An extremely light diversion: 4 completely different songs titled — variously spelled — "La Dee Dah"

The most familiar one to me is this — on the first 4 Seasons album. Much as I've loved the 4 Seasons in my time, I've got to promote the Billy and Lillie version from 1958:



This is a silly song, with lyrics that include: "La dee dah, oh boy/Let's go/Cha, cha, cha/I feel so fine/Now that you are mine...." Excellent candy.

I'm not sure if I remember the Ringo song "La De Da" — spelled like that. This is from 1998, from his 11th album:



This too is pretty silly, with lyrics like "La la de da, like que sera sera/Whatever la de da, la de da/All you got to say is la de da." Okay. Ringo. It's Ringo. What can you say? It's easiest to quietly love him.

Then there's a Foo Fighters song from 2017. The spelling here spelled "La Dee Da." This lacks the la-dee-dah feeling of Billy and Lillie and Ringo, with lyrics like: "Hate if I want to, hate/Psychic Television and Death in June/Jim Jones painting in a blue bedroom." Listen to it here if you like. Whatever their problem is. I choose to pass that one by.

But the really striking la-dee-dah song is "Lah-Di-Dah" — and let me say, that's my favorite spelling — by this English guy Jake Thackray, whom I had never heard of:



I hope you made it past his long introduction! Wikipedia says: "John Philip "Jake" Thackray (27 February 1938 – 24 December 2002) was an English singer-songwriter, poet and journalist. Best known in the late 1960s and early 1970s for his topical comedy songs performed on British television, his work ranged from satirical to bawdy to sentimental to pastoral, with a strong emphasis on storytelling, making him difficult to categorise."

This "Lah-Di-Dah" is an elaborately written song about loving a woman enough to put up with her awful family. The lyrics include:

I'll be nice to your mother
I'll come all over lah-di-dah
Although she always gets up me nose
I love you very much
And so I'll smile and I'll acquiesce
When she invites me to caress
Her scabby cat
I'll sit still while she knits
And witters, cross my heart
And I shan't lay a finger on the crabby old batface

That's one of 5 verses. I had to look up "witters." It's Scottish dialect, and it means "To chatter or mutter; to grumble; to speak with annoying lengthiness on trivial matters." What a useful word!

Anyway, what blew my mind is that it was covered as a duet by Petula Clark — who has a lovely voice — and Rod McKuen — who just really isn't even a singer:



I can see that there are clearly at least 2 completely different meanings for "la-di-da." I know that's another spelling, but I'm looking it up in the OED now, where it says the word is onomatopoeic, ridiculing the "swell" manner of speech. It's a "A derisive term for one who affects gentility." The British also say "lardy-dardy." This is the meaning I grew up with, except that I encountered it as an adjective. It meant pretentiously fancy. So I was confused by the usage in the movie "Annie Hall":



There, you see it's a mild, almost meaningless interjection — similar to "oh, my" or "gosh" — basically, ah, well, what are you going to do. I think you can put Ringo, Billy and Lillie, and Foo Fighters in the "Annie Hall" category. Only Jake Thackray has the OED meaning.

Well, enough of that. I hope you enjoyed being distracted from the troubles of this crazy world for a few minutes. Here, I'll let you vote on your favorite la-di-da:

Please listen first, then pick one:

4 Seasons

Billy and Lillie

Ringo

Foo Fighters

Jake Thackray

Petula Clark and Rod McKuen

 

pollcode.com free polls

"I don't want to touch an object," I found myself saying, socially distancingly.

The sun was rising, and 3 young women...



... had asked me if I'd take a picture of them — the kind of request I've always happily agreed to. And here I was being stand-offish, in the manner of a person with OCD because they wanted to hand me their phone. It's covid19world, and we're all OCD now, so I couldn't go along with that, and I knew they'd understand. Actually, they'd probably have understood in pre-covid19world and simply regarded me as a person with a disability to be treated with empathy.

