Deconstructing The Gibson Robot

At the Embedded Systems Conference, teardown expert and guitarist David Carey disassembled the electronic system on a Gibson Robot Les Paul. CNet posted pictures.

Last.fm Streaming Good For Music Sales

Interesting news from over at Wired's Listening Post where Mr. Van Buskirk sez the early returns from Last.fm's full-track streaming are good news for music sales.

Laugh Gleefully Or Cry In Despair?

That's how I feel after finding out that Yamaha will finally be releasing the Tenori-On in the United States. The happiness? Because the Tenori-On is f'ing cool.

The tears? Because Yamaha is only releasing 100 units a month, with the run rumored to top out at 1,000 for the year. Plus, the price tag will be about $1,200.00 (US dollars). That means some of us will end up paying about double or triple that on eBay for the Tenori-On, used or new.

If you can't stand the wait, or if you don't have $1,200 to throw at it, you could always tide yourself over with a Korg KAOSSILATOR. At $200, it's a lot more affordable and offers a modest slice of the geeky musical goodness of the Tenor-On.

Save Your Ears

Protect your hearing. This cool wiki page on the Wired How-To Wiki gives you some tips.

Crazy Record Labels

Hahhahahhaha. Phew.

MAN! More Cool Pitchfork TV News

Pitchfork announced today that Radiohead will be joining the launch of Pitchfork.tv! The band got together in Nigel Godrich's basement to shoot a live performance of the song "Bangers & Mash" from the In Rainbows album. Obviously Pitchfork is thrilled, and I'm sure there are a lot of fans out there who are, too. I'll definitely be watching. Is there any band in the world as cool as Radiohead right now? I think not. It just seems like they're firing on all cylinders in the right direction at the right time.

FindSounds Internet Sounds Search Engine

Now THIS is cool! Ever wish you could find a sound on the Internet? Not a song, necessarily, but a sound. You know they're out there, you've heard them on websites, but it's not always easy to locate them. The other day I stumbled upon a unique search engine called FindSounds designed just for that purpose. You can search for all types of sounds, from aardvarks to jet airplanes. And you can even filter for certain types of files, like 8-bit, AIFF, mono, WAV, sample rate, etc. Pretty cool.

Woohoo! More Pitchfork TV News!

Remember back when I posted this? Well, we're in the homestretch now for the launch of Pitchfork.tv! I don't know about you, but I'm really excited. I got even more pumped when Pitchfork posted their initial schedule on Monday.

The highlights include the most-excellent Pixies documentary loudQUIETloud: A Film About The Pixies which follows the band around on their 2004 tour, Juan's Basement will finally surface, there will be a rooftop performance by excellent punk-poppers The Thermals, and some up-close-and-personal time with the folks at Death By Audio, makers of some of the craziest noise blasters around. Good times for music lovers.

Earth Hour: You can make a difference tonight (Saturday)

Okay, so this has nothing to do with music. But this is an issue that's bigger than just music and affects us all as human beings, not just musicians.

Tonight from 8pm to 9pm is Earth Hour. All across the globe people will be turning off their lights to conserve power and show their support for the planet and green living. The idea is simple and easy, but as it scales upward can have a truly tremendous impact. The Earth Hour initiative was started by the World Wildlife Fund, but has quickly grown into a much larger movement. Join in tonight!

P.S. – If you're unhappy about this post, I'll gladly refund your money for this issue. 

P.P.S. – I jumped the gun just a bit yesterday. Hey, what can I say? I'm an eager beaver. Earth Hour is tonight (Saturday, March 29) from 8 to 9 PM.

Dying Weird Isn't Easy

One of the things I'm always amazed by is the crazy ways many musicians meet their demise. Drinking, drugs, plane crashes, etc. So you'd think (at least I did) that there would be more musicians on Neatorama's list of the 30 Strangest Deaths In History. But no, only two musicians made the list. I won't spoil the surprise for you. Go read the article and find out for yourself.

Busking The Day Away

Someone on the HCFX forums posted this awesome video of two guys busking outside a Japanese train stop. I miss the city.

Fun For Friday

It's been linked to many times in many places, but for Musical Machines readers, I present the Gigwise gallery of Worst Album Covers. Enjoy.

Music Gear Spotlight: Korg pitchblack

Okay, okay . . . I can hear the head scratching already, "How does something as mundane as a tuner deserve a spotlight?" The answer? When it's as flat-out cool as the Korg pitchblack. If you've never used a nice tuner (and by nice, I mean something rackmount or that costs more than $100), you don't know what you're missing out on. And no, this is not one of those audiophile geek things where they plug in two different cables and swear that the one hand-wound by virgins on a super-secret Japanese island using pure copper in a de-oxygenated environment sounds like liquid gold.

