Steampunk Stratocaster

Nice.

David Fiuczynski Demonstrating His Microtonal Guitars

This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time: David Fiuczynski shows off his fretless and microtonal guitars. Whatever amp he’s using sounds great, too.

Birotronics, Or: The Lesser-known Mellotron

Sacha sent me this link to an article in The Believer, a magazine to which I should have a subscription anyway. It’s about Dave Biro and the homebrew 8-track-based analog sampling keyboards he built for Rick Wakeman of Yes.

[The magical sound] was coming from Rick Wakeman, prog rock’s wizard — the guy even wore a glittering silver cape onstage — and the keyboard Wakeman was playing cost thirty-five hundred dollars new. Biro didn’t have anything near that, and his unemployment checks weren’t going to last forever.

But he could get nineteen automotive 8-track decks from the junkyard for twenty dollars each — and an old piano from a friend, pulling the keys out one by one — and he could stay up thirty-six hours at a time in his father’s garage, working and working — recording, splicing, wiring, cross-fading, figuring out the action of the board, grinding the ivory off the keys to glue in electrical contacts...

Also, don’t miss the sound samples of the Birotron and other wacky devices.

Zappa Gets the ‘Classic Albums’ Treatment

Hi all. Sorry I haven’t posted in forevs — work has been particularly busy lately, and also I am a lazy blob.

Brian pointed me at this fun-sounding goodie:

There is lots of footage of the band performing parts of several different songs live, as well as a generous amount of vintage interview material of the bright and talkative Zappa expounding upon his approach to music. Further, Dweezil demonstrates some particulars of Frank’s style on guitar, and Ruth Underwood gives a fascinating marimba demonstration to explain an aspect of Zappa’s compositional technique. Among the songs that get partially dissected are “I’m the Slime,” “Dinah-Moe Hum,” “Montana,” “Stink-Foot,” “St. Alfonzo’s Pankcake Breakfast” and “Cosmik Debris.” Did you know that Tina Turner and two other members of the Ikettes sang on “Zombie Woof”? I didn’t, but Dweezil isolates their track for us and then shows us how it fits into the whole of what is a very weird song. On another tune he shows us how Frank multed a horn and violin part on a single track to make a singular sound.

Currently listening to: “Dick Suffers is Furious With You” by Don Caballero

For Audiophiles

Here’ a handy form you can fill out when dealing with magically-thinking audiophiles:

All these questions about the possibility of interference to the SB3 from stoves, microwave ovens, cell phones, vibrating toys, etc., has me wondering if it is possible for the titanium implant and porcelain crown in my skull to cause interference that would affect the sound of my SB3. I mean, maybe the saliva in my mouth, the electrolyte that is my blood, and the titanium metal and mercury-amalgam fillings could set up a sort of battery and the current could generate a magnetic field.

Any ideas if this is something I should worry about?

You claim that an

( ) audible
( ) measurable
(X) hypothetical

improvement in sound quality can be attained by:

( ) upsampling
( ) increasing word size
( ) vibration dampening
( ) bi-wiring
( ) replacing the external power supply
( ) using a different lossless format
( ) decompressing on the server
(X) removing bits of metal from skull
( ) using ethernet instead of wireless

Vernon Reid Eases the Pain

Here are some videos of a jam with Vernon Reid, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and Calvin Weston on drums. Thanks Al!



Part 2:

Evil Music Influencing our Children!

A child stabs a duck with a pencil

Was it... The Residents?!

Build Your Own Classic Synth

The x0xb0x is a homebrew synth/sequencer kit from Limor, an engineer from the MIT Media Lab. (Fun fact: The design of the front page of her site is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.)

Photos of the x0xb0x on Flickr

Currently listening to: Headhunters, Survival of the Fittest (with Blackbird McKnight!)

God Hates the Guitar

Apparently, the Pope’s aesthetic sensibilities are just as medieval as his politics and beliefs:

ROME - Pope Benedict XVI has called for an end to electric guitars and modern music being played in church and demanded a return to traditional choirs and Gregorian chants.

...

“It is possible to modernize holy music,” he said at a concert conducted by the director of music at the Sistine Chapel, Domenico Bartolucci. “But it should not happen outside the traditional path of Gregorian chants or sacred polyphonic choral music.”

