Journal tags: tunes

When I play music, it’s almost always instrumental. If you look at my YouTube channel almost all the videos are of me playing tunes—jigs, reels, and so on.

Most of those videos were recorded during The Situation when I posted a new tune every day for 200 consecutive days. Every so often though, I’d record a song.

I go through periods of getting obsessed with a particular song. During The Situation I remember two songs that were calling to me. New York was playing in my head as I watched my friends there suffering in March 2020. And Time (The Revelator) resonated in lockdown:

And every day is getting straighter, time’s a revelator.

The song I’m obsessed with right now is called Foreign Lander. I first came across it in a beautiful version by Sarah Jarosz (I watch lots of mandolin videos on YouTube so the algorithm hardly broke a sweat showing this to me).

There’s a great version by Tatiana Hargreaves too. And Tim O’Brien.

I wanted to know more about the song. I thought it might be relatively recent. The imagery of the lyrics makes it sound like something straight from a songwriter like Nick Cave:

If ever I prove false love
The elements would moan
The fire would turn to ice love
The seas would rage and burn

But the song is old. Jean Ritchie collected it, though she didn’t have to go far. She said:

Foreign Lander was my Dad’s proposal song to Mom

I found that out when I came across this thread from 2002 on mudcat.org where Jean Ritchie herself was a regular contributor!

That gave me a bit of vertiginous feeling of The Great Span, thinking about the technology that she used when she was out in the field.

I’ve been practicing Foreign Lander and probably driving Jessica crazy as I repeat over and over and over. It’s got some tricky parts to sing and play together which is why it’s taking me a while. Once I get it down, maybe I’ll record a video.

I spent most of Saturday either singing the song or thinking about it. When I went to bed that night, tucking into a book, Foreign Lander was going ‘round in my head.

Coco—the cat who is not our cat—came in and made herself comfortable for a while.

I felt very content.

A childish little rhyme popped into my head:

With a song in my head
And a cat on my bed
I read until I sleep

I almost got up to post it as a note here on my website. Instead I told myself to do it the morning, hoping I wouldn’t forget.

That night I dreamt about Irish music sessions. Don’t worry, I’m not going to describe my dream to you—I know how boring that is for everyone but the person who had the dream.

But I was glad I hadn’t posted my little rhyme before sleeping. The dream gave me a nice little conclusion:

With a song in my head
And a cat on my bed
I read until I sleep
And dream of rooms
Filled with tunes.

Brighton has a thriving Irish music scene. Some sessions are weekly—every Sunday afternoon in The Bugle and every Wednesday evening in The Jolly Brewer. Some are every two weeks, like the session in The Fiddler’s Elbow. Others are monthly, like the session in The Dover Castle and the session in The Lord Nelson.

So it sometimes happens that if the calendar aligns just right, there are many sessions in one week. This was one of those weeks. I managed a streak of five sessions in a row.

The first was the regular Sunday afternoon session in The Bugle.

Then on Monday, it was The Fiddler’s Elbow.

The night after that there was a one-off session in the Hand in Hand, which will hopefully become a regular monthly occurrence.

On Wednesday it was the regular session at The Jolly Brewer.

Finally on Thursday it was the monthly session at The Lord Nelson.

I’m very lucky to have so many opportunities to play the music I love with my fellow musicians. I don’t take it for granted.

Every day I’ve been recording myself playing a tune and then posting the videos here on my site.

It seems like just yesterday that I wrote about hitting the landmark of 100 tunes. But that was itself 100 days ago. I know this because today I posted my 200th tune.

I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed to keep up a 200 day streak. I could keep going, but I think I’m going to take a break. I’ll keep recording and posting tunes, but I’m no longer going to give myself the deadline of doing it every single day. I’ll record and post a tune when I feel like it.

It’ll be interesting to see how the frequency changes now. Maybe I’ll still feel like recording a tune most days. Or maybe it’ll become a rare occurrence.

If you want to peruse the 200 tunes recorded so far, you can find them here on my website and in a playlist on YouTube. I also posted some videos to Instagram, but I haven’t been doing that from the start.

