White People Going Crazy: The Parliament Funkadelic Story

This past Friday, I had the pleasure of attending the Parliament Funkadelic concert at Toad's Place, and I can honestly say it was one of the top concerts I have ever attended, as evidenced by the amount of white people going crazy:

(Actual Concert Photo)

Led by funk legend and the "grandfather of hip-hop" George Clinton (far right in the tye-dye), the Parliament ensemble delivered, going well-beyond my expectations.

Parliament was brought up in class discussing our discussion of the Moog Synthesizers, featured prominently on their seminal works of the 1970s, notably hits such as "Flashlight" and "Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Of the Sucker)." During the concert, I was positioned opposite the two keyboard players, but as far as I could tell, they appeared to be using mostly Roland model keyboards and synths. In any case, though, they provided the musical backbone of the P-Funk set.

The set lasted roughly 3 hours, and began with a run through over their classic P-Funk hits, and later moved onto a more free-form jam style format, which focused heavily on the guitarists. Later in the set, George Clinton also showcased his influence on hip-hop using some freestyle lyricism. Overall, the concert was an amazing example on how much a classic band has influenced the artists of today, all while managing to stay true to their roots while keeping an eye to the future at the same time.

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Dance Loops

Blog 2, Part Duex

For the first part of my post I wanted to do something relating to what we did in class, but for this part I want to showcase something related to electronic music not covered in class.

I've been listening to Ratatat for quite sometime, and recently I downloaded an album titled "Remixes Volume 1." The Ratatat remixes are quite different from their traditional music; they take hip-hop vocals and write new instrumental tracks to accompany them. "Remixes Volume 1" contains a wide variety of hip-hop tracks, ranging from more well known song's such as Missy Elliot's "Hot" to several lesser known Ghostface Killah ones.

One of my personal favorites is the remix of Kanye West's "Get Em' High" (which also includes lyrics from Talib Kweli and Common). The track in its original form on The College Dropout is one of the best ones on the album, and the laid back feel of the jazzy chords elevates it to a whole new level. Other standouts on the album include "Hot" and the remix of Dizzee Rascal's "Fix Up."

While the remix albums are quite different from typical Ratatat, they are a good find for fans of both standard hip-hop looking for a new perspective as well as fans of traditional electronic music looking for a new genre.

The album is available for free download here.

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Blog 2

In his blog, Jeff mentioned our experience with microphones and recording. One additional aspect besides the decision on whether to go dynamic or condenser was what kind of pattern we wanted. While many different subtypes of microphone patterns exist, the main kinds are cardioid, omnidirectional, and figure-8 (which is more specialized than cardioid or omnidirectional). For the most part, the cardioid pattern (which is so named because it picks up signal within a heart-shaped field) is the most popular type. Because of the directional pattern, cardioid mics are useful for situations that require multiple microphones. Moreover, omnidirectional mics don't exhibit a proximity effect, meaning that any signal within the field will sound the same regardless of how close to the diaphragm it is; cardioid mics on the other hand have this proximity effect, allowing for a greater feeling of presence.

For our desired application (live vocals), we knew that we wanted to go with a cardioid signal pattern. Because we practice in a small space, it was recommend that we consider a hypercardioid pattern, which is considered to be the most directional of all the cardioid patterns. It has the most isolation, since it blocks more signals from the back and sides than regular cardioid patterns and is thus less likely to cause feedback, a major issue considering the small space that we have. In general, we have been very happy with this microphone choice.

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Ringtones

Here I've posted the link to access my ringtones via esnips.com:

http://fb.esnips.com/web/ScavoneRingetones

For the first ringtone, I sampled a random assortment of drums from band practice, and applied various effects, including Reverse, Pitch Shift, Fade In/Out and Silence, as well as normalizing when necessary.


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