Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Tinarowen cool intro


powered by ODEO


Tinariwen Web Site
Tinarowen is a super cool band that plays "Mali blues" in the vain of artists such as Ali Farke Toure and Lobi Troure.
The guitars are often tuned to open G tuning (gadgbd) and the music is usually fairly simple structurally, yet often times extremely hypnotic. Check out this brief example of one of their tunes, sorry I don't know the name of it, it's from a mix Tinarowen mix tape a freind gave to me.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The good ole'cell phoneless days

I decided to see how many people were on cellphones while taking my 10 minute walk to class. I decided to count the 1st 5 females and 1st 5 males. Out of the females that I walked by, 4 we're on their phones. Out of the 5 males, 1 was on his cellphone. It makes me miss the 80s because no one had cellphones then. I don't know why it irritates me, it just does. People were less oblivious to their surroundings and less likely to be tangled up in a pointless conversation while walking to wherever they're going. Maybe the conversation is meaningful and important, but I highly doubt it in almost every case. At least the person on the phone looks like they have something they need to talk about and someone to listen.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

2 great songs by Janes Addiction

I've got my negativity band bashing out of my system with the blog a few days ago. I will now begin a never ending series of positivity blogs entitled: "2 great songs by (artist)"
It will name 2 great songs by a particular artist and breifly, or maybe not so briefly, explain why I think they are great songs. My first entry is 2 great songs by Jane's Addiction. The first one is "Stop" off of " Ritual de lo habitual" 1990 I think. For me this song captures that fear in the back of my mind that I have had since I was about in 7th grade when I was told by someone that the USA and Russia have enough bombs to blow up the world many times over. In 8th grade in a political Science class we saw a film called "Fail Safe"
about the US accidentally dropping a nuke on Moscow, and them retaliating by sending a nuke to New York. From that day I could never get it out of my mind. It didn't leave me numb or anything but is was an unwaivering fear that I lived with. I would always have nightmares of walking outside and seeing a mushroom cloud coming from the direction of the Minneapolis skyline which was about 15 miles from my house at the time. I would hear a voice screaming, "France did it" Anyway to make a short story long, the song "Stop" encompasses that feeling of seeing the world heading in a direction where almost no one wants it to go and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it. Well maybe there is we just haven't figured it out yet. Luckily most of us aren't curled up in the fetal position in the corner of a room in a mental ward weeping "The End is near" So go on with your life and basically just don't be an asshole, you know like those EnRon ceo types. Anyway, back to the song, here are a couple lines in the song that are most memoreable for me... "Save the complaints for party conversation. The world is loaded. It's lit to pop and nobody is gunna stop"
and during the trippy slow part, my favorite line..."One come a day the water will run no man will stand for things that he had done, hurrah!! And the water will run"
The other great song is off of "Nothing's Shocking" called "Ocean size" I won't go into detail as much about this one, but I love the lyrics and what it symbolizes...
"Wish I was Ocean size, they cannot move you man no one tries" Anyway, that's enough for now.

