There's a scene in the movie Crumb, about the retro-iconoclast cartoonist & musician R Crumb, in which he sketches out his belief that everything went to hell when wires were strung across the American landscape*. I'm with him. Wires are ugly, and furthermore they have a lot in common with chains. That's why wireless technology feels not just convenient,...

All microphones have proximity effect. This means that the closer your mouth is to the mic, the more bass frequencies it captures. If you move away from a mic, the bass diminishes. Professionals know how to use the proximity effect to their advantage. It's almost a way of "tuning" a microphone.

I went to see "The New Cars" in concert a couple of nights ago; Todd Rundgren has replaced Ric Ocasek as lead vocalist and frontman. (Disclaimer: having been Todd's business partner for many years, I'm probably a wee bit biased). Having been a fan of the original Cars line-up, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. The show was fantastic;...

BBC News recently ran a wonderful article on the tritone, beginning, “A new film about the history of heavy metal highlights the so-called Devil’s Interval, a musical phenomenon suppressed by the Church in the Middle Ages.” A tritone, as you probably know, is the interval from C to F#, which spans three whole tones. Subjectively, it has an unresolved...

Poking about on a Japanese gadget site, I came across an illuminated, motorized, fish-shaped speaker called the iFish. The description was intriguing: “5 kinds of LED lights flash in many different patterns when music is played through iFish. iFish is capable of changing its feelings from happy to angry by waving its body side to side and by changing...

Pearl Jam has a new album out, and has just opted to release its first video in over eight years, "Life is Wasted", over Creative Commons. The video, which premiered on VH1 last Friday, can be downloaded for free from pearljam.com and video.google.com through May 24th. After that, the video will be positioned for sale through paid distribution channels. Pearl...

Okay, I'll admit it: Even though I learned (and loved) electronic music production on patchcord synthesizers, I never got deeply into Reason, Propellerhead Software's pioneering studio-on-a-screen. There was just something about its snarled cords and infinitely tall rack of modules that looked forbidding. Then I bumped into Reason virtuoso Kurt "Peff" Kurasaki at a party and learned he was hosting...

Recently I stumbled across an interesting survey of music blog readers (roughly 700 respondents and about 30 questions); check it out at Music Blogs Reader Survey. Among the findings there were stats you might expect like that 73% of respondents were male, and most of the readers were either in arts and entertainment, in technology (or both), and/or are students....

One of my favorite blogs is Chris Randall's Analog Industries, where topics range from "Hard-Core Gear Porn Friday" to "Four Measures of Fury." Today, though, I read an entry that provoked me to sign up and post a reply. Chris had blogged about getting great coverage for his company's effect plug-ins in Future's Computer Music magazine. Readers then opined about...

Today is the release date for the new Red Hot Chili Peppers CD, "Stadium Arcadium". About a week ago, the album was leaked onto the Internet -- which angered the band no end. In a rambling open letter, the band's bass player Flea said he and his colleagues would be heartbroken if fans downloaded the album beforehand. "I cannot put...