Archive for the 'Music' Category


Geek monkey

Published
by
drew
on 8 August 2008
at 19:53
in Consumer goods and Music
.
0 Comments

It’s not often I spruik software (or anyware) but I’m loving Media Monkey. I’ve thought for a while (as long as I’ve had an mp3 player that’s not an ipod) that there should be an easier way to contain a music library and synchronise songs and podcasts with my K800i.

I don’t like itunes (for the same reason I didn’t like iphoto) because of the way it takes all your files and hides them in a labyrinthine structure of folders and subfolders whose names bear no resemblance to their contents.

WMP has sufficed as a general listening tool. C has a wifi laptop that I’ve networked with my music folder, so we can plug it into the hifi and do decent playlists but I’ve really been missing a good syncing tool.

Till now, I’ve been using Feedreader as my RSS client. It’s good for catching  up with blogs, etc but when downloading podcasts, using it meant I had to check the filename of the mp3, go into Disc2phone, find the file and transfer it as a normal track. I’ve now deleted all my podcast feeds in Feedreader, as MMonkey can download them automatically and sync the ones I want with the phone. I can do a global sync or I can just go to the music list, find the podcast I want, right click and send it to the device. The great thing is you can determine the directory the files go into, as well as create subfolders according to the ID tags, so everything is set up nicely.

The only problem with syncing with the k800i is when you have albums containing multiple artists, it creates a new folder for each artist but this is a shortcoming of the phone, not the software. On the phone, you can’t sort by album, only by artist, so if you want to play a various-artists album, you have to either make a playlist in the phone (which is a bit of a pain; I don’t think it supports .m3u files) or change the artist tag to ‘various’, which is a pain if a song comes on and you don’t know who sings it. Support for the ‘album artist’ tag would help here.

What’s good about the tagging thing, is that MM lets you recreate tags according to filename. Some podcasts have long tags, so you end up with an artist tag, that’s the same as the album tag, that’s also the first part of the title tag. In MM, you can tell it how the filename is setup, eg <artist>- <album>- <title> and it will create the tags accordingly, which is great, as it keeps things shorter. The k800i can’t fit all that text on the screen so will scroll a few words at a time and it’s hard to find out what track you’re on when you have to wait for it to scan through three screens’ worth of words before you get to the episode number or title.

No conclusion, just very happy that there’s a free media player out there that actually works.

In my next geek episode, I might put up some photoshop tutorials if anyone’s interested.

Between Marx and Marzipan

Published
by
drew
on 14 July 2008
at 14:42
in Film and Music
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1 Comment

A few weeks ago, the household was taken over by Herbie-mania. This past week it’s been Poppins fever. When all the new releases have been taken out, you have to trawl through the weeklies and find something worth watching. This was.

I think it’s one of the lines of Mary in the movie, she says something like ‘Practically perfect people never allow sentiment to cloud their judgment’. I thought this was a character trait that I’d developed rather well, to the point where any pathos or gratuitous sentiment makes me go ‘ewww’. But something about watching Mary Poppins just makes me well up in tears and start blubbering.

Firstly, I think it’s something to do with childhood memories. In the opening sequence of The Wonderful World of Disney there was a clip of the ‘Step in Time’ dance on the rooftops. Of course, I watched that every Sunday night, so that clip of London rooftops is indelibly marked in my memory. Then there’s the music, which (in general) has always been a strong emotional trigger for me but the songs and orchestration in this movie are so rich, every time Julie starts singing Tuppence a Bag the waterworks start all over again.

Watching the DVD extras now adds another bittersweet edge to it as well. Hearing Dick and Julie talk about making the movie, looking at how young and fresh and vibrant they were in the film and how they’ve aged now, looking at the behind-the-scenes footage and stills of the production and seeing how big a part of their lives this must have been (they were nine months in shooting) and how much fun they must have had doing it: all that combined kind of makes everything—childhood, life, gala premières—seem so fleeting and temporary, it just gives me those parental stomach twists that make me want to pick up the kids and hold them and make time stop.

I have to leave it there. All this sentiment is too much for me.

The only Conchords fan

Published
by
drew
on 12 June 2008
at 11:54
in Links, Music and TV
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0 Comments

Just got this link from a friend. A treat for Flight of the Conchords fans.

