Matt Marks Music

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Try and suffer through this pedestrian cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, through Tom Petty’s placid singing, through Jeff Lynne’s autotune-massacred vocals, until Prince takes a solo that murders everyone on stage.

Prince.

-via the amazing AUDIOTUTS

Andrew Vactor was facing a $150 fine for playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo in July. But a judge offered to reduce that to $35 if Vactor spent 20 hours listening to classical music by the likes of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.

Vactor, 24, lasted only about 15 minutes, a probation officer said.

–CNN

Ok, coming from someone who both loves classical music, and was known in the past to blast loud rap music from his ’68 VW Bus, this is ridiculous. You couldn’t get me to listen to classical music for 20 hours. You couldn’t get me to listen to anything for 20 hours, not even my own tunes (and I’m known to indulge in quite a bit of the vanity listens). This is one of those articles targeted toward smug oldsters who can’t get enough of the ‘Kids Today…’ type of fluff stories.

Of course, when you read on:

It wasn’t the music, Vactor said, he just needed to be at practice with the rest of the Urbana University basketball team.

“I didn’t have the time to deal with that,” he said. “I just decided to pay the fine.”

If I had the choice of listening to the classical station playing “the hits” and talking about the latest Mostly Mozart festival (how come I only hear about these on the radio btw??) or going to a rehearsal, I’d go do my responsibility.

This isn’t about culture or the youth or the decline of western civilization. This is about compulsion. You couldn’t compel me to go record hunting (quite possibly my favorite activity) for 20 hours! Fuck, you couldn’t compel me to do it for 1 hour. I’ll do it on my own. Defiance is individuality. I respect this kid more for leaving after 15 minutes than I would had he stayed for the entire 20 hours. As the sentencing judge, Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott, said herself, “I think a lot of people don’t like to be forced to listen to music”.

I agree with you Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott. They also wouldn’t like being force-fed filet-mignon for 20 hours straight. You’re a force for evil and tyranny in the world.

Smiles!

It’s a great strategy. Very smart. It dismantles McCain/Palin’s criticism, and leaves McCain with the only option of bringing it up in the debates, and polls show that swing-voters dislike dirt in the debates. They need an ad with this up today, which would make every utterance of the Ayers bullshit in a public setting seem cowardly.

It looks like CNN is finally recognizing its descent into abject sensationalism, a symptom of which is its ridiculous headlines, which have become an internet meme of their own.

So CNN decided to take a hard look at their decaying sense of journalism and has begun a set of reforms aimed at delivering the news in a non-exploitative manner.

Ha, just kidding. They’re releasing T-shirts, whoo!!

Now you can own a wacky CNN headline of your own!

Wacky headlines such as, um:

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Uh… haha… get it? Cowboys riding an economy? An economy is not a horse, silly!

Or this gem:

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Ha! Get it? Get it?? She, um… almost died!

(Cough!)

What makes it an even better deal is that not only do you get to own the zaniness that you once ridiculed as a symptom of CNN’s crumbling integrity, but you also get the equally large “*I just saw it on CNN.com (followed by date and time)” that depletes any sardonic pleasure you may have derived from buying something from the source of your mockery!

Yay corporate humor!

I’ve been making some changes on this blog in the last couple days:

1. I changed the design template from that crappy dark blue bullshit to a simple white page. It’s not ideal, but it’s clear and will do until I take the time to fancy it up, which could be never.

2. I’ve cleaned up the page a bit, getting rid of one of my pictures and a couple redundant categories.

3. I’ve ditched the links to many of my songs, which were hosted by fileden.com (yuck). I joined the brand-spanking new SoundCloud, which is a nice music sharing site. I’ll have a rotating embedded song (that doesn’t play automatically), that has a link to where you can download said song and many others. The current song is Sing, give it a listen.

4. I’ve added ShareThis links at the bottom of all of my posts. This is an easy way to share things you read here on Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Myspace, etc. Just click the box and a menu will pop up. I’m still figuring out how to make the link show up in RSS readers, but hopefully I will soon. Btw, if you use an RSS reader and you received about 10 test posts from me today I apologize!

I’ll be gradually making more changes in the future, so stay tuned.

