one Pete Seeger, there’s only one Pete Seeger
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008Oh my, Pete Seeger,
Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and
Guy Davis were great last night at Hugh’s Room. Everyone was belting out the songs, and having a great old time.
Archive for the ‘choons’ Category
living legend
Monday, July 7th, 2008We’re going to see Pete Seeger tonight.
tee”oh^oo”oh lo^oo tee
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I’m learning to yodel, from Cathy Fink & Tod Whittemore’s Learn to Yodel. Why not?
dammit
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008The left channel of my Etymotics just gave out.
supplies!
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008Pleasantly surprised that a local store - Scarboro Music, at Vic Park and Kingston has autoharp strings.
It also has a very fine old Dobson banjo for $1500.
autoharp frenzy
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
I got an autoharp on eBay a couple of weeks back. It was cheap, but fairly beat up. 32 of the 36 1970s-vintage strings were intact, if very tarnished. I spent more on new strings and a tuning wrench at Elderly last weekend. After spending a few evenings cleaning (you don’t want to know what I found in it), replacing strings (fiddly) and tuning (slow), I can now make 1970s sounds. Fun!
(and yes, before you ask, it does appear to have two B♭7 keys.)
Absolutely: The Hills of Buccleuch
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008This is my favourite song from Absolutely: The Hills of Buccleuch.
spring tines = happy tunes
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
I just got a Kalimba from Paul Tracey.
annoying ringtone
Sunday, May 18th, 2008Now I’ve discovered how easy it is to create MP3 ringtones for my BlackBerry (make a 64KBit mono MP3 of short length, e-mail it to the phone, open attachment, save it, and select “Use as ringtone”), I just had to use this little snippet of the DeZurik Sisters: dezurik.mp3.
beautiful drone
Monday, May 12th, 2008The chill units in the new Loblaws Superstore in Scarborough make the most harnonious drone. I might just come here to listen.
most abrupt stylistic change ever
Monday, May 5th, 2008Would have to be on The Silver Apples’ “The Garden”. The zappy bongoid weirdness of Canonball Noodle is followed by a very credible bluegrass version of John Hardy, which is then followed by Cockroach Noodle, a return to their previous “explosion in the VIC-20 factory” sound.
I like it …
no Barnes for you
Sunday, May 4th, 2008Kevin Barnes cancelled his solo Toronto show at the Mod Club tonight.
smalle fowles maken melodye
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
glitch out
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
I really don’t think that my ipod was supposed to do that. But then, it was playing Columbus Fruge’s Saut Crapaud at the time, which is enough to make anyone shift a few pixels to the side:
Saut crapaud
ta queue va brûler
Prends courage
a’va repousser
guess my music competition
Thursday, March 6th, 2008So I could listen to semi-disposable CDRs in the car (and with that phrase, my green cred has vanished) I wrote a program that converts directories of mp3s to WAV files and TOC files for cdrdao. It works rather well.
In order to get sensible file names, the program truncates album names down to eight letters. I will send $5 canadian by paypal to the first person to guess correctly the album and artist of the following four names:
dancetun darlingc hepooscl maggotbr
Answers in the comments only, please. They’re all official releases, before you accuse me of getting you to guess my mix CDs.
Circulatory System - Lee’s Palace, Toronto - 2003-04-13
Monday, March 3rd, 2008(imp)Ursonate
Saturday, March 1st, 2008Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu,
pögiff,
kwii Ee.
Ursonate, by Kurt Schwitters (and the score).
Holy Modal Rounders - Live 1965
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008Someone helpfully posted Holy Modal Rounders - Live 1965 as MP3s. Both Pete and Steve are clearly out of their heads when they played, but it’s a diamond in the rough of the freak folk scene.
The recording has a chequered history. Recorded on June 5th 1965 (no-one knows or remembers where) by WDTM Detroit, the tape belonged to Peter Stampfel’s mother. It was found after she passed away, and mastered to CD for release in 2002. According to Peter, Steve borrowed a CD-R copy, and released it through an acquaintance. Much to Steve’s dismay, the acquaintance claimed that all the money from the release disappeared as expenses. It is now out of print, and seemingly any release could trigger legal action from either party.
Whatever the history, it’s a great record of the time.
Rise Up Singing! in freedb
Sunday, February 10th, 2008It took me a while, but I finally put all the track information for Sing Out!’s Rise Up Singing teaching CDs (also on the artists’ website) on freedb. I was given the data just over a year ago by Mark D. Moss, the editor of Sing Out! magazine.
The discs are:
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc A
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc B
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc C
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc D
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc E
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc F
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc G
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc H
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc J
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc K
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc L
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc M
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc O
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc P
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc R
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc S
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc T
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc U
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc W
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc Y
Perhaps what took longest was working out a UTF-8 safe processing workflow, from converting the original Excel table to e-mailing the entries to the freedb server. Let’s just say that OpenOffice, sqlite, and Perl were very helpful here.
decade
Thursday, February 7th, 2008Was it really ten years ago that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (aka my favourite album ever) came out? Optical Atlas thinks so.