Get back

Published
by
drew
on 5 June 2008
at 23:55
in Idea v. Reality and Music
.
0 Comments

I think about time travel a lot. Mostly about what I’d do if I found myself in another time and what I’d do, knowing what I know, to get filthy rich. It would be easy to know what the next big thing was going to be if you knew what it was. And I’m not sure that last sentence really conveyed the importance that the conditional/past tense transition really had on what I was trying to mean. Maybe I should have used a pluperfect. It would be easy…going to be…if you knew what it had been. Better.

I usually think of it in terms of popular culture: I could write scripts for great films (”Think of it Steven, the alien hides inside the basket of the kid’s BMX and they take off into the air… what?… oh, it’s a kind of bike); come up with great inventions (”what if the headphones didn’t go over your head, but had tiny, tiny speakers that you put inside your ears”); and the most popular thing I come up with is making music (”thanks folks… I love you all. Now here’s a little number called It’s Not Unusual“)

Which got me to thinking one day…

Do you think that Paul is actually from the future and went back in time and arranged for Stuart to have a little accident with a gang of thugs?

Guitaraoke

Published
by
drew
on 13 April 2008
at 22:31
in Music
.
3 Comments

As I drove across town last night, I was in endless pursuit of something decent to listen to on the radio. Y’know… when you’re in that mood and you don’t want to listen to news or talk, you just want to find something you like, maybe even something a little cheesy, that you can belt out at the top of your lungs, while you hope that your closed windows are 100% soundproof.

There was some very cheesy stuff that I sang along to in a very ironic way (Spandau Ballet, anyone?) and there was mostly a lot of very very bad crap, with the one exception of Ita by Cold Chisel (I do like Cold Chisel but not Khe Sanh, and nothing Barnes since he went solo). I was flicking between most of the FM stations, as well as the golden oldies AM station, because you never know when they’re going to play something nostalgic that doesn’t make you want to hurl, I dunno, maybe Witchita Lineman or something (long story, but I discovered one morning as I was driving my parents car after dropping them off at the airport, that I have the same vocal range as Glen Campbell. I only know two of his songs and I just don’t think I could bare Rhinestone Cowboy coming on the radio, so…).

I’ve never done Karaoke. OK, so I did it once on my honeymoon, when there was only the Belgian couple we had befriended to laugh at me, and I figured we wouldn’t be seeing them for a while, so I did my best Aretha Franklin impression, which no, I don’t think got me any R E S P E C T at all. The idea came up at work the other day though (Karaoke, not Honeymoons or Aretha), that it would be a good outing for a Xmas do. One of the chaps here is very into Singstar, so it might happen. I wouldn’t mind singing but it’d have to be the right song.

I know Bruce is really into Guitar Hero, which looks like fun. But I actually play the guitar, so I think it would be kind of counter-intuitive for me pressing buttons; I think I would be fretting (some guitar humour there for you).

Anyway, I was listening to Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky album this morning. I’ve long said that The Edge killed the lead break in pop music, so this album is refreshing for the fact that they’re in there and they’re fucking brilliant. It’s not all noise: the band make a clean bed of music for the lead guitarist and his guitar to make love to it. It’s gorgeous (I’m thinking Impossible Germany in particular - there are a couple of White-album-ish riffs on the album too).

Anyway, I got to thinking, why don’t they have guitar karaoke, where you plug in a guitar, they remove the guitar track and you play along? That’d be ace! And record companies who are sick at the fact their wares are just being mercilessly copied should make interactive music where you can put the disc in a computer and create your own mixes, so take out the bass, and play along on the bass yourself!

I mean, why should crap singers have all the fun, when there are a lot of us crap instrumentalists out there just waiting to make everyone sit and listen to how shite we are.

Twang

Published
by
drew
on 19 March 2008
at 22:03
in Adelaide, Events and Music
.
0 Comments

Fucking heatwave has warped the neck of my guitar.

That’s it, I’m checking the insurance policy.

Performance anxiety

Published
by
drew
on 27 March 2007
at 22:12
in Idea v. Reality, Ma vie and Music
.
2 Comments

I used to be quite the entertainer. I grew up in both a family that was fairly musical and a community that had a lot of amateur theatre groups. I guess it was inevitable that I would get caught up in it all.

I started my life in music as a drummer. Our music teacher was the guy who wrote the Kleenex jingle. One day, when I was in about grade three, he was assigned the task of giving us each an instrument to learn. He bought in this amazing, new electronic device, which was probably some midi system that ran through a keyboard but was pretty space-age back then in the early 1980s. He was basically showing it off and surreptitiously testing us all to see who among us had rhythm.

