Aging Rockers

“Epic Free Synth Frolic” via Discchord

DJ Mahssa set at intercontinental psychedelic dance party, Sud Basel, 2/24/2012 by Dispokino on Mixcloud

Presented by Diskopino
More by DJ Mahssa

One Day on Earth the music video – by Cut Chemist from One Day on Earth on Vimeo.

Rare sighting: Kizzy in studio. She is only welcome when she remembers not to scratch the fabric grill on the face of the amp she’s sitting on.

The discussion, for me, began on February 10, 2012, with Chip Boaz’s post on the IOS Music and You blog, 10 Answers to the Question Why Make Music On an iPad or iPhone? Ten days later, Chip follows up with The Blurry Line Between Professional And Amateur Music Production On The iPhone And iPad. These thoughts simmer in the IOS audio community for a month and then Synthhead at Synthtopia weighs in with Is Making Music On iOS Really ‘A Bag Of Hurt’?

At this point we’re off to the races as commentary ping pongs between various blogs and Synthtopia. The subject matter of making music on IOS devices soon loses its center, fragments, moves off to replay calcified pro-am non-controversies. Still, the interesting concerns of this new-fangled community get a fascinating airing.

I don’t have any enlightening thoughts on this flurry of concerns. I’m too long in the tooth. As a music maker or sound artist, you gravitate to utilize the tools you resonate to. Early adapters are always in retrospect seen as the vanguard of the future’s conventions.

Workflow does suck on an iPad, yet you can’t manipulate by touch the screen of a laptop. In this latter, touching, respect, a desktop or laptop computer doesn’t possess any workflow at all.

Portability isn’t a big advantage for me in my own approach, so, to me the wonderful audio capabilities of the iPad are wed to the unsurpassed possibilities inherent in my static, studio set-up based in a laptop and DAW and the accoutrements. Right now I’m running right out of the iPad’s 3.5mm jack into a USB interface and into Logic and it sounds fine.

Does it sound free of a slight, barely perceptible, noise? No. Shall I gate or otherwise mitigate this noise.

Yeah.

Someday touching for sound will be so mainstream that the touch brethren will no doubt decry the eye-activated renegades.

Full Movie

LAST SHOP STANDING – RICHARD HAWLEY from Record Store Day on Vimeo.

Record Store Day

Week before last I was browsing through the collection of compact discs at Lakewood Public Library and a patron is doing the same a few rows over. She was probably forty-something, and she turns to me and tells me, “I remember vinyl and how good it sounds.”

Not being sentimental–anymore–about vinyl, I responded, “Yeah, but then it gets played a lot and worn down and scratchy.”

She had the last word, “Even then it sounds better.”

I thought to myself, ‘No, worn out records don’t sound better.’

I think I know, I possess many thousands of worn records filling half of a large basement room.

Last year, vinyl albums sales grew 39 percent, with about 3.9 million albums being sold, and sales are up about 10 percent so far this year, according to Nielsen Soundscan. HP

I presume Soundscan doesn’t capture the magnitude of the vinyl market. If it were closer to 40 million albums, this would represent a moment’s worth of worldwide unit sales from, say, 1990. 3.9 million. on the other hand, is not much; who knows how many million downloads of any type happen every hour?

Yet, I get the romance and appeal and the gist of the inspiring fundamentals of the rubber record revival. My own mild bragging rights accrue from spending seventeen years on the front lines, although I was thankful to walk away in 2000.

A nice video from the first Record Store Day year.

Earl Scruggs (January 6, 1924 – March 28, 2012) | WSM’s tribute

Levon Helm (May 26, 1940 – April 19, 2012) | The Beginnings of The Band

It is my usually editorial policy to reinforce that life is for the living. However, it isn’t often that losses pile up as they did so the last several weeks. Earl Scruggs introduced me to the idea of musical virtuosity via a lucky vinyl strike at Tommy’s Polka Store on Cleveland’s West Side, sometime around 1969. This opening will soon enough lead a few years later to Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Carlie Parker, and John Coltrane. You know Scruggs is jazz, yes?

Meanwhile, I heard The Band for the first time in the fall of 1969, and in a very particular sense my elementary education in the resonant great American music of my own time had made its first wind around the circle. The gracious Dynamo Man, Jamie Cohen, had in very short order cued up The Notorious Byrd Brothers, Workingman’s Dead, Music From Big Pink, and Little Feat, and so had squared this same circle.

bonus:

A new recording project has inserted itself into the line-up of projects. The best way to put it is that my initial release of sound based in IOS (iPad) capability will be intuitive and inexpert, and the follow-up, Racket, will be less inexpert.

June 2012.

Diverse sound experiments, and some along the lines of, for example,

produced in the marvelous DroneFX app. This app can be configured as kind of ‘self-player’ or, as a controllable synthesizer. This latter mode has captured by enthusiasm.