a beautiful blend of new- and old-school musicality

This is one of my favorite videos on YouTube. It explains how a funk rhythm breakdown in a song released by The Winstons in 1969 titled "Amen, Brother" became one of the most famous and widely used six seconds of music in western culture.

For a lot of people, sampling, DJing and modern synthesis is still a somewhat controversial act (yes, even in 2010). To be sure, you can't deny the incredible musicianship of this hip young drummer giving it his funky best in the middle of the original ripping R&B tune. But in my mind, it's tough to ignore the incredible ways this break beat has been used over the years to create powerful new music. Just watch and see.

Them Crooked Vultures gear

Guitar Edge magazine has an article up that runs through the gear that each member of Them Crooked Vultures is using on tour. It's pretty cool, because none of them use "standard" stuff at all. On another TCV front, Spinner has a video with some backstage footage of the band members talking (well, Dave Grohl, mostly) about their first gig and being on SNL.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Cool new internet resources for musicians

I just found this article over at Reuters that lists several new web-based services aimed at helping independent musicians. The best part? They're all free. Free is such a nice price.

Fanbridge is another cool (and free) service not listed in the article that musicians might want to know about. It basically brings mailing list management for your fan base into the Internet era.

Good stuff abounds.

Korg KAOSSILATOR: Coolest Musical Toy For 2007

There has been a lot of cool high-tech musical gear released in 2007, but for my money, none is as cool as the new Korg Kaossilator. It's so new, Korg USA doesn't even have a page up for it yet. Korg UK does, though, because it's been out in the UK and Europe (and Japan, obv.) for a while before hitting the States.

Anyway, why all the love for the Kaossilator? Because it's probably the most fun new musical instrument of the year. In my book, fun can trump a lot of other factors. It's portable, battery powered, lets you play music and build loops by yourself, and can easily be integrated into your music rig for fun at home or live. Thanks to the XY touchpad interface, you don't have to know scales or play keyboard or anything to play it, either. It's the perfect starter musical instrument for a generation that grew up on video games, cell phones, the internet, and iPods. And for non-technophobic musicians, it's a toy that can keep you entertained and let you make music pretty much anywhere. Plus, it's really, really yellow.

There are several videos up on YouTube (they have all the best stuff over there), including a semi-professional product demo and some user stuff.

You can pre-order the Korg Kaossilator at Musician's Friend.

Stolen Thunder

I've been quiet for a few reasons. The first of which is that I wanted to leave the Internet Radio brouhaha at the top of my blog so anyone who came here would see it and (hopefully) respond. The second is that I was doing some research to put up a big, long post detailing exactly who and what SoundExchange is. A bit of investigative journalism, if you will.

In the course of that research, I found this post on Daily Kos, which pretty much took all the wind out of my sails. In just a few paragraphs Douglas Giles—a.k.a. DJ ProFusion—turns the heat lamps on SoundExchange and illuminates the entire situation Internet radio currently finds itself in.

So instead of listening to me ramble on for eight or nine paragraphs, you can just click over and read the article Save Internet Radio From Corporate Money Grab for yourself.