New Year Music Resolutions

[Lisnaholic]

Yeah, yeah, everyone's going to eat healthier food, lose weight and start a daily exercise regime.

But how about music? What do you hope to do in 2024?

My plans are to contribute more to the Album Club: Hard Reset : https://scd.community/index.php?topic=407.0

Also to check out "Russian Breakbeat" music, that my nephew recently recommended to me, plus some other genres I don't know anything about, like Trance Music:  https://scd.community/index.php?topic=614.0

[Lexi Darling]

I've started to post some of the old music I've made in my thread in the creators forum, so maybe that counts. I am also slowly working on new, better music, so I do want to resolve to complete that album this year.

I also want to continue to spread the synth gospel on here, maybe I'll rework my 100 electronic albums thread in some way so I can share that synthy love without having to feel like I'm too busy to have the motivation to chip away at an incomplete project.

[Psy-Fi]

I already started my music resolution a couple of months ago. I'm finally going through the detachable hard drive where I keep all my music downloads, and listening to every album in alphabetical order. I decided it was time to thin out the music that I've lost interest in or never had a lot of interest in to begin with. So far, I've been deleting about 60% of the albums in my list after listening to them. Many of the albums haven't been listened to for several years and I'm surprised how many of them sounded good to me when I downloaded them but I couldn't care less about them now.

[Lexi Darling]

I already started my music resolution a couple of months ago. I'm finally going through the detachable hard drive where I keep all my music downloads, and listening to every album in alphabetical order. I decided it was time to thin out the music that I've lost interest in or never had a lot of interest in to begin with. So far, I've been deleting about 60% of the albums in my list after listening to them. Many of the albums haven't been listened to for several years and I'm surprised how many of them sounded good to me when I downloaded them but I couldn't care less about them now.

I went through that same process when I was bored during the 2020 lockdowns. Lots of stuff people sent me or that I downloaded on recommendation in the days before you could find any music ever made on YouTube.

Also a lot of discographies of classic "essential" artists that I only listened to because they were deemed important even though I never had a real connection to them. And some big discographies of artists where I only really need one or two great albums of theirs.

[Lisnaholic]

Yes, Psy-Fi and Mrs.Waffles, I can totally relate to what you say, as I also have a bunch of hard-drive MP3s that I once downloaded with great enthusiasm, but have not revisited much since. For me, many are not from the lockdown, but from earlier, when I first caught up with the technology of getting music for free. Remember watching these things while waiting for the track you wanted to download ?



So, yes I have a lot of material that I should really thin out - and I know where I should start: a mess of Dead Can Dance files: one day I thought this band were amazing and downloaded lots, then realised that their music got kind of samey and boring pretty quickly. 

[innerspaceboy]

I'm going to try to listen to more of what I already have but have never spun. 20TBs of lossless archival FLAC and -b 320CBR content, plus thousands of LPs and nearly a thousand compact discs...

I did the math at one point and discovered I had more media than I could consume in the remainder of my lifetime.

Another reason I've never used a streaming service.

[Lisnaholic]

^ That's a lot of material, innerspaceboy! I like that you did that calculation about how long it would take you to listen to your music collections.
I imagine that result must have made you stop and think about all your recordings.

I think your situation illustrates the dilemma of a serious collector very well: if you are going to be thorough about collecting an artist´s work, you end up with hard-to-manage discographies, which is what Mrs.Waffles mentions too.

For myself, I've never tried to be a completist*. In terms of collecting music, my attitude was formed in my teens, when buying an album was a carefully-considered extravagance and I had just a handful of albums that I absolutely played to death. My dream was to have a collection that was big enough that it was never over-familiar in that way again, but was also small enough to be just albums I really liked. I achieved that balance for a while, but free downloads and greed got the better of me about 10 years ago, which is why some pruning of my MP3s is now advisable.

