I recently picked up a new external hard drive (still using old-skool spinning drives, but I saw that SSD’s are now readily available, for a price) and I’m looking to not only organize the sprawling music collection, but add to it. A few nice Micahael Walden things just appeared on the Dime on the dime and there’s always amazing compilations from ParisDJs. The list goes on and on…
Marillion (pictured above) is betting that their fans will still shell out the bucks even though the ‘new’ record doesn’t have any new music. ‘Less Is More‘ (October 2) contains acoustic arrangements for older tracks – some favorites and some obscure. They’re emphasize that they really worked hard on doing something new with these songs. I’ve already placed my order.
Steve Hackett looks to get up off the mat after his ex wife Kim Poor metaphorically shattered his jaw with a lawsuit that could cost him his Genesis royalties. As a result of the hard times, this electric rock album, featuring hall-of-famer Chris Squire, had to be completed in Hackett’s apartment. ‘Out of the Tunnel’s Mouth‘ is available on October 5.
On October 27 we’re all going to be crushed by Transatlantic’s ‘Whirlwind.’ No word about touring yet, as bass player Pete Trewavas will be busy promoting Less is More with Marillion (see above). And you can decide for yourself whether it’s genius or a dick move to have the record as one track. this pretty much forces us all to buy the ‘bonus disc’, which has the rest of the songs and some covers. Of course, that bonus disc will, no doubt come at a premium.
You will notice that only the Transatlantic title is slated for a Tuesday release. Hackett’s record is due on a Monday, which is, I think, normal for UK releases. But the Marillion release on a Friday is just more proof that, no matter how many years you have in this business, traditional distribution rules don’t hold up for prog records – unless you’re Dream Theater.
What you see above is still, in my opinion, the best way to do this. Those pedals, in that order, with that amplifier, provide enough sonic options for me to do pretty much anything I want to with an electric guitar. There’ a lot I’m not capable of, in terms of both technique and technology, but right now my focus is on documenting what I can do, instead of encroaching into the territory of what I can’t. Quite simply, i want to be able to come home, plug a guitar into that set-up, and, should the moment so strike me, press the record button and have a document of that evening’s inspiration.
Now, of course I have the capacity to do just that with the present technology. Even if I don’t want to set up the computer and the A/D converter and Logic (or even GarageBand), I can just do like FBdN and record right to iPhone OS. Or I could use the old minidisc. I could even go right to an old cassette multi-track.
The problem is TIME.
Not that these things take time, but rather that I want to be able to take whatever I’m doing and bring it back into a digital audio workstation later. That’s no problem, unless there are going to be loops. And there are always loops. If a song sketch is off by even a tenth of a second, that means that after a minute, the deviation is 6 seconds – that’s not music, that’s chaos.
So the question now is: how can I get a master clock associated with an impromptu recording of a song sketch? Playing along with a metronome is not enough. Whatever device records the initial jam has to associate a bpm with that snippet, which can then control other music. I’m not sure this is possible.
The more sensible approach would be to take the impromptu performance as inspiration and then properly construct music around that, starting with the beat and locking in the time. Of course, this means recreating that moment of creativity in a very sterile setting. Much less fun and much more time consuming.
All of this would be a piece of cake if I (a) had no day job and (b) were fabulously wealthy.
I’m a fine one to talk. But since the admonishment from Dave Meros of Spock’s Beard, I’ve certainly done some thinking. Am I going to stop sharing music – No. This is something I’ve always done (long before the advent of intertubes) and it is one of the fundamental, moral, goods that we give each other gifts of music.
That being said, there are artists that are intensely deserving of our (my) financial support. To help celebrate an upcoming Marillion release, I did give them a few dollars and downloaded some items directly from their web store. That just makes me feel good – giving the money directly to the artist.
Over at Prosaic Paradise, I got the report from last weekend’s ProgDay down in Chapel Hill. Sipport takes many forms: buying the ticket or merch, pumping the keg or j.st chatting up the artists after the show. *jealous*
So, with that warm feeling, I’m going to enjoy some great music on this beautiful Sunday, and I hope you will do the same.