Tuning is a purely functional thing. When you tune, you want it to be fast, easy, and accurate. The pitchblack is the stone that kills all three of those birds with one throw. Cheap tuners are not usually fast (jumpy needles and slow note attack recognition), they are not easy (dim displays, flimsy cases, and crappy buttons), and they are not accurate (poor fundamental tone recognition). The pitchblack does all of these things very, very well. It recognizes notes super fast, its display is ridiculously easy to read, the case is solid cast aluminum, and it has a heavy-duty metal footswitch. These are the facts, not flights of fancy. I've got the tuner and it works like a champ.

You can pre-order the pitchblack right now on Musician's Friend, Music123, or GuitarCenter for $89.99. Throw a cable or some picks or strings in the cart and you're over the $99 free shipping limit, and you don't even have to leave your house to get the coolest pedal tuner around.

Happy Easter, Suckaz!

Technically, this is not musical or machine like (although there is a soundtrack), but it's just so damn funny I had to post it.

I Want My Link TV

Here's a couple of music links to check out.

Reuters/Billboard story about music e-commerce, indie style, with a spotlight on Merge Records.

The new NIN album Ghosts I-IV is doing well. In just over a week, it's already cleared 1.6 (cue Dr. Evil voice) million dollars. Proof of new distribution concept?

The Take-Away Shows has passed 6 million views on the web. In light of this success, I'm extremely interested to see how the newly announced Pitchfork.tv performs.

Listen To Sharin Foo

Daytrotter has a page up where you can listen to Sharin Foo of The Raveonettes read a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, "The Little Girl With The Sulphursticks." She's pretty good at it, considering this is probably her first time narrating a story. Plus, it's Hans Christian Anderson. You really can't go wrong here.

Music Gear Spotlight: New Boss SL-20 Slicer Twin Pedal

Ooo, kewl. Boss just announced a new pedal over at Musikmesse in Frankfurt, Germany called the SL-20 Slicer. This pedal combines several of my favorite things: synthesis, arpeggiation, tremolo, and general sonic mayhem. I love it already. The audio "slicing" is handled by 50 different onboard patterns. It's also got looping, tap tempo, stereo panning, and filter-type effects controllable by expression pedal. Cool stuff abounds.

Music Gear Spotlight: Ernie Ball Titanium-Coated Slinky Acoustic Guitar Strings

Yeah, that's right. Ernie Ball is releasing guitar strings coated with titanium. These strings for acoustic guitars are made by taking EB's popular Slinky acoustic guitar strings and putting an ultra-thin coating of titanium around each one.

Titanium-coated guitar strings? Are you serious? In a completely geeky way, I think that is one of the coolest things I've ever heard. If Superman played guitar, these are the strings he'd wail on. Mostly because they're probably the only strings that could stand up to his super-powerful picking.

Ernie Ball is calling this patented process Titanium RPS Technology. EB claims it makes the strings more resistant to rust and dirt so they sound better, longer. They also claim these titanium Slinky Acoustic strings are stronger and longer-lasting than other coated and uncoated strings on the market.

By the way, this "Music Gear Spotlight" is something I've been meaning to do around here for a while and simply haven't had the time to start, but NO MORE! From now one whenever I see a cool—or at least eyebrow-raising—piece of music gear, I'm going to share it. Cause that's what friends do; they share. And we're all friends around here, right?

Epic Audiophile Pwnage

This link has been making the rounds at Engadget and The Consumerist, but it's just so funny I had to share it.

Read and chuckle, my friends. Read and chuckle.

Ha-YUGE News From Pitchfork

Pitchfork is starting a 24-hour, internet TV music channel for independent music! Launching April 7, Pitchfork.tv will be an on-demand, high-resolution video channel dedicated to covering indie musicians in news-documentary style through Pitchfork-original segments. According to the press release they've got really cool stuff cued up like video of basement gigs and jams, full concerts, interviews, and the tried-and-true music video. In addition to the original content, they're also going to show full-length feature music films. Obviously, you can read the press release for all the details, but as a fan of independent music and musicians, I'm really, really excited. I hope this is as cool as it sounds.

Remember when . . .

we all thought tapes would last forever?



Courtesy of The AllMusic Blog's latest Retro Ad Of The Week post.

Rainbows Remixed

The remix album is nothing new. Since the '80s artists have been letting producers and other artists remix their music. Of course, the whole idea came from the clubs, where it's been going on a lot longer. Used to be, it was done to add a more dance-friendly beat to a song, or make it more club-oriented.

Over the years, DJs and remixers have slowly put more and more of themselves into these new versions. Sometimes in very cool ways, sometimes in ways that caused some head scratching. In the '90s the art of the remix was taken to whole new levels, with DJs and producers not just remixing, but in some cases re-imagining a completed album. To some, this was blasphemy. To others, it was exciting. Some say that DJs are simply stealing other artists' music and screwing it up. Obviously the people on the other side of the process feel very, very differently.

