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Heyyyyy! I'm for any and all music challenge notions, honestly; I think a cover album sort of thing might be an especially good idea, tackle something both good and broadly known and see what happens.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 4:10 PM on March 30, 2021

I am coming basically entirely cold to Kate Bush and Secretariat and I were just listening to Hounds of Love the other day and I am immeeeeeediately into it. I need to give the album more listening time before making up my mind about anything but I'm already pretty stoked about the possibility of doing something with "Running Up That Hill".
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 5:50 PM on February 3, 2019

I can't tell if I actually want to cover Hounds of Love or just cover the three seconds where Kate growls "thhrrRROOOOWWWW them in the laaaaaaake"
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 9:38 AM on February 23, 2019

It's a big boat, there's room for doubles!
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 9:29 AM on March 16, 2019

Woo, greenish! I think another album project would be a lot of fun too.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 8:16 AM on January 7, 2019

It would be the best kind of abuse of power.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 10:35 AM on January 16, 2019

Got it added to the challenge page!
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:09 AM on May 5, 2017

It's up on the challenge page!
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:41 AM on December 2, 2016

Got this posted on the challenge page!

Of which, procedural note: since it's using the same "60seconds" tag, the entries from the last time will be in that playlist too. Which isn't a problem, unless it is! I could go either way. So if there's a desire to cleanly separate the two, we could go with a modified tag on this one, but we could also say "nah, it's fine!" and run with the default.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 9:01 AM on October 31, 2016

Mine's in, a weird stew of anger and peppiness I put together this afternoon: Everything Is Fucked (Keep On Going). Music challenge was sort of the perfect kick in the ass on this because I've been despairing of putting together a coherent longer song that wasn't a dirge. 30 bars at 120 bpm in 4/4 makes the math simple.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 6:28 PM on November 20, 2016

Woo! Got that posted.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 10:55 AM on April 30, 2016

Challenge page is up!
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 9:50 AM on May 4, 2015

Just in time: Rocket City, Huntsville, AL.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 9:25 AM on July 31, 2015

Nothing wrong with showing up late to this kind of party; get on it!
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 9:52 AM on November 7, 2015

I will do something, for sure, with Istanbul.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 5:09 PM on October 15, 2014

I did something with Istanbul.

I will presumably work on it some more in the next three months.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 5:52 PM on October 15, 2014

I've now got three different really questionable in-the-style-of covers I might work on just as bonus recordings of some these. Willie Nelson's "Dead"? Johnny Cash's "Women and Men"? Tori Amos's "Racist Friend"? Sure! Maybe. We'll see.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 3:42 PM on October 16, 2014

Hmm. Theme From Flood done as a lounge jazz thing, maybe?
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 5:54 PM on December 7, 2014

Why are there so many chords in it?

Not to put to fine a point on it
Linnell threw a mess of theory upon it
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:48 AM on December 15, 2014

Man, it had somehow never occurred to me that you could cut custom autoharp chords. That opens up a whole world of ideas about autoharp-as-portal-to-eldritch-doom for me.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:11 AM on December 17, 2014

44.1KHz vs 48KHz sampling rates could be responsible for the issue without being so different in speed and pitch to be obvious if you haven't run into that before. (The too-fast tracks would be running about 9% faster than they should be, basically.)
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:54 AM on January 13, 2015

Hmm. Uptempo 3-3-2 snare hit punk rock shouter, maybe? A little bit Ramones, a little bit Pixies?
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 11:00 AM on January 14, 2015

*seven distinct last-minute covers of Particle Man appear*
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 11:03 AM on January 14, 2015

Awesome, challenge page updated.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:48 AM on January 8, 2014

Feels like we could handle that with the sort of unspoken Axiom Of Flexibility that I feel governs Music Challenge stuff in general: if something just won't work / isn't work, say so and we'll nudge it until it does. The value in constraints is a big part of why I think these things are great, but we don't have to be hardcore about it just for the sake of the purity of the thing or whatever, it's ultimately about making some music and having fun.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 9:37 AM on August 30, 2013

Yeah, I think that'd make sense. Maybe I'll put the challenge up on Tuesday and then we can have a metatalk and a sidebar for it to let the larger mefi crowd know what's going down.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 11:38 AM on August 30, 2013

I suppose I should say explicitly that I'm in.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 12:14 PM on September 1, 2013

I am certain I can supply some buffer requests to make sure there's no danger of the hat getting empty.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:20 AM on September 30, 2013

Because of the complicated intersections of mefi being my job, Music being something I personally care about, Music being a place overwhelmingly for people other-than-me, and my general desire for people to be able to vent and kibitz and so on when they need to, I have extremely complicated feelings about getting involved with discussions on Music about how people feel about Mefi.