“Benedict XVI’s supporters argue that the music played during Mass is a vital part of the communion between worshippers and God” — which is, of course, precisely why the music should respond to and interact with modern culture in an other than dictatorial way. Imagine if a religious leader suggested taking gospel music out of African-American churches: unthinkable, absurd, and offensive.

Bunnie on Digital (and Analog) Technology

Electrical (and software) engineering is the platform on which modern music stands: electronic instruments, audio software, computer hardware, radio, and computer networks are all applications of electrical engineering and digital signal processing. Therefore, I think it’s handy for music makers and listeners to know a few things about it.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang is just the person to help us out. He’s got a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, is a technical advisor for Make magazine, created the Chumby hackable digital toy, and cracks computer hardware security for fun on weekends.

He has a pair of blog posts about how you can build your own analog-to-digital converter out of cheap, general-purpose parts. (Note: an FPGA is a “field-programmable gate array”, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a chip you can redesign on the fly. You can feed it a new design specification, and it will change its behavior from a USB controller to a digital radio receiver to whatever you want. As such, it’s perfect for making an A/D converter. Another cool use of FPGAs is the Universal Software Radio Peripheral, which you can use with GNU Radio, a free software-based radio system.)

One interesting thing from the theory part of the article is that, as bunnie says, “digital technology is on the verge of coming out of the analog closet” (emphasis added):

At very high signal speeds or densities, there is an important energy-time trade-off that digital signal designers must consider. The faster/denser you send/store bits, the less energy and time are available to interpret the information. In fact, the term Bit Error Rate (BER) is starting to appear more and more in product literature. BERs are typically specified in terms of expected failures per bits transmitted. For example, a brand-name hard drive today has a non-recoverable error rate of 1 per 1014 bits—in other words, once every 12,500 Gbytes transferred. This state of the art hard drive today stores 500 Gbytes of data. Chew on this: if you were to read data off of this drive continuously, you should expect an unrecoverable bit error just once every 25 times through the entire drive’s contents. Another way of looking at this is one in 25 hard drives performing this experiment should expect a bit error after one complete beginning to end read pass. Feel worried about the integrity of your data yet? Don’t look now. Hard drives encode data so densely that quite often there is insufficient energy stored in a bit to detect the bit on its own, so hard drives use Partial Response, Maximum Likelihood (PRML) techniques to recover your data. In other words, the hard drive controller looks at a sequence of sampled data points and tries to guess at what set of intended bits might have generated a particular response signature. This technique is combined with others, such as error correction techniques (in itself a fascinating subject), to achieve the intended theoretical bit error rates. Have valuable data? Become a believer in back-ups. Our robust digital complacency is starting to ooze back into the analog days of pops, clicks and hiss. Bit errors are not confined to storage, either. Many high-speed serial links are specified to perform at BER’s as low as one error per 1012 bits. While error-free enough for a single user to tolerate, these error rates stack on top of each other as you build more complex systems with more links in them, to the point where managing error rates and component failures is one of the biggest headaches facing server and supercomputer makers today.

Kinky!

Currently listening to: Leg End by Henry Cow

Outsound Presents Jim Ryan, 7 and 8 April

The folks at Outsound are holding two shows of Jim Ryan’s Forward Energy Trio, a new/free/out jazz group, in Oakland on Saturday the 7th and in San Francisco on Sunday the 8th.

MP3 samples of the Oakland version of the trio and of the Portland version are available.

Here’s the info:

Saturday April 7th, 2007
Jim Ryan’s FE3 Oakland Performance
With Scott R Looney, piano & Stephen Flinn, drums
1510 Performance Space
1510 8th St. Oakland CA
8pm
Also performing Dave Sewelson and Friends Jam [bring your axe and participate in a free jazz jam session]

Sunday, April 8th, 2007
Jim Ryan’s FE3 Portland performance
With Bob Jones, double bass & Andrew Wilshusen, drums (OR)
SIMM Music Series
116 9th St. @ Mission, San Francisco, CA
7:30pm $10, $8, $5
AND SBTG-Quartet David Sewelson sax (NY) / Carolyn Torrente sax/ Antony Bichon bass / Nicolai Gvatua drums

Steve Albini, Propellerhead

Rattlin' around in there like dried beans!

