World's Greatest Song...

Read on for the world's greatest song, or at least the most irritating...



The track in question is Public Image Limited's "Fodderstompf", the very name implies grinding banality and the track was indeed a sneering knock off, shoved together to fill up the running time of their debut LP and deliver a two fingered assault to the record company and record buying public. Despite having a history of getting up peoples noses in his previous band the Sex Pistols John Lydon decided PIL were going to be a complete break with the Pistols swaggering pub rock, indeed he planned a complete break with all rock, the one consistent being the power to annoy. But I don't think even John Lydon and his merry men could have envisioned how unbelievably funny and teeth grinding this track would end up.

When every rock act these days, with the honorable exceptions of Slipknot and System of a Down, seem obsessed with telling their mildly depressed Mondeo driving fans that its OK to feel a bit worried but everything will be all right because lets face it you are white and western, a glutenous shower of platitudes that make you want to join the Taliban, PIL's irony saturated track comes over the hill like the sanity police and reminds us all to stop moaning so much about fuck all. When global warming grows teeth its not Keane fans who will have to worry, mores the pity, it's the poor bastards in the third world who will get the big Kahuna...

This reality, the hand ringing of the western privileged classes and the shafting of anyone else is echoed in the bottomless "black" sound of the music, the thin helium voices moan "we only wanted to be loved" in increasing derangement as the rumbling dub bass and eerie squelching synths buzz like tsetse fly in the bush.

One proviso the Youtube clip below proved incapable of translating the bass of the original which is virtually inaudible on the clip so download for the full glory. Without the groove the piss taking voices are unbearable for the full ten minutes however funny!



Maningrey




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The Daily Adventures of Mixerman

If you've got a few hours to spare, check out the Daily Adventures of Mixerman. It tells the story of a recording job from hell. Many familiar situations for those who've been there, many lessons for those on their way...

(Unfortunately, you'll need to buy the book to see how it all ends...)

"The Daily Adventures of Mixerman" > read the full post

LSS upgrades to new gorgeous iMacs

Yes, the latest generation of iMacs with OLED displays had only been announced for thirty minutes and we were already on the phone to order new computers for LSS North Campus. The old ones had been there already for two years, and you know, the waste basket on the desktop was full of stuff, and yeah, you could click on 'empty waste basket' but it's quicker to throw them all away and order some new ones ;)

Read all about the new iMac on Apple's website, the ones we are getting have a 21,5" OLED display, 4Gb or ram and 3GHz processor, but we are staying well clear of the new wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse.
As much as we like LSS to be on the cutting edge, the classic extended keyboard remains the best one for music applications, and to be honest, I am very wary of anything 'Magic'. I like my mouse to be stupid and have real buttons to click, thank you very much, so we are sticking with the Apple Mouse (it used to be known as Mighty but it's now just the Apple Mouse > read how Apple lost the right to the Mighty Mouse name).

Still, you are welcome to bring yours in the class, if you think it's better.


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Open your mind Maaaannnnnnn

I have recently introduced various people to the work of Yes, Neu, King Crimson and Can....



Two of those four bands, Can and Neu, are now accepted as being cool despite sharing the same amount of facial hair and velvet loon panted leg room as the other two, in fact there could not be anymore uncool acts in history than Yes and KC in the eyes of the musical taste makers, and yet by sneakily playing people tracks blind or to people who have no knowledge of a particular period of rock history I have turned hop hop fans, wedge haired indie tykes and suspicious girlfriends onto all manner of embarrassing shit....

Try it! While doing the washing up put on The Clap by Yes, as if it was just on the radio, hum along and when your WAG/shades wearing flatmate or flute playing cat goes "Hmmmm this is nice" grab them, cuff them and yell "Ha it's by YES and I am making a citizen's unwitting prog consumption arrest" and then make them admit they only bought the Ting Tings CD because it was all over the tube on huge posters which said "Buy the Ting Tings you thoughtless dull eyed slaves of capitalism, see the bright colours, see the attractive girl and BUYYYY"

What gets my goat is that certain styles are swept under the carpet while other are venerated when lets face it how much of punk was actually good??? the Clash, The Pistols...ohh hmmm ohhh YES THAT'S IT!!

How much of grunge? Nirvana...there that's its I'm afraid...

60's Rock? Hendrix and Zappa...I also like the Loving Spoonful but I will admit that's a personal tic like scratching my ear when nervous.

Heavy metal? Sabbath and Zep.

Yeah OK so I am being a bit sweeping but cool people are always telling me how ALL prog sucks or all jazz is boring and how all dance music sounds the same and frankly that is balls.

So open you mind and don't worry about the labels, unless of course its an orange skull and cross bones on a bottle of bleach that says DEATH under it..

