Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts

Friday, October 22, 2021

Displaying custom fields in foobar2000

Today I found the TOPE frame in the ID3v2 tag specification, which can be used in cover songs. I was simply using the comment frame so far, and having a specific frame for that is great. Now I needed to display this frame in foobar2000, my player of choice for years.

I created an account in foobar2000 forums and posted the question there. Then I just found a specific subreddit, and I posted the same question.

Much to my amusement, I got answers in both after a few minutes.

Turns out, I vaguely remember having done this before. One must navigate to Preferences > Advanced > Display > Properties dialog > Standard fields, and add:

Original Artist=ORIGINAL ARTIST;

And it worked.

Monday, May 27, 2019

Clean tones of ESP Eclipse II with EMGs

In another chapter of my Les Paul craze, hoping for something more comfortable than my previous Gibson Les Paul Studio, which I had back in 2014, I bought an amazing-looking ESP Eclipse II, in silver sparkle finish. Realy eye-catching. A Japanese one, not the LTD crap.

I’m very pleased with the EMG pickups. Originally this guitar probably had a Seymour Duncan JB/59 set, and they were replaced by EMG 81 (bridge) and 85 (neck). However, I noticed the 85 is higher output and also it has a lot more bass, so I swapped both pickups. This EMG system is great: once you have the circuit installed, the pickups can be changed quickly by detaching the cables. Now, with the 85 at the bridge and the 81 at the neck, the guitar sounds very balanced.

As for the comfort, it’s not bad as my old Gibson, but definitely it’s not a comfortable guitar. The neck made me realize how much I like finished necks, and the ebony fretboard is sweet. Other than that, I played only one gig with it, and it felt very awkward on my shoulder. I guess I’m a superstrat player, definitely.

Friday, May 17, 2019

Tornado of Souls solo

About one year ago I recorded the solo from “Tornado of Souls”, by Marty Friedman, from the classic Megadeth album “Rust in Peace”, from 1990. I’ve seen many people saying that it’s the hardest Megadeth solo, so I decided to incorporate it into my band’s set list, by replacing the “Hotel California” solo, after noticing some theming similarities. The result is pretty great. Unfortunately, in my band gigs, I hardly find someone who can appreciate the effort I put in learning it.

Anyway, this is the take I recorded about one year ago, using my Suhr Modern Satin, which I’m rather disliking the thin tone these days.

Sunday, March 11, 2018

Capitalization Rules for Song Titles

I found this guide back in 2007, provided by Standard MIDI Files on the Net, how defunct. I kept it on a TXT file on my hard disk for 11 years, and I rediscovered it today. And it’s still great, so I’m publishing the original here.

  1. The first and last words are always capitalized, and all except the words listed below are capitalized.
  2. These are lower-case, unless they are the first word or last word.
    • articles: a, an, the
    • conjunctions: and, but, or, nor
    • prepositions that are less than five letters long: at, by for, from, in, into, of, off, on, onto, out, over, to, up, with
    • as (only if it is followed by a noun)
  3. Prepositions are sometimes capitalized.
    • Prepositions are capitalized when they are the first or last word.
    • Prepositions that are part of two-word “phrasal verbs” (Come On, Hold On, etc.) are capitalized.
    • Prepositions that are over four letters long. (across, after, among, beyond, etc.).
  4. These short words are capitalized. Some people occasionally forget to capitalize these.
    • also, be, if, than, that, thus, when
    • as (if it is followed by a verb)

A List of Some “Phrasal Verbs”

These are some phrases in which the preposition needs to be capitalized.

