Music

Steve Jobs opera set to premier this week after two years of preparation

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MikeyCampbell, AppleInsider:

Almost two years after the Santa Fe Opera commissioned “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” the narrative, music and rehearsals are complete and the production is set to open this Saturday as part of a limited six-show run.

And:

Throughout the course of 19 scenes, beginning with the launch of iPhone in 2007, the opera navigates the transformative experiences of Jobs’ life, from his days at Reed College to his time with spiritual advisor Kobun Chino Otogawa to the launch of the Apple I.

As can be expected, personal relationships appear to feature prominently in the production. Scene synopses and a cast list show interactions with Steve “Woz” Wozniak, former girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, wife Laurene Powell Jobs and father Paul Jobs. In true opera fashion, Otogawa’s ghost makes multiple appearances.

It’ll be interesting to see how this is received.

The most popular drum beat in the world

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[VIDEO] Dave here. I’ve been playing music since I was a kid. I started with an out-of-tune, broken down, flea-market guitar, then moved on to pretty much any instrument I could get my hands on. Master of none, tryer of all. But the one instrument I could never quite get going with is the drums.

I always felt awkward trying to make my feet do one thing while each hand did something completely different. Part of it was not understanding the rules. Then came the video embedded in the main Loop post. For some reason, watching this video, it all just clicked for me. And so I thought I’d share it with you.

To me, the best part of this video is the look on the drummers face. The thousand yard stare. Enjoy.

Apple updates Logic Pro X with new drummers and performance improvements

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Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today updated its professional audio editing software Logic Pro X to version 10.3.2, introducing bug fixes, performance improvements, and a couple of new features.

Today’s update brings three new Drummers able to play percussion in the styles of Pop, Songwriter, and Latin, and the new Drummer loops can be added to songs and customized with performance controls.

Apple has also improved the responsiveness of the graphical user interface, introduced an automatic time align feature for improved morphing in Alchemy, and debuted new tools for fine tuning the pitch of an audio region.

Follow the link for the full change list.

HBO’s The Defiant Ones. Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, now playing.

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HBO’s The Defiant Ones is a four-part series about the background and intertwined lives that led Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre to Beats and then Apple’s doorstep.

Episode One is in heavy rotation on HBO, with Episode Two airing tonight. Or, you can binge all four episodes on HBO Go.

There’s a lot to enjoy here, especially if you are a fan of the music industry. Pairs nicely with the excellent Straight Outta Compton.

Chris Cornell’s masterful vocals in the isolated track for Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun”

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[VIDEO] Open Culture:

The singer’s near four-octave range “made his live performances an incredible sight to watch” and his recordings a stirring experience to listen to, whether they showcased his own material or his unique talent for covering songs across a spectrum of styles and genres. “The imposing architecture” of Cornell’s voice, writes Pitchfork in a retrospective of some of his finest recorded moments, “was part and parcel to his legacy, but it would be nothing if he didn’t also know how to brilliantly arrange it.”

Keep that in mind as you listen to the isolated vocal track embedded in the main Loop post. The vocals don’t kick in until about 20 seconds in. Listen to the subtle changes, both in tone and in mode (key changes, major to minor, etc.) Chris died a few months ago, but I just stumbled on this video. We’ve lost quite a voice.

Struggling for survival, SoundCloud closes San Francisco, London offices

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Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica:

SoundCloud announced Thursday that it would be closing its San Francisco and London offices—firing 173 employees, or around 40 percent of its staff.

The Berlin-based company has been struggling for years: it reported losses of over €51 million ($58.1 million) in 2015—losses that have steadily grown since 2010.

What to do about this? SoundCloud offers real value to the community, but can’t find a way to make it pay. Somehow GitHub made it work. Is GitHub worth more to developers than SoundCloud is to the audio community?

The slow, secret death of the six-string electric. And why you should care.

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Washington Post:

In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million. The two biggest companies, Gibson and Fender, are in debt, and a third, PRS Guitars, had to cut staff and expand production of cheaper guitars. In April, Moody’s downgraded Guitar Center, the largest chain retailer, as it faces $1.6 billion in debt. And at Sweetwater.com, the online retailer, a brand-new, interest-free Fender can be had for as little as $8 a month.

And:

Guitar heroes. They arrived with the first wave of rock-and-roll. Chuck Berry duckwalking across the big screen. Scotty Moore’s reverb-soaked Gibson on Elvis’s Sun records. Link Wray, with his biker cool, blasting through “Rumble” in 1958.

And:

McCartney saw Hendrix play at the Bag O’Nails club in London in 1967. He thinks back on those days fondly and, in his sets today, picks up a left-handed Les Paul to jam through Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady.”

