music
YouTubeMusic: Tiny Major Metal
I really need to start naming these. This is another 60 seconds of layered guitars in GarageBand. This time in a major key so it's Tiny Major Metal.
Spotify, Wrapped
I would like to announce that I have ended my business relationship with Spotify. That means I'm no longer paying Spotify $15/month for a family account. With Neil Young off the platform, they're literally removing the music I listen to most. Here's my 2021 Spotify Wrapped top artists list. (And keep the judgy looks to a minimum—we all got through 2021 our own way.)
I agree with Neil Young (and Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren and Brené Brown) that it's not good to support a company that refuses to remove public health disinformation.
Not everyone in my family plays their carefully curated Neil Young playlist 24/7 so they weren't as eager to jump ship. We all agreed that moving to a new service was good, but we couldn't agree which service to move to. We rarely sit down and put together our technical requirements for a digital service as a family. So we assembed our RFP and we're waiting on the contracts from Procurement.
In the end we found a music service from a company with no problematic stances: Amazon Music. I'm kidding, of course. Chances are very good that I'm going to want to leave this service in the near future and maybe that will be the environment we're in until there's real competition. Neil Young recommends Amazon and he has a deal that will give new users four months free.
The biggest barrier to moving services was moving our playlists. I found an app for that that works well: Free Your Music. It costs $15, but I look at that like a moving services tax. Hopefully that's a one-time fee. I had 30+ playlists to move over and I've only found a few mismatches here and there that were easy to fix.
If anyone else is a hardcore Neil Young fan it's worth checking out his Neil Young Archives website. (Thanks for the gift subscription, Dad!) The central music services are kind of like fancy spreadsheets to me. They make navigating songs easy but treat all artists the same. Looking through the Neil Young Archives is more like rifling through a dusty trunk where there's all kinds of bizarre things to find. It looks like this:
Truly awful if you're trying to get something done efficiently. Awesome if you want to have a feeling of discovery. We have a lot of "efficient" experiences online and I think we could use more planned weirdness.
Anyway, Spotify is a good, efficient music service. They must view podcasts as the future of their business if they're willing to both be bad citizens and degrade their music offering to keep those listeners.
I agree with Neil Young (and Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren and Brené Brown) that it's not good to support a company that refuses to remove public health disinformation.
Not everyone in my family plays their carefully curated Neil Young playlist 24/7 so they weren't as eager to jump ship. We all agreed that moving to a new service was good, but we couldn't agree which service to move to. We rarely sit down and put together our technical requirements for a digital service as a family. So we assembed our RFP and we're waiting on the contracts from Procurement.
In the end we found a music service from a company with no problematic stances: Amazon Music. I'm kidding, of course. Chances are very good that I'm going to want to leave this service in the near future and maybe that will be the environment we're in until there's real competition. Neil Young recommends Amazon and he has a deal that will give new users four months free.
The biggest barrier to moving services was moving our playlists. I found an app for that that works well: Free Your Music. It costs $15, but I look at that like a moving services tax. Hopefully that's a one-time fee. I had 30+ playlists to move over and I've only found a few mismatches here and there that were easy to fix.
If anyone else is a hardcore Neil Young fan it's worth checking out his Neil Young Archives website. (Thanks for the gift subscription, Dad!) The central music services are kind of like fancy spreadsheets to me. They make navigating songs easy but treat all artists the same. Looking through the Neil Young Archives is more like rifling through a dusty trunk where there's all kinds of bizarre things to find. It looks like this:
Truly awful if you're trying to get something done efficiently. Awesome if you want to have a feeling of discovery. We have a lot of "efficient" experiences online and I think we could use more planned weirdness.
Anyway, Spotify is a good, efficient music service. They must view podcasts as the future of their business if they're willing to both be bad citizens and degrade their music offering to keep those listeners.
Music: Tiny Metal
Sometimes I have insomnia and I get a little dorveille time. As a treat. And there's nothing like using this quiet time to make a bunch of noise layering electric guitars in GarageBand. I've found that making 60 seconds of instrumental metal is just enough metal before bed ™. I have three now which is a trilogy.
To be continued depending on my anxiety.
To be continued depending on my anxiety.