Sage Advice From Dick Dale: Run Screaming From Record Companies

In this interview, the legendary Dick Dale tells it like it is, Steve Albini-style.

Don’t sign with a label, don’t sign with a record company; because the minute you sign you will lose all the rights to your music. And you will never see a dime. Build up your following by continuously playing; save up your money and record your own stuff on your own CDs, and learn to market yourself.

He goes on to explain the Ani Difranco business plan quite persuasively. “And that’s the reason why the system hates Dick Dale.”

Currently listening to: “Ouch” from Meg Nem Sa by Hilmar Jensson

Math Metal: Textures

I found this cool math metal band, Textures. Elements of Meshuggah, Dream Theater, Pantera, Converge.

Formed in 2001, TEXTURES – Jacobs, guitarist Bart Hennephof, drummer Stef Broks, bassist Dennis Aarts, synth maestro Richard Rietdijk and then vocalist Pieter Verpaalen – decided that the only way to truly capture their musical manifesto was to tackle every element of creating an album themselves – from production through to artwork.

Kill the Pimps

Here's a great summary of why the current middlemen between musicians and listeners are deservedly doomed: "How I Became a Music Pirate".

As dubious as it is to denigrate music sharers as "pirates", it's just as goofy to adopt it as a term of pride (ironic or otherwise). Technology, ethics, law, and business models are crazy unaligned right now, but "pirate", even as a denial, allows the moribund middlemen the rhetorical floor. There's nothing wrong with trying before you buy or sharing with friends. Like it? Be honest and buy the t-shirt, go to the show, subscribe to eMusic and (re-)download it, give the musician free advertising on your blog. But whatever you do, kill the pimps!

Currently listening to: "Tabula Rasa: Silentium" and "Collage über Bach: Toccata" by Arvo Pärt. The "Sarabande" is heavy as hell!@$#

Kris Delmhorst Live in San Francisco, 24 March

I met the very cool Kris Delmhorst the other day when I sold her one of my guitar amplifiers. She's playing at the Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco this Saturday, 24 March, with Ana Egge.

Kris Delmhorst at eMusic, and sample song "Weathervane".

Cory Doctorow on the Affordances of Networked Computers

Cory has a new article explaining that it's not the low resolution of screens that keep us from reading e-books, rather it's the nature of the computer (and its applications) that the screen is hooked up to:

A super-sharp, super-portable screen would be used to read all day long, but most of us won't spend most of our time reading anything recognizable as a book on them.

Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically pre-determined. The technology of the LP demanded artwork to differentiate one package from the next. The length was set by the groove density of the pressing plants and playback apparatus. The dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea of the 40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying artwork. Musicians were encouraged to create works that would be enjoyed as a unitary whole for a protracted period — think of Dark Side of the Moon, or Sgt. Pepper's.

No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to the single, as represented by an individual MP3, and then subdivisible into snippets like ringtones and samples. When recording artists demand that their works be considered as a whole — like when Radiohead insisted that the iTunes Music Store sell their whole album as a single, indivisible file that you would have to listen to all the way through — they sound like cranky throwbacks.

...

The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.

I'd try to rebut Cory, because I do think he's wrong, but I wrote this post halfway through reading his article and edited it while watching a movie.

Sun Ra on David Sanborn's TV show in 1990

Al Vorse sends us this delightful morsel: "A defining moment for me as a kid."

Top 10 Corporate Moments in Rock

It's hard to order these by importance or egregiousness or flabbergastage or whatev, because they are all so brutally heinous. For me, the John Fogerty and DJ Dangermouse episodes are particularly septic. Since I used to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you might expect me to be the most pissed about the Sony rootkit fiasco. But that was really just a particularly naked example of the sloth and contempt for fans the record companies are founded on -- and as such, mostly just funny.

Latest RIAA Perversion

From today's New York Times Magazine: DJs Drama and Don Cannon were arrested last month not for actual crimes, but for making mix tapes.

But Drama and Cannon's studio was not a bootlegging plant; it was a place where successful new hip-hop CDs were regularly produced and distributed. Drama and Cannon are part of a well-regarded D.J. collective called the Aphilliates. Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.

[...]

Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.