I try to stay away from idioms and other bits of faux-wisdom but one that actually stuck with me from recording/songwriting circles is “you can't polish a turdâ€.
Which I always took to mean “if your song isn't any good, no amount of production or recording wizardy will make it goodâ€.
So episode 19 of season 6 of the Mythbusters is awesome: they polished some animal shit. Which may forever alter my songwriting process. Kudos.
Songs are pretty:
What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see--literally--the shape of any composition available on the Web.
Neat looking, but since it's limited to MIDI files it's not as much fun as it could be. (Though obviously getting musical information out of audio is super duper hard.)
LyricWiki - a wiki of song lyrics. Wondering how long until they get hassled by the feds, but it's a nice resource for now.
Behind the Song: Eye of the Tiger - Jim Peterik's description of writing and recording Eye of the Tiger. A good example of why I hate talking about songwriting: because it's boring and lame.
Hit song sonograms - in-depth analysis of what hit songs look like. [via]
#1 Songs - 1930-1989 - just the lyrics, no audio, but still interesting.
"Please Don't Go Topless, Mother" songwriter tells all - interesting letter from the Nashville songwriter of a cute net famous song.
Kevin Kelly points out that you can get 4 by 8 feet of whiteboard for $13 at Home Depot. Pretty awesome if you want a big wall of whiteboard to mess around with. Writing things huge and on walls make ideas feel more important. And JB points me to this Krylon Chalk Board stuff. It's $4.95 a pint and claims to turn any surface into a ready-to-us chalkboard with a few coats. And there's also this page showing How to make chalkboard paint.
Beaterator - a Flash based beat creator by Rockstar Games. [via]
Versionist Riddim Community - a huge resource for reggae music and samples. And with RSS feeds!
Drum Tabs - over 7,000 of them. I had no idea these existed.
Musictheory.net - great simple flash-based music theory lessons. Plus a staff paper generator, sweet!
Music-Critic Breakdowns - "Translating today's lyrics." In Da Club is pretty great.
Bon Jovi Lyric Analysis - He takes on "Bed of Roses" first.
FAWM - It's February Album Writing Month apparently. 14 songs in 28 days.
MyVirtualBand.com - neat site for online music collaboration. (via Scott)
Scott sent me The Cut-up Page. And it's a pretty great resource for anyone interested in cut-ups. My favorite one so far is Bot 002 which makes cut-ups from text it finds on the web randomly through Yahoo. It'd be extra great if you could specify the source or seed it with some text for its search query, but still it's better than most of cut-up tools I'd played with before.
Mashing for Beginners - an intro to making mashups in Tracktion.
NaSoAlMo - as a companion to National Novel Writing Month.
Self-Annihilating Sentences - Saul Gorn's Compendium Of Rarely Used Cliches (via Zannah)