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence,” the letter reads. “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy.”Yes, cranky Neil Young, haha yes! This would remove most of what I listen to on Spotify. If Pink Floyd could get in on this they could wipe out everything. I should get our family to quit Spotify anyway.
Update: Spotify stands by their man. Everybody knows this is nowhere.
Pedalscrolling
I have been known to doomscroll at all hours of the night. It's not healthy and I've been pretty successful switching to the iOS Books app for insomnia reading. (Recently enjoyed the encyclopedic rhythm of Revolution in the Head about every Beatles track.)
Sometimes visuals are a better distraction than reading and for those times I like pedalscrolling. Guitar pedals are just metal boxes. They modify the signal from an electric guitar to add distortion, reverb, compression, or dozens of other effects before the signal gets amplified. They house a circuit board and include switches and knobs to control the effect. Sure I'm in the market for guitar pedals so it is shopping, but I also appreciate them as objects. Some are hand crafted with baroque art between components. Some are mass produced and extremely utilitarian. Some play with both of those expectations. They're small user interfaces and this wide variety of design makes them fun to browse.
I recently collected a bunch of guitar pedal manufacturer websites so I could randomly scroll through some pedals whenever I need to:
I'm sure there are more, but this is a good start. Thought I'd share. Here's to less doomscrolling.
Sometimes visuals are a better distraction than reading and for those times I like pedalscrolling. Guitar pedals are just metal boxes. They modify the signal from an electric guitar to add distortion, reverb, compression, or dozens of other effects before the signal gets amplified. They house a circuit board and include switches and knobs to control the effect. Sure I'm in the market for guitar pedals so it is shopping, but I also appreciate them as objects. Some are hand crafted with baroque art between components. Some are mass produced and extremely utilitarian. Some play with both of those expectations. They're small user interfaces and this wide variety of design makes them fun to browse.
I recently collected a bunch of guitar pedal manufacturer websites so I could randomly scroll through some pedals whenever I need to:
- Abominable Pedals
- Beetronics FX Pedals
- Black Arts Toneworks Pedals
- BOSS Pedals
- Caroline Guitar Company Pedals
- Catalinbread Effects Pedals
- DigiTech Pedals
- EarthQuaker Devices Pedals
- Effectrode
- Electro-Harmonix Pedals
- Fender Effects Pedals
- Fortin Pedals
- Frost Giant Pedals
- Fulltone Pedals
- Jackson Audio Pedals
- JHS Pedals
- Keeley Electronics Pedals
- Lovepedal Pedals
- Magnetic Effects Pedals
- Matthews Effects Pedals
- Mojo Hand FX Pedals
- MOOER Audio Pedals
- MXR Pedals
- nature sound Pedals
- Neunaber Audio Pedals
- old blood noise endeavors Pedals
- Pigtronix Pedals
- Red Panda Pedals
- Shift Line Pedals
- SolidGoldFX Pedals
- Stone Deaf FX
- Strymon Pedals
- T-REX Pedals
- TC Electronic Pedals
- Tech 21 Pedals
- Walrus Audio Effect Pedals
- Xotic Pedals
I'm sure there are more, but this is a good start. Thought I'd share. Here's to less doomscrolling.
CNN
CNN’I probably went through maybe 300 Gretsch images and I got pretty good at it so I could see them and I could know right away that it wasn't it,’ he said. ‘So it's eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.’This story has it all! And by all I mean classic guitars, classic rock, internet sleuthery, and people being nice.
vinylsleeves.tumblr.com spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk"A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential."AI lacks nerve is a fantastic way to put it. [via om]
lost-in-crystal-canyons.tumblr.com
lost-in-crystal-canyons.tumblr.comFor all your salacious guitar photography needs.
Cut Chemist Funk
Dang, watching Cut Chemist work is like watching magic. The whole thing is amazing but if you can't watch the whole thing go to 6:45 and watch him building layers. One turntable!
And for old time's sake: Cut Chemist Suite by Ozomatli. (The nostalgia is strong with this one.)
And for old time's sake: Cut Chemist Suite by Ozomatli. (The nostalgia is strong with this one.)
archive.culturalequity.org
archive.culturalequity.org"The Lomax Digital Archive provides free access to audio/visual collections compiled across seven decades by folklorist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and his father John A. Lomax (1867–1948)."Fascinating folk music archive to wander through.