bitflipper

This update to the venerable Zebra 2 has been teased for years. I'd given up that it would ever see the light of day, but here's Urs showing an alpha version of Z3. It looks a lot like Z2, which to my mind is a good thing because it took me a long time to wrap my head around Z2. But now with FM synthesis! Back when Z3 was first discussed on KVR, Urs had promised a $49 upgrade price for Z2 owners. It appears he has't forgotten that promise, as he mentions an even better 30 EUR upgrade price in this video. Zebra 2 has been my primary go-to synth for a very long time. It and Omnisphere are the two synths I use in every project. So yeh, I'll be first in line when Z3 is released.

Yep, it's the Elvis tune Can't Help Falling in Love - but with cooler chords. There are couple vids on YT with her performing Plasir d'amour with Joan Baez, one of which shows the latter clearly struggling with the guitar chords.

Hard to imagine this melody is 300 years old. You don't need to speak French to figure out what it's about. For bonus points, guess which 60's pop song is based on it.

With the decline of commercial radio as the primary arbiter of what's good, we older folk have come to appreciate the value of human-curated playlists and to mourn its loss. But there are still radio stations that are doing it, they're just scattered around the world. Your new favorite music might be playing right now on a college radio station in France, you just don't know it. Check out ScrobbleRadio. At the moment I'm listening to a station called SomaFM Folk Forward, and enjoying it quite a lot. Despite the name, it's not really folk music, unless this is what they call folk music nowadays. I wouldn't know. It's a diverse collection, the nearest I can discern as a common thread it that it seems to be heavy on acoustic guitar and melodic. ScrobbleRadio's FAQ says the site is oriented toward "scrobbling". I didn't know what that was, had to look it up. For those similarly ignorant, it's a term coined by last.fm for a method of tracking what you've listened to online. Which is why I wouldn't be familiar with it - I don't listen to streaming music, preferring to purchase albums and store them in a portable music player. I definitely never listen to music on my phone. Ugh. The service is free and you don't have to create an account. Scrobbling is optional.

The first album I ever heard in stereo: Magical Mystery Tour. I had an epiphany right then and there, that the studio itself could be part of the creative process. From a musical perspective, the album that inspired me most was In the Court of the Crimson King. It was a bolt of lightning, showing me that rock, jazz and classical were all just different facets of the same gem. For emotional impact, it would be the first Black Sabbath album. It was my first time listening on headphones. "I am Iron Man" emanating from the middle of my head! Well, I was also on acid, so there's that. For musical inspiration, Time Out by Dave Brubeck and its follow-up, Time Further Out. Prior to that, I thought that all music was in 4/4, 3/4 or 6/8. Not only was 7/4 a viable option, you could even dance to it. Look it up on YouTube; there is a live performance of Unsquare Dance with (admittedly pro) dancers having no problem bouncing along to its odd time signature. Honorable mention: Hope by Klaatu, an epic concept album on par -imo- with Dark Side of the Moon. I bought it on cassette while on the road and fell asleep to it every night that summer. Our drummer was also a big fan of it, so when he bought a Sony reel-to-reel with sound-on-sound, Hope was in our minds as we began experimenting. That was my first non-studio recording. Can't call it a home recording as it was in a motel room in Idaho.

I dunno, $39 would be a great deal for somebody who doesn't already have a de-esser and a spectral compressor. Such a consumer probably falls right into iZotope's marketing demographic. Next ground-breaking product: a combination bitcrusher + cheese straightener! Part of a new suite of things you never knew you needed.

I am reminded of Flo & Eddy (The Turtles), who set out to write the dumbest song ever as a gag, only to score a hit with it. That song was called Eleanor ("Eleanor, gee I think you're swell, you're my pride and joy, etcetera")

Next you're gonna tell me that music production is similar fakery.

Thanks for that, Marc. I was so disappointed with the first album that I never gave the band a second chance. But your comment spurred me to give it a listen. You're right - it's pretty good. I know there's a lot of good stuff from the 90's that I missed due to spending that decade completely disconnected from popular music. It was disco that pushed me away in the 80's, resulting in a retreat to the music of my youth, primarily oldies from the 19th century. The Brandenburg Concertos - that's the soundtrack of my youth, my musical comfort food.

When this song was originally released, I had never seen Saturday Night Live because I was a working musician and Saturday nights were spoken for. But I had bought the first videotape machine I could afford and began recording SNL episodes and watching them on Sunday. It was a Sony Beta, which my technoid brain assumed would become the prevailing videotape format, being technically superior to VHS. That thing cost over a grand and didn't even have a wireless remote. I can still vividly recall playing back an SNL episode that featured a band named Dream Academy, playing Life in a Northern Town. I stood there slackjawed, thinking this was the best thing I'd ever heard on that show. Rewound and played it over and over, then ran out that afternoon and bought the album on cassette. Only to find that Life in a Northern Town was the only good song on the album. The band vanished, leaving only this one masterpiece as their legacy. Here's Justin Hayward covering it 40 years later, with an orchestra and still sounding remarkably mellifluous for an old man.

Just watching Runaway Jury on Netflix...Gene was one of the best villains ever. You know he's evil, but he's still sympathetic. Of course, some of that credit goes to John Grisham, but I'd previously listened to this on audiobook and didn't even form a mental picture the villain while listening. My money's on carbon monoxide. At 95, the list of things that could have killed Mr. Hackman was extensive, but his wife was much younger and his dog younger still.

This is a most welcome addition. I'm a fan of the spectral filter, but it had been a little less usable due to it favoring the lower frequencies within the band because it was reacting linearly, like a compressor without a sidechain filter. Now we have a sidechain filter for it. Hopefully they'll someday make its slope adjustable. But just the modest 3dB tilt helps.

My Cinnamon Girl is Keep on Rockin' in the Free World.

What a voice. Pure silk.

I love a mystery, especially when something behaves in what seems to be an inexplicable manner at first glance. Long ago I had a pair of PA column speakers that suddenly had really poor bass response. I took them apart, tested each of the 8 speakers separately, verified they were wired correctly. Curiously, if I ran just one of the cabinets - either one - the bass was fine. But when connected in parallel, the bass disappeared. I'm sure anyone reading this knows exactly what had gone wrong. In my defense, I was 19 and didn't know half of what I thought I knew at the time. Turned out, one of my home-made speaker cables had one end wired in reverse. In Geoff's case, confounding though it is, the answer is simple in retrospect. The passive tone control on most guitars is a simple RC low-pass filter. The fact is that the harmonic content in a plucked electric guitar string is quite subtle. Plug your guitar into an oscilloscope sometime, you'll see that it's essentially a poorly-formed sine wave. And what happens when you apply a filter to a sine wave? One of two things: either it does nothing, or it acts like a volume control, depending on whether the signal frequency falls within the attenuated range of the filter. The effect of the filter is more obvious on the bridge pickup simply because there's more harmonic content in the signal. reginaldStjohn's comment about flat-wound strings being mellower was news to me, but makes sense. I've never heard flat-wound strings on a 6-string, but am familiar with the tonal difference on a bass.

This piece was written specifically for this singer, and he may well be the only person on the planet who can sing it. Jump to the 4-minute mark to hear his full range over 60 seconds.

My guess would be that Noel is very much in the loop.

Been there; I know that feeling. However, know that the idea that you have nothing left will eventually be proven otherwise. The emotional well from which we draw musical inspiration is filled with all the experiences life has ever thrown at us, both good and bad.

The way I heard it: Optimists believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. Pessimists fear that is true.