mrclay.rg

Brittle Stars 2000 East Coast Tour Diary

[Hey, only 11 years late. Found this rummaging through some old files. With the title "Tour diary – achingly detailed version", you know it's gonna be riveting.]

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Plastic Sitars Intro for piano

I’ve been playing more music lately, but also trying to go back and learn the fundamentals of reading/writing music and keyboard playing—I can play chords and pop melodies semi reliably but suck at playing scales with either hand. Yesterday I created a free account at Noteflight, which lets you compose scores online (you have to

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Maria Napoleon “Think of Rain”

Louis Philippe and Maria Napoleon put together a fine version of one of my favorite tunes. I usually don’t like covers that mess with the melody, but at the end of the choruses I really love how the vocal playfully jumps to what a high harmony might sing, if Margo Guryan had written one in.

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StackExchange folks, KeyMinor already exists

Why is there a StackExchange proposal in the works for a “Musical Practice and Performance site” when KeyMinor already exists on the SE platform? The proposed site is “for people who play musical instruments. On-topic questions will be about technique, practice, theory, composition, and repertoire.” KeyMinor already serves this purpose, it’s just not known about.

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Why the Pernice Brothers Don’t Tour

From “Will he/they tour?“: JP: We make any money if we tour for two weeks? JL: You mean ten days, if rehearsals are included. JP: Yes. JL: No. JP: Well then why would we do it? RM: Because Menck wants to rock. JL: Theoretically, the tour is just one piece of the things you do

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Chords: The Flaming Lips “All We Have is Now”

[Song on YouTube] All the tabs I could find were crap, so I wrote up a guitar arrangement. The inverted voicings in the choruses made it tough to figure out, but capoing the 2nd fret gets it pretty close. Capo 2nd fret. / = 1/4 note V1) A 3-5-5-4-3-x (2 bars) As logic stands you

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Bass for Stereolab’s “Miss Modular”

“Miss Modular” has an amazing bass line. It’s probably looped on record, but they play it live…and usually faster than the recording. I’m fairly sure it’s capoed at the 7th fret—that’s how I’ve typed it up here. Stereolab “Miss Modular” Capo bass @ 7th fret. spaces/numbers/hyphens = 1/16th notes. / = 1/4 notes. Intro) /

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New Bass

Craigslist comes through with a huge step up from my crummy Precision bass knockoff. Sounds golden, great action (a joy to play), even volume & tone all across the fretboard. Love it.

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Alex and Elliott

“Thank You Friends” was the first Big Star song I heard, hanging out with Dan Francke listening to a Time-Life cassette comp he ripped from his dad.

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Hooray For Tuesdays

A.V. Undercover: The Onion’s A.V. Club invites 25 bands to record 25 covers, released each Tuesday. Ted Leo makes a nice start with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (hat tip). I kinda see it going down hill from here but the cover choices look good.

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Guitar Tuning By Ear

(This is edited from an answer I posted to KeyMinor, a music Q&A site. They need more users!) A lot of recordings end up slightly higher/lower than standardized pitch (I always called this “in the cracks” but don’t google it!), and this is the quickest way I’ve found to tune a guitar to them.  This

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Chord Theory: 13 is probably 7(13)

A 7th add 13 chord is often voiced r-5-7-3-13, sometimes leaving out the fifth. To pin this to a key, a G7(13)—G⁷⁽¹³⁾ if your chart can handle Unicode—is usually voiced G-D-F-B-E and is a common (in jazz and standards anyway) way to make the resolution from G7 to C more subtle and harmonically interesting. In

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David Rawlings and Gillian Welch on Tiny Desk

Amazing performance and recording. Apparently David’s a great writer, too. I need this album.

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Brittle Stars @ Pop Mayhem, Thursday, May 8

6500 miles can’t stop the rock. Thursday, May 8th, a reunited Brittle Stars play Common Grounds as a part of Gainesville’s Pop Mayhem festival. Hear songs such as, but not performed as well as, these: Falling Backwards Someplace (but not this place) This Trip So Unfair Also that night: Ifwhen, the Buddy System, Giddy-Up Helicopter,

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Music is killing music

I’d never claim file sharing doesn’t hurt music sales, but there’s another simple reason why individual music releases will continue to sell more poorly over time: The continuous explosion of choice. Even if listeners spent as much on music as they did years ago, the chances of us buying the same releases drops constantly as

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Marriage Rock I

Yeah, we did it. I was in charge of the music and spent most hours from weeks before up until the morning of with my head stuck inside MediaMonkey. I can’t say enough good things about the “Gold” version, but these posts will shockingly not be about the boring machinations of software. Look For Me

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NPR music + Stephin Merritt

NPR just launched their new music site, which nicely gathers music stories and media from a lot of different NPR shows. My favorite feature: Their media player is Flash-based. It’s a little quirky in Opera, at least, but so much better than the works-some-of-the-time WMP plugin that Opera used, and don’t get me started on

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Rhythm guitar geniuses

Ivy frequently has stunning rhythm guitar parts–a little bit of extra texture, a little melody. Two examples: “Blame In On Yourself” from Long Distance, and Apartment Life’s ”Quick, Painless, and Easy” The latter I’ve been casually wondering how to play for some time so I finally sat down and figure it out. Ivy “Quick, Painless, and

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Mark Wirtz

This compilation of Mark Wirtz-produced songs rocks. Especially if you like 60′s girl groups with wall-of-everything+kitchen-sink productions, dramatic breaks that are just waiting to be sampled, bubblegum pop songs with psychadelic edges. There are duds and some dumb lyrics here and there, but it’s a great variety of sounds and clever pop songwriting. Some highlights:

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The Late Greats

The best song will never get sung The best life never leaves your lungs So good, you won’t ever know I never hear it on the radio

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