On the topic of streaming: I don't use Spotify, but these kinds of services are causing quite a revolution in attitudes to music, I think. I know people who have no urge to possess music in any format: to them, everything they want to hear is always instantly available anyway. Spotify, afaik, has an impressive range of material like that, but "Alexa", which I briefly experienced, was very disappointing. Say "Alexa, play Frank Zappa", and you get a very meagre response: Alexa only offers mainstream artists, and even with them, it's like you only get the trailer, not the actual movie. But thinking about it, being content with that kind of access to music is a very old attitude - like all the people in the past for whom music-on-the-radio was all the music they needed.

* with the exceptions of Nick Drake and Syd Barratt solo work. For these two guys put together, you can get about 7 albums total and then brag about having their complete works  

[innerspaceboy]

It indeed poses a challenge. It's a curious conundrum which I've faced similarly time and time again.

One prime example is my RetroBox project. I spent months researching and compiling television broadcast listings of every children's program from the mid 1960s (think Hanna Barbera and Sid & Marty Krofft productions) to the early 1990s like Invader Zim. I secured DVD rips where available of every surviving episode of 228 complete TV series and VHS rips where no official releases had ever been made available and organized the library into a series of spreadsheets by date of broadcast, producer, and network.

I'd planned to secure toy and breakfast cereal commercial archives of Saturday morning cartoons from that era and write a script to intersperse them between the episodes, and then port the streaming signal to an old CRT television set on a wood grain microwave cart like the one my parents had when I was a child.

It was a thrill to construct, but I honestly had more fun building it than actually tuning in to any of the content.

Such is the life of an archivist.

[Lexi Darling]

Yeah, I feel you both. I don't download MP3s anymore, but back in the day I would just download a ton of stuff from filesharing services and MP3 blogs, more music than I had time to actually listen to. I don't really download much music anymore, but I still have somewhat of a similar problem with online streams in this era of largely unrestricted listening options. These days I have more time on my hands without school and full time employment, so I'd love to try to go through and devote some attention to music I either never got around to or didn't give the time it deserved.

[Lisnaholic]

^ It sounds like a few years back you and I both reacted to the free-music revolution the same way: download, download, download!
Good luck working through those old files of yours, Mrs.Waffles.

It indeed poses a challenge. It's a curious conundrum which I've faced similarly time and time again.

One prime example is my RetroBox project. I spent months researching and compiling television broadcast listings of every children's program from the mid 1960s (think Hanna Barbera and Sid & Marty Krofft productions) to the early 1990s like Invader Zim. I secured DVD rips where available of every surviving episode of 228 complete TV series and VHS rips where no official releases had ever been made available and organized the library into a series of spreadsheets by date of broadcast, producer, and network.

I'd planned to secure toy and breakfast cereal commercial archives of Saturday morning cartoons from that era and write a script to intersperse them between the episodes, and then port the streaming signal to an old CRT television set on a wood grain microwave cart like the one my parents had when I was a child.

It was a thrill to construct, but I honestly had more fun building it than actually tuning in to any of the content.

Such is the life of an archivist.

Thanks for sharing the details of your RetroBox project, isb, and providing an honest insight into the joys and disappointments of being an archivist. One thing I learned is that you and I have very different approaches, as I am a shameless diletante: interested in something for a while, explore a bit, get bored, move on. That's normal for me.

Right now I'm rather between musical enthusiasms, so that's another resolution for 2024: find some exciting new (to me) sounds.

[Guybrush]

Finding something new would be a good resolution for myself as well 🙂

Other than that, I have a music project - a song that I love. I got a fairly decent instrumental version that I'd like to turn into something proper. Getting that done in 2024 would be GREAT!

Only trouble is it's not my song, but our band's, and I can't complete it without their work and input which is extremely hard to get.

It's like.. I'd like to replace some of my own guitar with my buddy's , basically so that he's also a part of it. He said he didn't have a good recording setup at home and it was too much work going to the studio, so in the hopes of enabling him to work more on our joint projects, I argued that we should buy a couple of mics as a business expense (we have a tiny publishing company). That way, we (or rather they) could use them for home recording. I ordered some good mics, paid for them and had them sent to his house. That was around the time the war in Ukraine really started up. So far I got nothing. No recordings, not even a reimbursement 🤷

My other friend should sing, but also wants to finish the lyrics. I think we're on year 12 or 13 with the lyrics still undone.

