music

Lists of Note: Thelonious Monk’s Advice

Lists of Note: Thelonious Monk’s Advice:

  • Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.
  • Pat your foot & sing the melody in your head, when you play.
  • Don’t play the piano part, i’m playing that. don’t listen to me. I’m supposed to be accompanying you!
  • Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. what you don’t play can be more important that what you do.
  • A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
  • When you’re swinging, swing some more!
  • You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to a drummer who didn’t want to solo).
  • Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
  • They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.

[A picked a few faces. Can’t have enough Monk. Can. Not.]

Apple’s iTunes Match: The First Royalties Are In

Apple’s iTunes Match (aka iMatch): The First Royalties Are In | TuneCorner Music Blog:

The music industry needs innovation. Services like iMatch, Spotify, Simfy, Deezer and others are bringing that innovation—it will take some time to learn which are the ones consumers want.  But in the interim, seeing an additional $10,000+ appear out of the thin air for TuneCore Artists by people just listening to songs they already own is amazing!

[Hmmm.]

Rediscovering the Beatles

Rediscovering the Beatles:

Paul McCartney was, of all the Beatles, the pure songman. He wrote music because he loved music. He really didn’t want to do anything else. For him, being a Beatle was the best deal in the world.

Now that probably still is a gross approximation of who McCartney is. But without the net, without Wikipedia, I didn’t even have that much to go on. Music is a story, like every other human art. It’s the story of one person laid out in a way that others can understand it. A song is saying here I am and this is what I say. Reading the story of the story gives me more to think, and imagine about.

I guess I just wanted to say that all along we had the idea that Lennon was the deep Beatle, and McCartney was somehow the silly one. But I think we got it wrong. As he sang later, there’s nothing wrong with a silly love song. Popular music is popular for a reason, because it engages us in a playful way that makes us feel good. Yes we feel a little silly when this point is touched. But that’s kind of nice too.

[It is also “popular” because something about that story, told that way, at that time, reaches a lot of people. It doesn’t have to be serious, or a narrowly defined “love” song. But there’s is some love or truth it will expose in a way that resonates widely. A tricky prospect on a lot of levels.]

Source: Scripting News

Neil Young: Piracy is the new radio

Neil Young was working with Apple on super high-def music format:

Young spoke at length about the lack of quality in today’s mainstream digital music formats, arguing that the “low-res world” of MP3s provide just 5% of the data present in the original studio recordings, paling in comparison to the quality of vinyl records back in the 70’s.

[If you watch the video, Neil Young said “Piracy is the new radio”. Interesting to hear from someone like him. I’ve long felt the same way since must of us toil in obscurity, and care more about being heard at all than the nonexistent lost sales. The fidelity thang has been long time issue for him, he’ cared about this as long as I can recall. I hope Apple doesn’t drop work on this altogether.]

‘The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center’

‘The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center’:

Starting in the mid-1930s, when he made his first field recordings in the South,  Lomax was the foremost music folklorist in the United States. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and much of what Americans have learned about folk and traditional music stems from his efforts, which were also directly responsible for the folk music and skiffle booms in the United States and Britain that shaped the pop-music revolution of the 1960s and beyond.

Lomax worked both in academic and popular circles, and increased awareness of traditional music by doing radio and television programs, organizing concerts and festivals, and writing books, articles and essays prodigiously. At a time when there was a strict divide between high and low in American culture, and Afro-American and hillbilly music were especially scorned, Lomax argued that such vernacular styles were America’s greatest contribution to music.

[Listen to a few cuts here. Great that all this material will be made available.]

Value | The Cynical Musician

Value | The Cynical Musician:

Google’s greatest fear, however, is that the content that draws the biggest audiences might be placed beyond its reach. It has seen this happen with Facebook. That’s why Google lobbies against copyright enforcement and for and “open internet” – with the special Googley meaning that “open” has here. It doesn’t mean open, as in “open market”(where anyone can set up shop, for fun or profit), it means open as in “you cannot shut Google out”.

[snip -Ed]

Apple, on the other hand, as Andrew points out: “hasn’t spent one cent on lobbying against intellectual property”.

Apple doesn’t need other people’s property to make money. For Apple, consumers aren’t the means to an end. They are the end. Apple creates valuable consumer products and charges a pretty penny for them. Guess what? People are buying. Not just the “atoms” (devices) either; the iTunes Music and App stores are doing pretty well, too. Apple sees value in intellectual property and is prepared to pay for it in order to sell it to its customers, increasing the value of its devices in the process. Apple’s thoughts are for the consumer and how it can provide the greatest value, that it will then charge for. Unlike Google, it has no interest in decreasing the perception of value, because that would mean that it would need to charge less. To Google, the value of what it provides is simply in how many eyeballs it gets. It doesn’t need to be great, just good enough.

