Yesterday I opened my SABA Freudenstadt 15M vintage radio because the right channel didn’t work. My modest artillery of troubleshooting techniques failed me, so I punted and just wired all of the speakers to the left channel. It’s mono now, but at least all of the speakers make sound!

But the real reason for this post is to show off my photos of the radio guts.

Thank you to Rachelle for making us look good.

Beekeeper is henceforth a band that releases photos instead of music.

1. Create a smart playlist to show songs added in 2009
2. Sort by playcount
3. Empirical evidence of music-listening behaviour results

There is a pretty bad sampling bias going on here, as these are all albums I discovered early in the year and, you know, had more time to rack up the play count. How could I do this better?

Did you know that iPhones geotag your photos? Neat!

Like father, like son…

Previously

AutoTune has officially been committed to the lexicon of the masses.

Evidence:

Evidence:

But somehow T-Pain himself still thinks AutoTune is the same as a Vocoder:

Listen to this…

This is an incredibly catchy song, but how did it make it to market with such poor audio quality? It distorts throughout, but not in the warm way… more in the no-regard-for-digital-full-scale way.

I decided to investigate in Pro Tools…

Yeah. Except for the intro, the whole thing is pegged. This is what the channel strip looked like most of the time…

Now I understand that this is sort of typical of the music of our day. There is the so-called loudness war and every mastering engineer wants their track to have the highest possible RMS so that it sounds really loud. It’s a tragedy of the commons.

But this isn’t even the same thing—it’s way worse. This song isn’t just compressed and limited, it’s actually clipping. A lot.

Here’s a zoomed in portion of the song at 2:51 (2:27 in the video version above) where it kind of breaks down and Kanye does his thing. Totally clipped.

Seriously. wtf.

We played The Biltmore on Monday. Everybody likes a good review…

1. Local Exposure: He who pays the Piper calls the tune

2. Piper… At the Gates of Dawn: Piper Davis at the Biltmore

Collarbone by Fujiya & Miyagi

Intro & Verses

   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4
G |----------------------------------------------------------------|
D |--------------1-------------------------------1-----------------|
A |3-3-------3-------------1-1--1--3-3-------3------------1--1--1--|
E |----------------------------------------------------------------|
   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4
G |----------------------------------------------------------------|
D |--------------------------------1-1-------1---3--------11---1---|
A |3-3-------3---1--------11-1--1----------------------------------|
E |----------------------------------------------------------------|

Chorus

   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4
G |----------------------------------------------------------------|
D |------------0-1---1-1-1-1-1-2-3---3-3-3-3-3---------------------|
A |3-3-3-3-3-3---------------------------------5-6---6-6-6-6\1-1-2-|
E |----------------------------------------------------------------|
   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4
G |----------------------------------------------------------------|
D |------------0-1---1-1-1-1-1-2-3---3-3-3-3-3---------------------|
A |3-3-3-3-3-3---------------------------------5-6---6-6-6-6\1-1-2-|
E |----------------------------------------------------------------|

Later in the bridge, the rhythm simplifies like this…

   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4
G |----------------------------------------------------------------|
D |--------------0-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-------------------|
A |3-3-3-3-3-3-3---------------------------------6-6-6-6-6-6\1-1-1-|
E |----------------------------------------------------------------|
   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4   1   2   3   4
G |----------------------------------------------------------------|
D |--------------0-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-------------------|
A |3-3-3-3-3-3-3---------------------------------6-6-6-6-6-6\1-1-1-|
E |----------------------------------------------------------------|

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