If you want something done, you should do it yourself. But if you can't, what's a guy to do? Herding cats would be easier.

[Lisnaholic]

It's like.. I'd like to replace some of my own guitar with my buddy's , basically so that he's also a part of it. He said he didn't have a good recording setup at home and it was too much work going to the studio, so in the hopes of enabling him to work more on our joint projects, I argued that we should buy a couple of mics as a business expense (we have a tiny publishing company). That way, we (or rather they) could use them for home recording. I ordered some good mics, paid for them and had them sent to his house. That was around the time the war in Ukraine really started up. So far I got nothing. No recordings, not even a reimbursement 🤷

My other friend should sing, but also wants to finish the lyrics. I think we're on year 12 or 13 with the lyrics still undone.

That lack of response from your buddy who received good mics is very disappointing. I always imagined that (bitter feuds apart) there would be a camaraderie among ex-band members, acknowledging an old bond forged over music-making together.

As for your other friend, I'm afraid that 12 years is a suspiciously long time for working out lyrics. Is he the sole lyric writer? In your position, I'd be tempted to remind him of songs like Tutti Frutti, illustrating how lyric-writers don't need to overthink things, then gently suggest that he just goes with what he has already, and not wait for furthur inspiration.

There's a traditional English saying: Strike while the iron is hot; it's advice based on a blacksmith's experience, that you have to act in the moment when everything is fired up in order to get the best result, but with your bandmate, a comment my sister made to me one time might be more relevant: "Sometimes you have to strike when the iron is only lukewarm, in the realisation that it's never going to get any hotter." That was my sister, may she r.i.p: an intelligent, quietly original thinker - and I think that would've been her advice to your sluggish bandmates.
Good luck, and please let us know if you make any progress in 2024 with the gestation of your song.

[Guybrush]

That lack of response from your buddy who received good mics is very disappointing. I always imagined that (bitter feuds apart) there would be a camaraderie among ex-band members, acknowledging an old bond forged over music-making together.

As for your other friend, I'm afraid that 12 years is a suspiciously long time for working out lyrics. Is he the sole lyric writer? In your position, I'd be tempted to remind him of songs like Tutti Frutti, illustrating how lyric-writers don't need to overthink things, then gently suggest that he just goes with what he has already, and not wait for furthur inspiration.

There's a traditional English saying: Strike while the iron is hot; it's advice based on a blacksmith's experience, that you have to act in the moment when everything is fired up in order to get the best result, but with your bandmate, a comment my sister made to me one time might be more relevant: "Sometimes you have to strike when the iron is only lukewarm, in the realisation that it's never going to get any hotter." That was my sister, may she r.i.p: an intelligent, quietly original thinker - and I think that would've been her advice to your sluggish bandmates.
Good luck, and please let us know if you make any progress in 2024 with the gestation of your song.

Thanks, Lisna 🙂 some good advice! We actually have that expression in Norwegian as well.

I think when it comes to creative work, they like to be spontaneously inspired in some moment. I think that's great, but it's also good to sit down and work on coming up with something. I feel like I'm just a little more disciplined in that respect than they are.

Until it's done, at least I can enjoy listening to my demo 😄

[Lisnaholic]

^ Yes, perhaps listening to the demo and dreaming of its possibilities will be a pleasure of its own.

Thanks, Lisna 🙂 some good advice! We actually have that expression in Norwegian as well.

^ That's interesting to know, Guybrush. I suppose that right across Europe, blacksmiths had the same piece of wisdom to impart. 

[DJChameleon]

Woof. I don't think I could get into cataloging everything. Seems like a daunting task.

I need to drive back into my journals now that I have more time on my hands for hobbies.

Also finish up my reviews for the album club to start it back up.