11 Obscure References in Classic Songs—Explained!

19 May 2015 2 Comments

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags:

mercury

(via mental floss)

by Kara Kovalchik

We’ve all heard these classic pop and rock hits a thousand times. But even if you know all the words, do you know what they were about?

1. “You’re So Vain,” Carly Simon

“You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte.”

The gavotte is a French folk dance that was popular in the late 16th century. It was somewhat majestic and pose-y, long before vogueing came into … well, vogue. Simon has stated in interviews that she pictured the character in her song making a dramatic entrance, one hand raised and the other on his hip, much like those elegant pantaloon-wearing Baroque folks did back in the day.

Read more: http://mentalfloss.com/article/32295/11-obscure-references-classic-songs%E2%80%94explained

Rare Robert Johnson Record Turns up at Jerry’s Records

13 May 2015 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: , ,

jerry

(via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online)

by Scott Mervis

You never know what you’ll find in a stack of old records, which is part of what has driven Jerry Weber for four decades.

Last week, the owner of the world-famous Jerry’s Records in Squirrel Hill gave a man he didn’t know $50 for several boxes of old albums found while cleaning out an attic. They sat in a hallway at Jerry’s for a couple days before anyone looked at them. Among a collection of mostly junky, water-damaged, stuck-together discs, he found what he calls “the holy grail of 78s.”

It’s a 78 rpm copy of “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” (on Vocalion), the second song ever recorded by late Mississippi blues legend Robert Johnson, in 1936…

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/music/2012/11/16/Rare-Robert-Johnson-record-turns-up-at-Jerry-s-Records/stories/201211160170

The Loudness War: Good and Bad News from the Front

09 May 2015 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts, Toward Better Sounding Music Tags:

swift

(via msn entertainment)

by Matt Medved

In honor of last month’s Dynamic Range Day, mastering engineer Ian Shepherd made an infographic comparing the loudness of popular albums — and the results may surprise you.

Take Taylor Swift‘s 1989, which clocked in at a fairly compressed DR6 rating. While Shepherd says that’s pretty standard for modern pop music, it’s still much louder than classic heavy metal LPs like AC/DC‘s Back in Black (DR12) and Metallica‘s The Black Album (DR11). Metallica’s more recent Death Magnetic reached a blistering DR3 level, while Skrillex‘s Recess charts at DR4…

…There may be hope on the horizon. As YouTube joins platforms like Spotify and iTunes Radio in employing loudness normalization to even out track volumes, Shepherd believes artists and engineers will realize the audio arms race is “pointless.”

Read more: http://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/taylor-swifts-1989-is-louder-than-ac-dcs-back-in-black-heres-why/ar-AAbEi07

Adobe Photoshop PDF

Dear David Guetta…You Suck.

04 May 2015 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: ,

guetta

(Reprinted from Melkor)

by Scott Melkor

Dear Dave (can I call you Dave?),

How are you? It has been a really long time! I hope that you are doing great.

Anyway, I was writing to let you know that you are the worst and represent everything that is wrong with DJ and EDM culture. I recently had the displeasure of reading your interview with Beatport. Riveting stuff, really. I particularly enjoyed the following excerpt.

“Not everything went smoothly behind-the-scenes, though.. Something crazy happened to me on the [first weekend],” he says. “I’m using Rekordbox and Pioneer to play, and before I saved my playlist to my SD card, my computer crashed. So I just had to put all my music in a random order on USB sticks at the last minute, doing it really old school, scrolling to look for the records I wanted to play next.”

There are so many things wrong with you, and with this paragraph, that I felt compelled to write you this heartfelt letter…

Read more: http://themelkerproject.com/

Early Morning, April 29

29 Apr 2015 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts, On a Lighter Note Tags:

This morning I was awakened by some men working in the street using a jackhammer. It sounded exactly like this:

“Music was better back then”: When do we stop keeping up with popular music?

24 Apr 2015 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts

swift

(via Skynet & Ebert)

by

After sixty years of research, it’s conventional wisdom: as people get older, they stop keeping up with popular music. Whether the demands of parenthood and careers mean devoting less time to pop culture, or just because they’ve succumbed to good old-fashioned taste freeze, music fans beyond a certain age seem to reach a point where their tastes have “matured”.

That’s why the organizers of the Super Bowl — with a median viewer age of 44 —  were smart to balance their Katy Perry-headlined halftime show with a showing by Missy Elliott.

Spotify listener data offers a sliced & diced view of each user’s streams. This lets us measure when this effect begins, how quickly the effect develops, and how it’s impacted by demographic factors...

Read more: http://skynetandebert.com/2015/04/22/music-was-better-back-then-when-do-we-stop-keeping-up-with-popular-music/

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