Dad3353

Good evening, BX, and ... Plenty to read and amuse you here, and lots to learn and share.

On the other hand, there's ...

Shared by someone else here (I forget by whom, but thanks ...) : Ted Greene, two hours of splendid snippets of information, all the while playing toe-curling off-hand stuff and shaking his foot nervously..!

Just in case anyone is following this topic, Andy ( @Erax Sound ...) has responded to the 'challenge' of re-mixing one of my orchestral compositions; I thought it suitable to post, here, the result. Here, then, is my original piece, uploaded to Soundcloud as a 320 K Mp3 to match that of Andy. Be fore-warned : there is no EDM in the piece, and each runs for nearly a quarter of an hour. Don't blame me if you drop off to sleep early on. Remarks, comments, evaluations of Andy's work welcome (if complying to BC anti-cussing rules, naturally...). For my part, I'm impressed, and will PM Andy to learn more of how he approached this. Here's the two versions, then; firstly my original, then the Erax Sound remix ... Thanks for listening, if you have; if you're about to, enjoy...

No, no; I thought that I had explained earlier. I'm not a Luddite, and have no problem with cookies, from any site. I use CCleaner now and again, which rubs out the ones I've not allowed for keeping, anyway. I'm far from a 'normal' customer, and pity any business basing any decisions on stats garnered from my web usage. I use ad-blockers, simply because it's a pain in the wotsit, and I need the screen real estate for whatever I'm peering at. No, my 'beef' is quite simply the hypocrisy of giving the choice back to the individual (after all, the horse bolted years ago; these 'non-essential' cookies have been in our systems for years, or decades; we just weren't informed about their usage...), and then making the 'refuse' choice darned-near impossible by hiding it away or smothering it in reams of mumbo-jumbo. Many sites have an honest 'Refuse all'; some have a 'Save the selection' with the selections being defaulted to 'Off'. That, to me, is enough. Any site that does not make the 'Refuse' choice simple and evident is, in my view, doing it deliberately to get around the fact that it's now compulsory to offer that choice. I won't condone that, so I don't visit those sites. That's all. Apologies for derailing this topic with such stuff; I've already indicated my Good Wishes to the OP for the success of his blog. It's my loss that I don't consult it; the price I pay for being a Stubborn Old Fuddy-Duddy.

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Of course; hasn't everyone..? Foghorns ...

I think that many 'indifferent to music' people would say 'Bof, I'm indifferent' rather than 'Anything' if asked about their tastes in music. Most folk answering 'Anything' probably do like 'anything that's musical', and are not indifferent. Play 'em something truly rotten (concert of chain-saws, pink noise generator, collection of coastal fog-horns...) and they'd mostly not like 'em, I think.

Getting old, maybe..? Folks used to have this same reaction to Eddy Cochran and Co; in fact every 'new' movement has been derided by the previous generation (Liszt..? Paganini..? Post-Gregorian chants..?). No, I don't like the 'new-fangled racket' either, but our grand-children will love it, then complain about whatever comes after... 'Tis the Way of the World.

All the sites I've visited with this new system have several buttons for cookie permissions, with 'essential' cookies greyed out, exactly so that the site may function correctly. Other cookies, such as sharing info with partners, or collecting stats, have the possibility of being refused. I'm not concerned with the financing of sites (blogs or whatever...); that's the remit of the site owner. I want to have an honest choice of what I'm paying for. As I've already posted, I may well accept all cookies, as long as there's a clear option to not do so. There's a principle here; i'm not against cookies, or sites, or blogs, but do prefer honesty to cheap tricks. Just sayin'; good luck with the blog.

So where are we, exactly..? Editors have been editing manuscripts presented to them for centuries, most, if not all word processors have typo correction, grammar correction and even whole phrase correction as standard, to say nothing of predictive text, whereby it's the machine creating the text before it's even been thought of by the author. How is any of this different to pitch, and any other treatment..? What's the big deal..? No cars with power steering, or assisted brakes..? No lifts; take the stairs..? To fly, just flap your arms..? The subject is a non-subject, I'd say. There are no dinosaurs left, get over it.

The rot set in when the first log-thumpers and hollow-bone blowers started to 'improve' upon 'natural' sound creation, tuning their bones to make more 'agreeable' notes and adding resonance to the percussions. Once one accepts that violins do not grow on trees, the article creating the sound (music...) becomes irrelevant, from a 'natural' point of view. That the vibrating air is excited by throbbing gut or by a paper cone matters not a jot; the ear has the same perception, and the brain fills in any gaps a lack of technicality may create. The 'world renowned pianist and conductor' was possibly quite content to have the money in the bank from sales of his facsimiles, I suspect. I'm all for 'live' music, and poetry recitals, but records and printed books are fine, too. Embrace it all; it's all good.

