AROIOS

But "Classical" is such a giant umbrella. When my friends make similar comments about how much they love "Classical music", I find it as descriptive as "loving Pop music". If we break music down by 1) Melody; 2) Harmony; 3) Timbre; 4) Rhythm; 5) Articulation, the only thing Classical music have in common is 3). Case in point, I love the works of Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Liszt and can enjoy some Bach on a good day, but the Schumann Sonata above just bores the shit out of me. 😃

Just came across an excellent instrumental cover of Diane Schuur's "By Design". It was originally arranged by Dave Grusin and is now beautifully adapted by Vadim Shinnik. I absolutely love his playing,. and what an endorsement for Viscount!

The first 15 seconds are surprisingly bouncy for TB-303. I can't even get a JX-8P to sound that funky.

Speaking of GM, Passport produced a bunch of excellent GM midi files back in the day. Some of them got shipped with early versions of Windows and even garnered fans decades after those OSes were released. Early GM support and sonic performance were all over the place, but it paved the way for Roland's GS and Yamaha's XG formats to come. Roland hired a Japanese keyboard wiz duo "IDECS" in the early 90's to produce a series of excellent MIDI files for their SC-55 GS synth. It became a line of commercial MIDI packs they sell. Yamaha soon followed suit and commissioned several American and British musicians to produce a vast library of original demo tunes for their XG synths. Like Roland, they also sold lots of XG MIDI packs. To this day, these GS and XG MIDI files remain the best sounding MIDI productions I've heard.

I recognize that room.

Excellent Brazilian Jazz and Bluesy Funk/Gospel! Don is a much under-appreciated master player. Here's a collaboration between him and Casiopea's Minoru Mukaiya from 10 years ago, this type of stuff is right up my alley:

Judging by the term "General MIDI", I highly suspect you're one of them T-1000s who just got wormholed here from 1990.

Yup, for now, I'd choose living within a self-sustaining "Intentional Community" over being a farm animal in those "15-minute cities", hooked on UBI and VR/Metaverse goodies. But I'm not delusional about how weak our species' will power is. The gaming industry has already been bigger than movie and music combined for a few years. And humans are only gonna get increasingly addicted as virtual experiences improve. Maybe all it takes for me to give in, is a VR trip to VR Caribbean with a VR girlfriend, on my VR yacht. 😆

This reminds me of another prediction I made back in 2015: Universal Basic Income (UBI). It's inevitable that we as a species will become economically "useless", facing challenges from A.I. and robots. Oppressive regimes like North Korea can simply "solve the problem" by starving their "excess" population to death. Luckily, we own guns here, and the AI/Robot corporations and their government cronies will have to throw us a bone reluctantly. Eventually, we'll exist as code and merge with A.I. Let's just keep our fingers crossed SKYNET doesn't wipe us out before then. 😃

He learned that from Eddie:

Exactly, I've watched some of his music theory videos and found them to be utterly useless. Just regurgitation of dry text you can easily find online, with little empathy or thought put into them. And there were poor souls in the comment sections saying those were way better explanations than what they received in school. Really makes you wonder just how terrible their teachers were, or how bad their YT search skills are.

A great album, always loved the string arrangement Ettore Stratta did on "I Love You Porgy".

I like what he did at the end of the intro: CHD Pro -064.mp3

Was listening to some YT playlist and heard this juicy piano "pumping" (starting from 3:58 below) that I assumed was done by Richard Tee. Turns out it was Dave Grusin. This is a side of his playing I'm not familiar with, is there any style Sensei Grusin doesn't play well?

I had the pleasure of hearing the backing track of Tony Bennett and Faith Hill's version of "The Way You Look Tonight" on a wedding a long while ago. I was lucky. Both of Tony and Faith are great singers for sure, but in the original recording, their voices were a total distraction from Jorge Calandrelli's beautiful arrangement. It was traditional, effective and elegant. Here's a snippet of a decent transcription of Jorge's work: https://www.karaoke-version.com/karaoke/tony-bennett/the-way-you-look-tonight-duet.html

Thanks for the thorough reply, brother. I too, preferred the studio version you shared. The first minute and half is quite enjoyable. Afterwards it became too "mechanical" for my rustic ears, as do most Baroque pieces.

Both tunes sounded very boring to my crude ears, just like Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert. I'm genuinely curious what you guys found intriguing in these two pieces.

jazzpiano88 and ReezeKeys both know what's up. Back in 2015, the copywriters and graphic designers around me had very similar responses to the self-assured brothers above, when I told them it's just a matter of time Deep Learning is gonna replace them professionally. "A.I. will 'NEVER' challenge our creativity." is what they said. It only took 8 years for Large Language Models and Generative AI to seriously threaten their revenue streams. 😃

The short piece at 8:09 is actually enjoyable, more so than 99% of the garbage on most charts today. If that's any indication of our AI overlord's potential, I'm all for it.

We are all just atoms optimizing for the continuation of our genetic code. What we call "love", "lust", "care", "fairness"...etc, are all just result of that process. And that optimization often goes absurd places when the "signals" and the "substance" have long de-coupled. This story about beetles obsessing over beer bottles serves as a perfect reminder: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/the-love-that-dared-not-speak-its-name-of-a-beetle-for-a-beer-bottle

While Beato's interviews are enjoyable, I never found him a great "educator". Scrolling 10 pages through his YT videos, I don't see a single title hinting at anything "educational" that interests me. I'm not being difficult, a short video from Matt Johnson often makes my day. And my reaction to vast majority of Beato's "What Makes This Song Great" series has been a consistent "Who T F Said It's Great?"

Speaking of arranging, there has been a trend of moving from the "Poppier" arrangements of the 80's/90's to a more acoustic sound. This happened to Bob James, David Benoit, Russell Ferrante and many others. While there's nothing wrong with a simpler setup, my ears get bored after a while. It's like stripping away the seasoning from a prime rib. Nostalgia perhaps, but the original version of Restoration is more enjoyable for me personally.

That's really weird. Anyone still interested, just msg me with a burner email address and I'll send it to you.

Let's see how long this one will last. Password for the zip file is keyboardcorner https://file.io/cF7sr1E2XgPz

Here you go: https://file.io/g9vSGt2QimTj