You’ll need your 3-D specs to properly appreciate this amazing view of the surface of an LP, magnified x390 by an electron microscope, photographed by Chris Supranowitz at the University of Rochester, who has also taken pictures of a load of other interesting stuff, including the pits on a CD, ladybird claws, and the surface of a fly’s eye… Makes you appreciate the wonder of the commonplace! Click on the pic to go to Chris’s project page, where you can find the rest of his images, or here to go to an amazing and totally non-music-related zoomable image of an ant under an electron microscope. 1950’s monster movie anyone?
Just a bit of fun, but since we’re based in Cornwall, we thought it might be of interest to our users to know that there’s a Cornish version of Wikipedia. Click here, and 1,000,000 bonus points to whoever writes RouteNote an entry!
Since Damon Albarn and Jamie ‘Tank Girl’ Hewlett’s collaborative cartoon band Gorillaz were nice enough to give YouTube an exclusive on the video for their new track ‘Stylo’, YouTube have let their fictional bassist Murdoc Niccols curate a post on their Celebrity Playlist section. The mask slips a little bit, and Murdoc’s voice betrays him as an excitable 40 year old man, rather than a sharp-toothed ego-bass-maniac. Some of the videos are nice, like the clip from Jacques Cousteau’s ‘Silent World’, and others are revealing, like the dressing room rehearsal of “Hip Hop”, by Mos Def and my favourite colliery band/rap mashup group, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (who you should definitely check out on dino-space here). Anyway, here’s the clip – and no, Charlie Bit Me isn’t on there, odd, considering the teeth thing.
Not content with the 3 albums they’ve released over the last 12 months (BlackRoc, Auerbach’s solo album – Keep It Hid, and Carney’s Drummer), the Black Keys are dropping another album on the 18th of May, with a tour to accompany it, obviously.
A track listing doesn’t mean much withouth accompanying sounds, so make some grungy blues noises in your head as you read this:
Brothers
01 Everlasting Light
02 Next Girl
03 Tighten Up
04 Howlin’ for You
05 She’s Long Gone
06 Black Mud
07 The Only One
08 Too Afraid to Love You
09 Ten Cent Pistol
10 Sinister Kid
11 The Go Getter
12 I’m Not the One
13 Unknown Brother
14 Never Gonna Give You Up
15 These Days
The new Gorillaz album, plastic beach is out next week, and the video for ‘Stylo’, the first single to be drawn from was posted on YouTube yesterday – featuring an El Camino driving, sunglass toting, Bruce Willis. Bruce proceeds to chase the 3D animated crew across the California desert in a Mad Max style chase ending in true Hollywood style. We can’t embed the video, but you can watch it here, and check out the intro to their Plastic Beach concept below:
Feel like helping develop a new piece of sampling software? Maize are currently developing the Beta version of Maize Sampler 2, to go alongside their ‘Modular Studio Environment’ a VST and effect chaining/mixing shell. They’re inviting producers to download the latest version of the sampler beta, and use it for a couple of weeks before reporting back with feedback and information on any bugs you might find. Be quick though, the software’s license will run out in a fortnight’s time.
The recording studio downstairs here at RouteNote Towers is only a modest affair, certainly no Abbey Road, but making sure everyone involved in the running of the studio or the scheduling of a project can still get complicated. This web app from Gain Studio aims to arrange your business neatly, and make it remotley accessible, so that multiple members of staff can use it even when they’re not offsite. You can also:
Book sessions and assign rooms, staff, resources etc to each one, then easily edit them.
Easily track tasks by assigning jobs, tickets, and to-do lists to staff, setting due dates and priorities.
Track your equipment and reserve it for sessions.
View calendars for every room, staff member and piece of equipment, or get an overview of the whole studio in one place.
Of course you can also manage staff calendars etc on Google Calendar or even Outlook, and having all your studio’s co-ordination happen online can be a problem if your internet connection goes down, but this does seem a neat way of collating all the necessary information and making sure everyone’s on the same page. The basic version, for smaller studios (like ours) is free, but if you’re managing a massive organisation with tens of projects and multiple simultaneous recording sessions you’ll need to pay for a premium version (up to $399 a month!). That said, they’re running a month’s free trial at the moment, so you don’t lose anything by taking a look.