It's only a question of budget; if he needs the prompt, he's best served with a prompt. If looks are so important, how bad does it look if the singer (or any musician...) messes up and the mind goes blank..? I understand, but the important thing is to be comfortable on stage, not to preen and risk losing the plot altogether. When I was drumming for show-bands, I had my drum scores on a music stand beside me. I didn't need to look at them, but played all the better for the binder being there.

Some are not ...

Some bands (and singers...) are amateurs.

This is a reflection more of yourself than that of the musician, though. There's nothing wrong with doing what it takes to play the gig.

Use whatever you have on hand (a 'phone..?) to record the rehearsals, just as a means of listening back the next day and picking up any issues. You'll not be looking for studio quality, just something to check on anything that comes up. I'm a drummer, and I drop sticks. I pick another from the bag hanging by and play on. I've maybe a bass drum starting to creep away from me; I discretely use my hi-hat hand to rein it back in. A cymbal stand gets knocked over by a drunken idiot (or the bass player...); I play on and use another for those hits. What I'm getting at is : it's important to continue as if everything is fine, whatever the bum note, dropped pick, foot fallen through rotten stage floor... If you're lost, stop for a second and come back in once you've remembered where you are in the song. None of these scenarios will happen during your first gig, but are very likely in a whole playing career. Keep it going; that's the thing. Timing is more important than notes, so keep tapping your foot. In many (most..?) songs, the drums give some clue as to when the verses end, or the solo is over. Listen to what the drums are doing. Have fun, and be part of everyone else having fun.

It's really quite simple for most things we're likely to buy. There's the cost of the item itself, then shipping, then VAT, then any handling charge, then import duty. Which of these apply and at what rate, depend on what the item is, and the country they're coming from.

Only to those aware of these notions; to everyone else, they're just out of tune.

Tell me about it..!

[pedantry] (sorry...)... 33 is not 9, but 27 (3x3x3...) Similarly, 44 = 256, 55 = 3125 These are, however, the correct complexities when working with groups of people, for music or anything else. I shan't post the likelihood of problems arising from institutions such as the House of Commons. [/pedantry]

A word on WAV files... Modern music is often 'continuous', filling a track from end to end. Much of my music is rather short passages interspersed along the track, so much silence. A WAV file takes as much file space for silence as for sound, and the files can be huge. My advice would be to compress the WAV file, using 'ZIP' or 'RAR', and send the compressed files. Once 'unzipped', the WAV files are recovered with no loss of quality, at their original size. I had sixty tracks, 15 minutes long each, to transfer; total 'weight' as WAV : 12 Gb. Once zipped, they weighed 1.06 Gb. The zipped files transfer faster, and take up less storage space; useful for archiving. If sharing, make sure everyone is using the same protocol and parameters for best results. Just sayin'; hope this helps.

Not much to add to all of this except to say that we are all different, and that experimenting is a Good Thing. The sound wanted from recordings varies enormously depending on genre, taste and style, so there's no 'silver bullet'. I'm 'old school', whereby I want the drums to sound like acoustic drums. Once, when recording for a reggae-style song, we used a giant ladybird cushion stuffed into a plastic bucket and spanked with a wooden spoon. This gave a much better 'reggae' drum than my kit. No, I don't put pillows into my shells; I use a pair of felt strips inside, vertically, each side of centre, to control the 'boom'. There's no port (nor need for one...). It was the fashion in the early days of mic'ing kits to remove the resonant heads altogether, and placing the mic's inside the shells. The 'sound' of the kit was created using the console, as the kit itself now sounded either like a steel drum band, if tuned up, or like cardboard boxes when damped with bits of whatever taped to the batter heads. These became known as 'concert toms', and many makers actually made whole kits like that, with no lugs at all for a resonant head. If that's the kind of recording and/or live stuff wanted, get a 'concert' kit and be absolved from the need to tune a resonant head. It's not quite the same thing to remove the resonant head alone, as one gets the issue of the unused lugs rattling, for instance. One wonders why bass drums are ported, but rack and floor toms are not. The sound will not be 'matched' if they're mic'ed up differently. Again, recording in studio conditions is a different game from recording at home, even in a suitable room. Most recordings can be adequately made using a bass-drum mic, a snare mic and an overhead. A well-placed overhead can eliminate the need for separate snare, too, if the player knows how to create the dynamics required without a separate channel strip. I'd recommend this, for anyone wanting to record stuff; there's a lot of questions answered in there, plus questions one didn't know to ask ... The Recording Engineer's Handbook 4th Edition ...

Bloomin' youngsters.. ...