Post a controversial music opinion

I just looked up tickets to a Dwight Yoakam show I was thinking about going to — $105 for a general admission lawn spot. And for that I have to put up with the Mavericks, too. Sorry, no thanks.

as long as I can sit down I’m fine. Saw suede and maniacs last year and felt like a damn teenager again singing along to “killing of a flashboy” and “a design for life”

Ended up standing up most of the time (everyone else was too) but it was good to be able to sit down

One thing that improved show-going was smoking bans. I used to have clothes and a coat that were reserved for concerts. Because a trip to a club would cause everything I wore to reek of tobacco for a week.

100% agree

yeah lord do I not miss smelling like an ash tray.

Suede was one of the worst shows i ever saw. after their original guitarist left and they had some clueless kid on guitar. it was sad. because i like suede!

upstairs at nicks in philly used to have a permanent cloud of smoke hovering near the ceiling at all times. it was so gross and i smoked! i would go home with insane smoke inhalation headaches.

man the House of Blues in Orlando has spacing issues, and I saw Slayer there in 1999, bought a shirt and wore it the whole show, leaving smelling of nasty-assed smoke, and was so excited about the show I didn't even wash the fucking thing and wore it to school the next day, friends not coming within inches of me.

then my religious mother threw it away anyway

1000% agree on smoking bans. Having to PLAY pre-smoking ban especially sucked, as you'd be stuck in the venue for even longer.

Scott, that guitar player has gotten SO MUCH BETTER he was SLAYING all those Bernard butler leads and riffs I tell ya!!!

Man alive otm. My instrument cases probably still retain Camel Light residue from 1994

Yes smoking at shows was gross even when I smoked but I was somewhere recently where people were still smoking indoors and I was tempted to buy a pack and do so just because I could.

if I'm somewhere you can smoke indoors there's no way I'm not tracking down a cigarette.

might as well at that point

My memory of 1990 is that even if you were not smoking, you were smoking

I’ve always substituted “chamber music” to describe the broader genre of “classical”— helpful for me because I think of “classical” as meaning Mozart and Haydn, not Mahler or Webern.

But somebody referred to it using the term “sheet music” recently to me and I was kinda charmed by that and I might start doing the same

I've also heard it called "concert music" and "art music"... I'm a rube so I just call it "classical," tho

i always thought of "chamber music" as notated, non-jazz music made by small ensembles (quartets, trios, quintets, all the way up to octets!), but i never thought of big orchestral music as "chamber music"

upstairs at nicks in philly used to have a permanent cloud of smoke hovering near the ceiling at all times. it was so gross and i smoked! i would go home with insane smoke inhalation headaches.

Yeah chamber music implies an ensemble, but something short of a full orchestra. No one has successfully defined the precise dividing line.

you even have chamber orchestras! but generally i think of chamber music as smaller ensembles or soloists. "concert music" is a nice term though

I talked to a lady today whose husband was a hymnologist! what a cool thing. she was trained as a Renaissance and church singer. when they first got married 50 years ago, one of the first things they did together was purchase a harpsichord kit.

she said they called the constructed harps it their first baby and sent baby pictures to all their friends

that is really sweet and I will keep an eye out for someone that wants to build a harpsichord going forward

is it controversial that we should bring back the harpsichord

My memory of 1990 is that even if you were not smoking, you were smoking

― alpaca lips now (Ye Mad Puffin)

i remember the world i grew up in smelling like cigarettes the way portland today smells like marijuana

is it controversial that we should bring back the harpsichord

― Florin Cuchares

harpsichord is great for loudness wars era music because it doesn't have the whole soft-loud thing that the pianoforte does

i like the way harpsichord makes you prance on your toes, i feel ever so fancy.

the whole soft-loud thing that the pianoforte does

That is literally what pianoforte means, of course. I have an uncle who plays the harpsichord rather well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-7ddjZNxUQ

rather well indeed haha

rather jealous, would love to be able to sit down at a harpsichord and just kill it

tried to find a cool live clip of never never gonna give you up but they are all too fast and do not contain the harpsichord riff, wtf Barry White, how are you gonna record the nastiest harpsichord ever and then just skip it live

Was there ever even a prog rock band that took a harpsichord on tour? Maybe the Savage Rose?

mostly just electric piano with harpsichord setting probably.

one of my very favorite 60s band used the rock-si-chord to great effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfVmk_RliOY

that band is holy to me. i met one of them once (craig anderton) - he was great friends and musical partners with my friend linda cohen who also recorded for poppy records - and i could barely speak to him. he couldn't believe i knew his music. it was like meeting a beatle!