(I don’t know how I let this one slip by last month. For those of you to whom this is old news – sorry)
Poor old Steve Hackett. When he was in Genesis, he could never get enough of his ideas across to the other band members. One day, he threatened to quit, they mixed him out of the record, and went on to become multi-gazillionaires. Steve managed to maintain a lot of artistic integrity by keeping all his solo stuff in-house. in other words, no major labels were used to get his prodigious and extraordinary solo material to the streets.
And while said material is all pretty good (very good, in fact), old Steve has never gotten the kind of economic remuneration that has been showered on all four of his former bandmates Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford and Phil Collins, although it should be noted that Collins has three ex-wives.
And now, as Hackett approaches his 60th birthday, he’s being sued for everything he has by his ex-wife. According to the TimesOnline, Kim Poor is making a play for EVERYTHING – including Hackett’s share of his royalties from old Genesis music. Ouch!
Apparently things are so bad that Hackett is working on his new album in the living room of his flat. Double ouch!!
But even with all this adversity, his new record will still be coming out on October 5, and I’ll bet it will be ten times more amazing than anything we’ve heard from Tony Banks in the past ten years!
It takes a long weekend to make a short movie, see some great music, enjoy the country with narrow dogs, and turn congressional hearings into a nationally acclaimed opera. Let me explain.
Em is now back from her First Descents excursion. As predicted, this was an intense time and I have no doubt the reverberations will continue for quite some time to come while they’re being worked into her general psyche and identity. Basically, take about fourteen young adult cancer survivors to Jackson Wyoming (scene, coincidentally, of the Beckerantz honeymoon) and take them rock climbing, out of their comfort zone and let everybody feel alive in a way they never have before. The results are hard to put into words, especially for someone who wasn’t even there, but I’m sure she’ll be reporting at length on Seeemilyplay. But tonight, it’s all about iMovie. I’ve supplied this girl with what little knowledge I have and she’s running hog wild. The results are already tremendous, and she’s only up to about the three minute mark. Hopefully, by the end of this long weekend, I’ll link to an audio-visual document that will give you some idea of what she has experienced over the past week.
ProsaicParadise is soaking in the groovy sounds at ProgDay 2009 down in Chapel Hill. She’ll be seeing Ozric Tentacles and some other cool acts over two days. Kudos to her for making the trek in the name of great prog!
FBdN is in the country with his family and the greyhounds. Bucolic and calming pictures are already starting to emerge, and I urge you to check them out.
It’s Fringe Festival time here in Philadelphia and one of the local acts is an opera based on the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings and Alberto Gonzalez’s extraordinarily humorous performance. The thing itself was outrageous, but the The Gonzales Cantata is swiftly becoming a national craze, especially thanks to Rachel Maddow.
Aliette de Bodard is catching up on her Battlestar Galactica and has a few choice thoughts as she gets into season 4. This woman is an exceptional writer of sci-fi and fantasy and her career is just starting to take off, so it’s exciting to get her sincere thoughts on BSG and everything else. Her blog and fiction are highly recommended.
Finally, there is a great Dylan bootleg from July 5, 2009, that has just surfaced at T.U.B.E. There’s always great audience tapes of Bob’s shows, but this one is from the soundboard, which gives it a little more clarity. Great setlist, including my favorite from the new record, a lil ol’ blues number called Jolene.
Propellerheads Reason 4.0 continues to fascinate me. It is a synthesizer and a sequencer and it can do a fistful of other tasks, but it is not a DAW – digital audio workstation. It can’t record sound from a microphone (as far as I know) and it doesn’t want you to hook up a guitar to try and control it’s various sound generating faculties that way. And if you want to make a recording that uses Reason with live instruments (which is exactly what I’m trying to do), then you have to hook Reason up through a DAW (I use Apple Logic Eight) and that adds a layer of complication.
I have previously mentioned that I want to be able to use this software with the same ease and enjoyment that I bring to guitar, with all its effects, and pedals and signal processors. The problem has been that I’ve been hung up with the recording aspect and connecting Reason to Logic. For some reason (no pun intended), it has taken a little while to get my head around the aux channel strip and the way it doesn’t record onto the editing window of the DAW, but it’s still there nonetheless. These are important concepts for me to become familiar with, but I was not having the joy.
