Of Recordings

I was flipping through some pornography the other day, admiring some pretty guitars.  Specifically, the maple-top Taylor T5 caught my eye.  Of course, Grl’s 614CE is not exactly an eyesore either.  Then I wondered: what gear do I have that’s nice to look at?  The yellow-cone KRKs?  The padKontrol?  I love my kit, but it’s not pretty.

Guitarists can find an axe with any body shape, color, finish, and wood they like.  Synthesizers, on the other hand, tend to look functional at best and butt-ugly at worst.

Sonically speaking, classics like the MS-20 or DX-7 were revolutionary.  Visually, they look more like appliances than instruments.  I would love to get my hands on an ARP Odyssey, but it’s pretty unattractive.  At least oddities like the Wasp and the Fizmo are so ugly they’re cute.

What synths are beautiful?  Pics and ramblings after the jump ..

(more…)

I just got back from a trip for Day Job.  Some notes:

• The guy next to me on the flight out was definitely cranking House of Pain on his iPod.
• The iPod game Phase is a great way to pass time on a plane.  On this more later.
• You find Kaosillators where you least expect them.
• If you download a bunch of podcasts before a flight, you should make sure you have the “sync podcasts to my iPod” button turned on.
• I greatly enjoyed guitar goddess Kaki King’s new-to-me record Dreaming Of Revenge.  30-second review: “Pull Me Out Alive” has the best hook; “Montreal” has the best guitar work; “Saving Days In A Frozen Head” has the best line; and “Can Anyone Who Has Heard This Music Really Be A Bad Person?” has the best title.
• If you have time to kill in a major American airport, and you want to meet some interesting people, find a bar showing a soccer game.

Music Thing created a cool Google map of music shops around the world– you know, actual buildings where you can walk in to look at and play with instruments.  It’s an open map, so you’re free to add your favorite joint.  I was flattered that I had the chance to add Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center to the map.

If you fancy yourself a musician and live anywhere in the mid-Atlantic USA, you need to make the pilgrimage to Chuck’s. It’s massive, occupying four ugly buildings in an ugly strip mall in ugly suburban Maryland.  The selection is huge and the staff are phenomenal.  I was there with my dad one time; he was looking for a guitar stand, which seemed like a good enough excuse to make the trip.  I think this was around Christmas time, and the place was jam packed with people.  But the clerk who helped him must have spent ten solid minutes asking about his guitar, comparing different models, showing him how they folded up, like he was Bob Dylan.

Happily, this is not one of those “please support this great independent joint or it might disappear” rants.  Despite operating out of a single location, insiders tell me Chuck’s is the only music retailer in the US with enough clout to compete with Guitar Center on price.

The Washington Post had a great feature on Chuck’s a few years back that captures the feel nicely.

Have you been to Chuck’s?  Share your love below.

In the market for an Oberheim OB-Xa?  Well, now’s your chance to have Debbie Gibson’s.

“Remix” means two completely different things:

1. To mix down a song for the second time.

2. To make a new work by creatively combining elements of a different song.

Unfortunately, it’s not even always clear from context what you mean.  I propose we coin a new term for one of the definitions.  Suggestions?

Warning: serious geekery follows.

I don’t actually use CDs any more.  I still have piles of them, and I even buy new ones from time to time, but they’re basically decorations.  I pretty much rip them once and put them away.  Unfortunately, my equipment has not kept up, and I don’t really have a good solution for listening to digital music away from my desk.  At the moment my solution is to plug my iPod into the receiver, but that is less than ideal.

I would like a solution that lets me have a single collection of music that I can access from multiple points in my house over the network.  A few candidates I’ve found are:

• The Mvix.  You put a hard disk inside, and then it acts as a music and video player with built in wireless and wireful networking.
• The Neuros.  Similar to the Mvix, but more video-oriented.  Also, no wireless and you must add an external hard drive.
• The Linn (no relation to Roger) Sneaky Music DS (no relation to Nintendo).  Very cute, and has the power amp built in (just add speakers).  But it’s comically expensive.

All three are built on open-source parts, which means they ought to be hackable, which is nice.  The Mvix is the frontrunner.  But at the moment I am leaning towards building a small, quiet mini-ITX computer in an attractive case and running mythTV or something similar.  It would run slightly more than a Mvix, but I like building stuff.

5. Russian Linesman

4. Low Technicians

3. Dan Deacon

2. The Hacker

1. The Architect

Trivia: The original “Russian linesman” was actually Azerbaijani.

Minimalmusic.org reports that someone stole Matthew Dear’s removable hard drive– in the middle of his set.

Stealing a musician’s instrument (and if you perform with a laptop, that’s your instrument) is a particularly galling form of theft because the loss to the performer is many times greater than the gain to the thief.  A USB hard disk costs about $200, while the data on there probably represented hundreds of hours of work.  Both parties would have been better off if the thief took $300 out of Dear’s wallet instead.

In one of my Beatport diatribes last week, I mentioned that I have a hard time DJing in Live. I’ve been puzzling over why. Ignore for the moment all the cool effects and re-arrangement possibilities that Live offers. Since Live keeps everything tempo-synced, once I’ve warped my tracks, I should be able to make the exact same mix I do on my decks with less effort. Right?

But it hasn’t worked out that way. My Live mixes come out sort of feeble.

I recently thought of a simple explanation: I don’t know my digital dance music nearly as well as I know my vinyl. While doing the actual beatmatching, I’m forced to listen fairly closely to both records. I also tend to let them play together for a while after the beats are aligned but before actually starting the transition. And beatmatching is something that you have to practice a bit, so I’m doing this over and over. In the process, I internalize the structure of the tracks and learn where transitions and breaks are. And that is the key to making two tracks flow together, not crossfaders or EQs.

If that’s the case, the solution is pretty simple: I just need to listen to all my digital dance tracks, all the way through, with an attentive ear. It may seem odd that I haven’t done this already, but it can be kind of weird to listen to house or techno songs straight through outside of a mix.

5. Sydney Blu

4. Rktic

3. Boards of Canada

2. Telefon Tel Aviv

1. Venetian Snares

Honorable mention: Metro Area

Edit: Lifetime achievement award: Afrika Bambaataa.  (Thanks Darius.)

This list was surprisingly difficult to assemble.