I dont know that band or song yet, look forward to learning.

from the whole baroque pop time, to me the big name is michael brown on the first left banke album... maybe there's harpsichord stuff that's even more classic, but from my knowledge that first left banke album is considered the goat. i actually like the second left banke album after michael brown left better, but i'm weird like that

Not at all, second album is great!

not controversial but harpsichords are a fvck to keep in tune if yr just moving them across a room, let alone going on tour with them

i tried to tune a guitar the other day and it was ... embarrassing. guess that's what happens when you stop playing for 20 years.

Just treat the guitar like a harpsichord - never move it across the room

Harpsichords are really difficult to mic up, too. I don’t love them outside of the context of Baroque music, at this point

what is the controversy level of reminding people that the piano is a percussion instrument?

https://i0.wp.com/chicagoreader.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/cage_photo_001.jpg

Are clavinets that difficult to keep in tune? It’s like a descendent or cousin isnt it?

Much easier, ime. Harpsichords, traditionally, are made entirely of wood... you can handily lift one on one's own without a second pair of hands. An adjustment in humidity or temperature in a room will cause the wood to expand or contract, requiring a complete re-tune. Clavinets in comparison are really stable. When I was young I played clavinet with a band on a months-long tour and don't remember ever needing to tune it.

My father owned a harpsichord, made by a guy out on the West Coast named Simon Sabathil. He was known for making experimental models of harpsichords... iirc he made one entirely of aluminium, another entirely of glass. I would later learn from harpischord-makers of the more historical variety that Sabathil harpsichords were widely derided. My only experience with one was my father's. I liked it for one reason only, the keybed was piano-scale, instead of the smaller traditional harpsichord-scale, so I didn't need to adjust my technique to play it. It had a heavy metal structural bar (I think it was aluminium, but it might as well have been iron), and required two people to lift it, it was very heavy.

I played one gig with it, in 2006 I believe, and it fell so out of tune by the time the room had filled that it was effectively unplayable. My friend had a studio down the street, and after the gig, we drunkenly decided to move the harpsichord ourselves. It was winter, and the sidewalks were icy. My friend, walking backwards with the tail end, slipped and fell and the harpsichord hit him full on the chest. He was fine, but the whole experience just soured me on ever using the instrument in a live setting again.

Harpsichords use items called "jacks", they sit on top of the key and rise upward to pluck the string with a small plectrum called a "quill". Traditionally, the tiny jacks are made of heavy wood, and the quill is made of hardened leather. The Sabathil did not have wooden jacks or leather quills, they were all plastic and light and unreliable. My harpsichord-maker friends offered to replace my jacks for me with good wooden ones, but I was sour on the thing. I lent the Sabathil to a band who wanted to record with it and never saw it again.

Recording things like harpsichord (or harp) is very tricky, you need the right microphones. I love harp, and have used harpsichord recently on some film stuff, and I bought a couple of active ribbon mics specifically so I can record these instruments. These mics aren't useful for much else except certain pitched percussion (they're reasonably good on marimba, for example).

I'm listening to La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25, 6:17:50 - 11:18:59 PM NYC right now and his just intonation tuning makes it sound kinda harpsichord-like to my ear.

strings do have a way of sounding good live, methinks

i don't have the right magenta lighting in my apt to do that album justice xp

i actually listened to patt of it on the 7 train a few weeks ago and unfortunately it assumed a cloying indie flick soundtrack quality with those visuals but it was still too mesmerizing to switch it off

I just looked up tickets to a Dwight Yoakam show I was thinking about going to — $105 for a general admission lawn spot. And for that I have to put up with the Mavericks, too. Sorry, no thanks.

there is a new pornographers live on conan clip on that orange amp thread and every time i hear them i can't believe how bad they sound to me. they sound like a bad local band that just formed two weeks ago and are now on national t.v.
i've tried to listen to them before and their solo stuff and i will never understand the appeal. maybe you have to be canadian. i'm just glad their stuff was never on letterkenny.