I am a sucker for cool and creative mashups, so here is another one that I saw at Neatorama. This is a remake of the classic Smiths song ‘This Charming Man’ – from the original ‘The Smiths‘ or the wonderful ‘Complete‘ from last year … but done in the style of Super Mario Bros!
It is amazing what a skilled DJ can do in terms of remixing two songs and coming out with something that is truly transformative. That is what happens when DJ Carlos Serrano mixed Daft Punk’s “Something About Us” with Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain.” Check it out below, and hit up his web page for more great tracks!
The Knack – Get The Knack As a disclaimer, this album isn’t actually ‘mine’ – or at least I didn’t buy it. My brother grabbed it back in 1979 and it got heavy play from him that I honestly have a hard time separating which songs were actually popular on radio. When my parents were getting ready to move out of the first house they had bought when were just little kids and move south, they packed up all of my large record collection and I grabbed it in boxes and bags and moved it into a closet in our…
One of the first things most kids looking to pick up the guitar do is imitate the lines from a popular rock or pop song. Rock music is rife with simple hooks that are guitar-centric and easy to play (Smoke on the Water, Baba O’Reilly, and so on). But beyond a single line is a fully composed song – and after learning the line you will find you want more! Alfred Music has just released a two-volume set of classic rock songs from the 1950s through the 2000s! The first volume looks at the 50s-70s, and the second volume looks…
One of the most important figures in jazz and greatest guitarists in any genre was Wes Montgomery. He died in 1968 at age 45 of a heart attack and cut short an amazing career. Despite getting started in the late 1940’s with th eLionel Hampton orchestra, he left the band and returned home to Indianapolis to start a family, and recorded only once between 1950 and 1957, making his first recordings as a leader in 1959 … or so it was thought! Next week we get a look at never before released recordings that Montgomery made in 1957 and 1958…
The rumor on CNET that MOG is shopping itself around for possible sale is making news and intrigue with non-denial denials from MOG only increasing the rumblings of truthiness to the tale. But whether or not MOG is for sale is only a small part of a larger story. MOG is considered a ‘small player’ in the on-demand music streaming industry with around 500,000 subscribers paying either $5 or $10 a month. Direct competitors include Rdio with a similar user base – though both of these are estimates and I have no clue if they are remotely accurate. They both…
For a fake band, The Monkees were a huge success. Formed in 1965 as a TV-friendly pop group with the intent to release singles and offer a weekly comedy show, Brit Davy Jones joined Americans Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork and Mickey Dolenz as the fabricated pop group. The requirements were more about look, basic singing skills and personality – in fact none of the group played drums, which became an issue when they needed to perform live! But the face of the Monkees during their 58-episode, 2-season TV run was Davy Jones – to the point that he ended up…
Jane’s Addiction had a major hit more than 20 years ago with the song ‘Been Caught Stealing’ which still resonates with kids today. It is edgy, fun and infectious both rhythmically and harmonically. It had an awesomely cheesy music video that helped as well! Last summer the band asked fans to participate in a promotion with LG to film their show using the Thrill 4G 3D camera. Today we get one of the results, a fan film of the classic ‘Been Caught Stealing’. It is a solid rendition, but I always prefer the original music video … enjoy!
The term ‘stochastic’ means ‘non-deterministic’, or a process influenced by a random factor or variable. The new Stochastik drum pattern machine takes a weighted random factor approach to pattern generation for the iPad. You are actually setting a probability at each step in the sequence that a sound will trigger. The result is amazingly varied patterns – and you can export the results to GarageBand or other apps. The one thing missing in version 1.0 is MIDI, but that is coming soon according to developers. Here are some details: 15 Samples at a time, arranged in 3 banks of 5…
While Judie and I were attending the Create.Work.Inspire event sponsored by Dell and Intel last week we had the chance to sit down with Mindy Abovitz, the founder and editor in chief of Tom Tom magazine. (As an aside, we both really love the magazine and highly recommend you check it out.) While the conversation was ostensibly about the Create.Work.Inspire project, Mindy was the driving force behind it, we couldn’t resist using the time with her to ask a few other questions. One that we had been dying to ask had to do with the recent uptick in vinyl record sales. As…
For as long as I can recall something about music has been dying – I remember hearing ‘Long Live Rock’ as a kid on the radio when rock was more vibrant than ever; lived through the death of disco and the crash & burn of punk, new wave, new age, retro-50’s, retro-60’s, retro-70’s and now retro-80’s, grunge, glam-rock, hair-metal, screamo, and on and on and on. Yet music never really dies – listening to Skrillex I hear so many of the traditions of techno and dance music from well before Sonny Moore was born reflected through his creations. The same…