(And I've had more than a couple with unSane in the past, and it's stuff that's, yeah, a… [more]
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 1:49 PM on August 28, 2013

Maybe there needs to be a "popular new songs" playlist on the front page of MeFi that includes songs that are actually new

Yeah, I think that something time-limited would make the most sense, and I think that may have been suggested in the previous discussions about it; it'd be the simplest way to get away from the Same Old Songs issue with the traditional chart. A "recently featured on the podcast" chart could work well too, since… [more]
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 5:15 PM on August 29, 2013

Welcome back, dude.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 8:00 PM on September 15, 2013

guys sometimes i think maybe it's the donuts that are eating me
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:03 AM on September 16, 2013

You're not alone. Oh, no, you're not alone.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 10:17 AM on September 2, 2013

Go to the front page of Music, click New Post, click Post a Song, and follow along from there. Once you hit upload on that next page it may take a couple minutes depending on your net connection.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 10:44 AM on September 2, 2013

Let me tell you, it ain't easy.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 3:26 PM on July 11, 2013

It's the best kind of not okay, that's a really nice cover.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 12:04 PM on July 30, 2013

I'm pretty sure he recorded a whole album of that at one point in the 80s.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 11:47 PM on August 29, 2013

A deadline is a thing you set so that musicians will be motivated by shame for having missed it and so meet the arbitrary extended one set thereafter.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 7:57 AM on August 30, 2013

I recorded a doofy me and my invisible band of clones video for a Happy Birthday Metafilter song a few years ago. I think I look a lot less stiff when I actually stand up and perform in front of human beings, but there I am. And it's weird that at this point my long hair looks weird to me.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 6:45 AM on July 12, 2013

Heck, I'm in.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 1:24 PM on June 6, 2013

Five minutes with my bari uke yesterday convinced me that if I wanted to do It Ain't Easy as a chilled out clean-blues riff on Jimi I could totally pull it off once I can convincingly play guitar and sing like Jimi.

And then this morning I decided that if I wanted to lay the guitar solo from Pepper over the track, that would work to.

In summary, land of contrasts, etc.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 8:00 AM on June 11, 2013

I could totally go for that, and then proper weird up a different version for COBRA!-charming purposes, yeah.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 12:30 PM on June 11, 2013

I always wanted to do a song in 1/4. Just remove any mooring sense of bars, make it feel like a toddler having a tantrum one footstep at a time, BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 3:21 PM on March 2, 2013

That's part of why I've always wanted to try it, to see how far you'd have to go to undermine the tendency to hear stuff in four when not otherwise prompted. Avoid repeating structures on even divisions, avoid letting a heavy vs. light beat pattern coalesce.

I wonder if anything sufficiently blatant in its rejection of a multibeat meter would sound basically like a CD skipping.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 4:00 PM on March 2, 2013

I gotta finish up the Taylor Swift / Star Trek parody I'm recording first. But I've been neglecting my drumming lately so it's kind of turning out BAM BAM BAM itself.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 10:06 AM on March 4, 2013

I hope you've all always wanted to know what Piano Man would sound like done in a minor key in the style of Tom Waits, because that shit is to occur.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 8:31 AM on February 6, 2013

I established to myself yesterday that you could rework Tori Amos' Me And A Gun as a rollicking alt-country major key stomper and it really works pretty well sonically. And then I put the guitar down and did something else because that is also the worst thing in the entire world to do.

Other unrecorded experiments: Don't Worry Be Happy in a minor is freaky; the sad theme from the "Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen are dead, the suns are… [more]
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 8:22 AM on February 21, 2013

Yeah, it's a weird sort of effect of living on the web; short of us locking down music content to a "no one can listen without an account and a pinkyswear" level, scrapers gonna scrape. We see mefite's music pop up on one or another nobody site periodically. If it's something really highly-visible or otherwise somehow egregious it's the sort of thing mathowie can try and be a heavy about with the folks involved, but with the blippish nobody sites it's often not realistically worth… [more]
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 11:08 PM on January 16, 2013

I've never really gotten the bluegrass roll thing to work for my fingers—I'm just not that clean of a fingerpicker in general—so I've tended to move more toward a more laid back, expressive approach the the banjo on the stuff I've been happiest with. It's lack of sustain compared to guitar is a pretty weird thing at first (and is I think part of why the tight roll approach is so popular and distinctive, as a kind of trem-picking analogue) but the thing that eventually clicked for me… [more]
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 10:45 PM on October 2, 2012

Insofar as it's even necessary to formally say it, consider the arbitrary deadline hereby arbitrarily extended. I'd much rather people get some creative fun stuff done than worry about beating the clock; I'm mostly just venting about my own weird headspace up there.
posted to MeFi Music Talk by cortex at 2:21 PM on July 31, 2012