Duolingo Music.
In October last year, Duolingo announced it was adding a music course to its suite of languages to learn. The course promised to be free (or freemium, really), rhythm, pitch, notation, and piano keys....
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Valedictions, Vangelis
It seems to be all a little bit disturbing to write shortly after the death of Klaus Schulze, that one must also put finger to keyboard to comment on the loss of Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou,...
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An image carefully constructed to make musicians cry.
Musicians who have a casual attitude to the continued use of their eyes may want to look over this advertising image and see if they can spot a single thing right about it: holding it like that...
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Protodome: 4000AD (2020). A chiptune jazz-funk EP played entirely on a 1-bit...
Blake Troise is the chiptuner known as Protodome. He’s spent the past four years doing a Ph.D., in the course of which he’s recorded 4000AD — “a tiny, 4-track, 1-bit, progressive jazz album. Each track...
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Records: Nero Bellum, Am I Dead Yet?, O.R.k. (2019).
NERO BELLUM: NFRN° (Metropolis) — This album exists for Nero Bellum to show off his actually-analogue modular synth collection, and build all the sounds from the ground up — “each piece in this...
View ArticleLinks: BitTorrent “web” client, the women of Rolling Stone, Deerful how-to,...
BitTorrent Inc. releases a “web” version of uTorrent! … it involves downloading a Windows-only binary with bundled adware, but it’s “web.” Bram Cohen has long since left BitTorrent Inc., the...
View ArticleLinks: Spotify metadata, VU meters, songwriting camps, Disney defends fair...
I was pretty sure someone at Spotify would read my whinge. They’re now promising to fix the data themselves, not just trust the record companies to do it for them. The early history of Smash Hits...
View ArticleLinks: Dragon Ball Super mass piracy, origin of the gated reverb snare, the...
Toei Animation and the Japanese government: “Please do not pirate Dragon Ball Super.” Local governments across Latin America: “lol GFY.” How Hugh Padgham tripped over the gated reverb snare, first...
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Links: Dick O’Dell/Y Records, DX-7 presets, Mony Mony, going algorithm-free,...
Dick O’Dell of Y Records did a fantastic podcast of early ’80s post-punk, largely Y-related. Reminding you that post-punk was considerably black and female. The story of writing the first Yamaha DX-7...
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Links: Chapter Music, Damned Industrial top 20, ZynAddSubFx terms, iTunes...
The history of Chapter Music. I remember when it started, you know. Damned Industrial’s top 20 albums of the year. And some are better than middling! The famous ZynAddSubFx soft synthesizer used to...
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Links: Sgt. Pepper, Raincoats, Severed Heads on DAWs, Tommy Keene RIP.
Some 1987 interviews with George Martin and the other engineers on the recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A career rundown on The Raincoats, the not-entirely-expected post-punk...
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Links: Reviews and auteurs in the streaming age, Grant Hart’s last interview.
Adam Clair at Real Life holds that written reviews are now superfluous, because music is readily streamable — so why read words when you can just click play! This misses an important point: listening...
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Links: TR-808 in Wikipedia, the Nick Cave graphic novel, punk podcast, Big Muff.
Roland TR-808 is now a Wikipedia Featured Article. There’s a graphic novel, by Reinhard Kleist, about the life of Nick Cave. BBC 6 Music’s A to Z of Punk podcast, presented by Marc Riley and Rob...
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Links: Devo “Satisfaction”, failed electronic instruments, subgenres of...
Devo got their start with their cover of “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Warner Music required them to get approval from the writers … and Mick Jagger liked it. Their performance on Saturday...
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Pop links: The missing V chord, why pop comes from Los Angeles, how earworms...
Where Have All the V Chords Gone? The musicology of current pop. The Internet Doesn’t Matter, You’re Making Music in L.A. “Recall that the purpose of pop music is to reach people with no active...
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Producers: Max Martin literally farts a top ten hit; Butch Vig; Brian Eno’s...
Brian Eno’s original handwritten “Oblique Strategies” cards. Below: Eno explains the cards to Jarvis Cocker. And Alan Moore interviews Eno. Butch Vig on producing everyone that mattered in the late...
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Synth links: Detroit techno, old gadgets, TR-08, Alan Vega, making your...
The pioneers of original Detroit techno. All four of them. How to make your synthesizer fart. Another paean to old synths and their potential for fortuitous mistakes. Roland has released the TR-08,...
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Well chaps, SoundCloud may be buggered. Save what you can.
It turns out that SoundCloud can’t just continue stumbling forth with no clear direction or business plan and losing twice as much money in a year as they take in revenue. After firing a pile of...
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Links: Declining guitar sales, I Feel Love, tinnitus.
Electric guitar sales are through the floor, down from 1.5 million annually a decade ago to 1 million now. The charts need more guitar heroes. Another retrospective on the writing and production of...
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Links: AIR Studios Montserrat, Carl Bernstein the pop critic, net neutrality...
AIR Studios, Montserrat, the source of many a classic album, is rotting away on the volcano-blighted island. Before he took down Nixon, Carl Bernstein was an acerbic ’60s pop critic. No Internet, No...
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