![]() For the past few weeks, I've been learning the guitar. Ohhhhh, boy howdy. I am terrible. I've actually owned an Ibanez steel-string acoustic for years now. The beautiful thing has been almost exclusively relegated to the lowly status of room décor because I couldn't be bothered to invest the time in it. Isn't that a loser thing to say? No more, my friends. I am now officially on the path to super-stardom (or at least a poorly-attended coffee shop gig). To celebrate my newfound love for guitaring (and because nothing says "Happy Easter" quite like a peaceful rendition of Coolio's Gangta's Paradise), I am sharing a preview of my first single. Enjoy. THE SUNDAY SOUND: April 24, Livin' in a (Folk)er's Paradise For those following along in an RSS reader, click through to the original post to hear today's piece.
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Yestereve (I just really wanted to use that word), I had the pleasure of attending Music 2.0: Tools + Tech for Musicians, Marketers, + Managers. The event was held at Microsoft's New England Research and Development Center (NERD!). Hard to rally for a three-hour meeting after working all day, but I was rewarded by a surprise reunion with my homeboy Jared Mooney who owns Dirty Water Sound and Music. I have about five pages of notes, but I realize no normal human being would be at all interested in those. So, my personal highlights:
- Ryan Spaulding, local music blogger: "You can't fix everyone else's issues. So pay it forward and build relationships." and, in referring to self-promotion: "You gotta be respectful, but you gotta be ruthless." Preach. - Music and Youth Initiative: a nonprofit founded because of cutbacks in music education... set up these "music clubhouses" in already established youth centers that provide everything necessary to teach music... Berklee provides work study students to teach music to under-served urban youth (Pro Tools, too! awesome!). As an aside: the presenter played a video and the audio levels were low. Someone yelled out "Hold a mic up to the speaker!" I know this sounds pretentious, but... REALLY?! At a music tech conference?! You HAVE to know that would cause the worst sound ever. Right? Right. - Indie Ambassador "empowers the music entrepreneur by providing the tools and resources necessary to build a transparent, sustainable career." I'm still not totally clear as to what that means, but it sounds like a consulting situation to help musicians actually get money for what they're doing (?). It is currently in beta; we'll see where that goes. - Marcus Whitney of Moontoast. Super cool. "Turning fans into sustainable business." Essentially, Moontoast has tools to embed music purchasing into Facebook and other social networking sites in order to "place the buying opportunity where the fan wants to be, not where you want them to go." It can embed audio purchasing for FREE and you/Moontoast get $ at point of purchase. Nice. - ZMX Music: you can sell your sheet music on your own page or via social media. Digital delivery means composer royalty percentages upped. Killer. - Chris Marstall of Tourfilter: I have loved Tourfilter since its infancy. I heard of it through a pal of mine who worked with the developer (and I think there was a romantic connection there? I kept calling out her name under my breath to see if he reacted. I shouldn't have admitted that last thing.). You can choose the bands you love and Tourfilter will notify you when they're coming to town. It also has a full calendar option (which is brilliant for finding new acts when you're looking for something to do on any given evening). - And finally, what for me was the crowning presentation of the evening, Alistair Macdonald of Bocoup (click on "Javascript Sound" to see what I'm talking about. You can also check out the W3C Audio Working Group). Holy crap. I was freaking out. Essentially, this is a group working on Javascript coding for HTML5 that gives you waaaaaay more options for audio embedded in web pages. This stuck out to me because of my Sunday Sound series. Right now, if you don't have Flash (cough, iPhones, cough), you can't play my audio pieces. BUT. This would be audio running in a browser using Javascript. Not Flash. Not Silverlight. AND. This would allow real-time audio adjustments (the presenter applied a low-pass filter on a track through a website!!). MIND BLOWN. And something I thought of... I wonder if this could lead to an online audio editor? AMAZING. Thank you, thank you to all the folks who made this event possible (namely Charles McEnerney). I am sooooo happy I forced myself to attack a 13 hour day. Hooray for Music 2.0! ![]() Most of the folks who read my blog know that I'm a Latter-day Saint. A Mormon. For those of you who don't know what that's all about... well... do I have a piece for you! Mormon culture is hilarious. I love it. We all sing! We all dance! We're all happy! And every once in a while, we put on a show to display our singing. And our dancing. And our happiness. My ward (what we call congregations) had a talent show last night. I was part of a crew of ladies who performed an a cappella version of Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby" (arranged by one of my pals in the ward and complete with beat boxing. Right?!). I only got audio of a few performances, but there were a host of fabulous acts (a fashion show! skits about Shakespeare! stupid human tricks!). Tonight's sixty seconds give a nice snapshot of what it is like to be Mormon on a Saturday night. I'm pretty sure you will all want to convert after listening to this. THE SUNDAY SOUND: April 17, Mormons on a Saturday Night For those following along in an RSS reader, click through to the original post to hear today's piece. ![]() For the production of Sealed, I had roughly twelve hours of source material. I recorded myself reading old love letters my parents had written, interviewed each of my siblings, interviewed my parents, digitized audio from old cassette tapes, recorded my random musings and narration ideas, etc. The release version of Sealed has a 22-minute running time. That leaves about 698 minutes of recorded material unheard by anyone but me. I love so much about that 698 minutes. Some of the best moments were recorded during a conversation with my siblings. We get passionate about every topic that ever comes up. Not an exaggeration. Some probably find that intense, but I am in love with our tendency. The context of today's sixty seconds: Dad says he'd had doubts all along about marrying Mom. But in reading all his letters and listening to his doting voice on cassette tapes he made for her, I just don't buy it. This spurred a conversation about owning up to doubt. (As a technical aside, I recorded this conversation between the four of us with an AKG 414 microphone set to a bidirectional pickup pattern. I set the mic on a tabletop stand. We sat two on each side. The levels of each of us recorded pretty evenly. I sound much louder in the track but that is only because I AM much louder. C'est la vie.) THE SUNDAY SOUND: April 10, Immortalizing Doubt For those following along in an RSS reader, click through to the original post to hear today's piece. ![]() A few weeks ago, thanks to a generous man, I attended a performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the first time. Beethoven and Haydn were obviously delightful, but I was most moved by Béla Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3. The second movement, Adagio religioso, nearly brought me to tears (not an easy task). Bartók wrote this concerto in the final months of his life as a gift for his wife. When I am moved by something, I become just the slightest bit obsessive. So I came home and read all I could about Bartók. It turns out he was responsible for pioneering a musical style called Night Music which is characterized by "eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies." Ahhhhh, yes. Right up my alley. In an effort to do something constructive with my new obsession, I composed today's sixty seconds from a few of my favorite sections of Adagio religioso and set them among the very literal sounds of the night. Enjoy. THE SUNDAY SOUND: April 3, Night Music For those following along in an RSS reader, click through to the original post to hear today's piece. |
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