But in  pre-covid19world,  covid19world, and  post-covid19world, there is a solution to the problem of not wanting to touch the other person's phone. You don't need to refuse the lovely social opportunity to take someone's picture for them. It's AirDrop. Take a photograph on your own iPhone and AirDrop it to their phone. You just have to remember, and fortunately I did.

It was nice to encounter some young people, up for a 5:40 sunrise, experiencing our strange time with optimism. Nothing more optimistic than a sunrise.

The walk back from the vantage point had the sun at our back and the fading Flower Moon up ahead. I always love when Meade sings. He began "When the moon...." but it wasn't the "When the moon" song that I thought it was. There are at least 3 well-known songs that begin "When the moon...." Which is the first one that you think of? Two are optimistic but they take entirely different paths of optimism. The other one is sad. I don't know why the sad one is the one I thought of, such a sad old Depression-Era song...

"Is there a way to make music that includes... cars honking, trains going past, buses grinding gears, people shouting in the streets?"

"We’d been reading ‘Silence,’ by John Cage, and that was the last key really. Chairs scraping can now be the music; what do we want to include? No drummer, because music is so quickly fixed and made traditional and acceptable by the four-four-drum pan of the rock music. Then why do you need to know how to play? What is an instrument? Something that makes a noise, amplified or not. We don’t need to know how to play. What’s around? What can we use, in the spirit of a Duchamp readymade?... [Cossi Fan Tutti] didn’t like electric guitar, because it was too heavy, so we got an electric saw and sawed off the bits we didn’t like. I didn’t really like the trying to learn where to put my fingers, and it wasn’t necessary for our purposes. Another member, Sleazy, who was Peter Christopherson, was really into William Burroughs, so he said, 'I’d really like to involve cutups, with a tape recorder.' He altered walkman tape recorders so when you played a cassette you could hear both sides at the same time..... Chris built synthesizers. Nobody was using them in England. We said, 'That’s great—it’s very anti-rock.'... Industrial music for industrial people.... And little did we know it would become a global phenomena—from that tiny space and four people who couldn’t play.... We had a big digital clock onstage, and we played only an hour; we were clocking on and off.... We had wanted to make music like Ford made cars on the industrial belt. Industrial music for industrial people."

From "Industrial Music for Industrial People: The Singular Legacy of Genesis P-Orridge" (in The New Yorker)(and here's where we talked about the NYT obituary for P-Orridge).

A lesson in managing alarm...

car alarm kept going off so i improvised pic.twitter.com/c8zMC2VueW

— Andrea Long Chu (@theorygurl) March 20, 2020

"More than two thousand episodes [of Desert Island Discs] are available online as downloads or podcasts..."

"... and I began listening to them a few years ago, as a way of glimpsing times other than my own. I love hearing about the path-altering memories of others—what it was like to experience Beatlemania or Motown or punk before they were settled narratives. At first, I was drawn to specific guests, hoping to learn more about the interiority of David Beckham (the Stone Roses, Elton John, Sidney Bechet), what kind of music Zadie Smith liked (Biggie, Prince, Madonna), where the cultural theorist Stuart Hall found inspiration (Bach, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley—'the sound that saved a lot of second-generation black West Indian kids from just, you know, falling through a hole in the ground').... It’s come to seem less like a show about music and creative inspiration than one about the possibility of loneliness. How do you find meaning in total isolation?... As many people prepare for weeks of 'social distancing' and working from home, we return to comforts.... It never occurred to me, until fairly recently, that this exercise was different from merely naming your favorite songs, or what you considered to be the best.... I didn’t realize that the desert-island choices were really a question about mortality.... What would it mean to survive and find yourself alone (Pharoah Sanders)? Would you bask in memories of friendship (the Beach Boys) and good times (Derrick May), of your greatest love (the Intruders)? Would those memories be too painful? Maybe you would want to listen to music that existed free of context—the last splendid and uplifting thing you heard before getting lost, a reminder that the world goes on without you?"