Beat Up        Do Over         Go Over       Make Up       Take After
Blow Out       Fill In         Hand In       Pack Up       Take Back
Break Down     Fill Out        Hand Up       Pass Out      Take Off
Break Into     Get Along       Hold On       Pick Out      Take On
Break Up       Get Around      Keep On       Pick Up       Take Up
Bring Up       Get By          Keep Up       Put Away      Talk Back
Call Off       Get Over        Leave Out     Put Off       Talk Over
Call On        Get Through     Let Down      Put On        Throw Away
Call Up        Get Up          Look For      Put Out       Try On
Carry On       Give Back       Look Into     Put Up        Turn Down
Come Back      Give Up         Look Like     Roll Over     Turn In
Come Down      Go Along        Look Out      Run Into      Turn Off
Come On        Go Away         Look Over     Run Out       Turn On
Come Out       Go Away         Look Up       Run Over      Use Up
Come Over      Go On           Make Out      Show Up       Wait On

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Simple minimalist JavaScript metronome

These days, when practicing guitar, I needed a metronome. Whey you type “metronome” on Google Search, it actually brings out a functional metronome – however it has no keyboard shortcut keys. So I decided to write a simple metronome, with keyboard keys, from scratch, to suit my needs.

Knowing the imprecision of JavaScript’s setTimeout function, I implemented a timer that adjusts itself each call, thus having a fairly reliable precision.

The code is so simple I decided not to create a GitHub repository, so I’m just sharing the whole source code here:

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Remembering Randy Rhoads

Randy Rhoads last day was March 19, 1982, 35 years ago today. After influencing so many guitarists, I just want to leave this humble tribute here. I’ve played “Crazy Train” in bands in the past, and it was always a lot of fun.



After publishing the video, I realized the guitar track was a bit too loud in the mix. Well, too late, but not too bad.

I used my Suhr Modern Satin, with Suhr SSV/SSH+ (neck/bridge) pickups, and the POD HD500X connected via USB. After using Billy Gibbons’ .007 signature gauge set exclusively for about one year and a half, I tried the D’Addario EXL130 set again, however with a .012 for the G, as I found on my graphic string tension calculator. It feels very balanced now. I don’t know if I’ll use this custom .008 set on all guitars, but I’m keeping it on the Suhr, at least.

Friday, October 28, 2016

Clean tones of Ibanez JPM100 P2

I recorded an improvisation of my 1997 Ibanez JPM100 P2, which has DiMarzio Crunch Lab + LiquiFire instead of the stock DiMarzio Steve’s Special + Air Norton. The previous owner did the replacement, and I kept it because it sounds crazy good. In fact, these new pickups sound very similar to the original ones, but with more gain.

I used my POD HD500X straight into the computer and a set of .007 Dunlop Rev. Willy's Lottery strings.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Clean tones of PRS Custom 24

This is the most beautiful sounding guitar I’ve ever owned or played, possibly. Being a hardcore superstrat player, I’m having a hard time adapting to the radiused fretboard and the unbalanced body shape – not unbalanced as a Les Paul, but definitely butt-heavy.

So I recorded this improvisation using the POD HD500X looper. I see myself selling this guitar soon: that’s how I want to remember it.



The video was recorded with the great Samsung Galaxy S6, in 1080p and 60 fps.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Lágrima, F. Tárrega

Here I share another sheet music from my personal classical guitar collection, a simple and famous piece, Lágrima by Francisco Tárrega (1852—1909). I typed this myself, with my own fingerings and tab, using Sibelius 6.2.

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Bourrée, BWV 996, J. S. Bach

I’m sharing this sheet music from my personal collection, the famous Bourrée in E minor by J. S. Bach (1685—1750), for classical guitar. I typed this myself, with my own fingerings and tab, using Sibelius 6.2.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Queen 2011 remasters: horrible

As an audophile, I care a lot about my music collection. Some albums do have multiple pressings, with new remastered versions of the same old material. These remasters rarely surpass the originals, they tend to be overcompressed due to the infamous loudness wars, but I always seek to hear them, waiting for a miracle.

Right now I’m listening to the Queen 2011 remasters, which sound all really bad to my ears. I’ve read somewhere that Bob Ludwig was responsible for this work, but it’s hard to believe that such a great professional have done such a shitty job. Some songs – particularly the heavier ones – have so much compression that distortion is openly audible. The Jazz album is the worst one so far, with burnt peaks on all tracks, a mess of noise.

