I’m home sick with a cold. Instead of wallowing in my own misery, I created my own rendition of Jingle Bells with Garage Band and my cheapo classical guitar. I spent an hour recording and arranging the piece before the repetition drove Hayley insane.
Enjoy! Jingle Bells
Tags: guitar, holidays, jingle bells, mp3, music
Most of my time between the ages of 12 and 17 was occupied playing sports, studying for school and searching for rare albums at Compact Disc Warehouse in Sunnyvale, California. I had so many great finds, like a rare bootleg CD of Phish performing Dark Side of the Moon or a deluxe Nirvana recording from back before they were famous. Those were the days. My CD collection was probably worth a couple thousand dollars and it was my most prized collection.
After losing my AOL account (long story), I quickly found other means for communication with IRC. Shortly thereafter I discovered file sharing. While IRC fserves worked pretty well, other easier ways to get files and music appeared, like Hotline. FTP was also pretty popular at the time.
Then came Napster. I arrived on campus and the illegal music revolution was just becoming mainstream. Every single person that owned a PC was downloading music like crazy. It was a marauder’s wildfire spreading from computer to computer. At the same time, my CD collection dropped from several thousand to three hundred dollars in value. All my rare CDs were now worthless and everybody had instant access to them on the Windows file sharing network (not my doing, I was selfishly keeping them on CDs).
The record companies were hit hard. They tried everything from discounting CDs in places like Target and Best Buy to suing grandmothers and ten year olds. It didn’t change anything. The fact remains that physical media is gone forever and there is little that they can do to stop it.
I suppose I should be thankful that I have millions of records to choose from online, or on my hard drive, but I miss those days. I can’t help but think that I was personally responsible for screwing such a good thing. I suppose that’s just nostalgia and it’s hard to break from what is comfortable.
I can say that I appreciated music more back then. Lately, I’ve switched back to purchasing music, mainly on iTunes. I love music and those artists deserve my money. I can afford a CD every now and then.
But It’s still not the same. The artistic insert, the shiny CD surface and the feeling of putting the CD in the player and pressing play. That feeling just never goes away.
I’ve composed another new song called “Inside the Computor”, with an ‘o’. That’s right, I can spell things however I feel like it. Get it here.
Tags: computer, garageband, music, technical
I’ve uploaded a new song called An Integrated Approach to Communication. It’s my first Garage Band song of, hopefully, many to come. Enjoy!