Congratulations, Herbie Hancock

Herbie Hancock won a surprising Album of the Year Grammy last night, with his marvelous River: The Joni Letters. Herbie has had a wonderful and eclectic career in jazz, from his early work with Miles Davis, through his electric jazz success with Rockit, to the present day. Other Hancock works of note: Watermelon Man, a staple of high school jazz bands everywhere (and rightly so), and his love note to George Gershwin, Gershwin's World.

If you want to get the Album of the Year, here's an Amazon link: River: The Joni Letters (with Bonus Tracks) - Amazon.com Exclusive

Herbie, you're the best.

Awesome organist

At first, it looks like just another child doing just another recital piece, but it gets awesome quickly. Keep an eye on the bass line being played by her left foot.

Via Erik's Weblog.

Amazing Young Organ Player Rocks Out - Watch more free videos

The Remainders in 1983

My old band, in it's only video appearance. This was the short-lived lineup that was missing guitarist Jim Moore, but he was represented as a songwriter. Here we see Bill Greenrose and Chris Wilson on guitars, Jerry Russell on drums, and me on bass.

Part 1: "No other man but me", written by me (if you don't count the fact that I stole the basic riff from Ray Charles):

Part 2: "Romance", written by Russell and Moore:

This video was made by Beth Ann Herrick at the Seton Hall University television studio. I haven't heard from Beth Ann in years -- maybe she'll do a vanity Google search and find this here.

Musical innovation: The Thummer

You may have seen a fascinating new MIDI controller called The Thummer before, but it's getting some more exposure now due to this WSJ article about it. I became aware of the article via a post on Richard Florida's Creative Class Exchange blog, and then I got into a great exchange in the comment thread with Jim Plamondon, the inventor of the Thummer. We touch on the history of musical keyboards, the benefit of standards, how best to encourage innovation, patents, and even music. Richard is quite indulgently letting us use his space for the conversation. Drop by and add your views.

Producing music again

It's been a long time since I last produced any music in my basement studio. It usually takes some kind of catalyst to place me in the correct mindset. This time, it was twin catalysts.

The first was hearing from an old friend on classmates.com. Well, more than an old friend, truth be told. It was my high-school sweetheart. We had lost touch over the years, and it was wonderful catching up with her. I mentioned this to my old band mates, two of whom knew her and two of whom did not. I could quickly describe her to the other two by saying, "She's the one Times gone by is about." This was one of the first songs I wrote, and certainly the first one that didn't suck. Our band, the Remainders (who had the name long before Dave Barry) played Times gone by quite a bit. However, our one early attempt at recording the song never quite captured what I wanted.

The second catalyst was a disk crash. I take a long time to migrate from one Linux box to the next, and still had all my audio recording and mixing software on 'berkelium', a 600 MHz Dell Dimension that was a leftover from Lockstar, the dot-bomb I worked for around the turn of the millennium. Its disk crash finally forced me to finish my move to 'porky', a 2.6 GHz HP/Compaq that I picked up on eBay for a song. Playing around with ecasound, my favorite audio software, I discovered that jumping from 600 MHz to 2.6 GHz makes a big difference in what you can do.

So, Times gone by got re-recorded. I used Hydrogen for the basic drum track, but recorded everything else live. Ecasound is great for multitrack recording as well as mixing, and the fact that it supports LADSPA plugins allowed me to give the lead guitar a nice fake-Marshall sound.

Anyway, I put the track up on the Open Source Audio collection at archive.org, and you can listen to it or download it here.

New blogging topic: Digitizing vinyl

I've been looking for something interesting to write about, as I while away my time digitizing my extensive collection of vinyl recordings (a. k. a. "records"). The small voice inside my head, which sounds astonishingly like the small voice inside Wil Wheaton's head, sez, "Duh! Blog about what you're doing!". True that. The Vinyl Digitization Obsession (VDO) process itself is fascinating, and quite blog-worthy.

I'll get into technical details later -- details most of you will probably hate, since I still find Linux, command-line utilities, and shell scripts to be my best friends when it comes to getting anything done on a computer. For the initial post on the topic, I'd like to ruminate on the pleasures I've discovered in the activity.

Ripping a CD is not really enjoyable, but it is fast. I thought at first that "ripping" my albums would be tedious, since it has to occur in real-time. But that has become its charm. I have been listening to albums that I haven't touched in ages. Reacquainting myself with music that defined me as a young man. (Those ones are kinda scratchy.) Discovering albums that I bought at the end of the vinyl bell-curve that never got played at all due to the overlapping start of the compact disc bell-curve.

As I slog through them, I've found quite a few that deserve wider recognition. That's where the blogworthiness comes in. (I'm not sure I spelled blogworthiness correctly, even though I'm reasonably certain I made the word up.) As certain LPs catch my ear, I'll note them in the blog.

As we speak, I'm digitizing John Lennon's Mind Games. I don't ever recall noticing before that the song Out the blue is such a blatant rewrite of Sexy Sadie. I guess John was lucky he didn't have the same music publisher that John Fogerty did.