And:

“Now, it’s more electronic music and kids listen differently,” McCartney says. “They don’t have guitar heroes like you and I did.”

That does sound a bit like a grumpy old person complaint, but read the article. The comment reflects the reality of the current trend in popular music, more about programming beats than emulating a specific riff.

Fascinating read.

One guitar, many hands

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[VIDEO] I fell down a well of guitar videos yesterday. More specifically, a well of multiple people playing a single guitar. Who knew this was a thing, and that there were so many of them.

I picked three, all embedded in the main Loop post. Please do add your own favorites to the comments.

How the Beatles Wrote ‘A Day in the Life’

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[VIDEO] Nicholas Dawidoff:

“A Day in the Life” isn’t a song to sing, as are “Eleanor Rigby” (ideal for both car and karaoke), “Hey Jude” (written to soothe John Lennon’s young son, no lullaby works better at children’s bedtime), or “In My Life” (a perennial at weddings and funerals and, I can’t help mentioning, rock’s analog to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116). Nor is “A Day in the Life” guided by melody like so many Beatles creations. It’s an elaborate production, filled with sophisticated George Martin and Geoff Emerick musical trickery (distortion, echo, dubbing, reverb). An orchestra plays, and then one singer’s voice gives way to another’s—John’s worldly reflections transitioning to Paul’s sketch of domestic memoir, and then back again—before orchestral cataclysm and a final resting place.

And:

And then, after all the chaos and destruction, what next? George Harrison had suggested a fade to humming. But it didn’t work. Paul thought that the song needed firmer resolution. Three Steinway pianos and a harmonium were rolled into action, and at every keyboard the players were instructed to hit the single chord of E major simultaneously and hard, with the sustain foot pedal down, letting it carry as long as possible. There were nine takes. The tone is so big, so capacious and resonant because Martin and Emerick thought to put the recorder on half speed.

Some terrific writing in this piece. If you are a fan of (or have never heard) A Day in the Life, take a listen to the video embedded in the main Loop post.

Three videos to ease you through your Friday

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[VIDEO] Not quite sure how to describe these three videos (all embedded in the main Loop post), other than to say they are all old, all have a groove and they all make me smile. Thanks to the Twitterverse for sharing these.

Fidget spinner on bass

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[VIDEO] Pretty good technique all the way around. Video embedded in main Loop post.

The newly redesigned Shazam

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Ryan Christoffel, writing for MacStories, walks through the new look for Shazam. I do like the new design. The old one was cluttered, and sometimes confusing.

Your MP3s are going to be just fine

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Three thoughtful responses to yesterdays river of “MP3s are dead” articles.

  1. No, the MP3 Is Not Dead, by Kirk McElhearn.

  2. Your MP3s are going to be just fine, by Hayley Tsukayama for the Washington Post.

  3. “MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story by Marco Arment.

In a nutshell, your MP3s will not spontaneously combust, the last known MP3 patents have lapsed, AAC is a better format, but the MP3 format is ubiquitous.

Clair Torry’s legendary vocals on Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig in the Sky

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This is a great collection of videos, including this interview with Clair Torry, where she tells the story about coming in to the studio to record her vocals, getting no guidance from producer Alan Parsons, and basically winging it, coming up with one of the greatest off the cuff vocal performances of all time.

The video embedded in the main Loop post is a somewhat isolated mix which really highlights Clair’s performance. I just love this track. Feels like it just pours out of her soul.

Unbelievable Sgt. Pepper’s/Star Wars mashup

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[VIDEO] Click over to the main Loop post for the embedded video, but to whet your appetite:

When you hear “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, think “Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans”. Oh, it’s good.

The story that emerges when the music is stripped from A-HA’s ‘Take On Me’

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[VIDEO] Lori Dorn, Laughing Squid:

Mario Wienerroither has taken the famous half-animated video for the A-HA song “Take On Me“, strategically stripped the music out and dubbed in appropriate reactive sounds. Without the music, the lighthearted romance of the original video was gone and a more sinister theme took its place.

Video embedded in the linked Loop post.

It’s not exactly a traditional story, but it certainly is interesting. This was the first example of rotoscoping I ever saw. I think it still holds up after all these years.

Mark Knopfler on learning how to play the guitar

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No matter your level of interest in the guitar, no matter how well you can play, if at all, this is so worth watching.

Mark Knopfler, best known as the singer, lead guitarist and songwriter for Dire Straits (Sultans of Swing, many others), talks about learning to play the guitar. He starts with the most basic of techniques, then slowly folds in the moves that took him places.

This is a piece from last years excellent Soundbreaking documentary. Take a few minutes to watch a true master sharing his craft.

