Here we are live from Los Angeles California. We're well into the second week of tracking for Koopa's record with Mark Hoppus and his trusty engineer Chris Holmes. Mark and Travis Barker's studio is a cool setup and kind of hidden away, you wouldn't know that it exists if you weren't looking for it. The drum room is also set up in the room where the front door to the place is, so it was very funny on the first day of tracking when there was a knock at the door and Stu Cooper opened it to see Travis Barker coming into work. Travis is a idol of most young rock drummers out there today so it was a pleasant surprise.

Added to this, Stu was playing Travis' signature Orange County kit for the drums on the record, it contains one of the largest kick drums we have ever seen

Mark and Chris have both been a pleasure to work with and Mark has been posting about Koopa and the project on his website where you can also hear Koopa on one of his podcasts whilst they are in the studio. 

It was roasting hot here on the weekend that just passed with temperatures getting up to the mid 30s (that's almost 100 in farenheit) on both Saturday and Sunday. The boys took advantage of the good weather and Sunday saw us on a class outing to Universal Studios for a few hours. We took the tour of the Universal Studios backlot where they have the ready made sets for a lot of their big movies. All very impressive stuff

Afterwards things started to deteriorate and it was time to get the boys out of there as the tomfoolery was starting to become more prevalent and the sunburn more fierce

The boys are continuing to track each day and there are more adventures on the horizon that you'll be able to keep hearing about right here. Stay happy on The-muzic.com until next time. 

Here we are at the end of another Easter weekend. Hopefully some of you found the eggs that were hidden and that they weren't broken or of the rotten variety.

Long weekends alway seem to give us time for reflection and to catch our breath somewhat in what is becoming a seriously busy western society. I don't know if many of you have the same sense that the minutes turn into hours, day, weeks, months and quite scarily years, without you realising that there is a bit more happening that the digits changing on the calendar.

There were a couple of things that really opened my eyes this Easter weekend. The first thing was, I was talking to a friend about CDs and the latest releases to come out and he was telling me about an album that he had seen whilst browsing in a store in town. I went to say something and realised that it has been probably 12 months since I set foot into a dedicated record store. I've bought plenty of albums and singles in the last 12 months, but it's either been mp3s or CD ordered through amazon and the like. It has become so easy to shop online through vehicles like snocap which is right there on so many artists' websites and also through sites like CD Baby which stock your CDs regardless of whether you are Tom, Dick or Harry.

The big question I asked myself, is do I feel bad about not going into the record stores any more? My answer was that although conflicted about it, given my involvement with the music industry and the fact that browsing the second hand record stores was a passion of mine for many years, that overall I'm fine with it. We live in changing times. The way we record and edit the music mostly digitally today (unless you have serious money for a tape machine and tape to use with it) has opened up doors to people with nothing more than a computer, a small economic recording interface, such as an Mbox 2 mini and some software like ProTools LE or Cubase to name just a few to do anything from laying down some rough demos to recording, editing and mixing a full project. What this has led to is more music being out there. With the advent of the internet and sites like The-muzic.com being created and attracting members and communities, the need for me to go into a record store to hear exciting new and original music is now greatly diminished.

The record stores will always have their place. I still regard myself as a collector of vinyl and if I'm somewhere away from home traveling, I love to check the music stores and buy some of the local bands' CDs to see what the scene is like there. I don't think that this will ever change. However, the mainstream music market place really is now online. The manager of U2, Paul McGuinness recently gave a speech at the big music conference Midem concerning the whole digital download issue and regulation of the internet to ensure that music that is being shared and downloaded is paid for. It's a long speech, you can read it here

Overall, it is the opinion of this particular music industry person (me) that whilst there have been some pretty cool forms of recording and reproducing music, like 1 and 2 inch tape and vinyl, and we can always look back on the "good old days", we need to embrace technology as well and utilise it for the purposes of good; affordable recording for bands and artists that have some amazing music to bring the world and to shy away from it's evil uses; autotuning someone's vocals so heavily that they are transformed from a talentless, practically tone deaf hack, to a multi-million selling "artist" with fake breasts and a perfect smile. After all, music is for listening to primarily and before MTV that was how it was judged.

Anyway, Easter is running away and the summer is coming at us at a rapid pace. I hope that all the bands and artists that are reading this are inspired to go and lay down their own little piece of musical genius and post it on The-muzic.com for us here at Pied Piper Records to hear. I look forward to hearing the fruits of your labour very soon.

The Pied Piper