Or was in 2008. Nice. Howtos, trick, tips and so on for using and programming that old commodore 64 you still have lying around. So if you’ve got time to kill, check it out: http://c64music.blogspot.com/
Here’s a cute story about cables. It’s no wonder USB mikes and there ilk are so popular — simplicity really is a virtue.
I’ve recorded and edited a lot of classical music, and the stuff done by pros is a lot easier to splice together: even if recorded weeks apart in different rooms they can match the tempo and pitch exactly, but amateurs can never match that stuff from minute to minute.
Recently, modern music has started using click tracks so that stuff can always be moved around and edited at whim, and the music tech blog the music machinery wrote an interesting piece where they actually analyzed the variations in tempo throughout the songs complete with charts and graphs. Of course, theoretically, people could have been using metronomes long ago and tight drummers could be keeping very consistent tempos without a click track today (or preprogramming variable click-tracks), so it’s not hard science, but it’s an interesting read nevertheless. I know I’ve heard more than a few tracks where I thought “man that’s tight!” and there was probably no click track involved.
Personally I don’t see anything wrong with using the tempo “click” track, even if the implication is that it’s a crutch. A lot of great music has been made possible that would never have been possible before because of the ability to drag and drop music in a grid. At the same time, I think the if you don’t need it, don’t use it philosophy is probably a good one.
For his next exploration, I hope he looks at tracking the pitch and tempo of a college a-capella group. NIGHT-mare!
Thanks to www.extrapepperoni.com for this one.
Sharethis usage data
An interesting blog post at sharethis.com has a pie chart dividing up how users of their service send and share web content with their friends and so on. This is some important data for anyone wanting to promote their website, or anything that has something web associated, like a band. They say, “as you can see, Email dominates sharing activity.” However, this may miss an important part of the picture: how many people are reached which each use of their service. For example, if 1.5 people are reached for each email use of sharethis, and six people are reached for each posting to facebook (I made those numbers up, but I think they are reasonable) then actually facebook may be king. Services like digg, which might reach an even larger audience, would do even better, even though they only account for a much smaller percentage of actual use of the sharethis service.
Of course, if a friend emailed you an article personally, you might be more likely to attend to it, comment on it and then, consequently, become involved in the site, whereas if it was posted on facebook and you read it, you might just skim it casually. This is not unimportant: there is still a personal connection with email (believe it or not) that is missed with just posting something to facebook. Imagine seeing something on a feed on facebook: “Oh, that looks interesting, I’ll check it out”, is your response. Getting an email from a friend who read something and took the time to look and it and think of you in particular to send it to evokes a different response. More like: “Oh, Chris sent me this, I gotta check it out!” That’s a small gesture your friend made, and doesn’t take long, but it’s powerful.
Thanks to Sharethis.com for making their data available!
An interesting article in times about the plugin everyone loves to hate: auto-tune. This article, though, actually explains some of it’s creative uses, rather than the tragedy of degrading of singing quality, which is what everyone else talks about.