[I don’t agree with everything here but there are lots of good points and even more in the comments. You can argue the various monitory theories, and for example Apple does make a fortune by owning its markets (iTunes, App Stores, iBooks, etc.) which do you require other people’s property. The bottom line, is that it is not easy to convince a large group of people that your art is valuable. It’s gonna take hard work and not a small amount of luck.]

The other side of SOPA

Put Up or Shut The F… Up | The Cynical Musician:

Supposedly the tech crowd are some of the smartest people on this planet. I mean, they’ve come up with the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, a site where I can broadcast myself and a way for me to find what I’m looking for on the web, that’s not evil at all. Surely, figuring out a way how we can stop unprincipled, opportunistic arsewipes making money from creators’ work without paying them, while at the same time keeping the Internet secure and assuring that people’s free speech rights aren’t abridged, isn’t beyond the capabilities of those bright minds. I’m not asking for the impossible: I just want to see a situation where it is very hard to run a pirate site and the chances of getting caught and punished when doing so are considerable. I want to see piracy being a bad business to go into.

[I haven’t heard about this side of the argument from the tech people… it’s a problem and a half.]

How does jazz work?

How does jazz work? :

Jazz is harder to understand now than it was back in the 40s and 50s because the repertoire is based around songs that were popular then but are esoteric now. Miles’ repertoire in the fifties and early sixties would have mostly been as familiar to his audience as “Prince.” Listeners would have been able to mentally sing along to just about everything, making all of Miles’ intellectual abstractions easier to parse. Jazz was still commercial music then, and when jazz musicians wrote their own tunes, they had a tendency to be as melodic and catchy as showtunes and standards — Miles’ own compositions of the period, like “So What” and “All Blues,” are about as catchy and hooky as music gets.

If you want to listen to jazz now, you’re at a big disadvantage. Without knowing all those pop standards and showtunes, the improvisation based on them will just sound like random strings of notes. I had a much easier time getting into jazz through tunes like “So What” than through adaptations of standards. Contemporary musicians are playing abstractions of references to abstractions to references to tunes that were popular seventy years ago. It’s left to the listener to supply a ton of historical context. The best way to approach the music is to start on familiar territory with a tune you know and like, and check out how different artists approach it. Miles and Coltrane are great people to investigate, because they liked playing corny pop songs that are still in wide circulation, and because nearly everything they did was so awesome.

[This was an interesting explanation, and not a bad one either. It seems to miss the essence for me though. It’s about the technique of playing standards which is not all of jazz, and barely mentions in passing the communication, composition, and discussion that is jazz. I’m not sure if an explanation like this does a disservice when it fails to scope the discussion. Where does “free jazz” or harmolodics or “Sheets of Sound” Coltrane fit? Sticking to Miles for a second, where does Bitches Brew fit into this explanation? Never mind that an example like Miles’ recording of Time after Time might have provided a somewhat more contemporary example.]

Peter Frampton Reunited With ‘Best Guitar’ After 31 Years – NYTimes.com

Peter Frampton Reunited With ‘Best Guitar’ After 31 Years – NYTimes.com:

It turns out the guitar did not burn up in November 1980 when a cargo plane crashed on takeoff in Caracas, Venezuela, on its way to Panama, where Mr. Frampton was to perform. Instead someone plucked it from the burning wreckage and later sold it to a musician on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao.

The guitar was returned to Mr. Frampton in Nashville last month after a two-year negotiation involving the local musician who had the guitar, a customs agent who repairs guitars in his spare time, a diehard Frampton fan in the Netherlands and the head of the island’s tourist board.

[Crazy. And interesting that it still feels like “home” to him.]

iPhone apps to tune your instrument

One of my teachers used to say (minus a lot of removed swear words) If it ain’t in tune, it ain’t nothin’. With that in mind, two favorite tuners for the iPhone:

iStrobosoft by Peterson recreates their great tuner which used a strobe light and a spinning wheel to create a great harmonically rich visual display. This iPhone app is an awesome recreation and works superbly, giving you both fine and gross indicators as well as that awesome harmonic stack. You can calibrate it for accuracy, it supports capos and dropped tunings and other reference pitches, has a noise filter, an input boost, and some display settings.

The other is the polytune from tc electronic. Aimed at guitar players, it allows you to tune all six strings at once, a quick strum is all you need. Start fine tuning one string and the display switches to a finer display along with the pitch. It allows for drop tunings, a range of reference pitch (lots of folks don’t use 440 as the reference) and has a setting for bass players as well. there’s a couple of display settings for good measure.

Both of these guys support the mic on a phone so tuning an acoustic guitar only requires a somewhat quiet room.

Both are recommended and work really well. It’s great to have a such great tuners with me all the time.

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