a bit of work to get it to both sit and cut through in the mix. Then again, the SM7 is famous for that.

Excluding the shock mount that I also picked up, the V67g into the DMP3 will run you under $300. It’s not the greatest vocal chain in the world, but you could do a lot worse spending quite a bit more.

Mentioned in this post

M-Audio DMP3 2-Channel Mic Pre/Direct Box

MXL V67G Condenser Microphone

Grace Design m101 Microphone Preamp

Shure SM7B Microphone

Version four, however, marks a major overhaul of paperplanepilot.com — in look, but also in functionality and programming. Compare screenshots of version four with versions three and two:

Apart from the new look, version four sits on a completely separate engine and was coded from scratch inside WordPress 3. For those of you on devices that don’t support Flash (iPad, iPhone, etc), there’s also a new radio player that works on pretty much any device.

All in all, I’m super happy with the new website. It’s the best PPP site yet, and all the work that went into it behind the scenes makes it easier for me to keep everything running smoothly around here. So, go ahead. Kick the tires. Just don’t break anything.

Ironically, that’s a picture of a decidedly NOT frozen fridge. Anyway…

Frozen is the newest release by Paper Plane Pilot. It runs 7 seconds shy of five minutes (4:53 if my math serves me correctly) and was written/recorded earlier this year.

From the notes:

Frozen was recorded, produced and mixed by Paper Plane Pilot in San Diego, California and mastered by Paul Abbott at Zen Mastering in San Diego, California. Cover by Paper Plane Pilot.

You can listen to it in full here, browse the lyrics here, and pick it up for whatever price you want here. Yes, you read that right. You can name your price. Like Radiohead. But way, way cooler. Frozen. Yes, $0 works, too, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can also pick it up on iTunes and Amazon.

It’s been something I’ve been thinking about since I decided on the segmented album format — a singles format just segments it to the song level. Originally, my idea was to release something more than a single but less than an EP or full-length. As I wrote back then:

First, writing, producing, recording and mixing 10 tracks all at once is a ton of work. Second, the current state of digital distribution just begs for a more frequent release cycle.

That still holds true. Realistically, though, releasing singles means twice as many releases, half the wait between releases and, hopefully, releases that stand on their own instead of as a bundle. Creatively, it means that I can focus on one track from start to finish instead of the jumping back and forth that I fall into when working on several songs at a time.

Who knows… I could wake up tomorrow and decide to go back to the album concept, scrap everything and start over. But it seems to be working for me so far and right now I’m sitting on one song that’ll be released on its own in the near future. Here’s to hoping that it turns out to be a good one.

Sure, I could sit on these tracks for another year or so and release everything at once, but, clearly, that’s crazy talk! And it goes against the first rule of this album: Do not wait to release songs. Okay, so maybe there are no rules, but it is part of the plan. And, yes, I realize I didn’t use any of the album names from October. Mea culpa!

Anyway, here’s the release cover:

And the track listing (and lyrics):

1. Tour Guide
2. Need From Me

And the liner notes:

If Nothing Else… For Something Else was recorded, produced and mixed by Paper Plane Pilot in San Diego, California and mastered by Paul Abbott at Zen Mastering in San Diego, California. Cover design by Paper Plane Pilot and Eugenio Iglesias. Cover photo by Eugenio Iglesias.

In addition to grabbing it here from the website, you can also get the release from iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, eMusic and other digital retailers.

Happy listening!

But we didn’t have the choice we have today.

The digital world changes that. We have access to all artists and their libraries at all times. Mostly for free. We have YouTube and MySpace. Instead of buying the CD, we buy singles. Or we copy them off our friends. There’s no time to experiment. Music isn’t a product anymore — listening to a digital song is an experience. And with so many musical experiences being released each year, month, week and day, supply is killing demand. The time we do have — we can’t just throw that time away on an experiment.

The old gatekeepers and distribution channels meant that our choices in the analog age were limited. We were excited when we heard a new artist or album for the first time. We wanted to know everything about them. To go to their shows. To buy their entire catalog. Now we can’t get away from new artists and new albums. There’s thousands of them now. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.

We wanted choice, but now we have so much that we’re paralyzed by it.

In the digital age of limitless choice and limited attention, there’s no room for most. And that’s why we’ve shunned average. We want the most real. The best. The phattest beats. The most honest. Anything but average. Average falls somewhere in the middle. Even awful — with pants on the ground — is remarkable. Is better than average. Because no one talks about being average.

Be remarkable. Be great. Be strange. Be real. Be anything but average. That’s the lesson of this new digital world.

There is no denying that these days art and technology not only collide, but frequently morph and spawn the most interesting music. Dustin started Paper Plane Pilot in 2006, originally writing his music on a little 25-key midi controller. Now he uses a Digital Audio Workstation to write electronic pop music with an Indie twist. Think Lily Allen meets New Order, the kind of sound you would happily listen to at home with your headphones on. In his home studio Dustin embraces the latest technology, he has even become a bit of an expert on the subject of DAWs. I talked to him about it, to find out his views on the marriage of music and technology.

