music
Be weird. Save lives.
There’s been a flood of great “create for the fun of it” content in recent weeks, that I desperately wanted to link to — but I feared I’d be repeating my message a little too much. Then, I saw a video pop up on YouTube that said the same
Why I went back to buying CDs (and you should too)
I blame David Lee Roth. A few years ago, the final studio album from Van Halen disappeared from streaming services. No one knew why. Even Wolfgang Van Halen didn’t know why at first. Then, in an interview much later he said, “I hope people who like it have a
They tricked us.
All of the following rock guitar gods sold tens of millions of albums. Guitar players, like myself, believed for years that these artists had access to futuristic tools and production tactics that were out of reach for the ordinary musician. The opposite was true. * Eddie Van Halen’s iconic striped
The Era of Perfection
YouTuber/Record Producer Rick Beato mourns the loss of imperfect music [https://youtu.be/L-8EbHkc8tc]: It does seem that there’s a new generation of anxiety-filled, perfection-seekers topping the charts. But what’s topped the charts has rarely been what’s interesting to the devoted fans/evangelists of any art
A Lesson from the 90s in Finalizing Projects
I spotted this uploaded to YouTube and had to share it. It’s from a 1995 documentary called Reel Satriani on the making of Joe Satriani’s seventh, self-titled album. There’s several cool things about this: 1. It’s from the end of the analog age. Everything in it
Violinists are Lazy
I’ve spent the past week at my son’s violin camp in Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s an incredible opportunity for him to learn from the best violin teachers in the world. 681 students work with 184 teachers for a solid week of classes. The camp started with
Musicians Want Their Analog Tools Back
David Sax, author of the forthcoming book The Revenge of Analogue [http://amzn.to/2e5T4wh], on why analogue tools are making a comeback for musicians [http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-lady-gaga-finds-appealing-in-reel-to-reel] : > “I think the sound quality is one of the smaller reasons why people chose analog,” Chris Mara,