Acetio | Blogma

Hudson - Against The Grain from Dropbear on Vimeo.

Dave Grohl talks with Kyle Gass (of Tenacious D) about writing hits.

This is a series of 6 brilliant lectures Leonard Bernstein gave at Harvard in 1973 on the subject of music theory. He goes so deep, yet in such an approachable way. Anyone with an interest in creating or appreciating music should listen to them

The Quoperative has a tool/utility/app that deconstructs the 9 tracks from the Rolling Stone's song, 'Gimme Shelter' into an interactive playback toy.

The woman who sang on the song was named Merry Clayton. The song, and her singing in particular, was a prominent part of my musical experience as a child in the 70s. Supposedly she suffered a miscarriage as a result of the effort she put into her singing on that song.

http://quoperative.com/gimmeshelter/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimme_Shelter

This is indy-folk singer-songwriter + stop-motion animation + papercraft + Star Wars, so I am obligated to link to it.

When we were kids, my brother and I were convinced that the proper pronunciation was Tatoonie

Dan Shiman has a radio show at KRTS public radio in Marfa, TX where he plays lots of obscure and forgotten 45s from the 50s and 60s. He runs a blog with lots of great tracks at officenaps.com

He keeps a subset of his collection at exoticaproject.com

"The index is a registry of exotica's familiar cues: its Afro-Latin percussion, its jungle and Eastern themes, its flutes, vibraphones and bird calls. These are the cliches of the phenomenon. They might be considered prime indicators of exotica. Other cues - wordless vocals and tremolo guitar, for instance - are less of an exotica stereotype, though, and, interestingly, are hardly less prevalent. Each individual record's character, too, assumes a certain shape in terms of its instrumental and aesthetic constituents. Some records collect larger subsets of the style's parameters together. "Jungle Slave Dance," "Sunset Mood," "Tobago" and "Maui Rain" are, by this logic, the most exotic."

There's no shortage of drum machine simulators online, but this is the only one I've seen done in HTML/JavaScript (what we used to call DHTML)

"Patternsketch is an HTML5 and Javascript audio sequencer and drum machine. With it, you can create audio patterns, play them back, adjust playback tempo, volume, and change the audio kit. You can also save, export, and collaborate with your friends.

Patternsketch is an excercise in imagining what browser based music tools could be, and an exploration in the possibilities of new web technologies. It was built with Javascript (no frameworks) and HTML5 (no flash).

The goal of this project was to create a tool that musicians and casual music fans could use to create music patterns and collaborate on rhythmic ideas with friends. We recognize the performance is currently unacceptable for serious use, but look forward to updates in browser technology to make tools like this a viable option for music lovers."

DJ Earworm http://www.youtube.com/user/djearworm creates musical mashups that make other mashups look like kindergarteners made them (although some are pretty awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfadLhw14l8&feature=related)

The best are in the "United State of Pop" series, in which the top 25 pop songs (based on Billboard rankings) are combined into a new mix.
I like pop music but I'm not as aware of what's new as I was when I was younger, and I had never heard some of the songs used in the mixes (while other songs, such as "Single Ladies", I've probably heard, literally, a thousand times) - yet, I found myelf listening to these mashups several times each.

They are a marvelous technical achievement and are also a singularly cogent distillation of the American music zeitgeist.

When I was a kid, MTV was criticized for exacerbating the general societal attention-deficit disorder, but that was nothing compared to these mixes.
Back then the videos had only one song with rapid cutting of the visuals. These have 25 songs mixed together, usually with 3 or 4 going simultaneously.
This seems like it hits the limit to human perception. I'm curious what music videos and mashups will look like in 2020.

It's also interesting to see the racial breakdown of the singers in the videos. Of the 75 songs featured in the videos for 2007, 2008, & 2009 black men, black women, and blond white women seem to have roughly equal representation. White men and brunette women are under-represented. And Asians and hispanics are not represented.

2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ESZEUXyyb4
2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls7yJmxAF9Y