From "Join Me in My Obsession with 'Desert Island Discs'" by Hua Hsu (in The New Yorker). Go here for the shows.

ADDED: To be clear: "It’s an interview show with a simple premise: each celebrity guest discusses the eight recordings that he or she would bring if cast away alone on a desert island." Just 8 songs. Not albums.

"It was the dawn of the psychedelic 1960s, and she saw that she could create herself in a new form, as an alter ego she called Genesis P-Orridge...."

"After art school she formed a confrontational performance group called COUM Transmissions, which shocked the British art world with a 1976 exhibition called 'Prostitution' at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. The exhibition included pornography, strippers and used tampons, and led one member of Parliament to call the group 'wreckers of civilization.' The core members of COUM morphed into Throbbing Gristle, an often abrasive experimental band that coined the term 'industrial music' to describe its repetitive, amelodic soundscapes. As with COUM, performances might involve nudity, self-mutilation, dead animals and Holocaust imagery; the band’s best-known single [was] 'Zyklon B Zombie'....  [I]n 1991... Genesis relocated to Kathmandu with her first wife, Paula, and their daughters, Genesse and Caresse.... There, as Genesis’s first marriage unwound, she found another unlikely identity, as a single father of two girls, attending P.T.A. meetings in a silver miniskirt and thigh-high boots.... On a trip to New York, she met Jacqueline Breyer, a dominatrix and nurse. Their love was so consuming that they wanted to fuse into a single entity, freed from the binary divisions of gender.... They got matching breast implants.... 'We’d go to our plastic surgeon and say, what else can we do now to look more alike?'"

From the NYT obituary for Genesis P-Orridge, nee Neil Andrew Megson. The cause of death, at age 70, was leukemia.

The obituary closes with this quote from Genesis: "Some people take their lives and turn them into the equivalent of a work of art. So we invented Genesis, but Gen forgot Neil, really. Does that person still exist somewhere, or did Genesis gobble him up? We don’t know the answer. But thank you, Neil."

"In Siena, the city to which I am very attached, you stay at home but sing together as if you were on the street."

A Siena, città alla quale sono molto legato, si sta in casa ma si canta insieme come se si fosse per la strada. Mi sono commosso pic.twitter.com/IDPqNEj3h3

— David Allegranti (@davidallegranti) March 12, 2020

How to Make a Beat Like the Top Producers

Remember when your parents told you- 'Don't be with the in-crowd... Don't follow the crowd?' Well, if you're into making beats, then, the 'crowd' is your 'promise land' or 'end all, be all', isn't it? You want that response like cooks want about their cooking!

So, how do we make beats like the top producers?

Well, we all know that anyone can beat on a table with their hands and have a distinguishing bass drum and snare going. And, with a little basic instruction of some beat making software, transfer that rhythm into an actual recording, but we also all know that's not going to deem them a top producer.

What I'm saying is that it's not making beat patterns and basic melodies that the top producers start with. They start with a feeling. Nope! Scratch that! We humans cannot have a feeling without first being inspired by a thought. And in that thought, ought to be knowledge. Thus, it's knowledge of 'feeling' that these top producers start with in order to keep coming up with hits.

What do I mean when I say 'knowledge of feeling?'

Is he feeling the crowd or is the crowd feeling his music?

You may say the latter, but I say think about the former- 'Is he feeling the crowd?'

One might ask, 'How can he feel the crowd before he makes a beat?'

This is what I mean when I say 'knowledge of feeling'. Sound shapes everything, and when it comes to us humans, music toys with our emotions day after day. Knowledge of how this works is the key to making beats like the top producers.

We've all heard people say things like, 'Ooh, that's my song!' Maybe you have a favorite song that you listen to over and over again. The music is resonating with you... and you like it!

You can make music that has that same type of affect on people! Anyone could do it if they were interested in it and had a little knowledge and understanding about the subject. One would need knowledge such as how a certain sequence of numbers work. You would need to know why when two lovers get together or even think about each other they get that 'feeling.' This knowledge can make you understand how a club DJ makes the 'air' sound when he's mixing.

