Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Why XM Just Bought the Farm


Satellite radio is great for the most part. Although they can be as repetitive as terrestrial radio there is a lot more variety in the programming. In the last week however, they have taken my favorite channel off the air and made it Internet only. This would be channel 80, "The Move." It's the deeper and more soulful house channel as compared to the other ones (BPM is more peak hour house and club and The System is just god awful Tiesto until you barf). I realize it may not be the most popular format, but it was a really nice mix of house, even if many of the blogs and forums said it was "too soulful" and missed the more tech-minimal tracks. I know this is really awful, but an African-American friend of mine said this about house music; "Theres another thing white people got their hands on and ruined."

What I know is that satellite only has so much bandwidth so in essence, The Move was taken off the air to make bandwidth available for either the "30 Days of Coldplay" or the "3 Months of Kenny Chesney" shows that debuted, I kid you not. If you look at channel 80, it says "Currently Off The Air" and nothing is in that spot so they didn't put something in its place, just utilized the bandwidth it had somewhere else for one of those 2 fine shows (and I was already bitter at the disappointing new Coldplay album. Pretty soon satellite will be no better then terrestrial now that they have the monopoly, and I was originally all for it. If they take off Opie and Anthony that might be the final straw.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Heres the Kick, Theres the Vocals... Nice to Meet You.

Why recently, has there been an influx of dance records where the vocals/samples/elements are not synced up to the kick or main drums?

It's awesome that you got your copy of Ableton/Logic/Cubase and have a super kick you sampled from some hot new electro track and now your going to take the acapella of "I Kissed A Girl" and make your own remix, but WHY WHY WHY is it so hard to actually sync up the vocals people? Go in there and edit the audio until it even feeeeellls right. It's like people take a sample or a vocal, start it on the one, and close their eyes and drive down a road hoping not to run into anything. Chances are theres going to be some timing differences so get in there and adjust words, lines, syllables, beats until that shits locked down. Thats what ReCycle and all those beat splicing and dicing programs are for.

If you're going to sample a loop from an old record, truncate it and do some audio surgery on it until it syncs up, don't just loop the loop and throw a beat under it, because after you pile on the 20 tracks of gratuitous elements the whole thing sounds like the music equivalent of a drunk driver.

And enough with the "I Kissed A Girl" remixes, I think 20 is enough. We get it, she kissed a girl, she liked it. Wheres the "I Kissed A Girl" and "Girls Kiss Girls" mash up?