If you are a child of the 70’s like me, you fondly remember your collection of 45s and the mysteriously vanishing spindle adapters used to allow the discs with large holes to play on 33-1/3 RPM turntables. But as the 70s gave way to the 80s and the AOR (‘album oriented rock’ or ‘always on radio’ depending on who you ask) of Styx, Foreigner, The Police and more dominated the airwaves the ‘single’ slowly became less and less popular. Then CDs arrived in the mid-80s without a real equivalent to the 45. Sure there were CD singles, but the record…
Had you heard that George Harrison had an iPad app launching this week? I have been anticipating it for a while, knowing that aside from music there would be loads of context and history about his guitars and what he used for which song and so on. Cool info for a music geek, in other words. But today when it launched, the $10 price made me pause for a bit before buying. Recently we have seen apps from Jimi Hendrix and Sting, both of which were free, as well as Rock and Jazz histories which are ~$5 each. The Sting…
Next Monday PBS is airing a concert event from the White House on February 21st that has already gotten considerable coverage due to President Obama singing a chorus of ‘Sweet Home Chicago’. But there was much more in the event hosted by the First Lady, and some of the stars playing are true musical legends including Jeff Beck, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Booker T. Jones, Mick Jagger, Gary Clark Jr., Warren Haynes, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks and more. I wanted to highlight a couple of clips from the PBS YouTube channel and other YouTube users. Here is the classic ‘Five…
… or, at least that is how it seems. Paris Hilton had a amazingly dreadful album a few years ago that made people realize that no amount of money can buy you talent, and apparently it also can’t buy good enough taste in producers or songwriters to put together something reasonable. Welcome to 2012 and the new release from Paris Hilton just a couple weeks after the one year anniversary of Rebecca Black’s Friday. And while many call that song the worst ever … this one makes Friday look like genius. The song is bad enough, but the video is…
I have frequently said that it feels like after Apple showed the potential for a new path in which the carrier worried about signal and the device maker worried about the phone, Android has ushered us back to the ‘bad old days’ in terms of carrier bloatware, handset makers skinning away the performance of their hardware to ‘differentiate’, no two handsets alike that kills accessories (thank goodness for the EU and required micro-USB chargers!), and so on. Apparently Apple felt left out and decided to bring us back to over-priced ringtones! While not as egregious as the ‘$12 5-pack bundle’…
Have you ever seen someone post a ‘now listening’ Tweet with the #nowplaying hashtag? It is a cool thing, but if your Twitter feed is anything like mine then those posts come and go before you get the chance to make note if you are on the go. This is where Twusic enters Here are some details: After being the first social network offering to all the tools to create their own radio for free, Twusic has now become a complete music application enabling users to create playlists, to follow the music of their friends and to discover all the…
Last we heard on Twitter from none other than Billy Joe Armstrong himself that Green Day had entered the studio to start recording their new album: Happy Valentine’s day! Officially started recording the new record today. It’s F*CK TIME!!!! My wife has been a huge fan since the early days, but I have to confess that my older son became so obsessed with the group a few years ago that I still can’t listen to their stuff anymore. But they are still a popular group with my family … and we all hope they manage to do better than their…
I took the picture above on New Year’s Eve, and I was originally planning to use it as part of a post illustrating how an iPad-centric music system costing under $1000 is capable of producing better music than multi-million dollar studios from just 25-30 years ago. So let’s take a quick look: My son Christopher is working a DJ mixer which is interfaced to a netbook that is streaming music from MOG; an iPod Touch with some other pre-recorded music; and an iPad. The iPad is the workhorse of the music system, located just to the left of the iPod…
This week on Facebook there are loads of those ‘what I do, what friends think I do, what my parents think I do …’ picture collages going around. Some are funny, some simply try too hard. There are always a bunch of comments which I can summarize to save you time: “haha … so true”. (you’re welcome) I caught this one on a guitar-centric site this week, and what was amazing was not so much the image, which is just another mildly amusing stereotype at play, but the discussion. If you look at the core of the image, there are…
While Skrillex didn’t win the ‘Best New Artist’ Grammy, I doubt many would debate that his impact on popular music both directly and indirectly in 2011 was as MASSIVE as his bass drops. Suddenly everyone is putting dubstep-inspired DJ-tracks along with their songs – it looks to be the next ‘new thing’ in pop after the already tired singer/rapper collaborations that have become omnipresent the last couple of years. Perhaps showing the influence of Daft Punk’s epic Prime Time of Your Life video, this week Skrillex uploaded the official video for the title song of his new EP Bangarang, which…