He handed me this little footswitch kind of thing and told me to hold it in my hand. He played some music and told me to push it, squeeze it, whatever, on every fourth beat, in time with the drum-machine beat that was going. Apparently my timing was very good indeed and based on that result I was designated a drummer.

I enjoyed the drums and when I was 13, mum and dad bought me a kit for my birthday. My girlfriend in year 8 had a family band that played bad country music. her brother was the drummer but when he got a job as a chef, I was asked to fill in on any gigs that he couldn’t make. So at the age of 14 or so, I was playing professional gigs at clubs, mostly in the Riverland. We even entered a couple of talent quests (and by that I mean “country music awards” - they were no Tamworth but were kind of a big deal among the country musos) with varying success, including at least one first place in the band section.

It was bad country music but the experience was probably a good influence on me, as it got me into music, not just drumming. I picked up the guitar and pretty much taught myself. Though being in an isolated town, our musical choices and influences were somewhat limited, I did manage to get into Hunters & Collectors, V.Spy V.Spy and the ubiquitous INXS. But there was also The Eagles and Billy Joel which, in retrospect, seemed somehow inescapable in a town with only one radio station. Of course, there was that Violent Femmes stage in about year 11. But that’s the law when you’re that age. We all go through it.

So my turntable blared out Hotel California and Harry’s Reasons? more than my parents could probably bear and they were fairly easy to play and that’s how I learnt my fancy fretwork. Later, I discovered Ry Cooder, Stevie Winwood, Clapton and even started listening to Cold Chisel, poring over Mossy’s solos and trying to learn them note-for-note. Oh, and the Beatles… of course.

fter high school, I kept playing live with a friend at a few pubs in town but sort of gave it away when the interest in community radio took over. I had discovered Billy Bragg, Stone Temple Pilot and Pearl Jam and it was easier to sit in a small room once a week and force your limited musical tastes on others than it was to bust your gut in a room full of boozers with more severely limited taste who would threaten to punch you if you didn’t play American Pie. Radio offered us an audience (albeit one not much bigger than a crowded night at the pub) who actually wanted to hear the stuff we were playing. They were no doubt as bored as we were.

The guitar became something I only picked up in the privacy of home. I had fun with a friend four-tracking and writing silly songs about coffee machines and vacuum cleaners (I was big into TMBG by this stage) and the idea of writing a song saying ‘I love you’ seemed arbitrary, rather dull and desperately unimaginative.

Since I moved to Adelaide, I haven’t really had an audience of more than a few people and I don’t really like playing for people. It all seems to contrived. That said, a friend and I have been saying for about five years now that we’re going to start a band. I do want it to happen but only if it’s anonymous and on our terms. I don’t really want my friends going to see me because I just don’t think I’m that good anymore; I’ve just been out of practice for way too long.

We visited some friends of the weekend. He has a music room in his yard. He’s borrowing some fancy 16-track mixer/hard drive recording arrangement. Nice. He set it up and I fiddled about and laid down a couple of tracks of some old blues standards and a Beatles song. I was halfway through the last one when C & everyone came out of the house and saw me sitting with the guitar and the mic and kind of had that patronising “awww… he’s playing the guitar and singing” look on their face, like I was some little kid sitting on his fire engine wearing a fire helmet and posing while dad took a photo.

It was probably completely imagined on my part but that’s just how I feel when I play in front of people.

On the way home, C asked me “Why did you play Blackbird? You always play that.”

The answer is that I have a pretty limited repertoire these days and it’s the one song that’s easy to play, unaccompanied without a pick.

Don’t really know how the band thing will pan out…

Ben Lee is a genius

Published
by
drew
on 30 January 2006
at 14:20
in Featured, Idea v. Reality, Ma vie and Music
.
1 Comment

Men are stupid. World leaders are a given but you don’t have to look any further than the TV to see how men are held in contempt for their utter numbskulliness. There’s the “Honey, have you seen my pants?” ad where stupid man is unable to dress himself without superior flower-pot-on-head-wearing woman. There’s the man-washes-car-part-in-dishwasher ad where, well, a guy washes a shiny bit of metal from his car in the dishwasher. Then there’s the stupid-man-follows-trail-of-underwear-into-garden-while-frigid-wife-drinks-coffee-alone ad where, well, you can probably figure out what happens there.

