While we’re at it, don’t miss his awesome and atmospheric rock concert scene:

[Video Link via feltron]

An old enka singer's house haikyo (Thanks, Mike!)

From what I’ve learnt, marketing is all about how make a product get noticed and grab media attention in the shortest possible span of time. An effective campaign can either be subtle, the get-under-your-skin kinds or be totally in-your-face. In the music industry it’s the latter route that finds much success, which is why flamboyance and distinctiveness is a part of the game. The O+ Promotional Media Package is just that! Ideal for single song releases and candid promos, the kit includes music access via a vinyl record, compact disc, USB flash drive and as an iTunes Download Code, bundled together. The only limitation is its memory size, not too big.

As designer David Riesenberg admits, it may not be commercially feasible to mass produce this concept, but for novelty special editions and buzz creation, this medium can be viable.

The way it works is this: the solid CD base accommodates a distortion proof vinyl layer, and the detachable USB flash drive accommodates the different spindle size.

The idea looks like it can create a major impact, any takers?

Designer: David Riesenberg

----------

Yanko Design
Timeless Designs - Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Yanko Design Store - We are about more than just concepts. See what's hot at the YD Store!

Video Link. "Stop Lookin' At My Moms" [sic], by The Astronomical Kid (Twitter / Facebook)

Buy the song, or the album: Amazon

Etymological note: "moms" is used to refer to one mother, singular; a regional slang term of familiarity and endearment like "pops."

(via Luke Hoverman / Sean Bonner)

Continue reading Tascam's TC-1S guitar tuner is solar powered, super tiny

Tascam's TC-1S guitar tuner is solar powered, super tiny originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Oct 2010 11:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In 2008, Kaki King charmed and impressed the TED community with her melodic and exuberant style of guitar-playing. Yesterday, TED’s Media Production Specialist Angela Cheng spoke with Kaki over the phone in hopes of learning more about her influences, the ever-changing music writing process, and what she gleaned from TED.

How was your day?

Good. I ran around a lot and lost track of time. It would have been more fun if it wasn’t for the rain. I’m doing this new project where I’m looking for twelve artists to provide blank guitars for them to design or re-create. And the theme of each piece would be the title of one of my songs. I haven’t been on tour for the last two months, which is rare, and I’m a bit of a workaholic so I’m keeping busy. Otherwise I go stir-crazy.

Do you enjoy touring?

I’m very used to it. There are a lot of places that I know extremely well. Like if I were to visit Sydney, Australia, I’d feel very comfortable there. I’m very comfortable in many many cities.

You’re originally from Atlanta, but New York is now your home. Do you ever miss the South?

Yes. My mom and dad and uncle and sister all live in Atlanta. I have relatives in Texas. I do try to visit as much as possible. It’s wonderful that all my family is there and I get to go there and chill out. It’s very peaceful. I have a very strong tie – not necessarily to the South – but to nature.

How much of the South is in your music?

I definitely will say that being in the vicinity gave me a lot more access to bluegrass music. Bluegrass is not a clear influence. But you have to play bluegrass music at a very high level of skill. Anything involved with taking things to a higher level of skill really interests me.

A lot of people have characterized your music as “percussive.” In fact, you started off wanting to play drums. Does it make sense to say that percussion has a lot of influence on your style?

Yes it does, and not only “percussion,” but the independence between the hands that you learn as a drummer helped me become a much more creative guitar player.

You started off as a solo musician, but now you collaborate with a full band. What was it like making the transition, in both writing and playing?

The writing remains the same. I write almost every single part of my songs, even the actual drum parts sometimes, whether they be simple or layered with many different instruments. The great thing about havinga band for the first time was that I didn’t have to work as hard onstage at making all of these different sounds myself. I could just sit back and let the band play the parts I had written.

Do you have a typical music writing process?

Right now I’m at the very beginning of the new writing process for a new album. The process changes for every record, every song. For my first two records, there was an intimacy between me and the songs because I hung out with them so much. You have less time the busier you get. At this point, after putting out an album, I have to re-learn the songs that I’ve written.

