58 posts tagged “music”

After several years of barely touching my bass guitar at all, this year I started playing again and somehow I magically had the ability to figure out and play along with songs. Now I practice a couple of times a week by putting on iTunes Party Shuffle and playing along with whatever comes up. If something is especially fun (like OSCA by Tokyo Jihen), I'll devote a few sessions to getting it right. In other cases, I'll just write down whatever I can make out and then move on. In case anyone is searching for bass tabs of songs by Judy and Mary, Harada Ikuko, clammbon, YUKI, Shiina Ringo, or other such unlikely acts, I've started posting my notes online.

More of my heroes on the Colbert Report; Richard Dawkins was on a while back.

I think I'd like to keep making Muxtapes every now and then. Here's my first one, which I made on a challenge from Jules. I have another one ready to upload but I'll wait a couple of days.

So I looked at the Information Aesthetics post about graphing out one's music listening history from last.fm. It's pretty neat, but of the two tools available for drawing these kinds of graphs, one is for Windows and the web-based one has been processing my data for like four days so far.

Music history clip

I couldn't find bass tabs for this song, so I tried to learn it by myself. For reasons I don't understand, I became able to kind of figure out songs by trial and error. It's probably pretty wrong, so if you know the right way to do any of these parts, please let me know. 

I keep coming back to this as one of the greatest musical performances I've seen.

A mysterious package arrived at my home today. When I opened it up, it was the free copy of the Snakes & Arrows DVD version that Musictoday promised me after I had to deal with their awful concert ticket purchasing site. I hadn’t heard anything about it in over a month, and this version came out back on June 5, so I’d just assumed that they never sent it. But there it was. I guess I shouldn’t complain about getting my free stuff late.



The app you use to browse the contents of the disc is industrial waste. It took long enough to launch that I was worried it would never fully open. Of course, it has an interface reminiscent of the mid-90’s “Enhanced CDs” that were supposed to change the way we experience music, but instead just made us embarrassed that someone obviously spent lot of time and energy to make something so unimpressive. The performance was bad enough to make my one-year-old MacBook stutter the video more than once per second.

And, as a final stab, the “create your own ringtone” feature as advertised on the package:

• It is, for some reason, a separate Flash app.
• It makes you scroll through a list of hundreds of cell phone models to find yours.
• Once you choose a phone and a song, it gives you this completely fake waveform graphic for finding the segment of the song you want.
• Once you have chosen your song segment, you are expected to click the BUY MY RINGTONE button. Isn’t it grand that if you pay the extra money to get the awesome, ultimate version of an album, you are blessed with the opportunity to pay for the music again in another form? Thankfully I know how to open Bluetooth File Exchange and move an mp3 file I already own onto my phone for free.

This would all bother me a lot more, but! Someone smart made it so that, if you dig around the folders on the disc, you can get at all of the content without launching the awful custom interface. All of the photos, desktops, icons, music, and videos are sitting there as sensible files you can drop onto the apps of your choice. That common-sense feature makes it all worthwhile.