Al's Blog-o-Sphere

The Soundtrack to My Life would be like a tapestry that extends from birth to death, but there is one section of it that is particularly special to me. I don’t know why I was thinking about it, but there is a period of time where some of my favorite music was made and still stands the test of time today.

The time was the years around my graduation from High School and the transition to the working, adult world. I suppose it’s a typical time where most young people have strong feelings about their music. But I think there was more to it than that. There was just something special about music of the time.

Here’s a list of music that I’m thinking of and it’s all music I still love today. Almost every album (and some of these were some of the first albums – remember vinyl? – I bought, not just heard on the radio.) is full of songs I know by heart. I don’t think there is more than one or two tracks in the bunch that don’t hold up today.

Don Mclean – American Pie
Paul Simon – Paul Simon
Arlo Guthrie – Alice’s Restaurant
The Moody Blues – Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
The Byrds – Fifth Dimension/Turn Turn Turn
Cat Stevens – Teaser and the Firecat

… there are more, but I’ve got to draw a line somewhere or this post will be too long… Continue Reading…

Last night, I was looking at the web site for Heil Sound. I was sort of window shopping for a microphone, but ended up getting distracted – like I often do on the internet – and was browsing through the photos on Bob’s site.

I came across this photo, of Bob Heil with Les Paul and a shudder went down my spine. Here was an image of two men, possibly THE two men, responsible for modern sound recording technology. Each of them came up with equipment and techniques that, while not wiz-bang super-new technology, the way they applied their knowledge to a problem they saw changed the way that music recording and live sound amplification was done almost universally.

Little did I know, the next day, I’d be reading that Les Paul had died. Continue Reading…

The return of the Lockport Molson Canal Concert Series is about a month away and the promoters released the schedule and lineup of entertainers on Wednesday.

As usual, there is a lot of fuss about the headliners, and has brought in a bunch of top-name acts that will undoubtedly have the square behind Ulrich City Center packed again. You’ve probably already heard the names and most of them were no surprise; they were almost all leaked/announced on the individual bands websites and show schedules.

But, unlike most of the local free summer concert series, they have also released the local or regional performers who will be opening for the headline acts. I think this is great as it gives the fans of the local bands some notice, give the bands themselves time to promote their appearance and in the end, brings even more people to the shows. Since the openers play first, this means more people get there early and probably stay longer which translates to more business for the vendors and surrounding businesses. It’s such a no-brainer, that I don’t understand why venues like Artpark and Thursday at the Square don’t put more emphasis on this.

So, let’s look at a few of the local bands: Continue Reading…

I’ve made a couple posts recently about free software that I’ve found useful. One of the most used pieces of software on any of my computers (and I have too many) is a media player.

First of all, media player covers a lot of ground. I divide that into two camps: ones I use to listen to audio and ones I use to view video. Most of them try to do both and often it is this Swiss-Army-Knife approach that limits them and annoys me.

As I mentioned in one other post, my long-time favorite music player, Winamp, will play movies, but I’d only use it as a last resort. Actually, my favorite video player, one I use all the time for watching both downloaded video and DVD discs, is the lean and simple VLC player. In full-screen mode, there are no annoying player buttons that pop up if you bump the mouse, but everything you need is found in a popup right-click menu. It has screen format options that none of the fancy DVD player programs have.

But, I don’t want to rehash all those programs. Instead, I want to mention a new audio player that I just found out about. It’s called Songbird and is another project that comes out of the Mozilla program. I don’t know when it came out, but it’s now in version 1.0, which is the initial public release. Continue Reading…