I remember seeing an animated stick man kung fu fight somewhere on the web about a decade ago. It was a big hit before youtube or myspace or any of that mess. Apparently the stick man fight has been going strong underground ever since.
This might have been the original one:
And this one has over FOUR MILLION VIEWS.
30 October 2009
Stick Man Rasslin
This Holiday Season
You gotta love Donny Hathaway. Loving Reuben Studdard is optional. I went to see RS at the Midland when Kem opened for him. It was a great show.
What we need is for all peoples of the universe to make pithy statements of love this holiday season. Amen. Buy American. I mean, Amurrrkn.
Love this gittar solo. Damn. Remember when pop was glossy and smooth?
The rest of the essay.
26 October 2009
Avg Human Weight = 60#
Enjoy the music ironically if you must. Scorn the trainers who whip children into shape as a collective performance machine. But the skill can't be denied.
25 October 2009
Nice Endcap on the Autotune Backlash
Seems like the world discovered Photoshop and Autotune at around the same time. The popular conception of Photoshop got a lot closer to how professionals actually use these tools. With Autotune, it has pretty much always been used as a special effect to get the robot voice. Big products have always - and probably will always - use Melodyne, Waves Tune, and the simple, low-level tools in Logic and ProTools, which are all much MUCH more transparent.
So the AutoTune backlash edges out the Photoshop backlash for the title of most retarded fashionable opinion so far in the digital age. But I thought this was a nice little recording. It actually sounds like 80's hip-hop - the rough and rowdy world of samplers. I.e. it's much more backward looking than forward.
24 October 2009
Rockwell Test Results
A few days ago I got a last minute call for an R&B show. At rehearsal we ran a whole bunch of Michael Jackson songs and I finally caved in and got all nostalgic like everyone else. I was just watching old MJ videos on YouTube when I came across this. Seems like this style of music has been getting better lately.
23 October 2009
How to make your bass sound great.
I sat down this morning to hack a bass in the same way I've done my last 4 basses. It occurred to me that most people must not know about these - otherwise everyone would do it. Here are some secrets to making your bass sound great.
- Get rid of onboard preamps. The best OBP's are weak compared to the pre in a decent bass amp. OBP is a very old idea that had its time.
- Strip the electronics. I mean gut it. My basses generally run from the pickups directly to a wireless transmitter - no pots. Even if you fail to leap the mental/emotional hurdle of discarding your crappy OBP, you can get a lot more out of your pickups if they aren't loaded down by pots; at the very least get rid of the volume and blend pots in front of the OBP and replace the pots with switches.
- Use are wireless transmitter. This takes cable capacitance out of the picture and gives you a clean, consistent gain stage in front of your amp's pre. It also makes for less stage bumbling and gives you a convenient way to mute your instrument without relying on 1940's potentiometer technology.
- Take the time to find the right strings. ProSteels will make the dullest bass zingy, and worn flats will give any bass a good, soft-edged thump.
- Learn to pick an instrument. The stiffness of the neck is what makes a bass great, and really nothing else. Some bottom budget clunkers are great, and some expensive basses have no magic in them. You have to sort through a pile of instruments to find a good bass of any brand or model. Laminated necks are more consistent, but if you look it is easy to find a cheap maple neck that sings.
- Consider giving up the low B. The correct solution to the problem of flabby B-stings is a multi-scale fingerboard, such as that employed by Sheldon Dingwall. However, because some a-hole filed a patent on the centuries-old idea of multi-scale fingerboards, manufacturers have been slow to adopt the design. I.e. you are never going to get a good B out of a 35" string. So the choices are: buy a Dingwall (worth it if you can afford it), have a luthier build you a multi-scale bass, or stick with 4-string. It's less than half an octave you're giving up.
- Get your tone from your fingers. That's actually number 1 through 10 - the rest of this stuff is just icing on the cake.
In case you don't know/care who Gary Willis is, here is a GW student using this technique on hard groovin improv:
20 October 2009
Esperanza Spalding
This is what jazz needs - an adorable young woman who writes/plays catchy, poppy music. She will draw 10x more people to real jazz than any mofo horn player.