Maningrey







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Cinematic Strings

Cinematic Strings are giving away their Monster Staccato patch when you register on their site....

Been playing around with it for a hour now, and it sounds pretty awesome. It's only available in Kontakt format, but you've already got the free Kontakt Player now, haven't you?

Register and download the Monster Staccato here.

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DIY reamp box and more from Jensen

Thanks to Matt Foster (Mixing Engineer Supremo and great guy all around) for this link.

Jensen Transformers is an American company producing all sorts or useful boxes for musical use: DI boxes, microphone splitters, the list of gadgets is too long to publish but you are welcome to visit jensentransformers.com and discover one or two boxes you didn't know you wanted, and now you do.

The best part is that rather than waiting for Behringer to go and copy their designs, Jensen is not afraid to publish full schematics for each one of their products, encouraging people to make their own. They know perfectly well that after a couple of aborted attempts at doing it yourself you will just get back to them and buy the real thing, but this shouldn't stop us from having a go.

Matt is currently getting his soldering iron out for a very handy reamp box, to be used to get some guitar tracks out of Pro Tools and back in to some cool vintage guitar amps – because, you know, just having every guitar amp plugin in the world is not enough.

Here is the link to the schematics for the reamp box and to the full list of application schematics
.



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Ultra Anal?

AudioMIDI have another of their "no-brainer" deals going on.

They're offering the Applied Acoustics Systems Ultra Analogue VA-1 synth for just $15 (that's $184 off the regular price!)

It comes in VST and RTAS for all you PC users, and AU, RTAS and VST for Mac.

I got my version yesterday, and it's a very cool, 2 oscillator, 32 voice polyphony physical modeling virtual analogue synth.

You'll find the deal here.

Just one thing - why don't manufacturers realize how their name will abbreviate in a sequencer window? I expect to get some strange looks if anyone sees me with this.....

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Synth Britannia!

Friday 16th of October, BBC4. From Human League to Throbbing Gristle, check out what it was like before the days of plugins....

Check out the trailer.

"Synth Britannia!" > read the full post

Shels build a "Guitar Bunker"

There's quite a cool DIY solution to recording loud guitars at home up at the Shels blog...

Looking forward to the new album - they're using classical guitars through a 5150

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Logic 9.02 update

Use your software update to download the latest version.
At the time of writing the list of changes and bugfixes has not been updated on Apple's website but it should be available soon on this page > http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2565

We can only assume this release addresses a number of bugs (Logic 9.01 still had many serious bugs) and we can also safely assume it doesn't fixes all of them.

Apple has got in to the bad habit of NOT giving a complete and detailed list of bug-fixes, possibly to avoid projecting a negative image about the product. So what we get is a non-committal "Some issues addressed include (but are not limited to)" which means having to go and spend hours trying to figure out which bugs are still there and which aren't. Bastards.

At this moment in time we still recommend not upgrading to Snow Leopard and not deleting your Logic 8 if you upgrade to Logic 9.

Note: the plugin settings (the presets) of version 8 are overwritten by version 9, and version 8 might not be able to open some of them. If you really like certain presets and you want to be able to open them again in version 8 all you have to do is save them as 'user' settings and Logic 9 will leave them alone – obviously this has to be done before you upgrade to 9.


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Freemasons Master Class (Become a Dance Music Superstar)

The British Music Experience are presenting a unique chance to interact with one of the UK's most successful DJ and Producer teams, The Freemasons.....


Dance music superstars Freemasons are giving a masterclass on Thursday 26th November 2009 at The British Music Experience. Sounds like decent value for £8 and access to the exhibition as well, see the BME hyper link for more details.






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Classical Music Event - Student Discount

The historic 100 Club has a new night for the classically minded among us...read on.



The good people at Limelight are bringing classical concerts to the spit n beer atmosphere of the 100 Club in an effort to "attract a younger crowd, to prove that classical music is not the preserve of the white-haired stalwarts", heartening news unless you are a "white haired stalwart" of course...But anyhow they are offering a 2 for 1 discount for students from music schools so check this link and follow the instructions.



If you can't make this night they have more excellent young musicians playing over the next few months:

Upcoming headliners:

* Tuesday, Oct 13th: saxophonist Amy Dickson

* Tuesday, Nov 10th: violinist Daniel Hope

* Tuesday, Dec 8th: pianist Joanna MacGregor




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Electromagnetic noise from an iPhone

These things are amazingly noisy!...An old friend of mine has been experimenting with his iPhone and iMac, seeing how much electromagnetic noise they put out.Here's the iPhone, but head to his Youtube page to see the iMac, as well as his circuit bending experiments...



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