I’m quite chuffed with the overall output (even if some of the individual recordings are distinctly sub-par). Recording 200 tunes sounds like a big task by itself, but if you break it down to recording just one tune a day, it becomes so much more manageable. You can stand anything for ten seconds. As I said when I reached the 100 tune mark:

Recording one tune isn’t too much hassle. There are days when it’s frustrating and I have to do multiple takes, but overall it’s not too taxing. But now, when I look at the cumulative result, I’m very happy that I didn’t skip any days.

There was a side effect to recording a short video every day. I created a timeline for my hair. I’ve documented the day-by-day growth of my hair from 200 days ago to today. A self has been inadvertently quantified.

We got a headstart on the lockdown. A week before the UK government finally stopped dilly-dallying (at the expense of tens of thousands of lives), Clearleft became a remote-only company. At the beginning of this stay-at-home time, I started recording a tune a day. I wasn’t sure how long I’d keep it up, but I’ve managed to keep it going the whole time.

Yesterday I recorded my 100th tune.

It’s funny how small efforts can build up into a satisfying corpus. It’s not like I’m attempting anything ambitious, like Matthias, who is doing 100 days of writing. Recording one tune isn’t too much hassle. There are days when it’s frustrating and I have to do multiple takes, but overall it’s not too taxing. But now, when I look at the cumulative result, I’m very happy that I didn’t skip any days.

One hundred is a nice round number, so this could be a good time to stop. I could quit while I’m ahead. But I think I’ll keep going. Again, despite what the official line might be from the UK government (who have lost all trust), I reckon I’ll be staying at home for a while yet. As long as I’m here, I may as well keep playing. I have plenty more tunes to play.

At some point, the daily streak will end. But even then, I think I’ll continue to record tunes like this, even if it becomes more sporadic.

If you like these tunes, as well as being here on my own site, they’re all in a YouTube set. So …like’n’subscribe, or something?

I don’t talk that much on here about my life’s work. Contrary to appearances, my life’s work is not banging on about semantic markup, progressive enhancement, and service workers.

No, my life’s work is connected to Irish traditional music. Not as a musician, I hasten to clarify—while I derive enormous pleasure from playing tunes on my mandolin, that’s more of a release than a vocation.

My real legacy, it turns out, is being the creator and caretaker of The Session, an online community and archive dedicated to Irish traditional music. I might occassionally mention it here, but only when it’s related to performance, accessibility, or some other front-end aspect. I’ve never really talked about the history, meaning, and purpose of The Session.

Well, if you’re at all interested in that side of my life, you can now listen to me blather on about it for over an hour, thanks to the Blarney Pilgrims podcast.

I’ve been huffduffing episodes of this podcast for quite a while now. It’s really quite excellent. If you’re at all interested in Irish traditional music, the interviews with the likes of Kevin Burke, John Carty, Liz Carroll and Catherine McEvoy are hard to beat.

So imagine my surprise when they contacted me to ask me to chat and play some tunes! It really was an honour.

I was also a bit of guinea pig. Normally they’d record these kinds of intimate interviews face to face, but what with The Situation and all, my chat was the first remotely recorded episode.

I’ve been on my fair share of podcasts—most recently the Design Systems Podcast—but this one was quite different. Instead of talking about my work on the web, this focussed on what I was doing before the web came along. So if you don’t want to hear me talking about my childhood, give this a miss.

But if you’re interested in hearing my reminisce and discuss the origin and evolution of The Session, have a listen. The chat is interspersed with some badly-played tunes from me on the mandolin, but don’t let that put you off.

Cobh really has become quite the tourist town. Today we—myself, Jessica, and my mother—took a boat over to Spike Island and enjoyed strolling around the fort and taking in the magnificent views. Then we went back across to town and had lunch where the White Star Line office used to be, sitting right next to the pier used to load goods and passengers for the Titanic.

We finished the evening in a pub listening to some great tunes (once the bodhrán player got the hint and left). Plenty of sunshine and plenty of pints. A really nice day.

Last year at An Event Apart in Seattle I was giving a talk about long-term thinking on the web, using The Session as a case study. As a cheap gimmick, I played a tune on my mandolin during the talk.