February the 17th saw the hugely sucsessful Dean Martin with surprisingly, his only ever UK number one. With “Memories Are Made Of This”, Written by Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr and Frank Miller, Dean enjoyed one month in the UK top spot.
Terry Gilkyson’s daughter Eliza spoke of her dad, “He always hated people finding hidden meanings an metaphors in his songs, because he just did it as a job. He went to the office everyday and just wrote songs. But “Memories Are Made Of This” was an exception, its about us: its about him meeting my mother and having three kids. He’s left us a wonderful legacy. At the time everything dad was writing was turning to gold”.
On the other hand Dean Martin was going through hell in 1956. His marriage was on the rocks and his hugely successful comedy duo with Jerry Lewis was just about over. He told Gilkyson that “Memories Are Made Of This” was awful as far as he was concerned so they recorded it anyway. He recorded it with “The Easy Riders”, a group containing Gilkyson co-writers, Richard Dehr and Fran Miller.
The single topped the US chart for 6 weeks, with a cover version of the song, Gale Storm, reaching number 5 simultaneously. The only whiff of a snip of any real competition in the UK came from television comedian Dave King, whose own version of the song also only reached number 5. The song again made the top 20 in the UK when it was revived by Val Doonican in 1967.
In a competition that opened on the 1st, Guitar Center is offering the chance to have Guns n’ Roses Slash write, record and perform on a 3 track EP with you. The prize is more than that:
· A 3-song E.P. produced by legendary producer Mike Clink (Guns N’ Roses, Megadeth, Mötley Crüe)
· Slash will write, record and perform on your single
· A management development deal with “The Collective” (the team behind Linkin Park, Slash & Avenged Sevenfold)
· Feature of your single on iTunes
· World-wide digital distribution of your music through Tunecore
· $10,000 Guitar Center shopping spree
· $10,000 in new gear and endorsement deals from Ernie Ball Music Man
· The opening slot on Slash’s Monster Energy Bash
· An editorial feature on your band in Guitar World magazine
Whether or not you think Slash will fit into your J-Pop band, or be able to enhance the sound of your folk band, the experience and connections of a man who’s been at the top of the music industry for the last 25 years is going to be invaluable, and the publicity generated from the win, let alone the efforts of the management team will push you into a new league. Submit your music through the competition website here. Just read that contract.
Even though we don’t do her digital music distribution, we still love Lady Gaga. She’s every bit as much of a paragon for the new music industry as Radiohead and Trent Reznor, as a long article on the Wall Street Journal, in which they extol her virtuosity at replacing the ‘lost’ revenue from the music she gives away with other sources of income: touring, licensing, make-up endorsement deals…
An interesting point made in the article is that:
…much of Gaga’s audience got her music for free, and legally. They have listened to free streams—by the hundreds of millions—on YouTube and the other online services that Gaga currently leads, according to research firm BigChampagne. On MySpace, Gaga has had 321.5 million plays. By contrast, singer Susan Boyle tallied only 133,000 plays, despite scoring the No. 2 selling album of 2009. A difference (among many) between Gaga and the dowdy Scotswoman discovered on a British talent show: Ms. Boyle’s material, including “Amazing Grace,” was traditional—and so were most of her buyers. Some 97% of her albums were sold on compact disc.
This really underlines the generation gap between Gaga and Boyle, which points at a larger truth – while it is still possible to have enourmous commercial success through the traditional routes, Boyle’s fame being delivered mostly through the TV and her sales being on CD, this market will be dwindling with time. Young consumers are more used to getting their music online and for free.
by an electron microscope, photographed by Chris Supranowitz at the University of Rochester, who has also taken pictures of a load of other interesting stuff, including the pits on a CD, ladybird claws, and the surface of a fly’s eye… Makes you appreciate the wonder of the commonplace! Click on the pic to go to Chris’s project page, where you can find the rest of his images, or here to go to an amazing and totally non-music-related zoomable image of an ant under an electron microscope. 1950’s monster movie anyone?
Loading ...