If you're worrying about being able to afford the type of equipment that the top producers use... fret not! Technology has taken care of that. Not only is there very affordable software in 2012 that replicates the state-of-the-art equipment commonly used in the big studios, technology also provides a cyber display platform in the form of the internet with exposure sites such as YouTube and Facebook. Technology makes things affordable and achievable. As a matter of fact, nowadays an artist could possibly write his/her own lyrics, produce the music, and promote themselves.

You can get my free eBook, 'What The Top Producers Don't Want You To Know', wherein I discuss the above topics and also things like how to conjure different 'feelings' in your listening audience via the particular sounds and beat patterns you choose.

How Can Trance Beats Help To Shape Music?

Even in the most solo of efforts, music is always a collaborative effort. The musician takes his personal collective influences and transforms these into sound, or music. Trance music, specifically was introduced as a genre of music in Frankfurt, Germany in 1993 and is primarily computer generated, although it is often manipulated by human beings. Trance is very popular in the "club scene" because much of the trance beats are designed to be very upbeat and motivating. When played in clubs, the preference is often to play the music on vinyl which gives the DJ the opportunity to manipulate the songs through bending and scratching the record and offering variance to the sound.

The "instrument" used in trance is the computer, which gives the music a very modern feel. Vocals may or may not be present, but when they are, it's usually a female voice with an operatic or ethereal quality that simply vocalizes rather than sings. However, ironically, it shares a lot in common with classical music, particularly the characteristic of repeating variations of short musical phrases throughout a piece. Most trance music, however, is much faster than typical classical music keeping a beat near 150 beats per minute. Many listeners are both captivated and uplifted by trance music.

While many people love trance music and love it on its own, it's not something everyone likes to listen to by itself. However, there are elements of trance beats that occur often within other kinds of music. One only has to listen to a few minutes of trance music to recognize that very similar beats have become the backdrop to many different pop and dance tracks as well as on film scores and music for television shows. Musicians and producers know the positive energy trance music brings to many people, and how it gives them an opportunity to feel and experience the music. Many musicians really embrace incorporating elements of trance sounds into their own.

Human beings have always had a fascination with music and their own ability to play and participate in music. Today, most of the music we listen to is played from digital files, and as a treat we may go to a club, a concert, or try playing an instrument ourselves. But of course, not everyone is musically gifted. With trance music, or other genres of music that features a trance beat there is an emphasis on making the listener a participant in the music, even if they have little talent.

Music and instruments are made from whatever we have available around us, and the things that are important to our lives. Our ears pique when we hear a cello in a rock band, or an electric guitar appearing in an orchestra. We crave "one-off" sounds that let us know music is still marching forward. With technology being such a driving force today, there is little doubt that elements of trance music will continue to infuse music of all genres for years to come.

Learn to Make Your Own Dubstep Music

There have been huge advancements in both technology and recognition when it comes to music that happens to be engineered digitally. Dubstep music has exploded and is turning out to be more popular as the recording industry is reacting to what plenty of people are dancing to in night clubs around the globe. Dubstep performers such as Skrillex and Deadmau5 are even performing at and winning Grammy Awards. What is huge about this music is that you can generate it in the enjoyment of your house with just a computer.

There are many software platforms which can be purchased and downloaded that enable you produce the best Dubstep music of all. Your very own. Never before has it been so easy to create the kinds of music which you love. Much of the best Dubstep can be made without any of the fancy computerized gear you find in a recording studio.

DubTurbo 2.0 is the best Dubstep software available for the starting music maker. It contains all the comprehensive music making attributes currently available on the big Digital Audio Workstations (DAW's) for a small fraction of the cost. You can design your own personal beats and multi-layered tracks in minutes of getting the software because of the simple to use and intuitive interface.

