Tag: Music
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Outsourcing…it can be a good thing.2!
As Spare Parts rambles towards completion, cello, violin and backing vocals have been added out in Omaha by Megan Siebe, Mike Williams, Sara Gleason, Benjamin Brodin, Laura Burhenn and Simon Joyner. Vocals were done at ARC studios on the 17th, and a few final percussion, lap steel, and backing vocal tracks will be done chez…
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The Core is Getting Soft.2: Unreal Reels
Continuing this series of posts on software and plug-ins, today’s post has praise for the one I use more than any other: Universal Audio’s Ampex ATR-102 plug-in. (On sale through the end of december for $299, or $499 as a bundle with the complementary Studer A800 24 track emulation, also mentioned below.) While I’m critical…
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The Core is Getting Soft.1
I’ve been thinking about starting a new set of posts for awhile about various kinds of music software – plug-ins, virtual instruments, etc. Digital doesn’t tend to get a lot of love in the indie world, historically speaking. Even the word “soft” carries negative connotations in a genre that followed in the wake of hardcore.…
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Top 40 Over 40.10: Bill Dixon
In this series of posts on artists who inspired me to start recording again by doing first-rate work on or after their 4oth birthday, Bill Dixon is an anomaly. Most of the folks I’ve written about were known for an early body of work done in their 20’s, and managed a “return to form” after…
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Top 40 Over 40.9: Jandek….live?!?!
I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on in the undie music scene during the aughts. I listened to some things that were current, but mostly I was just writing lyrics on my own and listening to a lot of modern classical music. When I started lending an ear indie-ward over the last…
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Top 40 Over 40.8: Scott Walker’s hat trick
Sometimes pop artists you associate with youth surprise you with a new vocal persona that suits them as they get older. (Think Robert Plant on Raising Sand.) But in the case of Scott Walker, he never really sounded like a young man to begin with. Sure, he was a teen idol back in the late…
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Top 40 Over 40.7: Egypt by Youssou N’Dour
This album was one of a few that made me want to try putting strings on my next record. I don’t like how strings are often used in western pop as a soft bed of sound in the background. I do like how they carry the lead parts on much of this album. The Egyptian…
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Other John Davises.2: Practice Space Music
In a parallel lifetime, I moonlight as the lead singer of Korn. If you haven’t seen me recently, the ‘locks may seem like a bit of a stylistic departure from the shorter look you can see below at left: Chris from Refrigerator wrestled me to the ground until I promised to grow my hair out…
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To the victor go the spoils…
The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The engineers there proudly showed off what they thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio. When Boyd asked…
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Top 40 Over 40.5: Sun Ra, live in 1989
One of my great regrets in life is that I never got to see Sun Ra and his Arkestra live before the great man passed. If I had arrived a little earlier, I would have. They played the campus of the University I attended the year before I got there – which was in fact…
johnhdavis / inundation records 