What or who got you into music?

While I was growing up, music was exploding everywhere and really coming into the mainstream. I was born the same year MTV launched, and when we finally got the channel when I was nine or 10, I remember spending countless hours watching all sorts of music videos. These days it’s hardly a shell of its former self, but back then the exposure to this new music media was nothing short of amazing, especially at that age.

Getting a record player, tape deck and CD player were also big moments for me. Being able to listen to music on demand was huge, and it was a nice departure from the top-down communication of radio and MTV.

But more than anything I have to credit all the great music that I grew up listening to. As I started getting into music in the late 80s and early 90s, there was so much innovative and interesting music available. Synthesizer-based music gave us a whole new musical experience, the influence of which continues even to this day.

How many instruments do you play?

I’ve picked up a lot of instruments over the years, many unsuccessfully. When I was five or six my parents got me lessons on the violin, but each time the teacher would look away I would flip it down to my lap and try to play it like a guitar. In sixth grade I tried my hand at the saxophone, and after just a few weeks I fell in love with the drums in music class. I wouldn’t get to really play drums for another 10 years, but the idea of rhythm really appealed to me.

My parents got me my first synthesizer I think when I was 13 or 14. It was an early 90s Yamaha keyboard, and unlike most of the sample-based, pick-a-sound keyboards you see today, it was a true subtractive synth that had tons of sliders and knobs. It was actually way too complicated for a young kid, but I would play with the built-in beats and write little melodies over them.

I started getting serious about trying to compose music when I got my first guitar in high school. Most of my output from that time was pretty lousy, but I managed to play locally in a few punk rock and indie bands with friends. I also picked up the bass and drums. No matter what I played or what kind of music we played, it was always fun.

Why do you use a D.A.W.?

I’ve been playing with computer-based recording for almost 10 years. I started with Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) on a laptop that had no business running an audio program, but those experiences drove me to experiment and learn how to get the sounds I heard on other records. That’s where I picked up some rudimentary knowledge of effects and processing. Most of the music I recorded was live audio (vocals, guitar, bass, drums), and I didn’t get to recording electronic sounds for another few years.

These days, I use a computer because with a minimal amount of gear (a few synthesizers and a computer), I can make music that would have required a pretty serious studio just 10-20 years ago. Instant recall is also huge for me. I jump from idea to idea and song to song so being able to bring it up just as I left it is important.

It’s really great that the power we have in a typical computer these days enables artists to record and release their own music. Some people lament the fact that anyone can do it, but the democratization of the tools of production for music I think has largely been a good thing. I wouldn’t be able to make music without it!

I read who you have been compared to, but who are your influences?

I’m sure anyone doing electronic indie music these days will get The Postal Service comparison — they really brought the genre into the mainstream a few years ago. Owl City’s doing it again right now. And tons of rock acts today are incorporating synths in their music.

But my influences are a little more old school: New Order, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Human League, Kraftwerk and others. I don’t think I particularly sound like any of the above, but the sound that they captured in the 80s is definitely something that inspires me.

Interestingly enough, I’m also a big fan of ambient music (from pop-ambient to noise-ambient). I love texture and depth, and it’s definitely something I try to shoot for in my music. Some of my favorites are: Tim Hecker, Stars of the Lid, Fennesz, M83, Boards of Canada and Sigur Rós.

Do you have a day job, or is music your life?

In addition to music, another one of my passions is in web development. I’ve been building websites for probably 10 years, and it’s what pays the bills. It’s great, because I can use that stuff to help spread the word on Paper Plane Pilot, like with the paperplanepilot.com website.

I’d love to make a living from music, but I realize the challenges of doing that in today’s world. With so much music being created these days, each slice of the pie is getting smaller and smaller — there’s just so much available, and when you add piracy and the idea that all music should be free and on-demand, it’s even harder for an independent artist to make enough to live off off.

That said, there’s no better time to be a musician. Computers and the Internet afford artists the ability to record, release and promote their music more effectively than at any point in history. Unfortunately, though, the problem is one in the same… anyone can do it.

Do you ever play gigs and if so do you have any groupies?

Ha! I’d like to think I have groupies… and maybe some fans! But I’m not playing live right now so who knows if they would come out in support. But that’s what Internet fandom is for, right?

For me, the most rewarding part of music is in writing and creating. Some artists are strictly performers and that’s what they thrive on. Writing and producing music is secondary and is often done by someone else (or a team of people). I take a lot of pride in the fact that I write, record, produce and mix my music. I seek out the opinions of people I trust, but at 2 am I’m the only one in front of the computer turning knobs.

Once you start mixing your own music, it’s pretty amazing to see how much of your “sound” is developed in the studio. For all music, this sound is what defines them, which is funny when you consider that most artists have their sound created for them by someone else. That’s why I think it’s so great that more bands and artists are recording their own music today. They’re shaping their own sounds, which is authentically theirs.

From your blog I can tell how important is the internet is in promoting your sound, did you try traditional methods first, and what works best?