Chris Coyier was also speaking. He plays mandolin too. Barry—one of the conference attendees—also plays mandolin. So we sat outside, passing my mandolin around.

Barry is back this year and he brought his mandolin with him. I showed him an Irish jig. He showed me a bluegrass tune. Together we played a reel that crossed the Atlantic ocean.

Amazon is selling MP3s. Right now it’s US only (and I’ve got a sneaky US account on the side) but hopefully this will reach foreign shores before too long. Straight out of the starting gate, they’ve got about 2 million songs on offer. Every single one of those songs is encoded at 256kbps with no DRM. It’s that last detail that makes this such a big deal.

I’ve never been able to get my head around the justifications for DRM. In the past, I have been literally sitting in front of my computer with my credit card in hand, eager to spend money on music I love. But rather than greet me with open arms, services like iTunes instead treat me with suspicion, demanding that they get to call the shots about how I can use music that I’ve bought.

For a really egregious example of where this can lead, take note that Virgin Digital is shutting down:

All tracks used Windows Media DRM, and therefore were only playable under Windows and on WMA-compatible devices. The site now advises its customers who have purchased tracks to back them up, as they will not be able to download them again once Virgin Digital has closed. It’s unclear whether the purchasers of individual tracks will be able to access their songs without burning them to CD and reimporting them as MP3s, but it’s better to be safe than sorry if you’re one of those customers. And naturally, subscribing members will lose access altogether once their subscriptions lapse.

DRM-crippled suppliers treat me like a criminal. That turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s precisely because of the DRM that I resort to using peer-to-peer networks or other illicit means of music acquisition.

Make no mistake, the design of the iTunes music store trumps Amazon on just about every level. For most of the purchasing process, the user experience is far superior on iTunes. But the user experience doesn’t end with a financial transaction. The user experience of interacting with the purchased song continues long after leaving the store.

I haven’t bought anything from the iTunes music store because of the DRM. I have used it though: I’ve been given gift certificates for iTunes downloads. This is what I have to do after completing a download:

1. Pull out the read/write CD I keep just for this,
2. Burn my new music to the CD,
3. Rip the music back as MP3,
4. Erase the CD in preparation for step 1.

And that’s perfectly legal *. But I can’t just convert from DRMed AAC straight to MP3—that would be illegal.

Now, it’s pretty clear that this kind of “copy protection” isn’t going to get in the way of anyone who seriously wants to make copies of the music. All it does is place frustrating stumbling blocks in the path of legitimate customers who want to listen to their purchased music wherever they choose.

I hope that the launch of the Amazon MP3 store is a sign that record companies are finally beginning to realise that people who want their music to be open and portable aren’t criminals—they’re music lovers.

John Gruber puts it best when he says:

Given the Amazon MP3 Store’s audio quality, prices, and user experience, I can’t see why anyone would buy DRM-restricted music from iTunes that’s available from Amazon.

In a wonderful twist, the current number one bestselling song on Amazon is 1234 by Feist— the very song that Apple uses to promote the iPod Nano. And why not? iPods and MP3s have always been a great combination (it always frustrates me when I read reports by lazy journalists that contain statements such as “only songs purchased from Apple’s iTunes music store can be played on the iPod”). I suspect that the vast majority of iPods are filled with un-DRMed music, mostly ripped from CD. Now, thanks to Amazon, there’s also an easy way to fill them with un-DRMed music downloaded from the tubes of the internets.

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* Matthew points out that back-ups, archiving, shifting format, all currently illegal in the UK. Here’s the petition to change that. Even the government agrees that the current situation is pretty stupid but the law hasn’t changed.

Richard has published his annual round-up of the past year’s music available, as usual, on CD for anyone willing to reciprocate. It’s a great idea that always reminds me of Thurston Moore’s essay in Wired magazine on the subject of mix tapes:

Once again, we’re being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it’s not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing — by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along — is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.

Inspired by my esteemed colleague’s example, I hereby present a short list of songs from some of my favourite albums of 2006. To say that I bought all these songs would be stretching the truth beyond its elastic limit.