19 October 2009
West Side Story/Waterfront Mashup
I never heard this song before today - great groove and a good old 80's pop-R&B bridge. Also check out Jets vs. Sharks.
18 October 2009
17 October 2009
Interview Magazine
I subscribed to Interview magazine. After the first issue arrived yesterday, I am no closer to understanding the super-gay world of fashion photography, but the rag is very enjoyable.
Here's a quote from the first issue I got, September 2009.
When you're with people that are aware of the fact that you're a photographer, they'll say, "Oh, look at that! That's something to take a picture of!" That's almost a sure sign that you shouldn't do it. - Ari Marcopoulos. Read more...
Loop Soup
Pretty cool boomerang type loop jam. BTW this type of thing is much easier to do in Ableton Live.
16 October 2009
Lee's Summit Native Pat Metheny in Kansas City (Rhythm & Ribs2007)
I was at this show. It was even more awesomer than it sounds here. This tune supports the theory that Metheny at heart is more than a little into 1970's progressive rock. Hearing him blow over a simple groove makes me wish he would get with some project akin to Roy Hargrove's HR Factor.
BTW about the GR300: most guitar players are tragically unaware that you can do all of this modular synth stuff with software now. The great thing is that it works pretty much exactly like the old stuff did - simple stages that do a single thing according to a few easy-to-understand variables. Where each stage used to be housed in a physical enclosure or a square of panel-mounted components with a dark line drawn around them on the interface side, now with software each stage is just a drag-and-drop widget.
There are lots of platforms with which you can roll your own, like Reaktor and SynthEdit; or you can use one of the innumerable premade synths that have all the components arranged already, such as Tripp Lead and Guitar Controlled Bass Synth from FrettedSynth. Basically any modular synth software that lets you assign control voltage can be controlled with the signal that comes out on that 1/4" cable on a normal guitar.
Now if you are truly a lazy, luddite guitar player, you can do what you always do to solve a musical problem: buy a pedal. Electro-Harmonix, the undisputed kings of making terrific stuff for blue collar musicians, offers all kinds of boxes that do synthesis. Micro Synth is one. POG is also unbelievably cool. Digitech also includes synth capabilities in a lot of products, from standalone synth pedals to very inexpensive multi-effects DSP units. There are other companies that make specialized little modular synths for guitar pedalboards, but the prices get into boutique territory.
Check it out, you lazy guitar players; it will only take away a few minutes from your busy schedule of practicing the same old crappy pentatonic riffs that everyone else plays.
15 October 2009
14 October 2009
13 October 2009
JJ Grey & Mofro
Let's enumerate what this music video has going for it:
- down and dirty groove
- solid, traditional engineering
- humor
- solid, traditional cinematography
Read more...
12 October 2009
Uuungh!
I saw a video with this gal a long time ago and forgot about it. This grooves real hard. She's like an undercover Marcus Miller - and she sings!
Embedding is disabled on this video, so you will have to make the jump.
11 October 2009
Slide Guitar that Does NOT Suck.
Slide guitar. Good music. Scientists must have dedicated massive resources to overcoming this longstanding mutual exclusivity.
10 October 2009
Mr. Spriggs
It has come to the attention of management that some of you still have not viewed this important training video. Please take a moment before our next meeting to bring yourself up to speed.
09 October 2009
New Misc Photos
In Misc set at Flickr. Had to go for a walk w/ new lens to get it out of my system so I can get back to work.
Read more...
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My Documentary Treatment
I am presently working round the clock on the treatment, rough cut, and narration script of my current project, a documentary on the history of my church congregation. It is a fascinating history spanning the late days of the American frontier, Kansas City in its boomtown days, the entire modern era, and the present.
I just wrote this line in the treatment and thought I should share it with the world, considering that it probably won’t make it into the film in any form:
Read more...Scene: Reenactment In 1897 on the Jesse Barlow farm in Lisle, MO, wife Emily goes to draw water at the family well down by the railroad tracks. As she is executing her chore, she finds a newspaper called The Gospel Trumpet, a publication started in 1881 to promote the principles of D.S. Warner's brand new Church of God. She reads it and is pursuaded of its merits.
[A prominent KC Historian] describes how this is as American as apple pie, baseball, and coochie shots of celebrities.