Music

Anything music.

There are 323 posts filed in Music (this is page 1 of 33).

Dolly earns her wings

Yesterday, American icon Dolly Parton died at the age of 80. Though I never met her, I admired the work she did and the example she set for being an outstanding human. Dolly was amazingly generous with her time and her fortune, helping people when they were in need and supplying over 330 million books to kids with her Imagination Library organization.

I watched many videos yesterday from people who were touched by Dolly and to be honest it got me bawling. As a friend said, what a gift it was just to be alive at the same time Dolly was!

I wish I had my own Dolly story but I wasn’t so lucky. Back in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, I was in Franklin, Tennessee, on a business trip at the same time my friend James was. James worked as a satellite truck uplink operator and was at the Ryman covering a country music awards show. I saw he was also in town and was considering going down there to say hi to him. The real reason I wanted to go was the chance that I might be in that backstage area and possibly meet Dolly. I know I would’ve been all tongue-tied if that chance presented itself, and I pondered how random people probably seek her out all the time to the point of it being creepy, so I opted not to go. Now I wish maybe I’d gone there anyway.

Dolly was the example person I could point to and say “here is what greatness humanity is capable of.” What an example she set for us all.

I am a drummer

The winter before last, I bought an electronic drum kit from Facebook Marketplace. Seemed like a deal and I’d always wanted to learn, so why not? I drove a few hours to the seller’s home somewhere south of Charlotte and hauled it back home.

It sat in our playroom for a little while until I got over my intimidation. Then, like with everything else I want to learn nowadays, I fired up YouTube and watched my first drum tutorial video. After a day or two of practicing, I was able to do a basic pattern!

Once I had that down, I was constantly feeding myself new material to master. I would fire up Spotify in my headphones and drum along with whatever song struck my fancy. Soon I was doing more complicated music. Eventually, I progressed to watching videos that included drum tablature, getting to the point where I could read music and nearly play at full speed. Suddenly I was somewhat useful behind the kit.

Fast forward to today. My band DNR’s drummer, John Palmer, sometimes can’t make practice due to prior commitments. The rest of the band could either waste time, noodle around, play to a drum track, or bag the practice altogether. I have been stepping up in practice to take over drumming with the aim to keep a steady beat. I’m still new and not nearly as fancy as I want to be, but often I can get the job done. It does drive me to want to get better, especially since I know the caliber of musicians my bandmates are and that they deserve an equally talented drummer. I’m not quite there yet but I definitely get charged up about playing with a real band. John’s position is secure, let me just say!

While I still get self-conscious about missing a beat or not adding the right fill, I can appreciate how far I’ve come in the short time I’ve been a drummer. Drums to me are a welcome break from work. I will leave my home office for the playroom, sit down, and play to a song.

A little bit here and there can get you far, before you know it.

Montserrat and music

AIR Studios Montserrat in 2014,. Photo by CaptMatty, Wikipedia.Commons.

As you may know, I got serious about my music when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. I will talk more about that in a moment, but the gist is that music takes up much of my free time at the moment. I still ask myself “wouldn’t it be great if I could do this full time?”

Recently, I learned of a recent documentary called “Under the Volcano” about Sir George Martin’s recording studio built on a hill in Montserrat under … well, a volcano. While I have not yet seen the documentary, I did read up on this studio, called AIR Studios Montserrat.

As a music fan in the 1980s, I knew many of my favorite albums of the time had been recorded in the Caribbean. I just didn’t know exactly where, or that most had been made at a single studio: AIR Montserrat. The Police; Dire Straits; Paul McCartney; the Rolling Stones; Jimmy Buffett; Elton John, Earth, Wind, & Fire, and so many others recorded some of their best work in Montserrat. Oh, if those walls could talk! They don’t have much to say anymore, sadly, as they are literally crumbling as the harsh Caribbean weather tears into these exposed, abandoned buildings.
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Popular rock band forced to turned down tours, can’t make money on them anymore – nj.com

Even as big-scale tours and festivals have resumed, many musicians are still navigating a tumultuous concert landscape four years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher discussed how his popular heavy metal band manages these difficulties on YouTube interview series “The Break Down With Nath & Johnny.”

