Nashville’s Blackbird Studios has become one of Nashville’s most important facilities over the last two decades. While it expanded to include Blackbird Academy some years ago, now founder John McBride has taken the studio’s brand online with a new venture, Inside Blackbird. Check out PART ONE for the intriguing how’s and why’s that led to Inside Blackbird, but in this conclusion, McBride explains the what’s…and what’s next.
WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?
The simple description would be that Inside Blackbird is a subscription-based website that produces and hosts a collection of video interviews with the talent involved in making a record or putting on a live concert, along with technology demonstrations featuring new and classic products, with context for each one’s place in the recording chain and visual examples of how it might be used.
The navigation structure is topped by four main categories—Studio, Live, Diaries and Resources—with each category broken down into headings such as Mixing, Producing, Vocals, Instruments, Plug-ins and Gear. Click on any one of those, and dozens of videos pop up, ranging from trailer-type soundbites on a very specific topic, to 90 minutes with Al Schmitt and Niko Bolas setting up mics, Trina Shoemaker or Sylvia Massy talking about engineering, Nathan Chapman showing how he comps vocals in Melodyne, Desmond Child on songwriting, Yelawolf on life and music, or ace Nashville session guitarist Tom Bukovac detailing how he crafts a song from start to finish, then taking the audience inch by inch through his pedal board.
It’s not that McBride invented something completely new with Inside Blackbird. There are hundreds of sites that discuss pro-audio gear, and there are hundreds more that feature musicians explaining how they do what they do. It’s the deep level of detail and expertise that McBride coaxes out of his guests as an interviewer, as well as the passion he brings in his own demonstrations of technology, that makes Inside Blackbird stand out. That and the storytelling. Anyone who watches the Butch Walker video on being an artist and producer, chock full of his insights into guitars, is just as likely to walk away thinking about the hilarious and well-told tale of his first concert, KISS at Atlanta’s Omni Center, at age 10, chaperoned by his parents.
“About three years into all this, after recording a bunch of videos, people all around me kept saying that I should switch from the idea of licensing a curriculum to a subscription-based model,” McBride explains. “At the same time, I was finding that I wanted the content to be both educational and entertaining, so I took the edutainment approach. Then as we started back up, I couldn’t find anybody who wanted to do the interviews. So I thought, ‘Well, you know what? I can study up, figure out some good questions.’ I don’t want to ask the same questions.
“Like with Billy Corgan, from Smashing Pumpkins. I looked up some interviews with Billy, and they all talk about the first three records, which were huge. They might talk about his guitar sound or whatever—and we do talk about guitar, of course—but I decided that I wanted to talk about his two kids, who are young. I wanted to talk about how you manage your life with all that’s going on, with half your life on the road. How do you manage that in your own head? I want to know, ‘Did you have a stereo growing up? What record did you play the grooves out of when you were really young?’
“At the same time, nobody in the world is as involved with every tiny sound that comes out of an acoustic guitar as much as Bryan Sutton,” he continues. “He gets sounds out of an acoustic that I didn’t even know you could get. So we talk about tone. We talk about the feel of the neck for him. We talk about what he looks for if he’s buying an acoustic, what’s going to sell him. Is it the volume? Is it the evenness of the strings? He goes into things that even musicians who have been playing for years haven’t thought about yet.
“Jerry McPherson goes into fingerpicking versus using a pick, and he explains it so beautifully. He talks about when you strum with a pick, there’s a certain kind of ‘shang’ in the sound. Then he plays with his fingers and you say, ‘Oh, lord, that’s so much more intimate.’ Most of the people I’ve interviewed are really good at explaining what they do and why they do it.”
WHAT WILL IT BECOME?
Inside Blackbird is already up and running following a soft launch earlier in the year, and it will officially debut in May at $15.99 a month, with free trials, discounted annual plans, breaks for students and all that you might expect. Two new videos are promised each week, on top of what is already a well-populated site. According to McBride, he has about 600 videos in the bank, including ones with Garth Brooks, Vince Gill and many others to be released throughout the coming year.
There have been delays and bug fixes, a few fits and starts, and there will be ongoing tweaks as the site itself figures out what it wants to be and as the audience sends in feedback.
Marketing plans are being assembled, across social media and in partnerships. He’s already formed deals or alliances with companies like Gibson and Steven Slate Digital. He’s talked with executives at Apple Corps and he’s entertained suggestions that he expand on the content he already has and create a 10-episode series for television, or more likely, a streaming partner. The potential audience extends way beyond pro audio, into guitars, drums, bass, keyboards and even the rabid fan. The potential audience is now worldwide. Who doesn’t want to skip the front row and go backstage? Who doesn’t want to be a fly on the wall when Dann Huff is in the studio, producing a hit record?
It’s not clear where all this will end up right now, but Inside Blackbird is packed with rich, one-of-a-kind content for people who share a passion for music.
McBride is the son of a Wichita State University Anthropology professor, so he’s understood from an early age that education is a lifetime pursuit, a work in progress. He’s also aware that Shakespeare’s best plays come in five acts. Stay tuned, there is certainly more to come.
