MLT Club Member David
MLT Club MemberForum Replies Created
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Colorizing sure has come a long way since the early days of bands of blue and green to represent sky and ground. I liked that website. Thanks for the link. It illustrates an important point: two things can have the same value (light or darkness) without having the same hue. So we can’t reliably say what colors would map onto a black and white photo. Take Clara Bow’s hair. Was it really red? In the original of that photo, did her lipstick really match her hair like that? Was her blouse green or maybe blue? Or gray?
Years ago I worked as a graphic designer in the U.S. federal govt. When contracting for printing, we could specify whether the colors had to be accurate or just “pleasing.” “Pleasing” meant that they may not be quite right but they still looked good. That was of course less expensive and in most cases was still pretty close to what was intended.
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Sad news that Gordon Lightfoot had passed away. His “Summertime Dream” album, with The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, was one of the first two or three albums I ever bought. I still have it, as a matter of fact, so I’ll have to give it a listen once I get a turntable set up to play my recently acquired MLT vinyls.
I think it would be great if Mona and Lisa covered some of his songbook. One of his would be a natural for a Duo Session.
I know some of you are Rick Beato fans, so you might want to see the Gordon Lightfoot tribute he posted a few hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/live/4Iw7Jei8XOo?feature=share
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Hi Jung, I tend to agree about the Bach, though I’ve not heard it on the Hammond. Somewhere I have a “direct to disc” recording of Virgil Fox on some big old pipe organ playing the Toccata and Fugue. As a teenager and a bit of a weirdo, on Halloween I used to put my stereo speakers in the window, facing the street, and crank up the sound as I played the Bach LP.
Okay, this isn’t exactly “popular” music, but I can’t resist:
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Hey guys, I’m glad your having a discussion of vinyl. You’re just the right group to address a question I’ve had for a while. As a kid I listened to vinyl because CDs didn’t arrive until I was in my 20s. Audiophiles, many of you will remember, disparaged the sound of CDs when they first came out as being harsh. The claim was that because the recording process was analog (tapes), the digitization of sound for the CDs led to a loss of sonic info, whereas the analog vinyl preserved everything that was on the tapes. Since then, recording in most places has gone digital all the way through, so the sound is digitized when first captured and stays digital when encoded on a CD or streamed online.
Here’s my question: If a vinyl record from the 1960s is superior to a CD made from the same tapes because of that analog-to-digital conversion, what about a vinyl record made today from a digital source? Does anyone find that, for instance, the Orange vinyl sounds different from the Orange CD? How so?
Thanks!
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Hi Roger, I’ve used the “download all albums” button in the “Club Music” section and then moved the folders of MP3 files to a usb drive. I have an AV receiver that accepts usb input. It works fine to interpret the files. It’s worth a try to see if you can just download everything to the USB drive. Maybe try with one album and see how it goes, then cut back to just the MP3s if your playback device gets hung up or is reading files twice or something.
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Hi Jung,
Thanks for posting about my hero Bertrand Russell. As a struggling grad student in Philosophy, I appreciated Bertrand Russell above all other philosophers I was reading for the simple fact that he was willing to change his mind and willing to admit that he had changed his mind. So many bent over backwards to avoid the possibility that their argument might not be correct. Russell was humble enough to acknowledge that Philosophy was an ongoing process of exploration. No doubt it tarnished his reputation in the field, where admission of uncertainty is a sign of weakness.
He’s also amazing for his continued intellectual growth throughout his long life. Had he retired in 1920 he would have already made major contributions to the Philosophy of Language and for influencing his student, Ludwig Wittgenstein who, coincidentally, also hailed from Austria. Instead, he went on, as shown in the videos, to be a social thinker and critic, writing on pacifism, religion, and the human condition.
As an aside, one of my most cherished possessions is an autographed book of his from his earlier, more hardcore, philosophical days.
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Hi Bill. Yes, very sad news. I absolutely agree with your assessment. In a way, she was the Paul McCartney of Fleetwood Mac at its heyday: steady, relatable, and imminently listenable. But today I’m thinking back to this beautiful, sad performance from before her days with Fleetwood Mac, when she was, appropriately, Christine Perfect.
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Hi David,
Speaking of April, the MLT channel had a total 1,176,258 views for the month, an increase of 177,404 over March. With a daily average of 33,925 new subscribers so far in 2023, April did 5,284 better, averaging 39,208 per day.
Since early last August (about the time YT gave the channel the checkmark), I’ve been tracking daily channel growth and noting whenever YT ticks up the subscriber number by 1,000. It’s all in a Google spreadsheet if anyone wants to dig into the numbers.
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Hi David,
Thanks for doing the research on all of this. These are the kind of questions I scratch my head about, curious but without the statistical background to pursue properly. No doubt there’s a lot of factors involved, some clear and others very murky. For instance, is the song one that more Youtubers are going to search for, driving new views faster than repeats?