Last night I decided to move in a different direction. I started listening to some music in iTunes and, with the music still playing, I started reason, with the Axiom 25 keyboard attached, and just started to try and play along, fiddling to find the right sound in Reason. Then it hit me – this is how I learned how to play guitar! Not by looking at books or videos, but by putting on the music that I love and trying to imitate melody and tone as best I can. Now, the problem is that I don’t have any skills on keyboard/piano AND I’m playing a instrument that has 25 keys, instead of the preferred 88. But even with those issues, I still felt like I was able to move forward.
Until I tried to do something with drums. Reason was first recommended to me as a great source of loops and percussion potential. Now, I may be worse on a drum kit than I am on a piano, but I’m not above tapping pads to get something like a usable rhythm. And, Reason, like any sequencer, has a quantize function which puts the notes you play in the right spot. You still have to play the right notes. The problem is that the Axiom 25 doesn’t work for Reason’s drum computer. I don’t know why this is, but I’ve confirmed with some research that this controller is not going to let me do what I want to do in Reason.
So, what does this mean? Time to go shopping! If I can get an Akai MPD 24 or 32 for $100 – $125, I’m just going to go for it. Craigslist showed some potential for both items and they’re both supposed to work with Reason 4.0, although I may need some driver updates from Akai. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Zio – Demo 1 from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.
Glenn Marshall has designed generative/reactive video art for Peter Gabriel. That’s really all I need to know. And very soon, he’ll be doing the same thing on your iPhone. Technology * (sound +vision) = higher consciousness.
Notice Uncle Leo hiding behind the guitar in the picture above.
[audio:http://mpomy.com/Music/Powerless.mp3]Powerless – this is more musical microblogging, very much in the spirit of Hector & Achilles, but with better software. I’m not sure if it’s a better result. Anyway, the goal was to get both Guitar Rig and Reason running through Logic. That worked great, except I couldn’t quite figure out how to use the Logic instruments without triggering the Reason stuff. And the video tutorial I was working from sucked, so there was still a lot of trial and error. And Uncle Leo kept walking on the laptop – big surprise there.
So this is a pair of Dr Rex rhythms coming through Reason (first one then both patterns), acoustic piano from the Reason NN-19 sampler (but using reverb and chorus from Logic) and a Thor patch called Alan Turnig’s Dream, also through Reason.
Guitar was supplied by my old Travis Bean, still in need of some cosmetic repair work. Sadly, it was too late at night to run live out of the Lab Series amplifier, so I settled for a cheezy preset from Guitar Rig. You have to hand it too Native Instruments, even the feedback from the Bean’s high output humbuckers is faithfully modeled. Basically this is supposed to be a Vox AC-30 (2×12) with a bit of delay. I don’t like these digital models for guitar, but they are damned convenient, especially after hours.
All other sounds were played on the Axiom 25 keyboard, which had to have its first hard reset because when I started all but three of the keys were non-functional. Fortunately the reset solved that problem.
Hopefully there is decent volume. My old GarageBand efforts are usually pretty quiet. This may be quiet too because the meters on Logic weren’t peaking. To my ears, though, it sounds OK. I haven’t tried to automate any panning or really doing anything left-right at all. Sorry – no spacial dynamics this time. I try to learn that as I get more comfortable with the recording, mixing and mastering.
This was really just an exercise, but I’m very pleased about it’s faithfulness to the original musical microblogging concept from Fretbuzz.net – almost exactly one minute.
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If you are a regular reader of DailyKos, then you probably know of Bill in Portland Maine and his extremely entertaining and informative “Cheers and Jeers’ feature. Today, he is interviewing one of the regular contributors to the DailyKos community – Malacandra a/k/a Miles Kurland. He’s a web developer and designer with strong political feelings and, apparently, great taste in music:
What kind of music makes you feel invincible to the GOP horde?
Progressive Rock, of course! These days, it’d be the Decemberists. As luck would have it, they were doing a gig in Pittsburgh during Netroots Nation, just a few blocks away from the conference center. I had the unforgettable experience of seeing both a rousing speech by Howard Dean and a kick-ass Decemberists concert all in one evening.
Two great tastes that taste great together!
(via UK70sProgRock and it’s kick ass twitter feed)