“During COVID, no one toured, a lot of places shut down, and a lot of people changed careers,x said Kelliher. Techs that work for bands went into the real estate business or got regular jobs. Everyone was scrambling for money. And it was a f—ing disaster. So, the trickle-down effect of supply and demand. For instance, petrol and gas. It’s all economics. Everything relies on transportation.”

Source: Popular rock band forced to turned down tours, can’t make money on them anymore – nj.com

YouTube Interview here.

The Problem with Music | Steve Albini

I read this piece from Steve Albini years ago and it still resonates today. Steve died suddenly of a heart attack on Tuesday. The famed recording engineer (cough, producer) was sixty-one.

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”

And he does, of course.

Source: The Problem with Music | Steve Albini

A return to recording engineering

A side effect of my work on singing has been discovering what tools I need to sound decent. I started with a very good USB microphone a few years ago and then graduated to an inexpensive, 8-channel USB mixer board that I could use with some decent XLR mics I had lying around. When I got my current job, I went out and bought a top-of-the-line Shure SM7B microphone and paired it with my mixer, which got me even closer to the professional sound I wanted. Then I found a used digital sound card, an 8-channel Firewire-based M-Audio 2626 and bought it cheap.

Now, Firewire is essentially an abandoned technology now that Apple no longer ships systems with it, but it is still alive and well in Linux. I took one of my old desktop PCs out of storage, added a hard drive, installed Ubuntu Studio on it, and now have a digital audio workstation (DAW), for dirt cheap! Ubuntu Studio comes with a huge number of audio and video production tools and plugins. It works just fine with this very old M-Audio 2626, too.

My audio tool of choice for editing was once Audacity, but Ubuntu Studio comes with the open-source, ProTools-like DAW called Ardour. I’ve learned how to do some amazing things with manipulating audio using Ardour, simply by diving in and trying different things. I’m sure there is at last 200% more I can be doing with it when I fully understand its capabilities.

Over the past few days and nights, I’ve spent my free time using Ardour to recreate one of my favorite songs, R.E.M.’s These Days. I’ve often looked for old-school karaoke tracks for R.E.M. but there are few that aren’t the hits everyone’s heard a million times already. I did some Google searches to see if anyone’s done this themselves and hit pay dirt when I found a musician named Clive Butler. Clive posted several of his R.E.M. covers to Blogger from 2011-2018 and I thought I’d start with those. Then last week, I discovered he has fresh versions on his very own YouTube channel so I downloaded his version of These Days.
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Playing in a band – DNR

As I mentioned previously, I’d taken my singing much more seriously over the last few years, practicing for hours each week to improve my technique. At the end of last year, I got good enough to post a few audio clips and videos on a bandmate-finding website called BandMix. It took about a week before a few bands reached out to me, interested to talk to me about fronting their bands. I said yes to one which was a new Creedence Clearwater Revival tribute band but we never rehearsed because of a surge in COVID at the time. I wound up leaving the band and it kind of broke up soon afterward. Then I got interest from a Beatles tribute band, too, but didn’t think the music was varied or interesting enough. Finally, a musician reached out who was interested in the same music I was – and it was across the gamut of styles. My interest was piqued!

In Beaufort, NC, tagging along on one of Kelly’s work trips at the end of December, I got a call from Chuck, the drummer, who proceeded to talk my ear off on all the stuff the band planned to play. A week later, I showed up at the practice space at Kit’s home and sang a few songs for him. He didn’t say much but his ear-to-ear grin told me all I needed to know. Thus, I became the frontman for DNR.

DNR is composed of veteran musicians, many with a decade or more experience playing in bands. As for me, this is my very first band. At our early rehearsals, held almost every Saturday morning, I found myself being stared at by my bandmates, waiting for me to take charge and get us playing. It took me a few beats (ha!) to learn how to actually lead a band, but basically I faked it until I figured out what I was doing. I never considered before how cool and powerful it feels to set this band (or any band) in motion. It’s not something I pondered when I was singing solo to karaoke tracks!

