I’ve been ill lately—a cold and upset stomach which, if I had a wife, I would tell her was “gastric ‘flu”. Being ill is boring. Yesterday evening I crawled out of bed about nine to entertain myself by surfing the Web for some free music to download. There’s a site where people using a particular piece of music-making software share their compositions with other users. Not only do they make available MP3s of their work, but they release the files containing the scores of their tracks so that others can remix and reuse their material.
After browsing the “Electronica” section and listening to some pleasant sub-Jean-Michel Jarre efforts, I decide to risk downloading a track from the site’s “Urban” category, where I fully expect the content to be marred by the usual lousy amateurish vocals. The difference between good popular music recordings and bad ones—whether the performers are signed or unsigned—is almost always the same: the quality of the singing and the quality of the songwriting. I put on my headphones and my weary music-critic ears, expecting to hear the formulaic efforts of another cack-handed bedroom synthesizer bore with his girlfriend on vocals wandering forlorn somewhere in the vicinity of the tune. Instead I am treated to an amazing display of pitch-perfect R&B crooning and flawless close-mike technique. The production is a bit dated, but who is this guy and why isn’t he signed?
He’s Babyface. He’s sold 100 million records, his hometown named a road after him, and it’s an illegal copy of his 1996 single Every Time I Close My Eyes.
Ah well. I haven’t discovered the next Luther Vandross, but at least I can tell when the Emperor is fully clothed.
Download Babyface and Gwyneth Paltrow singing Just My Imagination if you can get your hands on it. It’s oddly pleasant, in a very sterile way.
“There’s a site”??? That has no name, and no sign of a link neither?
If I link to and name the site some musicbiz lawyer will descend on the place within hours and shut it down. I can mail you the details directly if you want—provided you’re not a lawyer.
Was trying to point out, with subtle irony, the chilling effects of record industry litigation on free discourse, but perhaps I was a bit too subtle. (“I knew that!” always sounds so lame, but sometimes it’s true! No, really! Ah, forget it.)
Anyway, if the music-making software in question is that which comes as part of an operating system whose name is represented by a Roman numeral (the tenth, as it happens) then I would be happy to hear more about the site.
Although I trained to be a lawyer, in the distant past, I made a last-minute escape into the exciting world of accountancy, just before I was scheduled to become assimilated into the Collective. So no, not currently.
Yup. Sorry about that.
No, on reflection, no apology necessary: although there was ironic intention when those words were written, there is so little irony (in fact the merest trace) that no-one who didn’t already know me could be expected to detect it. It would have been better to say, for instance “I wonder why Damian didn’t include a link to the nameless site? Couldn’t have anything to do with those nice FACT people, could it?”
Anyway, enough microscopic introspection. I take it that the site in question does not in fact cater for GarageBand users. What is your chosen music-making software, then?
I’m a Sonar user myself, though the site I referred to isn’t devoted to Sonar. See this old rave and this more recent one. The lack of a metronome I complained about in the former post has since been fixed in Sonar version 4.
Yuck, Windows. Not that I could justify spending any money on software, anyway; I’m not scratching the surface of GarageBand, even (just rearranging loops, if the truth be told) but it is a lot of fun. Might even get a keyboard one day…
I intend to listen to your stuff that you linked to on the other posts (if it’s still up) when I get home.