Posts Tagged ‘analog’
Friday, February 26th, 2010
The vast majority of music that I hear is recorded, and if you’re reading this the same is probably true of you. Most people don’t have a clear idea what the recording process is like, especially using computers. Here are my adventures in recording.
I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.
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Tags: analog, audio, audio editing, autotune, cold tech hot beats, computers, electronica, hip-hop, improvisation, looping, mashups, music, pro tools, recording, remix, revival revival, sampling, sequencing, synths, tape, tape editing, visualization
Posted in hardware, music, software | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Why are the Beatles still so cool? By which I mean the late Beatles, Revolver onwards. I like Please Please Me as much as the next guy, but it isn’t why the Beatles are cool now. No, I mean the last few records, especially Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road. If any of these albums were released next week, Pitchfork would go ballistic over them. Three quarters of the indie rock of the past ten years descends directly from Abbey Road. Why do we all still care so much?
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Tags: abbey road, analog, audio, audio editing, beatles, cold tech hot beats, common, divorce, hip-hop, john lennon, kanye west, mellotron, memes, mixtapes, multitracking, paul mccartney, prince, rock, rock band, sampling, tape, tape editing, video games
Posted in music, video games | 2 Comments »
Monday, July 6th, 2009
People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly it had been used as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated control surface.
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Tags: analog, cold tech hot beats, electricity, electromagnetism, electronica, feedback, guitar, harmonics, harmony, interface, jimi hendrix, music, music theory, recursion, resonance, tuning, wah pedal
Posted in hardware, math, music, web | 5 Comments »
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
When I was in third grade, my mom and stepfather went on academic sabbatical to London for six months, taking my sister and me with them. I guess I’m grateful for the chance to experience another culture and everything, but it was a rough six months. I missed my dad, school, New York, the Muppet Show. British third graders are manic xenophobes of Eric Cartman proportions. It was the first time I had ever experienced genuine alien-ness, and I didn’t like it. The best thing about being there was Doctor Who.
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Tags: analog, bbc, cold tech hot beats, delia derbyshire, doctor who, eighties, electronica, keybs, multitracking, scifi, sixties, synths, tape editing, tv, uk, vocoder
Posted in autobio, hardware, music | 6 Comments »