Men are always accused of being slobs, living in a pigsty, not being responsible, or being the (n+1)th child of the family (where n=the actual number of offspring in a relationship). But hey, who starts screaming like a schoolgirl every time there’s a huntsman on the back door?

Yeah, men cop a lot of crap from the fairer sex (and I’m wondering how they got that adjective ascribed to them when so much of what they do is completely UNfair).

But what of Ben Lee? Where does he come into it? Why do I think he’s a genius? I’m not referring to his general talent for writing witty, clever and very catchy pop songs; this makes him popular. No, his genius comes from one single lyric that he employs over and over again in one of his recent songs, which, when used properly, is the ultimate response that any “stupid” male can give to any nagging female (the term ‘nagging female’ being somewhat of a tautology) when such derogatory criticism is hurled our way. And the great thing is that males of any age can employ the response, viz:

Teacher (female): Your grades are the worst in the class. You’re insubordinate, insolet and just plain lazy!
Student (male): And that’s the way I like it.

Girlfriend: Ooh, stop. You’re doing it too hard.
Boyfriend: But that’s the way I like it.

Wife: You’re so unmotivated. You just plod along in your life without any focus or direction.
Husband: And that’s the way I like it, that’s the way I like it.

A similar situation occurred to me a few days ago. I was home looking after little Misses L and M and C was doing some shopping. I had finished making lunch for everyone and had been taking apart a camera at the desk so a few things were out of place.

C: I leave the house for one minute and I come home to this! You’re such a slob!
Me: So, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease,
Baby, ple-ease…

By george

Published
by
drew
on 12 March 2004
at 07:55
in Adelaide, Ma vie and Music
.
0 Comments

Went to ‘The Write Stuff’ last night. Part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts and a really lame attempt at a humorous event title celebrating the best of Australia’s songwriters. The bill comprised Mark Seymour, george, and The Whitlams.

Being an H&C fan from way back, I was a bit disappointed that Mark Seymour was up first because the first act kind of has the connotation of being ‘the support act’. This also means that because the sound check was done with an empty room, the mix somehow always sounds shocking for the first act when there’s suddenly people everywhere and some levels have to be reset, so it took a few tunes before they sounded half decent. This was also a shame because he kicked off with a mostly acoustic version (well… no drums) of When the River Runs Dry. The other disappointing aspect of it was that well… he was really the veteran of the night and it kind of seemed insulting to put him first and have to warm up the crowd. I think george would have warmed the place up almost instantly because of their appeal with the younger part of the crowd, which was probably most of them. Mark Seymour kind of summed it up when he said after his first song…

If you’re wondering, if you’ve just graduated from high school, who the fuck I am, well my name’s Mark Seymour and I used to be in a band called Hunters and Collectors

…which was kind of him saying ‘I know anyone here under 25 is probably not here to see me’. But he did a great set of nearly all new material, which I sadly admit I am not familiar with. And then he kind of sold out to popularity at the end and did Throw Your Arms Around Mewhich is better I guess than Crowded House or that annoying little Paul McDermott doing it.

Then there was george.

George are amazing. So amazing that I think they’re too amazing. A george song is multi-layered and has many structural elements. They are all such fine musicians and the vocals are brilliant. They change time signatures, they change key mid-song. George are so good that their brilliance commands your complete attention so that you can keep up with just how brilliant they’re being.

And I’m sorry, but I find this exhausting.

Add to this that they’re such good little kids. They’re not rebelling in an angsty, self-loathing, Linkin Park way, they have such a lofty social conscience that you’re not only artistically obliged to listen to what they’re playing, you’re morally obliged to listen to what they’re saying. It’s overwhelming. They’re just such hard work!

I will say that Katie Noonan is probably the best singer of popular music in the world. Now that’s a pretty big call, I know. But she’s so technically brilliant and her voice is so strong, delicate, soaring and lilting all at once. And sure, she does those vocal acrobatics that I normally hate but she doesn’t go at every note at full volume. She knows how to turn it down and do it effectively.

So the Whitlams were just very cool. Tim basically whispered Buy Now, Pay Later and you could pretty much only hear the crowd singing it. Nice. They did all the faves: Royal, Love this City, No Aphrodisiac, Thank You, and they finished with a killer I Will Not Go Quietly but a great highlight was Katie coming back on stage to sing Blow Up the Pokies. Sublime, really.

I recorded the whole gig on MD. It sounds shit. It was just too loud. I even brought the rec level right down but all that bassy noise flying around the place is just too much for my tiny stereo lapel mic.