I spend a lot of time on computers and the Internet — professionally, musically and personally — so it just made sense to promote Paper Plane Pilot there. I’ve done digital distribution through the typical channels (iTunes, Amazon, etc), but I also provide full streams and downloads through my website. I have some things in the pipeline to do more with the blog, such as studio tips and other production advice, as well as trying some creative things with video, but there’s only so many hours in the day.

In addition to the site, I’ve used most of the social platforms with success: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, iLike, etc. Because everyone is using them, these tools are crucial in getting the message out there and promoting my home base, which is the website.

I’ve largely stayed away from more traditional methods of promotion. Aside from being ineffective without big budgets, the future of music is obviously digital. MP3 blogs and personal recommendations have replaced radio and MTV for music discovery, and the instant access of digital downloads are replacing CDs.

Earlier this year I did do a college radio campaign that was actually pretty successful with a few No.1 plays on some stations. Unfortunately, I didn’t see much of an impact on sales or fans, so it further reinforced my beliefs about the power of online methods.

What so you think about illegal downloads, do you have any ideas to get round it?

I understand why the big business side of music doesn’t like it. But they have as much to do with music as a paper mill; they’re in the business of making money, not music, so I’m not very sympathetic to their cries. Unfortunately, the idea of music as something that’s inherently free (or that can be “stolen” for free without penalty) is a problem for everyone, artists and fans. In the last few years, we’ve devalued music to the point where most people simply do not buy music anymore, yet as a society we listen to more music than ever. In the quest to fill our iPods, we’ve reached a state of digital gluttony. Why would we pay for that? Most of it is available for free, and you can download it right now.

But all is not lost. I think most fans want to support artists they like, and direct support does seem to be the future of music. We’re entering an age that allows us to support artists through donations, pre-funding their albums, or buying direct from the artists themselves. Illegal downloads are here to stay, and I think artists need to spend less time worrying about who is getting their music for free (they’re not buying anyway) and more about why they make music in the first place.

Was Sara Yune inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince?

That’s actually a great comparison! I never thought of that before. I was lucky to have her agree to do the illustrations for the website and the First Flight CD cover. In those two projects, we went back and forth on concepts and ideas, but when it came time to do the designs, I gave her the freedom to do whatever she wanted. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Sometimes I think the illustrations outshine the music itself!

What’s next for you?

Right now I’m in the studio putting the finishing touches on two tracks I’ll be releasing in the next couple months. It’ll be a collection of five two-song e.p. releases over the next year or so that will be wrapped up in another CD when it’s all said and done. With digital distribution, I think more frequent releases are the answer, but the quality still has to be there.

Where can fans download your music?

In addition to iTunes, Amazon and other online retailers, they can get it directly from my website at paperplanepilot.com.

I like this idea for two reasons. First, writing, producing, recording and mixing 10 tracks all at once is a ton of work. Second, the current state of digital distribution just begs for a more frequent release cycle.

So five little mini-releases just makes sense — it’s easier, and it means that more music comes out sooner. And after all five, I’ll wrap the 10 tracks together in a proper release.

Along with the music, I’m also playing around with album names and concepts. Because of the nature of the release, it’ll have to be something that can be separated out into five segments, and I’m still not sure exactly how that’s going to work out. But however it shapes up, it’ll be another release that plays on the Paper Plane Pilot name.

Some ideas I’m kicking around include (in no particular order):

• Permission to Land
• Flight Log
• Captain’s Log
• Cruising Altitude
• Air Traffic Control
• Takeoffs and Landings
• Crash Landing

I’m still a few months away from releasing the first segment and finalizing the album concept, so get in touch or leave a comment if you have any thoughts. Thanks for listening!

Looking back to where it all began, even back to the other sites I used before I settled on the Paper Plane Pilot name, version three represents a big step forward.

Version one of this site served as not much more than a repository for song ideas and a quick outline of the Paper Plane Pilot project as I worked on the tracks that would ultimately form First Flight.

Version two, on the other hand, featured streaming music, a store to purchase and download that music, and lots of other media and information. As Paper Plane Pilot grew, so, too, did the site. I changed and added sections, and for more than a year the site has held its own.

I liked the site, but as with many redesigns, I looked for a change that would update the look and feel of the site, as well as lay the foundation for things to come.

Here’s the homepage of the new site:

While there are a lot of similarities between v2 and v3, the new site, in my eyes, is better for many reasons.

• First, there’s a new logo.
• Second, the rest of the site got a refresh.
• Third, the homepage incorporates updates from Twitter and this blog.
• Fourth, low-resolution mp3s are now available for free from the site.
• Fifth, all songs are available as full streams on the site.

That fourth one is probably the most important part of the new launch, and I’m glad that anyone can download and enjoy Paper Plane Pilot music. I’ll be talking about this more in a later post, but in the meantime just head over to the download page and pick yourself up a download of First Flight or I Will Follow You into the Dark.

While you’re listening, be sure to check out the rest of the new site and drop me a line if you have any comments.

Enjoy!