Up the Tree

  • I love music. Not only listening, but from 6 months old playing with sounds that I could make by fluttering my lips. I am by no means a professional, but more a lover of audio. I’m not sure where this love came from. My father is probably the cause, being a man who implored in me a love of all things.

    *Including the Beatles.*

    I can remember the day I heard them. My parents were visiting their friends who lived somewhere near the bear mountain bridge. They were nice people and all, but I remember that their children were complete animals. After an hour of these children, I escaped out the front door and into my parents’ silver Volvo. I knew the tape player worked without the key in the ignition, so I grabbed one of the tapes my father kept in the car and sat in the drivers seat. It was at this point that I heard a jet plane about to land on my father’s car. I can remember, quite vividly, looking up through the windshield at the sky as Back in the U.S.S.R. began to play. I knew from then on that this was the band for me.

    *This was it.*

    Since then it’s happened a few more times (in date order); Paul Simon’s _Graceland,_ Talking Heads’ _Stop Making Sense,_ Nirvana’s _Nevermind,_ Counting Crows’ _August and Everything After,_ Jeff Buckley’s _Grace,_ DJ Shadow’s _Entroducing,_ Bob Dylan’s _Blond on Blond,_ Jellyfish’s _Spilt Milk,_ and Wilco’s _Yankee Hotel Foxtrot._ Looking at them as a whole, they all represent very distinct sounds-capes. Each one has an amazing “transparent” production, where you feel like you’re sitting in the midst band not listening to a recording.

    *These are my influences.*

  • “GarageBand,”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/ the latest and, hopefully, greatest new application from “Apple”:http://www.apple.com/ arrives on Friday and promises to be a hoot to play with. The basic premise behind GarageBand is that you can create music on your Mac without any musical training at all. The concept has been around a while, but Apple always seems to deliver while other manufacturers always seem to botch it up (Mixman Studio).

    As I said back in “November,”:/archives/031103_52_pickup.html I intend to record my musical ramblings for you guys to see what you think… I’m thinking of it as writing music like a blog. I would post a new song, you guys would take a listen and I would repost a revised edition, unless I thought that your comments sucked… like somebody out there says Barry Gibb isn’t the king of disco. It would be a big experiment, that will probably self-destruct but it’s worth a try.

    GarageBand is basically a program to supply anybody with a backing band for their musical expressions. You can even record into the thing using a microphone, or guitar! I am totally stoked. I have already started looking at new electric guitars for recording these compositions.

    * “Fender Stratocaster”:http://www.music123.com/Item/?itemno=119416 (American Made)
    * “Epiphone Casino”:http://www.music123.com/Item/?itemno=69552 (Lennons guitar) (No, not the dictator)
    * “Epiphone Dot”:http://www.music123.com/Item/?itemno=28135 (Like Chuck Berry’s guitar only cheeper)

    The best part of GarageBand is that it costs a measley $49.00 with 4 other great iLife applications (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD). The only question I have, is why didn’t they call it iBand, or iPerform, or iMix? GarageBand seems like a strange move in their naming strategy.

  • So, everybody else is talking about it, why don’t I enter the fray and publish my opinions about the new “iPod Mini”:http://www.apple.com/ipodmini/ and the seeming disapproval of many diehard mac enthusiasts.

    Contrary to popular belief, the iPod Mini is priced perfectly in the “MP3 player market.”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000AXKBK/ref=pd_ts_e_12/102-4376633-4439302?v=glance&s=electronics&n=493964 Sure there’s people who are saying that a $250 price tag is too high to compete with the junky players offered by other companies and I agree. That doesn’t, however, mean that Apple has ever tried to get enter that market or should.

    *Jaguar cars has never offered a low end car because they want to compete with Honda.*

    Apple’s original iPod was not marketed from it’s low price. It was, and still is, the top of the line in portable digital music players. It costs the most and sells, why? Because Apple’s strategy is not to create the lowest price digital players on the market, there is enough competition already, instead they created the best MP3 player in the world.

    People still don’t quite understand that when you buy an iPod it’s because it is the best player that money can buy, not because it’s a cheap product. I’ve had this conversation with a few people so I shall post it here. People say…

    “I wouldn’t buy the 4GB Mini for $250, when I could have the 15BG iPod for $300.”

    So, where’s the downside for Apple? Instead of shelling out $250 you’ll shell out $300 and think you’re getting something even better. What Apple do, extremely well I might add, is up the ante ever so slowly that before you know it you’ve bought the $400 model because you wanted the remote and sleeve. The scenario is this you go into the Best Buy to buy a MP3 player and see the iPod Mini. Wow, you say to yourself it’s only $50 bucks more than that other player that holds 1/16th the amount of music. Wow, you say to yourself again for $50 more I get 3 times the amount of storage!

    You have just added $100 to your purchase, in small increments and before you know it Apple has you as a customer. It’s simple and brilliant. The best part is that it’s a win win situation, Apple gets you as a customer and you purchase the best MP3 player in the world.

    “Then there’s the fact that later this year HP will be producing their own iPods thanks to an agreement with Apple.”:http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jan/08hp.html So all those PC people out there who don’t get it, will buy one and marvel at it’s ease of use and the thought will creep in “maybe I should try a mac.”

    _Or maybe that’s wishful thinking._

  • Am I psyhcologically disturbed? When I sit at a computer to draw, I always seem to draw upset male serial killer type men. What would Freud say?

    upset male serial killer type face

  • Ta-da a not so angry woman. I just don’t want to be the one to mention that the shade of lipstick isn’t really her color… if you know what I mean.

    Not Angry Woman

    I really hope Freud isn’t looking.