The Sheer Heart Attack song, from News of the World album, is a full block of deafening noise, that gave me a headache before the second minute ended, and I had to skip it. The same for the heavy parts of Brighton Rock and Stone Cold Crazy, from Sheer Heart Attack album. Basically, the songs are ruined, sounding really harsh, overcompressed on every single opportunity.

Label managers of today are not only stupid, they are deaf too. When I see things like this, I only can hope that digital music distribution kills this industry as soon as possible, as it is already happening. With the home studios and the internet, we don’t need their greed anymore.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Sound Forge 11: no FX chain apply?

I’m a long time Sound Forge user, since the golden pre-Sony Sonic Foundry days, when the horrendous .NET Framework, a toy for script kiddies, was not needed. I’ve been following the version upgrades until today, when I gladly installed version 11. One of my most used options – applying the FX chain right away – simply disappeared. I’ve been searching around, and I found that I’m not the only one who complains about this.

There’s an alternative way to apply the FX chain through the FX Favorites menu, but it’s cumbersome and you cannot work upon the waveform while it’s open. Ironically, the new FX chain window is one of the “new” things Sony is marketing about. Well, congratulations for messing it out, Sony. I’ll pass.

I rolled back to Sound Forge 10, and I’m keeping it. Let’s see if a future Sound Forge 12 will bring that facility back.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Sibelius 7 sucks

As a musician with classical training, I love sheet music. They are not only beautiful pieces of graphic art, but also great repositories of musical knowledge, which are always ready to have music pulled out of them. And music writing is universal: sheet music written in China is the same written in Canada.

Obviously, when it comes to computers, I always was interested in sheet music editors. My first editor was Encore, a very simple one. But soon I moved to a more powerful editor: Sibelius 2. And since then, I’ve been a faithful Sibelius user. Well, up to version 6.

Sibelius Software was acquired by Avid, know for its sluggish Pro Tools. Unfortunately, Sibelius 7 suffered a huge shift in development direction, jumping on the ribbon bandwagon – the single worst thing ever invented in computer user interface history – and bringing up a very confusing and keyboard-unfriendly screen. Now, all the actions and option dialogs – previously organized into regular menus, easy to reach with keyboard shortcuts only – are spread among the ribbon tabs, with distracting and childish icons, wasting precious screen space and requiring you to execute many, many additional mouse clicks while searching for something among that mess. Oh, and there’s still a File ribbon tab, with even more additional tabs at left and options distributed like mucus dropped from a strong sneeze!

But Sibelius 7 didn’t change only the interface, they also brought improvements, right? Wrong. There is only one improvement, relative to text flowing inside textboxes. Everything else is insignificant for music writing. I felt really ashamed by watching the what's new videos from Sibelius Software, with nothing new to show besides that horrible user interface. Don’t they have some critical sense, at least?

So it seems that I’m stuck with Sibelius 6, which is a bit slow, but it’s usable. Well, until some other company comes out with something better. And without a ribbon.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Brazilian progressive music

Well-made progressive music is just amazing. There’s not much to write about this one – lyrics (see here and here), arrangements, actual playing, mixing – there are no flaws I can spot. I’ll just leave this here and appreciate:



Unfortunately the other songs of the band are not good as this one – not even close, actually. But this very one song is so exceptionally good that the guys can die in peace.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

KRK VXT frequency charts

As looking for a pair of studio monitors, I wanted to have a comparison between the three KRK VXT series models: VXT4, VXT6 and VXT8 – cones being respectively 4, 6 and 8 inches. I got the individual charts from KRK website, and I just made a collage with the three. This is what I ended up with:



It’s easy to spot how the low end increases with the cone size. Many people recommend a subwoofer, but not everyone has an appropriated room to fit everything. Indeed, in my case, I can hardly fit anything larger than the VXT4 on my desk, so I’ll probably have to stick with the VXT4 or other monitor with similar size, like the Yamaha HS50M – although I found these too bright and lacking in lows, rather unpleasant.