In the past, most of what I’ve written, I’ve written during times of pain or loneliness, and the music is therapy. Things change when you get older. I’ve followed the lives of great musicians and have learned that you don’t have to always write in pain. You have all of your past experiences, feelings, and thoughts that you can turn on when you need them and turn off when you don’t. Right now I feel a bit older and wiser and I don’t need to go out and create a painful or sad situation or feel estranged from the universe.

Also, all experiences are relevant to making art or music. Right now I’m learning the piano. I’m not going to become a piano player, but I do know that in some way it will open up my world and give me inspiration for my music.

READ MORE: Kaki talks about her experience at TED, being remembered by Al Gore and what it’s like to be short. What was your experience at TED like?

I remember so much about TED. I still have friends I’ve met at TED. It’s interesting because leading up to the conference, I was completely unprepared. My record [Dreaming of Revenge] was released just 10 days after TED so I had been doing all sorts of promo work. But once I got there, I was looking at the speaker program and it was like, “Oh wow, this is going to be incredible.”

I obviously remember <a href="Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk – I was in the audience for that. And I also remember Phillip Zimbardo, who wrote The Lucifer Effect. In fact, I went out and bought The Lucifer Effect after the conference. There were also these incredible underwater pictures of leopard seals. And of course watching Al Gore present a completely new talk was great.

I was just in Nashville to perform for The Climate Project. When Al Gore introduced me, he mentioned that he had seen me at the TED Conference last year. I was surprised and happy that he remembered me.

Did you know about TED before you were invited to perform? What made you accept the invitation?

I’d known about TED Talks because I had seen them online. Just knowing that it’s a place where you can go and have your mind opened by the brightest minds working, calculating, and discovering – it would have been foolish not to accept.

We were talking in the office about all the great statements you made onstage…..

I had to come up with something because my session included Peter Ward, John Hodgman, and that woman who spoke about dark matter and I thought, “I gotta put this somehow together” because otherwise I just get up there and play and people will be like, “There’s a dumb musician.”

You mentioned onstage that people like to comment on your height. Does that annoy you?

Ha, not really. I am quite short but that never comes across when I’m onstage in front of people. When I get offstage and greet an audience afterwards their first reaction is to comment on my height because it seems like a very drastic difference.

If you haven’t visited http://www.ted.com/ yet, then you need to right now!  Who is TED, you ask?  Turns out, TED is no-one; TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.  What started out as an attempt to combine these three fields into one harmonious meeting of the minds has grown into something truly wonderful.  TED conferences, currently held yearly in Monterey California and other global locations, bring together many speakers from very diverse backgrounds from all around the world.  In the true spirit of sharing knowledge, TED makes these talks available by streaming and download for FREE on their website!

 Talks are generally 20 minutes or less, and therefore, very to the point.  Topic range wildly, from science, economics and design, to art, literature and mathematics.  You can search for talks using common queries like subject matter or speaker, or in more interesting ways, like “most inspiring” or “most ingenious.”  You would be hard pressed to not find something that turns your crank.  One feature I particularly like is TED’s built in video viewer.  You have all the common features like play, stop, pause, forward/reverse and volume, but you also get an interesting overlay when you place the mouse over the video.  An overlay pop-up appears at the bottom of the video and shows the content of the talk in a time-line fashion.  This time-line allows you to skip to a particular part of the talk that may be of more interest to you, and definitely helps if you want to show someone else just one part of a talk in particular. 

There are so many good speakers and topics its hard to know where to start; my personal two favorites are:

#1: Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids - this one is awesome!

#2: Vusi Mahlasela: “Thula Mama” – my favorite new artist, this guy is amazing (I reviewed his latest CD here)!

 There is a wealth of free knowledge available on the web, but rarely is it presented in such a fun, clean, and creative manner.

