Making a Scene Presents

Making a Scene Presents an Interview with JP Soars
JP Soars has spent more than two decades building his reputation the way roots music was meant to be built: onstage, night after night, with a guitar in his hands and a road-tested sound that refuses to stay politely inside one genre. A fiery guitarist, soulful singer, and inventive songwriter, Soars moves through blues, rock and roll, Latin rhythms, country, Southern soul, and gypsy jazz with the confidence of a musician guided less by category than by feel.
That wide-open musical vision comes into sharp focus on Gypsy Blue Revue, his collaboration with acclaimed Chicago-based violinist, singer, songwriter, and recording artist Anne Harris. The project brings together two restless musical spirits: Soars with his blues guitar fire and road-house grit, and Harris with a violin voice that can move from rootsy and earthy to soaring, cinematic, and nearly otherworldly. Together, they create a sound that blends Southern soul, blues, rock, Americana, country, folk, and Django Reinhardt-inspired swing into something raw, adventurous, and deeply alive.

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Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey's Interview with Sujata
Sujata is a British-Indian singer and songwriter based in London. Raised in Calcutta by her musical family and steeped in the Bengali Folk Music tradition, her focus moved to Pop and Rock soon after she settled in England. Inspired by Janis Joplin, Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin, George Harrison and her own cross-cultural upbringing, Sujata’s songs present a unique fusion of Rock, Pop, Blues and Indian sounds – sitars and tablas with guitars and drums. Her powerful, potent lyrics reflect the challenges of life and honour the human spirit. On the subject of songwriting, Sujata states “If there’s something I want to say, but can’t for whatever reason – I turn it into a song”.

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Making a Scene Presents - Harmonics Without the Math: What “Warmth,” Saturation, Tubes and Transformers Are Really Doing to Your Music
Walk through enough recording studios and eventually somebody will tell you that a microphone preamp sounds warm because it has tubes, another sounds punchy because it has transformers, and a plug-in sounds analog because it adds harmonics. Give the conversation another ten minutes and somebody will announce that even harmonics are musical while odd harmonics are harsh, as though the harmonic series itself has joined a political party. These words describe real things, but years of advertising, studio mythology and musicians repeating what other musicians told them have turned some useful engineering ideas into a strange collection of half-truths.

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Making a Scene Presents - You Own the Music. But Who Owns the Pipes?
For most of the modern independent music movement, we have spent a lot of time telling artists to own their masters, control their publishing, keep their copyrights, and avoid signing contracts that turn a lifetime of creative work into somebody else’s asset. That advice still matters because ownership is the foundation of almost every serious attempt to build long-term income from music. The problem is that the music business has changed enough that owning the song is no longer the entire independence question. An artist can own every note they recorded and still depend on a long chain of companies to distribute it, collect money from it, communicate with fans, license it, store it, sell tickets around it, process payments, and make it visible to the outside world.

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Making a Scene Presents - Your Studio Has New Landlords: Native Instruments, iZotope and the Price of Trusting an Ecosystem
There are few relationships in modern music more intimate than the one between a producer and a piece of software that has been sitting inside every session for ten years. We may pretend plugins are tools in the same way a screwdriver is a tool, but nobody has ever opened an old album session and discovered that their screwdriver needs to log into an account in Germany before it can turn a screw. Music software is different. We buy it, learn it, build templates around it, save presets in it, use it on records, recommend it to friends and eventually stop thinking about the company behind it because the software has quietly become part of the studio furniture.

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