Rudy Sarzo’s Audio Video Tech blog Post #2

We musicians are living in a very exciting era in history.  For the very first time we are capable of controlling all aspects of our creativity in just about any environment we choose.

Now, I’ve been playing for over 40 years and believe me when I say that back in the late 60s  no one would’ve imagined that someday  we would have so much creative freedom at our fingertips. We can make a record on the road in a hotel room or on the back of the tour bus, in our bedroom or right on stage and then market it and distribute it to all four corners of the world through the internet.

But for better or for worse, things were way different not too long ago. Back in the pre-internet era  the only way to reach the masses was through an infrastructure called the record industry that would handle and control all aspects of the creative process for you. Basically it went like this.  You would put a band together, learn a few covers, write a few originals and play around town.  Once you believed your band could be the next big thing you would pack up all your gear and head to either Los Angeles or New York City to showcase for the record companies.  Then if you were one of the few that got signed to a record label, the big machine would kick in and you would begin working with the various A&R, producers, radio promotion and marketing people assigned to your act by the label to turn you into a world class recording act.

In my case, once I arrived in Los Angeles the guys in the band I came to town with parted ways and joined other bands in order to survive.  Me, I got lucky and wound up in the Randy Rhoads version of Quiet Riot. But my story doesn’t end there, it just begins. 

This version of Quiet Riot played endlessly around Los Angeles and did numerous demos in some of the best recording studios in town such as the legendary Record Plant.  If the demo wasn’t of professional studio quality, the record company wouldn’t even bother listening to it. It didn’t matter how popular the band or how great the song was. But anyone familiar with Quiet Riot’s history knows that the band got rejected by every record company in town leaving Randy with no choice but to go and fulfill his musical aspirations with Ozzy.

Now, I can assure you that if we had back in the late 70s the same recording technology that a lot of the today’s generation takes for granted the story of Quiet Riot would’ve probably gone much different. I know because we were pretty resilient and we went to extremes to get a record deal.

So I’m quite sure that after being turned down by all the major record labels we would’ve taken matters into our hands and made our own recordings and distributed them through MySpace, Facebook and other sources of internet distribution and since the band was very image oriented we would’ve definitely done our own music video.  Case in point, if you go on YouTube you’ll find numerous live performances of Quiet Riot with Randy Rhoads from the Whisky a Go Go and the Starwood.

This was a major effort in our part since back in the late 70s not everyone had a video recorder because they were very expensive and quite bulky to carry around, unlike today when you can record your favorite band live onstage from your phone.  But even then, we understood the power of video to sell the music.  You see, these videos preceded the MTV video revolution which just a few years later the new version of Quiet Riot took advantage of to establish our image with such videos as “Cum on Feel the Noize” and “Metal Health”.

I cannot stress enough how important it is for any artist to have a video presence especially on the web to brand and identify their image.  ITunes is loaded with faceless music, if any of these artists wants to make the maximum impact and gain a competitive edge they must self produce videos that will help them promote their music.

After all, throughout the history of modern music it has been the TV appearances of such music icons as Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones that catapulted them, you could even say overnight, into superstardom.  And let’s not forget the impact that MTV had not only on the music industry boosting record sales through the roof but also the social and cultural impact it had on our generation.

Fortunately, the same technology that’s available for us to make professional audio recordings in our home studios is also available for us to create music videos.

And for most of us who’ve already invested in a powerful computer for our home studio all we need is a couple of reasonably priced video editing software packages such as Sony Vegas, Adobe After Effects and a powerful video card such as the one I use, the NVIDIA Quadro. As a matter of fact, most of the computers recommend for DAWs already come equipped with a high quality video card so chances are you already have an NVIDIA card installed in your computer.  All you need to do is to install the CUDA driver from the NVIDIA website and then you’ll be able to maximize your audio and video performance by tapping into your video card’s GPU.

In the next posts I will go into details of my workflow to create audio and video content with such programs as Acid, Vegas, Adobe CS4 Suite, Combustion, Softimage, Mudbox using the  NVIDIA CUDA driver.

Rudy Sarzo