And the quest for my new home studio monitors goes on.

Update: after a lot of research and some listenings, I ended up picking up the KRK VXT4, which not only sounds really good, but also fits my desk. I’ve got a new pair for a good price, and I’m pretty satisfied so far.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

R.I.P. victims of the loudness wars

Terribly mixed, brickwalled, clipped everywhere, static noise, ears bleeding, the horror... loudness wars victims. As an audiophile, it deeply saddens me when I find a good album ruined by a horrible mixing. I think this disease began spreading towards the end of the 1990’s, and from now on, most of the albums are simply unlistenable. Producers responsible by these atrocities should die slowly and in great pain, by having all their blood drained away from their perforated eardrums.

Here it follows a list of some ruined albums which I particularly mourn over, because I cannot listen to:

Slayer
Undisputed Attitude
1996
-10.54 dB

Red Hot Chili Peppers
Californication
1999
-12.42 dB

Children of Bodom
Follow the Reaper
2000
-12.63 dB

Pantera
Reinventing the Steel
2000
-11.42 dB

Stratovarius
Infinite
2000
-11.47 dB

Rage Against the Machine
Renegades
2000
-11.98 dB

Velvet Revolver
Contraband
2004
-10.45 dB

Franz Ferdinand
You Could Have It So Much Better
2005
-11.02 dB

Audioslave
Revelations
2006
-11.14 dB

Joey Ramone
Ya Know?
2012
-10.12 dB


There you have something that makes me really sad about.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

FLAC and LAME frontend

I use the FLAC and LAME command line tools, and I’ve tried many FLAC and LAME frontends. And I disliked all them. One day I decided to write my own, with a parallel multithreaded handling of the files, so all the files are converted at once, taking advantage of multicore CPUs.

Today I’ve just published it as open source on GitHub. It’s pure C and Win32. I hope it can be useful to someone – not only the program itself, but also my C programming techniques. It can be found at rodrigocfd/flac-lame-gui.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

My first program on GitHub

That’s a simple C Win32 program to shrink down padding bytes from ID3v2 tags on MP3 files. Maybe the most important thing, I think it showcases my style of C programming, and I’m glad to share it with the world. I hope it can be useful to someone someday.

It can be browsed at rodrigocfd/id3-padding-remover.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Smells Like Teen Spirit for orchestra

I started having formal music training when I was a child, and although I didn’t have any classes for years, I still like to study music when I have time, specially orchestration and related disciplines. Writing music for orchestra is not an easy task and it requires not only a lot of study, but also a lot of practice.

Today is the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. At the time it was released I was just a kid, and it made me to play a lot of guitar. So after 20 years I decided to make a tribute to Smells Like Teen Spirit and write a full orchestra arrangement to this song, mixing the original voice track over it – this voice track can be easily found on YouTube.

It took me about a month to write, render and mix the whole thing, and so far I’m pretty satisfied with the results. It gave that 4-chord music a whole new dimension. And here it is: Smells Like Teen Spirit for orchestra.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Replay Gain

I’d say this Replay Gain thing is the coolest thing that appeared on the personal computer music listening world since the birth of Winamp in 1997.

How it works: first you use a Replay Gain scanner to add a couple new tags to each song of your music library. These new tags stamp a relative perceived loudness level corrector to each song, so that when your player plays them, it will raise or lower the volume accordingly, and all the songs will have the same volume (or almost), and you don’t need to raise/lower the volume yourself anymore. This is specially useful if you have a long playlist in shuffle mode, with songs at all sorts of different volumes.

Several music players of today implement Replay Gain, but some of them don’t perform the scan. If you want a suggestion, try foobar2000, it can do all the job.

Corollary: if you have a large and heterogeneous music library, Replay Gain will make you smile.

Now on the technical side: I found what it seems to be the C implementation of the Replay Gain scanner at the (rather old-school) project site. It really drove me curious, I guess I’ll download and try to compile it later.