Music

Stuff about music, either mine or stuff I am listening to.

A turntable for Xmas

 Posted by (Visited 10255 times)  Music
Dec 252009
 

…means reading those crazy crazy liner notes, full of pretention and affection.

…means finding Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and Steve Martin as a wild and crazy guy.

…means wondering why my wife had so much Barry Gibb when she was a young teen. And uh, Crystal Gayle?

…means laughing over the albums that we gave each other on CD this year that suddenly we can also play on vinyl.

…means marveling over the 25 cent stickers on them, remembering being broke in college and tracking down obscure stuff in bins in used record stores.

…means blasting Joan Jett & the Blackhearts.

…means rediscovering our classical and jazz collections.

…means, unfortunately, hours and hours and hours of “ripping” the vinyl, because the romance of the record will probably only last another few hours. 🙂

The Sunday Concert: Halloween!

 Posted by (Visited 6607 times)  Music
Nov 012009
 

Here’s the 2 hour and 20 minute recording of the concert I did yesterday for Halloween on Metaplace. It’s all covers, and there’s plenty of awkward silences between the songs, because you can’t hear and see anything that the audience said and did while I was playing. You only get what went up the stream. Some of my answers to text chat may seem out of context. 🙂

No download link — it’s almost 200MB. 🙂 Edit: here’s a download link for the concert broken up into individual MP3 tracks, in a ZIP file. It’s around 170MB this way.

Before anyone asks, this is just me singing and on solo guitar, plus a harmonizer pedal. Most of the songs are fingerpicked, actually, but I used a flatpick on a few that asked for more of a strum. The recording setup is moderately complicated — mic and guitar into a harmonizer pedal which added some EQ and reverb and of course harmonies sometimes; then guitar further into a multi-effects pedal to add some reverb and punch. I also had a large diaphragm mic, dry (meaning, no reverb or effects at all), sitting close to add detail and some wood back into the guitar. From there, into BUTT and thence up to a Shoutcast station. BUTT did the recording locally.

I tried to make each song lead into the next narratively, and to cover a nice wide range of genres for everyone who was there. Here’s the set list, which was selected to fit the holiday: horror songs, creepy songs, songs about death and madness, prison tunes, and murder ballads and silly songs. It has a bunch of the stuff I usually do — blues, a lot of singer-songwriter material, 80s covers that it’s weird to tackle on acoustic…

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Playing live concert nowish!

 Posted by (Visited 5621 times)  Game talk, Music
Oct 312009
 

And it will be here:

Concert over!

Thanks to everyone who came — I had a blast! I recorded the audio stream, so I will post it up once I get a chance to peek at it in a sound editor. Off for Halloween night stuff now, though!

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