We can’t tell (I don’t think) whether a view is new or a repeat, but we have sort of a proxy in likes, since you can only like a video once. Have you looked into the relation between views and likes? I wonder if there’s a correlation early on that can presage views over the longer term. For instance, Any Other Day currently has something like 25K fewer views than Junk, released around the same time. But Any Other Day has more likes than Junk, so a greater percentage of viewers are liking it over Junk.
Does this ratio of likes to views suggest that over time Any Other Day will get more views than Junk? Will Junk continue to outpace in views because it’s a McCartney song and people will always be searching for Macca? Beats me, but I think likes would be an interesting additional variable to fold into the analytical mix.
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Hi Daryl, sorry I’m a little late getting back to the conversation. I loved your story of hanging out in the stereo shop. It definitely brought back memories when, after high school and before college I finally had a full-time job and a few bucks to spend. So of course I went stereo shopping!
The speakers you describe are almost certainly electrostatic speakers, possibly Magnepans. Electrostatics have a charged film that vibrates between two screens as they pull or repel the screen. Because the film is so light weight, they do great with high frequencies. But they don’t push much air, so you’ll see them paired with subwoofers a lot. It’s also why electrostatics tend to be quite large.
Back then, a lot of cymbals in recordings sounded to me like hissing. It wasn’t until I got some electrostatic/woofer hybrid speakers that I thought I could actually hear the metalic sound of cymbals as they were supposed to sound. Now my hearing is so lousy I doubt I could hear the difference anymore.
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Hi Chris, I’ve been out of the conversations here for a bit, but I just saw your comment about Cage. I think he’s the kind of artist that people don’t really listen to as much as they talk about. For instance, one of his best known “compositions” is “4’33” and is four minutes, 33 seconds of a pianist at a piano doing nothing. The idea is for the audience to become atuned to the little sounds all around them and to think about what makes a musical performance anyway (after all, it had a musician at a piano, so doesn’t that count?) He had another one that is currently being performed, apparently, and won’t be done until the year 2640! Ridiculous, in a sense, but also opening doors for more mainstream composers to explore in areas they might not otherwise.
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Hi Jürgen,
I got into minimalist and experimental music back in the 70s, though less so these days as the minimalist movement seems to have run its course. I remember the first time I listened to an early Philip Glass album, it was so wildly different that even though I can’t say I enjoyed it, I was compelled to listen to more.
The tapestry of sound is certainly accurate for some composers. Terry Riley’s “In C” is a perfect example. Others have a more identifiable structure but use it to play around with repetition or shifts in time, etc. Then others, like John Cage, made noise (or silence) and challenged the audience to think about what it takes for something to be “music.”
As for influences in more popular music, Revolution 9 I think qualifies as minimalist (and Yoko Ono knew John Cage) and I always thought “I Want You, She’s So Heavy” had minimalist sensibilities in the spare lyrics and in the way they repeated the instrumental phrase for 3+ minutes and then cut with no fade, no resolution. Compare it to the piano ending in Clapton’s Layla.
More “avant garde” composers like Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, or Kraftwerk have definitely borrowed from minimalism, though sometimes these days the aim seems to be more about creating a great dance groove than trying to strip away elements of traditional classical music to try to find what’s essential. Anyway, I can’t even play an instrument, so I can only talk about what it sounds like to me!
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Hi Jürgen,
Steve Reich, whose composition is performed in the video, was trained as a percussionist. His compositions tend to feature percussion instruments, from hand claps to wood to marimbas. Most of his better known works are experimenting with time and sounds that go in and out of phase with other sounds, sounds that get shorter or longer. Fans of “minimalist” music and percussion should definitely check out his “Drumming.” You can scrub through if you just want to sample the variety of instruments and sounds in the nearly hour-long composition.
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Hi Jürgen,
John Cage was an experimental composer, mid 1900s. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything by him, either. His best known work is something called 4’33, which consisted of the musicians going on stage and then just sitting for four minutes 33 seconds. The idea was to question just what music is and to get the audience to hear the ambient sounds around them as music. He also liked to alter pianos so you could still play it like a piano but it just made different noises based on what he wired into it. All to blur the line between random sounds and traditional music. Like I say, experimental.
Actually, though, I suspect John Lennon and certainly Yoko Ono knew of him. Yoko Ono even collaborated with him on something back in 1962. There’s a video on YT. It’s noise, apparently. Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that his work was one inspiration behind “Revolution #9”. Is it noise? Is it music? Is it a song? Fast forward to Orange and we could ask the same thing about “The Future.”
Oh, and as if this weren’t enough, he’s also credited with the longest composition in history, something that’s supposed to take more than 600 years to perform. Hopefully there’s an intermission. 😉
Great wiper video! I hope I never look over to see the driver in the next lane trying to keep the glass clear in a pouring rain by using a squeegee. Yikes!
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Why not programmable windshield wipers that could replicate different beats instead of just the steady slap-slap-slap we get now? Have each wiper driven individually for left and right hand.
Sure it might create a safety hazard, but it might make driving in the rain a bit more fun. Imagine the ride with Bobby McGee with some more varied beats…