When my brother visited we wanted to play around and make some music. I was pretty excited about being in a ‘band’. Basically some people from the building like Dave, Jason, and Julio would come up and Jam with Shawn and I.

I have no musically talent so really I just contributed to helping set up recording equipment, simple beats, and a bit of editing. We did get it set up so we could record 3 or 4 instruments at the same time which is pretty cool.

We also had a pretty hilarious setup that allowed us to use wiimotes to make sounds of various instruments. We were using the wii rockband drums for most of our drumming until, Dave brought up a really amazing set of electronic drums. Then it was mostly me rocking away on a wii guitar which was set up to play horns, piano, drums, or whatever else I could think of.

Anyways, I didn’t post this way back then because I thought I might have some time to edit it a bit more. I also thought I might whip some of our other ‘sounds’ into songs. That hasn’t happened so I will leave here the one song as fully developed as it got… The Barbara band presents, Inoculation.

I know many people have already been enjoying buying music for some time online. Unfortunately I could never enjoy it. I basically think DRM is pure evil, it is companies punishing their customers and giving them a inferior product. In what other industry does the ‘black market’ illegal items actually have a much higher quality than the legal offerings? Apparently the music industry (and to the lesser extent the movie industry) want you to not buy from them… or at least they did until recently. So I boycotted buying music and movies online, I wouldn’t buy anything with DRM in it, because with DRM “music can never be truly owned by consumers.”

I have to give some props to emusic, which has been DRM free for a very long time. The problem is that they had such a limited catalog, that I really couldn’t buy much that I actually listened to from emusic.
iTunes is now DRM free

So finally with all the changes you can buy music a variety of places online and you can find almost any song that interests you. So finally I have started buying music online and I am happy.

My favorite place to buy Mp3s right now, is Amazon’s Mp3 Downloads. Hooray for music, so sweet the sound.

For movies and TV, hulu is great, Netflix DVDs and Streaming is the future, and if you have a spare computer around I highly recommend checking out Boxee for all your streaming needs.

UPDATE: cool article from NYT about Apple’s battle with the music industry over DRM

My brother finally posted his best Albums of 2008 lists by him and his friends…

Best albums of 2008 it is always an interesting read and a great way to find good new music, check it out and download some tunes now that iTunes is DRM free.

Yeah the flobots are making it huge. They released their album nationally on the 20th, and it seems like they are doing really well. So I figured I would post their new music video and their recent Carson Daly appearance! The new Handlebars video It is cool to see that Joe got to come back and play with them on the show! Nice, well keep on rocking out and I look forward to your upcoming Leno appearance as well. Give it up for Jesse Walker on the bass guitar!

Every year for a while now, my brother and a good group of his friends all release their top 10 albums of the year. Every year they come out late and well after the year is over. So finally the 2007 list is out. Now you can tell if you were listening to cool music or your still some punk that might as well find all your music on the radio…

Top 10 Album Releases

We are hoping to get all of them to import their lists onto our Seekler, Best Albums of 2007 list, so I can pass back a special widget to Shawn that will combine all of their lists showing their ultimate friends best albums list.

Anyways fun stuff ad your own.

I just paid 4.50 in Lyra or whatever the british feel like calling their money (pounds, but I won’t call it that) for Radiohead’s new album. The album is In Rainbows. I am not really a Radiohead fan, I haven’t even heard the whole album yet, why would I pay money for an album that you can get for free? Well a mainstream band is finally skipping the RIAA and releasing music in an unencrypted format that I can download and bring anywhere. So I have to support that and show all the bands still think like Metalica, that their time has come, I just won’t buy and support music screwed up with DRM, and I won’t pay 12 bucks an album.

Others are following and small bands are making it with out labels… Rock On, now hopefully this album has some good tunes. Back to work while listening to In Rainbows

My brother finished a new song awhile ago, and I have been meaning to post about it. If you want to check it out, the song is called Horseshoe Ghosts.

I like the song, it is quite and soft, with a nice melody. It has some cool and interesting sounds, but it follows in the weirder music that he is into sometimes, and that makes it a little less accessible to me. Some of the timing of the beats seem awkward and hard to follow to follow to me. I do enjoy listening to the song and find it relaxing. In fact I had it on loop for awhile while reading to let it sink in to my head.

Great work to my bro for completing another song, it is awesome that you get to work on such an awesome hobby and actually complete full pieces, since so many people talk about making music, but rarely really get to release something.

If you haven’t heard any of his music I highly recommend checking it out, perhaps starting with Horseshoe Ghosts.

What is everyone listening to these days, leave recommendations, I need new music! Lately I feel my music has been getting stale, listening to the same things over and over, and hardly hearing anything new. The only new music I hear is radio crap that I hear while briefly driving around in my car (I don’t have a CD player!). I can’t really even recall the last time I added new music onto my MP3 player. I still haven’t taken the time to recover my old music collection from a unconnected hard drive. So in the next week as I try to sort through my music, delete, organize, rename, and create some new play lists, I also want to discover some new music. I recently met a girl through Ben and his WashU connections and she had a bunch of musical suggestions mostly saying I need to check out some the the original rock greats:

• Flaming Lips
• Dylan
• Joni Mitchell
• Beatles (after finally loving the genius of the Love album might have to check out some originals)
• The Who
• David Bowie

It is way late but I now officially know what the best music of 2006 was… Now when people ask me that questions I am prepared…

A little above my musical tastes, but always good stuff…

Best music of 2006, even though we are well into 2007.

I just wanted to make a quick mention that I got the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, Stadium Arcadium. I am enjoying it quite a bit. I enjoy both discs, and have quite a few songs that I am sure I will be listening to over and over. I got excited about the new album coming out, and listened to all of their old music. It was a good time to go back through some of it, although I still really hate some of their songs, over all I really enjoy the music this band makes.