Scott Fraser

Just heard that the massively talented, weirdly witty, darkly joyous, fun & funny purveyor of more strings than you can shake a stick at, David Lindley, has left the stage for greener pastures. He started out in the folk-rock 60s scene in LA and was able to turn quirkiness & obscure ethnic instruments into a music career. I was always one degree of separation away from him via several different bandmates, friends & family, but never got the opportunity to meet up & hang out. But I saw Lindley whenever he played locally & it was always an inspiration, leading eventually to my occasional fitful attempts on lap steel guitar. David Lindley, RIP, I hoist a catfood sandwich in your honor. Much respect.

Fortunately technology marches on & we have improvements in many areas of life. Noiseless single coil pickups are readily available now, so there's no need to put up with the hum.

Beautiful. Magnolias were blooming in LA, but we've had a shit ton of rain in the last 2 weeks & all the petals got knocked off.

I haven't eaten any meat since 1968 and I still don't sound like Kirk Hammett, for better or worse.

Making music isn't a competition.

I think context is crucial here. A Sus implies that the chord will resolve its suspended status to the third. But if the chord doesn't resolve, and the sus really stands on its own, is it a 9th? I'm not sure, I didn't study THAT much music theory.

Actually that's more correct than calling it an A9, since the 9th implies the existence of the dominant 7. I just never got in the habit of thinking of that as a sus2.

+1. I would think of that chord voicing as functioning as an A9, but a chord can be spelled as many ways as there are different notes in it, so Esus4 works too. Great discoveries are always just around the corner, especially if you try something you don't already know.

At the risk of sounding like my parents in the 60s, I feel sorry for kids now, growing up with this as the popular music of their impressionable youth. They will look back from their older years & realize they have no melodies to hang on to.

Same reaction. I hope they sold a lot of parkas. But, great game, & I hate football, so that says something.

I see Waters is picking at old scabs again. A more enlightened person would be happy to let old arguments be bygones. <<This announced legal plagiarism of DSOTM is solely a money-grab; he'll be cutting most or all of any profits from this release from the remaining members of Pink Floyd.>> The others will still get their publishing royalties as co-composers, but not any record sales payments.

Pink Floyd at their best were a band in the true sense of the word, with all four members contributing to their unique vision & sound. Wright was never a keyboard prodigy but his work was always very appropriate, understated, atmospheric, & affecting, & his background vocals complemented Gilmour's lead vocal perfectly. Mason apparently had a big hand in the creation of tape loops & other sound textures. Post-Waters Floyd is still interesting, though I find it indistinguishable from Gilmour's solo work. Good, intelligent music, fabulous sound design & production, yet not quite the full Pink Floyd experience. Pink Floyd informed everything I know about sound design & the use of real world environmental sound as an intrinsically musical element in composition. I can't think of a deeper influence on everything I do in music, both as a musician as well as an engineer.

But mainly, the guy says the tone improves markedly, but never lets us hear it before he ruins the instrument. I call bulls**t worthless clickbait.

Yup, sure, it's a huge improvement over the undrilled sound.

I've had that CD since it came out, sometime in the 80s. Hedges was great, really an innovator. You wouldn't know it from this album but he was a really fine singer too.

On the plane back from gigs in New York, I watched Dune, the 2021 version, not the 1984 mess that Lynch butchered. A couple reactions: (1) the score, by Hans Zimmer, was really beautiful, appropriate, transcendent, & felt perfectly in sync with the story & production approach. As opposed to his Dunkirk score, which felt phoned in, never worked for any given scene, & where the best, most elegiac gesture in a truly heroic moment in military history was when we departed from Zimmer's score for a section of Elgar's Enigma Variations, which alone was successful at setting the tone of what it meant to be a part of English culture & history during an epic trial by fire. (2) Timothée Chalamet, playing Paul Atreides, the hero, looks exactly like Syd Barrett. He definitely has the part when the Syd Barrett story gets made into a movie. It's uncanny.

I'm guessing more likely 'Sustain" is the threshold, whether it's just nicking the tops of the peaks or the whole dynamic range. Ratio would have a lot less utility in a pedal, unless it's attempting to recreate a full featured studio comp, like the Cali76. In the 45 years I've been using UREI 1176 compressors in the studio, I can't recall ever choosing a ratio other than 4:1.

Yup, you rackmount the whole thing because there's never enough space in the studio to set a lunchbox down.

Van Dyke Parks, yeah! RIP Crosby, by all accounts a most difficult person to be in a band with, and a great writer, singer & guitarist. A very big part of the sound of my generation.

As a studio owner I think it's a dumb format. Not the 500 format, the lunchbox package.

That's Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, who has played with a ton of people, like Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Sting, Allan Holdsworth, John McLaughlin, & on & on, and Jason Rebello on keys, who has worked with Sting, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, etc. In my opinion, that group, with Tal W, was Beck's finest band ever. They perfectly matched Beck's genius. They always knocked it out of the park.

In some bands the drummer is somewhat interchangeable, not utterly essential to what is unique to that band. In others, the drummer is such a tightly integrated element that the band simply can't be that band without that drummer. Nobody could play like John Bonham, so Led Zeppelin decided to disband after his passing. IMO the right move. The Who continued after Keith Moon's death, & became a band without the manic energy which made them utterly unique. IMO a mistake. I don't know the Foo Fighters enough to have a sense of their essential identity with a different drummer, but I suspect it will still sound & feel just like the Foo Fighters.

'Where Were You' has been on regular rotation on my CD player, then iPod for about 30 years. It's everything I try to explain to people about how JB advanced the art of the whammy bar as an expressive melodic tool light years beyond where anybody else had taken it. Plus harmonics, plus highly controlled feedback, plus volume swells, plus overdrive, plus tone for days. It's the whole package of his brilliance, wrapped around a gorgeous melody.

The greatest practitioner of the art of electric guitar. RIP.

Looks like all upstrokes with his index finger. How anybody can play like that is beyond me. But if you do something long enough, you get great at it. Like Jeff Healey playing overhand style. And what a cool example of how wonderful Firebird mini-humbuckers sound.