For almost ten years, Professor Don Franzen has asked Yarlung to participate in his music industry classes at UCLA. I, Bob Attiyeh, represent the fly between elephants in this class, and I have enjoyed participating in Don’s class very much. His students are always exceptional, ask hard questions, and are destined to remake the music industry in better ways in coming decades. When I describe my participation as the “fly between elephants,” Don often situates me between music titans such as Sheryl Gold, Senior Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs, and Andrew Ross, Executive Vice President at Sony, or Gregg Field, uber music producer (and touring pianist with Ella Fitzgerald for many years). These friends treat little Yarlung kindly, and are often intrigued by our (to them) upside down methods of recording and representing our musicians to the world. Don enjoys sharing Yarlung’s “too small to fail” perspective with his students, and Sheryl, Gregg and Andrew and others have expressed equal intrigue.
This last year, Don expanded his music law course and taught at Peabody at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I was delighted to join once again, meet fresh students, and catch up with Sheryl, Gregg and our other teaching friends from this process.
Two paragraphs of feedback from students seem worthy of sharing:
“Yarlung Records is a very unique label, The live mixing process is fascinating to me, and perhaps I will have the opportunity to work with Bob in the future.”
“I was very impressed by Yarlung’s unique, purely acoustic approach to recording. The level of meticulousness, that they would spend 7 hours just to mic one piano, is admirable. I will definitely do some digging into that because most of the mixing now happens in a digital workstation environment, and I would love to listen for any subtle sonic differences between the acoustic and digital methods.”