History of metal, all in one song

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[VIDEO] Guitarist Ben Higgins does a masterful job moving from one metal sub-genre to another. If you’ve ever wondered about the difference between say, speed metal and grindcore, this video (embedded in the main Loop post) is for you.

Musical.ly syncs up with Apple Music

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[VIDEO] Recode:

Musical.ly lets its users create and share their own music videos, using snippets of songs. Starting on Friday, Apple Music will be the service that supplies the songs, replacing U.K.-based provider 7digital, according to people familiar with the companies’ plans.

If you’ve never experienced Musical.ly, check out the video embedded in the main Loop post. Some of these are very good. I can see the attraction, the fun of putting one of these together. Good connection for Apple.

Son of a bitch. Give me a drink.

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[VIDEO] I’ve heard this song here and there, but stumbled across the video today. Just me, or does the lead singer here, Nathaniel Rateliff, remind you of Jim? And he says this to me a lot. Video embedded in main Loop post.

Songwriting podcast, well worth your while

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Into the craft that is songwriting? Check out Song Exploder, a podcast that invites artists to explain their process.

My 2 cents, the best place to start is with the latest episode, where Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo talks through his approach to writing the song Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori.

The whole thing was fascinating, from the backstory of the song’s inspiration, to the mechanics Rivers uses to bring together chord structures. Lots to learn here.

Wannabe songwriter? Give it a listen.

The hot new Hip Hop producer that does everything on his iPhone

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Wired, talking about Steve Lacy:

Last year, he was nominated for a Grammy for executive-producing and performing on the 2015 funk-R&B-soul album Ego Death, the third release from The Internet and Lacy’s first with the band. He’s a sought-after producer, featured on albums like J. Cole’s “4 Your Eyez Only” and Kendrick Lamar’s new “Damn.” Earlier in 2017, he released his first solo material, which he’s playing as part of the setlist for The Internet’s worldwide tour. (Somewhere in there he also graduated high school.) The only connection between his many projects? All that music is stored on his iPhone.

And on his process:

He paged through the drum presets in GarageBand for a while before picking a messy-sounding kit. With two thumbs, he tapped out a simple beat, maybe 30 seconds long. Then he went back to the Rickenbacker. He played a riff he’d stumbled on while tuning, recording it on a separate GarageBand track over top of the drums. Without even playing it back, Lacy then reached down and deleted it. It took three taps: stop, delete, back to the beginning. He played the riff again, subtly differently. Deleted it again. For the next half hour, that’s all Lacy did: play, tap-tap-tap, play again. He experimented wildly for a while, then settled on a loose structure and began subtly tweaking it. Eventually satisfied with that bit, he plugged in his Fender bass and started improvising a bassline. A few hours later, he began laying vocals, a breathy, wordless melody he sang directly into the iPhone’s microphone. He didn’t know quite what he was making, but he was feeling it.

All night, Lacy goofed around. He found a sword in the studio, and made up a shockingly catchy song called “Sword in the Studio” that’s still rattling around in my brain.

This really resonated with me, a terrific read. Steve Lacy sounds like a bunch of people I know, kicking around in GarageBand, laying down a base track, then layering in guitar, vocals, what have you. But while most of this work ends up in a far corner of some hard drive or SoundCloud, Lacy’s efforts got him nominated for a Grammy and a bunch of high profile gigs.

And much of it done on an iPhone. Amazing.

The best guitar apps

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I’ve become a fan of Brian Sutich’s new guitar blog, Chasing Sound. In this post, Brian takes a look at some of the top guitar-related iOS apps.

A musical walk through the impact of Chuck Berry

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If you are a fan of music, take a few minutes to dig through this multimedia piece by the New York Times. Year by year, you’ll make your way through the critical work in Chuck Berry’s catalog, focused on the beat and guitar licks he introduced to the world, each accompanied by covers of his songs, as well as songs that influenced his evolution and songs derived from his work.

Great job by Guilbert Gates and the Times multimedia team. The songs load instantly, stop on a dime, making it easy to quickly shift gears, control the pace. I love this.

Robot’s delight

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[VIDEO] I said a hip hop, the hippie, the hippie, to the hip, hip hop, and you don’t stop.

Hope over to the main Loop post for an update to this update to The Sugar Hill Gang’s seminal Rapper’s Delight.

Watch Beats 1 Creative Director Zane Lowe give SXSW music keynote

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[VIDEO] Zane Lowe is the creative force behind Beats 1 Radio. Watch the video embedded in the main Loop post for his SXSW 2017 keynote. If nothing else, click to about 5:48 in to hear Zane talk about his father and his role bringing rock to New Zealand.