So we rehearsed and rehearsed, picked an interesting setlist, and missed various practices here and there due to vacations, COVID cases, and what have you. Finally, after months of hard work rehearsing, we held our first gig over the Memorial Day weekend: a surprise birthday party for Chuck’s wife, Claudia. There were about two dozen people in attendance and friendly faces at that, but re-watching the video I took I appreciate more and more how heartfelt the applause is that we earned.
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Highlights of 2020: Karaoke!

I’ve always loved to sing, I have moments of greatness even, and I’m known never to pass up an opportunity to crank up a karaoke machine. We spent New Years Eve 2019 at Panama City Beach, Florida, for a short few days. The bar across the street from our condominium had karaoke nights and I wasn’t going to miss another chance to perform. This is the same place I sang with my extended family a year earlier. It was raining that night and the wait was long but we got in for food and drinks and then made our way over to the karaoke area where many of us belted out tunes for mainly our own enjoyment and that of anyone else who cared to care.

Earlier in the fall of 2019, Kelly and I had made a trip to Nashville where we stopped into a karaoke bar near downtown. I performed a few songs and did okay but flubbed a few, too. It made me feel that if I was going to do this I needed to do it right. This thought began to grow in my mind.

Fast forward to January 2020 or so. I am searching Spotify for a particular song and notice that a karaoke version appeared in the search results. Suddenly I realize there is a huge library of karaoke music on Spotify: everything I need other than the lyrics. Well, lyric sites are plentiful on the Internet, so that wasn’t a problem. I had a PA speaker and microphone I could use. All of a sudden everything clicked!
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How to perform music together virtually

Musicians together virtually


A retired music teacher friend, Ruth Johnsen, needed help setting up a virtual performance by her music students. Because I was eager to learn a new video editor and because it’s really impossible to say no to Ruth, I stepped up and took it on. For the past few weeks, videos from each musician has been filtering over to me and I’ve been learning all I can about stitching them together. Fortunately, the occasional karaoke videos I’ve created have given me a little insight into the best way to get this done. Here’s my recipe for successfully recording musical parts for a virtual performance.

Consistency is key. The video clips I was given all look and sound different. That’s to be expected from so many musicians and no way to use identical hardware and software. There are some aspects that can be easily standardized, such as:

Video orientation. Have everyone use either portrait or landscape mode. It will look much better. Purists insist on landscape but portrait can work, too. Whichever you choose, it’s best if everyone uses it.

Distance. Be consistent with camera distance. If your phone or camera is too close, you will overwhelm the microphone; too far and you won’t be heard at all. You’ll also make work for the video editor as she has to scale or crop the video to make everyone look consistent.
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Karaoke is my quarantine creative outlet

After a public performance or two over our New Years trip I thought I’d take my singing more seriously. I quickly realized the huge library of karaoke songs on Spotify and that could use this and some Googled lyrics to turn a PA speaker into a karaoke machine. I’ve posted two of my songs to YouTube already (“(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” By Elvis Costello and “Pink Cadillac” By Bruce Springsteen) and have gotten positive feedback. It feels good to be able to try something new, share it with the world, and get feedback on it.

It’s been a good lesson on how I sing, too. I sang in chorus in middle school and sang in my church’s youth choir around that time, too. I’ve been singing along to my favorite music whenever I’m alone at home or in the car. Once my colleagues caught me singing in the server room when I thought the roar of machines was drowning me out! Rarely did I sing for an audience before.

I have learned that singing with the goal of sounding the best is new to me. I realized that many of the songs I’ve been singing along to, ones that I’ve enjoyed singing, are not necessarily songs fit for my vocal range or style. When I’ve tried to do karaoke versions of these songs I quickly realized the ways in which my voice came up short. You know what? I have learned to be fine with this. I can’t nail every song but there are still hundreds or even thousands where my voice fits just fine. My list of karaoke songs is now well into the hundreds and I can easily organize a hefty, interesting set list to cover any performances.
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