 1) Exact Audio Copy: Exact Audio Copy is basically the “front-end” for the whole operation.  The program started off as a very high-precision tool for ripping music tracks from CD’s into WAV files.  Over time it has evolved to support WAV ripping, MP3 conversion (through external programs), image ripping and writing.  Without getting too technical, EAC gives you the ability to rip the finest and most accurate WAV files from a CD possible.  This of course is the first step in creating a MP3: 1) rip the track from the CD to a WAV file, and 2) create an MP3 file from the extracted WAV file.  While many free programs already do this for you, usually in one seamless step, the combination of EAC with an external MP3 conversion tool gives you total quality control over the entire operation that cannot be matched.  The actual MP3 conversion takes place using a second program that integrates behind the scenes with EAC.

 2) LAME: LAME is an open source encoding project that has also evolved over the years to become probably the most respected and high-quality MP3 conversion utility that there is.  Fortunately for us, EAC provides a beautiful front end for the command line LAME program, through a few simple configuration items in EAC’s menu.  Once EAC has been configured to use LAME as the MP3 encoder, ripping a track from CD to MP3 can now be done in one easy step. 

The whole process goes like this.  Download EAC and LAME; read the installation instructions, install both programs, and setup LAME as the MP3 encoder that EAC is to use (this is all very straight forward).  EAC gives you many options to configure the way that the MP3 tracks are to be named, if you want to save the WAV files after conversion or delete them (I delete them), MP3 bit rate and a slew of other things.  After you get it all setup the way you like, you simply put in a CD, EAC retrieves the CD info from freeDB online database, and you hit the “MP3″ button on the side menu.  A few minutes later you have incredible sounding MP3 tracks ready to go with complete and accurate tag info.

A note on sound quality.  Sound quality is a very subjective matter.  What sounds great to one person may sound like crap to another.  I am very picky when it comes to sound, and if I must compress my music (all compression reduces the quality of the original – except lossless), then I want it to sound the very best that it can for the size of file I am shooting for.  To me 128kbps is terrible, period.  I feel that 192kbps is the lowest I am willing to go.  With LAME I have found that 192kbps sounds significantly better than any other conversion program I have heard up to 256kbps.  Since flash is getting cheap and plentiful, I have started to re-rip my collection at 320kbps, and with the combination of EAC and LAME, I cannot tell the difference between the original and the MP3, at least with the audio gear that I have.  Yes you pay a price in file-size for 320kbps, but you have to find a trade-off between sound quality and size that is acceptable to you.        

Well I hope this helps any of you music lovers out there who love the portability of MP3′s but are unwilling to compromise too much on sound quality.  While this write-up is not intended to show you the nitty-gritty on how to use EAC and LAME, it should put you on the right path, as both programs are well documented and very easy to setup and use.

Never heard of Vusi Mahlasela?  Neither had I until about two weeks ago when I happened across him while watching some videos on http://www.ted.com/, and what a find it was.  All it took was one listen to “Thula Mama” from his new album Guiding Star and I was hooked.  Vusi has the body of a bouncer but the voice of an angel and his guitar work is amazing.  From what I have read on Vusi, he grew up under apartheid in South Africa, and spent his early life fighting it, largely through his music.  Though his beginnings were very humble, playing on homemade guitars, he has come a long way and Guiding Star represents his second release on Dave Mathew’s label ATO (Dave also appears on the album), and his sixth overall. 

Songs on the album are sung in a mix of English and Zulu (? I believe), and each is a masterpiece.  Vusi’s compositions are beautiful, his lyrics are powerful and touching, and his influences are all over the board, from South African, Jazz, and Reggae to Pop.  I could try to describe his music all day but I would only do it an injustice, your best bet is just to listen to it for yourself.  My three favorite songs right now are ”River Jordan”, “Heaven In My Heart”, and “Thula Mama”.  I play this album several times a day, everyday, and don’t see myself ever getting sick of it.  Listen for yourself, push your musical boundaries, let me know what you think.

Facts:

His Website: Here

Album On Amazon: Here