So I’ve been getting back to work on my musical, after a break of about a month or so, and I happened upon a little milestone. I gathered all of my songs – finished and works in progress – from The Lil Death together into an iTunes playlist, and I have about 30 tracks. Over 2 hours of music. Almost all of it written in the last year. What the hell?

Let’s compare this to 2005 Mafoo, who was basically dicking around on his sampler creating silly noise loops. I would say that one of the main things that has gotten me going has been my adoption of Ableton Live as my primary DAW. I think that productivity in composing is all about finding the right interface, whether it be pen and paper, Sibelius, Pro Tools, or hardware. Contrary to how most people use Live, I use it almost predominantly as a sequencer. I also perform with Live, but I’d say that aspect is about 3% of what I do on it. Live is great because of all of the DAWs, it feels the most like an instrument. I feel comfortable in front of a piano, just dicking around and seeing what comes out. Live essentially feels like that, but I’m controlling synths, samplers, and drum machines on my laptop.

It has also changed the type of music I make. My first fully-sequenced tracks were instrumental, collage-type tunes built around odd and humorous samples from my record collection. Now I’m writing very tonal weird pop songs that are increasingly free of samples and are built using mainly the instruments in Live. I often consider upgrading my synth from Live’s basic Operator FM synth to, say, the synths in Logic, but I dig the simplicity of Operator. Sometimes I consider moving into Pro Tools, with its superior audio editing capabilities, but I don’t think my edits in Live ever really sound that bad. Live is what it is, a specific tool, and I use that tool to create music.

I’m sort of a ‘take it as it comes’ kinda guy (I’m from California…). As a horn player, I’m not the type who is constantly seeking to tweak and make little changes and modifications to my instrument. I bought my Paxman because it felt great, and I’ll live with it until it fucks up or I want something different. I’m the same way with DAWs. I’m an instrumentalist at heart, so I find the program I like and I fit inside of it. Sure, the minor changes and improvements that come with various upgrades are often very welcome, but overall I take it as it comes. Contrast this approach to the approach of many Max users. There is such freedom in Max. You can build your own synths, samplers, sequencers, etc. The only limit is your imagination and all that. It sounds great in theory, but that openness isn’t always conducive to the production of art, which works well under restrictions and limitations. At least for me, I don’t know if I could ever make music in such an interface. Max seems to be predominantly the domain of the builders – Ableton was actually crafted in Max – and this makes sense. How many instrument makers are accomplished musicians? There are a few of course, my buddy Mark Houghton is a horn player and a builder; and my dawg Presh is a producer, performer, and Max wizard. But they are freaks of nature.

Part of me wants to analyze what has helped my creativity and productivity; part of me wants to tell my brain to shut the fuck up and keep working. I’ll probably go with the second scenario because, ya know, I’m from California. But I want to acknowledge the other thing that has crazy motivated me, and that’s my zany partner in crime Melly. She has had to listen to every single track good or bad that I have vomited into my sequencer, and she’s been ridiculously supportive. It helps that she’s a badass musician herself, so we have a nice healthy competitiveness. I would feel like a serious douche if I wasn’t keeping up with her crazy list of achievements.

Anyway, this Lil project is ballooning larger and larger. It was originally going to be an album. Then I had enough material for two. Now I’ve got almost enough for three. It may be hard to sustain interest for enough time to actually produce the whole thing, but I kind of like the idea of releasing albums as a serial drama. I believe that’s a unique idea (correct me if I’m wrong), releasing albums episodically as part of a larger drama. We’ll see. Maybe my inspiration will dry up. Maybe I’ll lose interest in the story. Maybe I’ll get sidetracked by other projects (after I finish Part 1, I’m going to do a covers album, seriously). Who knows. I guess all that is really important is that I keep working.

So I’ve been getting back to work on my musical, after a break of about a month or so, and I happened upon a little milestone. I gathered all of my songs – finished and works in progress – from The Lil Death together into an iTunes playlist, and I have about 30 tracks. Over 2 hours of music. Almost all of it written in the last year. What the hell?