If you have been wondering in precisely what the best software for Dubstep is, then look no more. You will be amazed at the type of sounds you can develop and what a great artist you can transform into. The music that you've been following and love can be crafted by you tonight. Imagine the feeling of composing your genuine tunes and coming up with your own different sound. You can also produce re-mix's of some of your very own favorite songs.

You are in a nutshell only restrained by your imagination. This Dubstep making software makes possible you to add together a number of tracks and sounds into a single track and then export it in the most advanced file forms to ensure that you don't lose sound quality. You can easily import your own personal sounds using free 3rd party recording tools to really get the customised sound you desire to have.

It is a very cool time if you desire to generate your own music. By no means has it been a great deal easier to generate higher level music for such a discounted price tag. I would recommend any person that is a supporter of Dubstep to have a look at the dubstep software that is available on the market today. It is obvious that the best Dubstep software is DubTurbo 2.0.

How to Promote Your Music in 2012

A couple of decades ago it was unlikely an aspiring musician would get the opportunity to record their own music. If you were in a band and wanted to record a proper sounding album you would need to be signed to a record label which would pay for the advance for you to make an album. The advances in digital recording in the last decade have it made it possible for musicians with even a modest budget and proper skills to make something that may be worth listening to. Although, it's great that musicians now have the ability the record in the privacy of their own homes it has saturated the market with an excess of music on the internet that would take endless hours to sift through. Luckily, if you have recorded something worth listening to their maybe a couple of ways you can rise above the masses and get your music heard.

1.Streaming music services

This day and age more and more people are subscribing to different online streaming music services like Spotify, MOG, and Pandora. A lot of musicians might not know that submitting your music to these online services is usually a very straight forward process. For example, in order to submit your music to Spotify you would have to license your music through an artist aggregator like CD baby or to Ditto. Services like this also make it possible to submit to other digital services like Itunes or Amazon at the same time. The process for submitting your music can vary for each streaming services but from what I have researched I haven't found one that is to hard to accomplish.

2.Social Media

If you haven't already it is integral that you join as many social media outlets as possible. Everyone knows about Facebook and Twitter but there are other sources as well like Pinterest, Bebo, Netlog that could be a valuable way to promote your music. There are lots of interesting ways you can market your music through social media.Think outside of the box so people can get interested and involved with your music. For example, bring a video camera in the recording sessions of your band making a new album, then post the videos on YouTube and then go on Facebook to tell all your friends about it.

3. Radio Stations

Don't forget about the power of radio stations. The good news is that are a lot of small independent radio stations on the internet that you can submit your music to. Services like shoutcast and live365 have thousands of radio stations that you can try to submit your music to. You obviously want to submit to stations that cater to your genre and have a decent amount of listeners. Sirius radio has over 20 million subscribers so make sure you submit your music to them.

4. Soundcloud

If you haven't heard of Soundcloud yet you need to start taking advantages of these services. Soundcloud is a service that dedicated to letting people distribute and listen to sound files. It is unique in that it lets artists have their own distinctive URL which they can then embed on their own website. It is also very easy to integrate with Facebook and Twitter. If you are a paid member you are granted more hosting space and can distribute to more groups.

5.Get reviewed

Hopefully, other people will appreciate your music as much as you do. That's why it important to submit your music to different magazines and websites.A good review on a popular website like "pitchfork" can catapult a band from playing local bars to being on a national tour. Tiny mix tapes, drowned in sound, and the a.v. club are just a couple of places you should be submitting your music to.

How Can Young Music Composers Enhance Skills Through Music Forums?

Internet serves as the best tool to gain insight into several things. Just like you can conduct research for your school project online, you can also get lots of information about the entertainment industry, religion, finance, politics and everything that you read and watch through other mediums of communication. The music industry does not lag behind in this race and you can see a visibly stunning amount of literature and resources available at music forums to help the aspiring musicians.

These music forums are administered under the guidance of some of the best musicians who are willing to help out the budding musicians to create innovative music. The best part of these music forums is that young musicians from all parts of the world can participate and share their knowledge and art with others. Music is discussed and improvised together by the young musicians and established musicians to create a stimulating piece of music. The recognized musicians also help these budding musicians by providing resources like vocal software and hardware that smartens up the music completely.

