Whiplash (The Movie)

[Babz]

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2015/02/w ... -play-djs/

[mikehalloran]

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2015/02/w ... -play-djs/

Funny!

[Shooshie]

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2015/02/w ... -play-djs/

I nearly choked on a taco when I watched that. FUNNY! Especially the part where they all start saying they're DJs.

[Babz]

I loved when he throws the glow sticks in his face. So perfect!

"i'm just pressing the spacebar!"

[mikehalloran]

I loved when he throws the glow sticks in his face. So perfect!

"i'm just pressing the spacebar!"

Or are you pushing?

[Shooshie]

I loved when he throws the glow sticks in his face. So perfect!

"i'm just pressing the spacebar!"

It's just hilarious!

[Babz]

And it just so perfectly captures the essence of music today!

I can accept that the flying cars, jet packs, and shuttles to Mars, never happened, but wasn't the future was supposed to have better music?

There there is also THIS CLASSIC from Portlandia.

Babz

[Shooshie]

And it just so perfectly captures the essence of music today!

I can accept that the flying cars, jet packs, and shuttles to Mars, never happened, but wasn't the future was supposed to have better music?

There there is also THIS CLASSIC from Portlandia.

Babz

In the 60s and 70s science and audio intersected and made fantastic hardware... IF you could find it. I traveled to obscure stores or repair shops to see some amazing piece of gear, carrying my baseline reference recordings. Eventually I had a nice system, but temperamental. I was always sending my amps back to Conrad-Johnson for repairs and tube replacement.

I held a few parties during which someone put on flatlined metal and cranked the volume to the max without my knowledge. My speakers would shriek for a moment, then collapse into a buzzing coil of wire, ripped right off the cones. I actually glued them back the first two times. The third time, I just quit. I still had my studio monitors, which kept getting upgraded. But I let go of the home-audiophile experience.

All that's a long prelude to the fact that the 2000s led us to earbuds and computer speakers, and most folks seem fine with it. I have some theories about that, though I hesitate to discuss it here, where I already write way too much. But briefly, I think it is a multi-faceted change. It includes technological leaps which enable us to hear more with less information, plus there's the cost component which had made the high-end audiophile experience a rich-person's game, and then there's classism.

High-end audio hardware pulled incredible information from the grooves of LPs. We know it's there. If you crank up an AKG414 on a pre-amp, you can hear clocks ticking all over the house, people breathing in other rooms, neighbors talking in their houses. To some degree, all of that is encoded into LP grooves, maybe not efficiently enough to matter, but it has some effect. The shape of a room is encoded in the reflections. It's all there. High-end gear exploited the vibrations consumer gear ignored. Some of it mattered; with a great system you could close your eyes and "see" the orchestra, the hall, and if a 3rd violinist tapped their bow on the stand, you could tell who did it, more or less. Poorly produced recordings, like the flat-lined heavy metal stuff that "friends" used to blow my speakers, sounded unbelievably bad through a system like that. You heard every edit, every track, and all the FX, which sounded artificially overlaid on top of the noise.

Fast-Forward to mp3s and iPods. At their very best, using LAME and variable Variable Bit Rate recording, mp3s reproduce an amazing amount of audio information, but they don't play well with audiophile gear. If the player is optimized for mp3, and the recording is high-quality and maximum variable-bit-rate, you can get pretty much the same experience I used to get with high-end stuff, but without any options. It's the great equalizer, except that it renders a lot of expensive audio gear kind of useless. I think they have devices that compensate somewhat for that, but what's the point? Unless you have old LPs and/or audiophile recordings, that expensive equipment is just a pissing contest for the rich or tragically obsessed.

It's just interesting to me that when we reached the point where we could extract SO much wonderful audio data from old recordings, the game changed and dumbed-down the whole system, while upping the audio quality perceived by the average listener. And anyone who thinks listeners today are hearing less quality than the average listener of the 1960s must not have been there. Most people listened to monaural radios, cheap speakers, and entire "stereo systems" that cost less than $40. What they hear now on an iPod must sound amazing to them. So, the average Jane has moved up in sound quality, the rich have lost their high-end content for their studio-sized home entertainment systems, and the obsessed have lost their relevance as technology keeps overturning all they thought they knew.

Ok... I'll cut it off here. Oh... almost forgot... the Portlandia excerpt was funny. Portlandia is so over-the-top that I can only take a couple episodes at a time, but like many people, I know folks who fit their stereotypes almost exactly, making some episodes painful to watch.

Shooshie

[mhschmieder]

Well, I believe there was a long period where instrumental music (in pop) was king, and from what I remember reading, it was the world wars that made people long for lyrical content they could connect with (whether for nostalgia, escapism, or whatever).

There was, of course, also the brief surf craze in the early 60's (?).

The must-see movie for musicians (and even non-musicians) is "The Wrecking Crew". I saw it at the AES Show in SF in NOV 2012. It finally had its kickstarted theatrical release last Friday. Most of those musicians had a classical or jazz background, had to be available 24/7 and couldn't rest on their laurels, and were constantly exposed to genres that were new to them and had to deliver the goods on the spin of a dime (yet the first takes were often gold, and stand among some of the most memorable lines ever).

There was occasional tension, for sure, but getting product out the door always trumped ego.