Janes Addiction Web Site

Friday, October 13, 2006

Pop music at an all time low, thanks Clear Channel

I told myself I was going to avoid being negative and or cynical about information in my blogs but I can't help it, I have to vent. A theory has been forming in my brain lately and it goes something like this. Nirvana in my opinion was the most important band in terms of popping the hair metal band bubble of the late 80s. It had become so ridiculous by 1990 with bands like Cinderella, Europe, Sherrif, etc etc that it had become painfulfully obvious that something had to give, and it gave thank god!!
Nirvana was not however the only band to help put this metal pop hairband glam fake predictable horridness out of it's misery. Bands like Jane's Addiction, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden were all important factors in the hair metal demise.
This brings me to my theory, I believe we are now living in an era of equally pointless, predictable, unimportant, faceless, derivitive bands that sound like regurgitated corporate made to appeal to the mass insipid consumer pallette.
I really do not wish to offend anyone but I can't sugarcoat this. Bands like Knickelback, 3 Doors down, and Hinder are among the bands I'm talking about.
This music is not about chemistry, or creativite musical ideas or great lyrics. It's not about well crafted songs either. It's about music created for the sole purpose of following a sellable musical formula that will appeal to the masses and sell tons of records. For instance, the"new" Jon Bon Jovi? What is that? Have you heard any of it? It sounds like Brooks and Dunn or something. I could go on and on about this.
I'm just hoping that someone comes along to burst this "Wimp Grunge" or whatever you want to call it bubble. Something has to give. I'm not confident that it will though. It just seems that the masses are so clueless when it comes to music. One ray of hope though, of all the 57 kids in Central MN School of rock this year ages 11-18, not one of the bands wanted to do any Knickelback or Hinder. The thing is there are so many amazing current bands that are out there, they just never get played on Clear Channel radio. AHA!! Maybe that's it!! Clear Channel, it's all their fault. Just do yourself a favor and go check out some Modest Mouse or Radiohead. Two of the many bands that still make great music and write great songs in my humble opinion. If you're a big fan of any of the bands I dissed, I sincerely apologize.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

file size consideration & a good mix

When mixing music it's almost crucial that the listener/mixer is hearing the mix from multilple point of views. For example...
(1)Big stereo hi fi speakers.(2) Most importantly, reliable, true, unbiased, near fields like my favorite's, Yamaha NS 10s. (3)Last but not least, lo fi speakers via boombox or anything that's crappy that can be hooked into your current system. The listener should be able to toggle between these options, this way you can come close to covering the extremes in what is available in audio quality, from lo-fi to hi-fi, and keeping it as real as possible.
I feel the same theory should be taken into consideration when posting stuff on the internet...
Assume that what you want to make available can be accessed by anyone in some way shape or form.
Think about the person that has a weak pre-2000 computer. Can they access at least part of it? Is it impossible? Is there anything you can do to compress the space of the file so it will be easier to open on an old pc?

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Kill Rock Stars

I was very curious and really wanted to hear some of these, but no luck. Hopefully by the end of class today I will know what I need to do to check this stuff out.

Kill Rock Stars

SCSU Podcast Resources

This is a local site which is a good guide to local podcast resources.
Once again had trouble getting anything to play that I checked out. Hope to get this cleared up in class.

SCSU Podcast
SCSU Podcast Resources

Monday, October 02, 2006

via podcast.net

I was having trouble finding anything that would play, this loaded and played. I can't really get into music that literally screams with a bleeding heart, "the end is soon. what about the people that are starving and dying in the wars funded by giant corporate greed etc, etc." Art/Poetry/Music says much more to me if it doesn't simply restate the obvious. Leave a little to the imagination please. This is cool though, this is what I want to be able to do, as far as broadcasting live from a location.

gallery podcast

Neil Podcast

After reading up a bit on the subject, through a yahoo site, the first podcast I decided to check out was from my favorite songwriter, Neil Young


Neil Young

What I want to be able to do

What I want to be able to do by the time this class is over in December is this:

1) Be able to have every song I've ever written and recorded available on this blog site so anyone could at anytime click on the song title and hear the song, and download for free any song they want. If there is a way so that when they click on the song, the lyrics automatically appear as the song starts to play, that would be super cool. I know this would take a lot of work, but it's something I want to do. It would be cool if somewhere on my website,
Hazzy web site You could automatically link to this blog so I could put something like, "Hear my music" and click on it and it would bring you there. I'm still pretty clueless but hope to become progressivly less clueless as the weeks pass.

2) I would also like to be able to know how to do a live podcast so that if I'm doing an upcoming solo show, anyone in the world could watch and hear it live. I have no idea at this point how to go about this, but I hope to learn how, if it's possible and I'm sure it is. If anyone has any advice I would appreiate it.

This is really a cool class and I feel really fortunate that there are only 4 kids in the class. This is my final semester at St Cloud State, consisting of 2 classes. The history of R&R, the largest class I have ever had w over 450 students and this class, the smallest class I have ever had. That's it for now.