In these music forums, the young musicians can find lots of useful tips, resources, and ideas from other artists who have established themselves through such forums. Besides these resources, the musicians get the chance to become actively involved in the music community and get great insight into several music genres. Also, since these communities serve musicians from all parts of the world, there is a great way to gain insight about the heritage of music of other countries. For example, the folk music has recently been a source of inspiration for many musicians and they have composed inspirational music, amalgamating the folk and urban music in their albums.

Also, there is a lot of competition going on in the music industry, which is an encouraging element for many aspiring musicians who want to make it big soon. The established musicians at the music forums provide opportunities to these young and talented musicians to build careers in the music industry.

While making the most of the music forums, the musicians should keep in mind certain things. Firstly, they should use these forums as a creative tool and a platform to learn new things. They should seek out ways to learn by interacting with other musicians and seniors. And most importantly, they should not cause any harm to the forum and its resources and other musicians at the forum. The discussions should be free of spam and useless posts, whereas the musicians should keep their profiles and posts informative, well-organized and uncluttered so it is easy to go through them.

5 Tips To Make Your Guitar Mixes Rock!

Now I know there are thousands of variables involved as well as opinionated ways of doing this, that's why I'm going to tell you 5 tips I use to make my guitars stand out to help make my mixes sound huge!

1. Double Track Your Rhythm Guitars:

You can easily thicken up the sound of your mixes by doubling your guitar tracks. Yes I know this is not really a 'mixing' tip but when you use both guitars in the mix it can beef up your guitar tracks. PRO TIP: You can even play around with changing the tone slightly on the second track to add even more emphases on certain characteristics of the playing. Say you want one to be more beefy and use another for note clarity. Just one of many ways you can use that to your benefit.

2. Pan Those Tracks:

The next step is to pan those rhythm guitars you tracked. I like to start at hard panning them both, one left one right. If they are sounding too separate bring them more to the middle, 70-80 is a good area where I like to put my guitars, especially for the slower parts. Faster more intricate playing can benefit from going all the way left or right. Panning these guitars helps separate the sound and clear up the middle for other instruments (i.e. kick drum, bass guitar) that need to be there. Turn that pan knob and immediately hear the results.

3. High Pass Filter Your Guitars:

OK yes, I know this is situational depending on the tone/style of guitar you are tracking. But in most times I mix I like to roll off some of those lows to clear up the bottom section and help your guitars not 'fight' so much with the bass and kick drum. I like to start in the 100,200k area and roll it off accordingly to the mix. Let your ears do the work, roll it off as you listen to a section and when you hear the guitars start to'thin out' back off a hair and Voila! You now have cutting clear guitar.

4. Did Someone say Plug-ins?

Yes you read that correctly. But dude, I thought you are always preaching 'crap in crap out, get it right from the source and you wont have to fix anything come mix time??!' Yes you are correct. I do live by that, but remember music and mixing is an art form. There are rules, but there are not. Weird right? I like to look at using plug-in's like using salt when cooking. You don't want to add too much because it will taste bad, but using just enough will make whatever your eating taste much better! Don't be afraid to add a little compression, or tube saturation/distortion to give your tracks get a little more omph! Experiment, you might find something you really like!

5. EQ Subtraction

The last tip here is my all time favorite, and yes it does play off of tip number 3. Subtracting EQ in certain bands is an ideal way to let other instruments in your mix cut through in return making everything (including your guitar tracks) sound bigger, cleaner and overall better. Especially with high gain guitar tracks cutting some of the lower (or) higher mids out is a good way to tone it down and get your guitars working in cohesion with other primary instruments. Don't be afraid to get the scalpel out and start cutting EQ like your a mad surgeon. Just remember to do it while you are listening to your mix, never solo your guitars and start cutting that would not be pretty.