The British Museum invited Dr. Cornelia Kleinitz, an archaeologist specialising in rock art, and Liam Williamson, a modern rock drummer, to try and discover how a rock gong might have been played. This was the result. Rock gongs are a type of lithophone that were used for thousands of years in several parts of Africa. They may have been used as part of rituals, to signal other people, or as a form of expression. Although they look like plain boulders, they have a hollow, metallic sound when struck due to the composition of the rock.
Leonard Bernstein, The greatest 5 minutes in music education
This amazing lecture series (The unanswered Question), is actually an interdisciplinary overview about the evolution of Western European classical music from Bach through the 20th century crisis and beyond a bit. Bernstein uses linguistics namely Chomskian Linguistics to provide a framework to illustrate how music and all the arts evolved toward greater and greater levels of ambiguity/expressivity over history until the 20th century crisis. He manages this impressive feat of popular education by dividing music into; Phonology (the study of sound); Syntax (the study of structure) and; Semantics (the study of meaning).
Transmission: An Animated History of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Pulsar
Joy Divison’s Unknown Pleasures is still one the great debut albums of all time. Peter Saville, who had previously designed posters for Manchester’s Factory club in 1978, designed the cover of the album, and guitarist Bernard Sumner chose the image used on the cover, based on an image of radio waves from pulsar CP 1919, from The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. Saville reversed the image from black-on-white to white-on-black and printed it on textured card for the original version of the album. It is not a Fourier analysis, but rather an image of the intensity of successive radio pulses, as stated in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia. The image was originally created by radio astronomer Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory for his 1970 PhD thesis.
And now, here’s the fun history, in animation!
https://youtu.be/QlZiTtQZ8wY
Prince Plays Guitar for Maria Bartiromo on CNBC In 2004, And It’s…Well…So Prince.
Prince plays guitar for Maria Bartiromo on CNBC in 2004. WQanna know how fun it must be to be him? Here you go.
Hear Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s “Au Clair de la Lune”, the earliest intelligible recording of the human voice, 1860
Dust-to-Digital proudly inaugurates its vinyl imprint Parlortone with the earliest intelligible recording of the human voice: an historic 20-second version of “Au Clair de la Lune” made in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. This single-sided 45rpm record comes complete with an etched back, a descriptive essay and a reproduction of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s original “Au Clair” phonautogram.
The recording, part of the French folk song Au clair de la lune, was initially played at a speed that produced what seemed to be a 10-second recording of the voice of a woman or child singing at an ordinary musical tempo. The researchers leading the project later found that a misunderstanding about an included reference frequency had resulted in a doubling of the correct playback speed, and that it was actually a 20-second recording of a man, probably Scott himself, singing the song very slowly. It is now the earliest known recording of singing in existence, predating, by 28 years, several 1888 Edison wax cylinder phonograph recordings of a massed chorus performing Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt.
Paul McCartney & Linda McCartney’s Lost Home Movie From 1997
Here’s one of music’s most endearing couple, Paul and Linda McCartney hamming it up in front of a camera. According to the man who uploaded this onto YouTube, Larry Jamieson, it’s a “lost” home movie made by the McCartneys while holidaying in New Zealand sometime during 1997. Sadly, Linda McCartney died in Tuscon on April 17th, 1998.
How to arrange your guitar pedals, according to Steve Vai
Musician’s Friend and BOSS teamed up to present an exclusive live webinar featuring guitar icon Steve Vai that takes the mystery out of guitar pedal order.
Mass Appeal caught up with Post Malone as he did a bit of guitar shopping in New York City.
Mass Appeal caught up with Post Malone as he did a bit of guitar shopping in New York City.
Ever since Austin Richard Post dropped that “White Iverson” back in 2015, the industry has been trying to put a tag on his toe. But ever since we heard him singing Bob Dylan, we knew Posty had much more to offer than a dope crossover move. White rappers come a dime a dozen, but the Dallas-born music man-who fell in love with guitars while playing the Guitar Hero video game-refuses to be put in a box. The success of his debut album Stoney offered a mere glimpse of Posty’s potential. So when he passed through Mass Appeal HQ the other day, it seemed only right to introduce him to Rudy Pensa, the Argentinian guitar-whisperer whose created custom instruments for the likes of Mark Knopfler.
Pensa’s SoHo shop Rudy’s Music is a mecca for master musicians the world over. When Posty stepped in the door he found himself in guitar heaven. “It’s not a question of being a virtuoso,” said Rudy after watching Post flex. “It’s just playing the right notes at the right time. Taste is what it is. This kid has taste. If you don’t tell me what he was doing, I’d say he played guitar-not a rapper… It’s only the beginning.” After trying out a few custom guitars, and treating us to a taste of “Feeling Whitney,” Post copped a Louis Telecaster. But he walked away with much more. Plug in.
Watch How To Build A Custom Handcrafted Acoustic Guitar In This Amazing Doc
Meet Michael Greenfield of Greenfield Guitars, a musician who began tuning, repairing, restoring, and making guitars in the 70s and since then has become a seasoned luthier of bespoke guitars. Having experience with vintage and antique guitar repair and restoration, he brings a unique insight to his craft, creating personalized musical instruments and functional works of art for artists, collectors and those who deserve the very best.
His workshop is based in Montreal, where we visited over a period of 5 months, filming as he and his apprentice, Julien, transformed slices of spruce, ebony, mahogany, and other tree species into glistening guitars. It was all of our collective vision to present the process in the most candid, down-to-earth fashion, so in this hour-long documentary you will see all the glue, smudges, shavings, dust, and callouses. His guitars feature Florentine cutaways with spalted beech rosettes, violin-style body purflings and simple decorative purflings along edges, Laskin style arm rests and rib rests, amongst other features.
This documentary follows several different steel-string guitars from beginning to finish. As Michael puts it, the guitar still thinks it’s a tree until it receives its first set of strings and that is when the instrument is born. After many months of work, the magical moment when we hear a guitar’s first notes is like hearing a child’s first words.
Here’s The World’s Coolest Drummer. Literally.
Watch as The Hellacopters drummer Robert Eriksson performs a solo on a set of custom-carved ice drums. The drums hold up pretty well, except the cymbals.