
Kendrick Lamar, pretty universally considered one of the truly great hip hop artists of all time. It's not actually my thing; my son is a huge fan and has gotten me to listen to some, and yeah, the guy is absolutely brilliant, but I'm just not a hip hop guy in general. To Pimp a Butterfly is his big one.
I know this is getting progressively more off-topic, but, well, it's still music-related, so good enough. One of the problems I have is there's far more music being released every week than used to be released in a year, because, well, back on-topic, we can make it in our basement with a laptop, audio interface, and DAW, and that's just led to an explosion of creativity out there and so many people making music. I thought 2024 was a fabulous year for music, and I know I only heard the tiniest fraction of it. Just the simple fact that it's so damn easy to record and publish music these days . . . it's just damn overwhelming trying to even vaguely keep up with a small part of it.
Also, other random recommendations for new stuff I really liked this year, Ber, Bad Bad Hats (both from Minneapolis, so pimping my local artists), Clairo, beebadoobee, Japandroids, Soccer Mommy, and Billie Eilish. Just a random list of enjoyable stuff to me.
Most modern music is definitely different to a lot of older stuff, whether that's better or worse is very subjective. On average I'd say newer music is less musically complex, but more sonically complex. Shorter loop based structures and no jazz chords, but a lot of sound design and arrangement to make things interesting in a different way.
And as Dan says, trying to find the good stuff hard because there is now soooooo much and what bubbles to the surface is what works well over 1 million TikTok videos. I'll +1 beebadobee and Billie Eilish. I'm also fond of Charli XCX on the pop side, Earth Tongue, Turnstile and Kills Birds on the rockier side. All very different types of thing.
And to sort of bring it back to the topic, my 10 year old daughter is interested in guitar, but I won't be able to motivate her with Knocking on Heaven's door. I'm going to have to find songs she likes, but songs now are written on samplers and with keyboards, so they tend to be in unfriendly keys. I think I may need to have her playing triads from the beginning, I'm not going to be introducing bar chords for her tiny fingers.
A lot of Taylor Swift's songs were written on guitar first, so you can usually find chords to strum to it.
A lot of Taylor Swift's songs were written on guitar first, so you can usually find chords to strum to it.
Not to mention the other 5,000 pop songs that also use some variation of a Canon chord progression. It’s popular for a reason.
One of my standard jokes that really isn't much of a joke is if you hear an acoustic guitar, it's in G. If it's not in G, there's a capo and it's still played with the G, D, C9, and Em shapes. It's just such an intuitive way to play and it sounds great, so people keep using it (including me). Including Taylor Swift (who has some phenomenal examples of why that chord progression works so well).
Technically, that's Cadd9, not C9. But, yes. You can strum a guitar to over-engineered pop songs and still sound great.
This is mostly a G, Em, C loop.
One of my standard jokes that really isn't much of a joke is if you hear an acoustic guitar, it's in G. If it's not in G, there's a capo and it's still played with the G, D, C9, and Em shapes. It's just such an intuitive way to play and it sounds great, so people keep using it (including me). Including Taylor Swift (who has some phenomenal examples of why that chord progression works so well).
I should have said that her favourite band, and therefore most logical on ramp, is Neoni and a lot of their bigger songs are in keys like C# and Bb, but for some reason a capo didn't occur to me.
Taylor Swift isn't on the cards, she's completely disinterested in her for now.
Gotcha. So one way to get her going is to find a "chords and lyrics" video of a song she likes. Have her learn a chord and strum it when it's on the screen, and then move into chord changes on time. This one says capo 2nd fret in the title.
A friend was kind enough to give me an old prosonus audio interface which has opened up the large world of plugging my guitar straight into my PC! I was a little worried that nothing would be available on Linux (Have I mentioned that I switched to Linux?) I found both Guitarix a free amp/pedal sim that works surprisingly well and Ardour a mostly free DAW that is extremely confusing in that way I hear all DAWs are. I did have to futz with something called Jack that is supposedly the only way to do low latency audio on Linux but I managed to flail my way through getting it to work just fine in the end. Now all I have to do is resist the urge to spend $600 on reverb plugins...
Now all I have to do is resist the urge to spend $600 on reverb plugins...
Mmmmmm, beautiful reverb plugins
My wonderful kids gave me a Pigtronix Cosmosis pedal for christmas. Been spending the day creating cosmos sized reverb sounds. Wonderful pedal.
A friend was kind enough to give me an old prosonus audio interface which has opened up the large world of plugging my guitar straight into my PC! I was a little worried that nothing would be available on Linux (Have I mentioned that I switched to Linux?) I found both Guitarix a free amp/pedal sim that works surprisingly well and Ardour a mostly free DAW that is extremely confusing in that way I hear all DAWs are. I did have to futz with something called Jack that is supposedly the only way to do low latency audio on Linux but I managed to flail my way through getting it to work just fine in the end. Now all I have to do is resist the urge to spend $600 on reverb plugins...
Very cool, good luck with Linux!
Can you run most standard VST's? While I'm not going to talk you out of buying some great plugins there are so many free ones that you can experiment with before dropping any cash.
https://www.kvraudio.com has listings for more than you can ever use
Valhalla Supermassive is a a cool reverb/delay/modulator that can get you cool spacey sounds and can get wild.
Variety of Sound has a more conventional plate reverb Epic Plate MkII, Black Rooster has RO-GOLD and the Kilohearts free bundle has a bunch of utilities including a nice reverb
My wonderful kids gave me a Pigtronix Cosmosis pedal for christmas. Been spending the day creating cosmos sized reverb sounds. Wonderful pedal.
Oh that's nice!
My understanding is that VSTs need to be made compatible with linux to work. But I'm not aware of any major hurdles to that it's just if they want to support it. I guess you can also get things to work just fine via wine emulation? Not really messed with that for anything not installed via steam though
One of my favorite amp sims is currently free. https://www.overloud.com/free-thu
Snag it while you can.
Nice. I probably have enough amp sims, but always happy to check out another
You're a big I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream fan?
One of my favorite amp sims is currently free. https://www.overloud.com/free-thu
Snag it while you can.
Well I went to snag it but apparently I already snagged it a while ago. My amp sim library has now officially moved into Steam library territory.
I don't know when was the last time I posted in here but hi again.
I'm still banging metal cover tunes together with a set of coworkers and ex-coworkers. We just had a subset of us plus a bassist sit in with us to play the intro and outro for a company wide all hands for our 6,000+ person company... a bit of Pantera and Metallica to kick off everyone's day.
Personal development wise I'm still struggling with my own technique, particularly alternate picking. I feel like it's a never ending story. I can do it well enough to do the things I have to do as a rhythm guitarist in a metal cover band but I want to raise my limitations. I've found something that's serviceable for some things but not others. I've embraced Troy Grady's site and advice, but it's still a long road.
My girls bought me some guitar books off my wishlist for Christmas which I'm using to try to get some more structure and variety in my practice: Petrucci's classic "Rock Discipline" for technique and "No Bull CAGED" for some theory. So far so good.
I feel like I just need to pay Podunk to move in for a month and just remold me into a less shitty guitarist.
Whoa. A crowd of 6k people is huge!! That must have been amazing. Well done!
That does sound awesome.
-BEP
I'll temper the excitement by noting that we were in our usual rehearsal room (which is a conference room in our building) and sharing to the vast majority remotely over Zoom. The locals could hear us (including getting complaints from neighboring tenants) but we were not onstage in front of 6000 people.
You still played a gig for 6k people. Still awesome.
Pages