I think what both sides should admit to themselves and each other is that the creative process can be funny thing. We don't always choose what we are inspired by, or even sometimes what we are inspired to do with our ideas. On top of that, "borrowing" ideas in music is nothing new. Hell, borrowing ideas in art is nothing new, much less music. Art is nothing more than a human being's interpretation (or re-interpretation) of life; usually a physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual object or aspect of their environment. The best art—and also music—reflects all four. Pieces of reality combined with figments of our imagination and filtered through our own, unique creative process.

This is the modern remix. A musical artist hears a piece of music created by another musical artist and is inspired to create/interpret/alter/experiment. The end result may not be something the original artist or their fans even like, but I think it's time for everyone to back down and realize that, yes, it is art.

With that, listen and consider Amplive's Rainydayz Remixes of the Radiohead album In Rainbows.

Three Quick Links

First up is a follow-up post from the Last.fm Blog about the free streaming of full-length tracks on their website.

Second up is enlightening news from the MIDEM conference in Cannes, France that maybe; just maybe record labels should try a different approach than scaring, spying, suing, and overcharging their customers.

And link number three is a feel-good story from ESPN.com on a celebrity soccer game played over the weekend. If you scroll about halfway down (just under the pic of Nomar Garciaparra) who's name appears? Why, Rivers Cuomo, that's who! Not only did the football-loving pop songster play, he even scored a goal for his team! I wonder if he sported those old school rec specs for the match . . .

Last.fm Is Cleared To Stream

According to an entry on the Last.fm blog, the company has gotten clearance to stream full tracks—for free(!)—from their website. Every single stream of a song will result in a payment directly to the artist, no middle men and no b.s. Pretty cool. The only downside is the streams are not unlimited.

There are a lot of details in their blog post, but basically they got all the record labels involved--majors, minors, and independents--to agree to it based on a subscription service they're going to roll out soon. During the interim you can stream each song three times and then a message is supposed to inform you about the subscription service. I'm not sure what is supposed to happen after that, but I tried it and no message about the subscription popped up and it definitely wouldn't let me listen a fourth time. I just got the old "Oops, we had a problem connecting" error message.

Anyway, when the subscription service is up and running, you'll get unlimited streams for a monthly fee. No word on what the fee will be or if non-subscribers will still be able to get three free streams. I'm pretty sure the standard scrobbling will continue. It would be suicide for them to dump that.

I like Last.fm and use it a lot, along with the desktop scrobbler. If you like music--and if you're here it's reasonable that you do--you should check it out.

RIAA Hires Former FBI Agent

Yup, it's true. You can read the full story over on Variety, but the RIAA has hired former FBI agent Kathy Loedler to help run its anti-piracy outfit.

When she still worked for the FBI she did things like fight organized crime and bust up huge casino cheating schemes. Oh, and she also happened to be running the RIAA case, but now they've just made it official and put her on the payroll.

What's next? Are they going to form their own private army of shock troopers to kick down doors and make downloaders disappear in the middle of the night?

Ringo Runs Away From Regis

For some reason, this story makes me laugh. Something about Ringo getting huffy and giving Regis Philbin the cold shoulder is hysterical. Come to think of it, pretty much anyone giving sh*t to Regis Philbin for any reason at all would probably have me in stitches.

Wired Review of U2 3D

Way back in March of last year I blogged about the pending release of the film U2 3D. This concert movie was produced entirely in 3D by a company called Real D. And it's about U2, featuring them live in concert during the South American leg of the 2006 Vertigo tour. Pretty creative film title, eh?

The highly esteemed music writer (highly esteemed around this blog, at least) Eliot Van Buskirk got to see the film at an Imax in all it's three-dimensional glory and wrote a thorough review of the whole shebang. The short take is that he liked it a lot. The long take is that . . . well, don't read my version of the long take, just go read Eliot's article. And then go see U2 3D.

New One On Me

Now here's something you don't see every day. Dr. Dre has a signature set of headphones. Called "Beats By Dr. Dre" these high-profile cans were speced out by Dre and Jimmy Iovine and are engineered and produced in collaboration with Monster. So not only are these the first signature headphones on the market (at least from a name with sway like Dre's) this is also a first for Monster, and the two parties chose to break this ground together.

I wonder what would happen if you listened to East Coast gangsta rap through a pair of Beats? Would Dre show up at your house with Snoop and take away your headphones?

Unwarranted Giggling

For some reason, the idea of Michael Stipe being dismissed from a jury made me laugh this morning.

Then I thought about it for a minute and realized that's actually a bad thing. I mean, isn't Michael Stipe EXACTLY the sort of person you would want on a jury making important decisions about his fellow Americans and standing up for what's right?

If I were being judged for a crime (whether I was guilty or not) I would take a whole bushel full of Michael Stipes on my jury.

Are You Tone Deaf? Let's Find Out

Ever been called tone deaf? Prove you aren't. Or conversely, you can prove someone else is.

This cool test for tone deafness comes straight from the labs of Harvard Medical School.

Happy New Year

Here's to peace on earth and good will toward men. And making music.