Let’s compare this to 2005 Mafoo, who was basically dicking around on his sampler creating silly noise loops. I would say that one of the main things that has gotten me going has been my adoption of Ableton Live as my primary DAW. I think that productivity in composing is all about finding the right interface, whether it be pen and paper, Sibelius, Pro Tools, or hardware. Contrary to how most people use Live, I use it almost predominantly as a sequencer. I also perform with Live, but I’d say that aspect is about 3% of what I do on it. Live is great because of all of the DAWs, it feels the most like an instrument. I feel comfortable in front of a piano, just dicking around and seeing what comes out. Live essentially feels like that, but I’m controlling synths, samplers, and drum machines on my laptop.

It has also changed the type of music I make. My first fully-sequenced tracks were instrumental, collage-type tunes built around odd and humorous samples from my record collection. Now I’m writing very tonal weird pop songs that are increasingly free of samples and are built using mainly the instruments in Live. I often consider upgrading my synth from Live’s basic Operator FM synth to, say, the synths in Logic, but I dig the simplicity of Operator. Sometimes I consider moving into Pro Tools, with its superior audio editing capabilities, but I don’t think my edits in Live ever really sound that bad. Live is what it is, a specific tool, and I use that tool to create music.

I’m sort of a ‘take it as it comes’ kinda guy (I’m from California…). As a horn player, I’m not the type who is constantly seeking to tweak and make little changes and modifications to my instrument. I bought my Paxman because it felt great, and I’ll live with it until it fucks up or I want something different. I’m the same way with DAWs. I’m an instrumentalist at heart, so I find the program I like and I fit inside of it. Sure, the minor changes and improvements that come with various upgrades are often very welcome, but overall I take it as it comes. Contrast this approach to the approach of many Max users. There is such freedom in Max. You can build your own synths, samplers, sequencers, etc. The only limit is your imagination and all that. It sounds great in theory, but that openness isn’t always conducive to the production of art, which works well under restrictions and limitations. At least for me, I don’t know if I could ever make music in such an interface. Max seems to be predominantly the domain of the builders – Ableton was actually crafted in Max – and this makes sense. How many instrument makers are accomplished musicians? There are a few of course, my buddy Mark Houghton is a horn player and a builder; and my dawg Presh is a producer, performer, and Max wizard. But they are freaks of nature.

Part of me wants to analyze what has helped my creativity and productivity; part of me wants to tell my brain to shut the fuck up and keep working. I’ll probably go with the second scenario because, ya know, I’m from California. But I want to acknowledge the other thing that has crazy motivated me, and that’s my zany partner in crime Melly. She has had to listen to every single track good or bad that I have vomited into my sequencer, and she’s been ridiculously supportive. It helps that she’s a badass musician herself, so we have a nice healthy competitiveness. I would feel like a serious douche if I wasn’t keeping up with her crazy list of achievements.

Anyway, this Lil project is ballooning larger and larger. It was originally going to be an album. Then I had enough material for two. Now I’ve got almost enough for three. It may be hard to sustain interest for enough time to actually produce the whole thing, but I kind of like the idea of releasing albums as a serial drama. I believe that’s a unique idea (correct me if I’m wrong), releasing albums episodically as part of a larger drama. We’ll see. Maybe my inspiration will dry up. Maybe I’ll lose interest in the story. Maybe I’ll get sidetracked by other projects (after I finish Part 1, I’m going to do a covers album, seriously). Who knows. I guess all that is really important is that I keep working.

The odds of Obama being truthful in his claim that he converted to Christianity are less than 100 to 1 against it, as fewer than 1% of Muslims convert to Christianity.

– Conservapedia

Gotta love that logic.

Yeah, it’s political. It’s also relevant. While the ‘but the Republicans would do it’ argument often gets old, it is totally apt here. It would be one thing to go after McCain’s failed first marriage – which the right would totally have milked if the situation were reversed – but the Charles Keating scandal and the S&L crisis, in which McCain was deeply involved, is directly related to what is currently happening on Wall St.

McCain is preparing an onslaught on Obama’s character, due to a free-fall in the polls. The Obama campaign is showing their teeth here and they’re using the truth. Good stuff. This is how smart politicians play the game.

The war against sex ramps up.

Interesting, but Family Guy did it first.

New Mac recorder called, um, Audio Recorder looks to replace Wiretap. Here’s a big benefit upfront: It’s free!

Will videogames become better than life?

Finally, a celebrity endorsement I care about.