• Forty Dollars from the album Powder Burns by The Twilight Singers
• Off The Hook from the album Cansei de Ser Sexy by CSS
• Britney’s Massive Hole by Divide and Kreate
• Map of the Problematique from the album Black Holes and Revelations by Muse.
• Way Out from the album Show Your Bones by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Black Swan from the album The Eraser by Thom Yorke
• Honey Child What Can I Do? from the album Ballad of the Broken Seas by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan
• O Mary Don’t You Weep from the album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions by Bruce Springsteen

I recorded an MP3 of In Praise of the Hyperlink, my presentation from Reboot 8. The recording process was pretty straightforward using Garageband but I should really invest in a good microphone.

I needed someplace to host the audio file — nothing will increase your bandwidth bills quite like audio or video files. I thought about using my .mac account. There’s plenty of room there but I think there’s still a cap on the amount of transfers allowed per month. I’m also concerned about what might happen in the future if I decide not to renew my subscription.

Then I found the ideal solution. On Pete’s recommendation, I downloaded ccPublisher with the intention of adding licensing metadata to my MP3 file. As well as allowing me to do that, the software also provides an option to upload files to the Internet Archive. “Why not?”, I thought. It seems like a good place to host media files. No bandwidth charges, no subscription charges, and it’s more discoverable.

By the way, the RSS feed for the articles section of this site doubles up as a podcast. If there are any audio files linked in an article, they automatically get added as enclosures in the RSS feed. I’ve also added some iTunes specific tags to the feed. If you want, you can subscribe to the podcast directly from iTunes.

If you’re a podcast producer and you’re publishing under a creative commons license, the Internet Archive might be the perfect host for your files.

Oh, and don’t forget to provide transcriptions if you can.

The party shuffle feature in iTunes is supposed to create a random playlist of songs. Oh yeah? Then how come, out of 6,435 songs, it manages to choose the exact same song performed by two different bands one after the other?

Update: The question is rhetorical. The fact that coincidences like this occur is in fact proof that the shuffling is truly random. If there were no coincidences, that would be suspicious. The Cederholm-Fugazi effect is another example. It’s just that, as Daniel Gilbert says, we notice things that are memorable and filter out the vast majority.

Since I started working at the Clearleft office, I’ve been using a lovely new 20 inch Intel iMac. That’s great… but it means that I now use three different machines; I have my 17 inch G4 iMac at home and my 12 inch G4 iBook for when I’m on the move. I decided that I really needed to centralise all my data.

The first step was a no-brainer: start using IMAP instead of POP for my email. This is something I should have done a long time ago but I’ve just been putting it off. I’ve got six different email accounts so I knew it would be a bit of chore.

After a few false starts and wrong turns, I got everything up and running on all three computers. Unfortunately somewhere along the way I lost a couple of emails from the last day or two.

Which reminds me…

If you’re the person who sent me an email about doing a pre-Reboot podcast interview (or if anyone else out there knows who I’m talking about), please write to me again — I lost your email but I’d love to have a chat.

Anyway…

With my email all set up, that left contacts and calendars. I looked into contact syncing services like Plaxo but I wasn’t all that impressed by what I saw (and tales of address book spamming really put me off). In the end, I decided to drink the Apple koolaid and get a .Mac account. I doubt I’ll make use of any of the other services on offer (I certainly don’t plan to send any electronic postcards… sheesh!) but I think it’ll be worth it just for the Address Book and iCal syncing. As an added bonus, I can also sync my Transmit favourites — a feature I didn’t know about.

I am surprised by one thing that isn’t synchronised through .Mac. There’s no option to centralise the podcasts I’m subscribed to. That still seems to be based around the model of one computer and one iPod. I would have thought it would be pretty easy to just keep an OPML file on a server somewhere and point iTunes at that to keep podcasts in sync but this doesn’t seem to be something that’s built in by default. No doubt somebody somewhere has built a plug-in to do this. If not, I guess somebody somewhere soon will.

Apart from that, I’m all set. I’m relying on Apple to store my data and my hosting provider to store my emails, but I somehow feel more secure than if I was just hoarding everything locally. I feel a bit less tied down and a bit more footloose and fancy free.