You said LEGO got expensive so I had to look it up. Wow. No kidding. I remember the max some elaborate castle or space set would be was something like 80 bucks when I was a kid in the 90s. I’m seeing stuff at like several hundred dollars for the same piece count.
Yeah, in the same way player piano is “kind of neat,” and certainly doesn’t replace a real player, but like Conlon Nancarrow is “wow” or “wtf.”
Musical innovations get put out as a functional solution to a problem but continuously get subverted by users. Look at the guitar, exhibit A -...
it is and it isn’t. the platonic ideal of rhythmic accuracy or regularity is very human. it’s just not achievable by the body to the degree we have designed machines - that's why machines are interesting:
a drum machine is not a true replacement for a drummer. you shouldn't write for a drum...
I almost never read fiction or re-read anything, but I do go back for passages. The Gay Science or Society of the Spectacle have some real banger aphorisms in there. Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein has lots of things to pull out from time to time too.
Pattern recognition is a part of music, but also aptitude forming semantic schema/categorization/taxonomies. I don’t think you can distill music down to simple pattern recognition. It’s an ambidextrous brain affair (and research shows higher ambidextrous use of hemispheres than general population).
who knows. the tone of the fuzz depends on whether the amp is cooking or not (angry bee vs melding with amp drive), and then it also depends on how much it was distorted on tape/recording. there's no real guessing unless you knew the guy or his setup.
I came to flatwounds for the cleans (put them on when I started learning jazz and only had a semi) and stayed for the dirty.
I think roundwounds are better for extreme music (metal, punk) and more aggressive distortion. But crunchy/moderate gained up stuff, which I do mostly, just sounds better...
Yeah the same thing happened with “hipster.” I remember when it was a very specific type of charlatan in the late 90s/early 00s. By like 2005 it was just used to denote any person between 18-25 who wore skinny jeans and a v-neck.
Some of the OG hippies cleaned up aesthetically but are still old hippies at heart. That’s cool. It’s the same way with a lot of punks.
But a lot of those “wow man” dudes in the seventies who went for the polo shirt and khaki pants in the 80s and 90s are 100% narc city. They were just young and...