Roger McGuinn:
High Flying Byrd

Icon, instrumentalist and innovator, the Grammy-winning James "Roger" McGuinn has experienced just about everything the music industry has to offer. From fronting "America's first super group," the seminal Folk/Rock band The Byrds, to forging a successful major label solo career, touring with Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, and being inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, McGuinn has successfully sustained his career for over four decades by experimenting, adapting, and challenging the status quo.

In addition to putting the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar on the musical map, McGuinn is also credited with taking acoustic Pop/Rock electric and fathering spin-off genres such as Acid Rock, Country Rock, and Space Rock as he experimented with a variety of sounds and sound-processing technologies such as the Moog synthesizer.

And McGuinn continues to be at the forefront of the music industry, illustrating where it is heading and what artists can accomplish on their own. By harnessing the Internet and personal recording technology, McGuinn created and is now monetizing his latest self-released album, Limited Edition.

Eschewing the expense of several weeks in the studio, his new release ultimately cost him practically nothing to produce. Only the first track, "If I Needed Someone" was "professionally" recorded in a Nashville studio - that track cost $6000 to produce. He recorded and mixed the remaining 13 tracks at home using a Dell laptop (the computer was free, offered to him by Dell for his evaluation); Adobe Audition software, retailing at about $299 and a couple of USB 2.0 hard drives. McGuinn estimates that by using self-recording technology he saved about $75,000.

Using Adobe Photoshop, McGuinn designed the package and sent it to Oasis CD Manufacturing for replication and Digipak packaging.

"It's really democratizing the way this technology has given musicians the power to record their own stuff," says McGuinn of tools like Adobe's Audition, which he began using when it was still called Cool Edit Pro. He's worked with other recording and mixing software, but says he keeps coming back to Audition because it's intuitive. "You just clip and paste, drag and drop, whereas [I find] if you want to do something with Pro Tools, you have to go through hoops."

McGuinn shrugs off the notion that music recorded and mixed digitally somehow sounds worse than records made the "old-fashioned way." "It's really just a psychological barrier some people think they have," he says. "They say that if it's recorded on a computer, they can hear the difference. But they really can't." 

Even with the right equipment at their disposal, not all artists are prepared to work entirely on their own without the support of experienced studios, producers and engineers (see the October issue of AtlasPlugged). But for someone with Roger McGuinn's skills, the entire project was liberating. Not only did he enjoy playing with the technology, the low production costs enabled McGuinn to bypass being beholden to a major label record deal. In fact, he never even shopped Limited Edition around.

So how does complete control over a project vs. partnering with a label feel? Comparing this most recent release with his last major label solo album, 1990's Back from Rio featuring the talents of Dave Crosby, Chris Hillman, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello & Dave "Eurythmics" Stewart, "It's like red vs. black," McGuinn said from a cell phone as he drove between tour dates with his manager, songwriting partner, and wife, Camilla. "As in, I was in the red, and now I'm in the black."

Rio, released on Arista, is still in the red - nearly 15 years after its release he has yet to see a profit, Limited Edition, however, took only a few months to yield results for McGuinn and his own April First Productions label. He won't say how many copies he's sold, only that by doing as much as he could on his own, he's making money on the project by selling it on www.mcguinn.com and through Amazon, and feels that's enough of a distribution network for his established fan base.

Instead of paying back a record label advance for studio time, McGuinn now makes money on every CD he sells. "It's all gravy now," he says. "Labels can provide only one thing, and that's hype. They've got the connections to get you on Leno and Letterman, but you can make as much money, probably more, doing it yourself."

Promotional support for this release consists mainly of touring and giving interviews to publications ranging from Acoustic Guitar, where he talked about his songwriting process, to USA Today, where he addressed music technology, sounding more like someone from Silicon Valley than an old Folkie. Disc replicator Oasis included several of the tracks on OasisSampler CD compilations that went out to more than 500 radio stations lending an added promotional boost.

In addition to his love for technology, McGuinn remains a fervent supporter of traditional Folk tunes and is on a mission to preserve the music and bring it to a wider audience. On his Folk Den web site, he's posted the lyrics and sheet music of more than 100 traditional Folk songs that are in the public domain, as well as MP3 versions of him playing those tunes. McGuinn says he was inspired to create the Folk Den when he saw that today's Singer/Songwriters were learning from artists such as himself and Bob Dylan rather than from the traditional songs that influenced his early '60s Folk contemporaries. So he began posting the songs, concerned that they were getting lost in the shuffle. "People aren't going back to the original material," he says. "It's like they think Folk music started with Joni Mitchell."

"I love that music and think it's great to share it," he continues. "This used to be how news was transmitted, with troubadours going from town to town. It's a way to preserve our heritage."

The songs are also a tremendous resource of wonderful melodies that are in the public domain, he says, giving songwriters a tool with which to build their own music. As an example, he points to John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)", which was based on the broadside ballad "The Noble Skewball" and "Blowin' In The Wind", on which Dylan wrote his own lyrics to the old spiritual "No More Auction Block".

McGuinn has licensed the recordings through Music Sharing Licenses from Creative Commons, meaning that he owns the copyright to the recordings. Listeners can download the songs and burn them to CD, as long as they don't sell copies. If a user wants to use the recording, they can contact McGuinn via Creative Commons, an organization that helps music and video artists create a "some rights reserved" alternative to the "all rights reserved" traditional copyright. "I just wanted to share the music, and as long as I don't walk into a Wal-Mart and see it for sale, I don't want access to be limited," McGuinn says.

Also available at the site is his 2001 Grammy-nominated recording, "Treasures from the Folk Den", a collection of 18 traditional Folk songs performed by preeminent musicians of the genre such as Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, Odetta and Josh White Jr. Like his recent Limited Edition release, McGuinn recorded, edited, and mixed the record himself on his PC, using 64 multi-track software then known as Cool Edit Pro.

Packing PC, instruments, and microphones in the car, McGuinn and his wife traveled around the country recording the artists in their homes.

McGuinn says the Folk Den project has garnered the interest of musicians as well as educators who use it as a Folk music resource. Along with the small success of Limited Edition, he says that this recognition of his work is as gratifying in its own way as the chart success he knew 30 years ago. So does he miss being a pop star?

"Sure, I'd like more recognition, and I would appreciate a Pop hit, if that were somehow ever to happen again," he says. "But I'm not willing to play ball with big corporations to try to get that. There is a compromise there that I don't want to make."