Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: music

  • Hollywood Vampires

    Alice Cooper’s latest project is a cover supergroup featuring Joe Perry, Johnny Depp, Duff McKagan, Matt Sorum, and more. They call themselves Hollywood Vampires and if you like rock you should listen to their self-titled album. Anyway, there are obviously a lot of stories, mostly focusing on Cooper’s past with the original Vampires, but this one from Rolling Stone feels more sincere.

    Depp and Cooper met on the set of Depp’s 2012 film Dark Shadows. Hollywood Vampires started with the idea of recording a covers album, giving them an excuse to fool around in the actor’s well-appointed studio (“He has the best guitar collection I’ve seen,” says Perry). The band took its name from a 1970s L.A. drinking collective that included Cooper, Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson and guest stars like John Lennon and Ringo Starr. Eventually, the new Hollywood Vampires cut an album, with a number of tracks paying tribute to rock greats who drank or drugged themselves to death — Moon, John Bonham, Jim Morrison — some of whom were friends of Cooper. (Cooper himself quit drinking in the 1980s after his doctor told him he could either stop or join his friends in the hereafter.)

  • Marshall London

    The Marshall brand is on a lot of things these days, including headphones. While headphones makes sense, a smartphone might not, and yet there’s now a $600 Android thing called Marshall London. But despite the dual headphone connectors, and the Marshall branding obviously, you don’t get much bang for the buck. Gizmodo sums it up nicely:

    Under the hood, the phone’s core specs are barely respectable compared to a top-of-the-line handset. It’s got a 4.7-inch 720p IPS display, which is going to feel pretty tiny and low-res compared to today’s 5-inch=plus QHD displays. It’s got 2GB of RAM, 16GB of on-board storage, plus a Micro-SD slot. It’ll run Android Lollipop at launch, which is great! But that Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset is a few years old, and might drag compared to a new flagship. We don’t know much about the 8 megapixel camera, but it’s lower resolution than the most up-to-date phones. It’s a low-spec handset, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean bad.

    I see no reason what so ever to consider the Marshall London, unless you’re a die hard Marshall fan that wants to match it with your t-shirt and headphones. In which case I’ll just remind you that unless you actually hook up your guitar to a Marshall amp, a product line with pedigree and quality, you’re basically buying a look. I guess that’s fine too.

  • Apple bows to Taylor Swift

    Apple bows to Taylor Swift

    Pop star Taylor Swift wrote an open letter to Apple, regarding the Apple Music streaming service and the fact that the artist weren’t getting paid during the user’s trial period. Obviously the media went into a frenzy, because it’s Taylor Swift, it’s streaming, and it’s Apple.

    The result? Apple, through Eddy Cue, bows their heads, recognise their error, and pays artists per stream during the user trial period (as opposed to a chunk of the revenue when users are actually paying).

    (more…)

  • The $1,000 vinyl

    Wired’s story about hot press vinyl is an interesting read. As always, sound quality is a complicated – and personal – topic.

    “There’s actually little reason why any two discs should sound the same,” says Masterdisk’s Scott Hull. “A grading system based on the different significant factors makes sense: surface noise, relative distortion during playback, and things like skips and major pops.” Before this becomes a hot stamper endorsement, Hull lowers the boom: “Saying one disc is wrong and another is right is very controversial. Only the producer, the mastering, and cutting engineers really know what that record was supposed to sound like.”

  • How noise-canceling headphones work

    If you ever wondered how noise-canceling headphones works, this is the piece to read. Don’t worry, it’s short and not particularly technical, which might be a problem for some of you. It does point out why I stick to regular ol’ headphones though:

    Noise-canceling headphones may offer great sound, but they do have this limitation: anything you listen to, with active noise cancellation turned on, will be affected by this hiss. Because of this, no noise-canceling headphone will sound as good as regular headphones of the same audio quality.

  • Record sales are down

    Forbes, reporting on record sales in 2014 thus far:

    In 2014, not a single artist’s album has gone platinum. Not one has managed to cross that million sales mark.

    One album has managed to sell over a million copies so far this year, but it’s a soundtrack. The ever-popular Frozen soundtrack may slowly be working its way down the charts, but it is by far the best selling collection this year. Though it doesn’t have any marquee names on it—those that are usually expected to sell the best—the soundtrack has managed to move 3.2 million copies so far, and with winter coming, that number is sure to rise.

    Sign of the times. Digital music sales are down, streaming’s growing in popularity, and a million records are a shitload of sales as it is. Billboard’s got more SoundScan numbers, where we learn that CDs are also down, but vinyl’s still up by large numbers.

  • Alice Cooper guitar incoming

    ASG’s got an Alice Cooper guitar coming on October 21. I’m hoping to get one because it looks marvelous.

    Telltale crimson drops bespatter a snow-white palette, and from deep within a piercing gaze of savage intensity lashes out, an aphotic visage taking in an unholy landscape. There’s something brooding and transcendent in his aspect, an ominous man, pugnacious and sanguineous. Who is this man behind the ferocious Cimmerian stare? Who’s responsible for this truculent view of the World that’s black and white and spotted with blood? It could only be one man. It could only be the groundbreaking artist behind the seminal hits, “Killer,” “School’s Out,” ”Billion Dollar Babies,” and “Muscle of Love.” It could only be Alice Cooper.

  • U2's Songs of Innocence will be free forever, somewhere

    Sure, the Apple and U2 promotion of the latter’s album Songs of Innocence could’ve been executed a lot better. The biggest problem were for people with the setting to download new purchases automatically, because the album essentially was a new purchase, albeit free and unintended, and thus it’d dowbload to your device(s). It would’ve been much better to just promote the hell out of a link to the album’s page on iTunes, and just set the price to free. Not as disruptive obviously, but without the backlash and its removal tool.

    Still, I think the whole thing got a bit carried away. You got a somewhat decent rock album from one of the biggest bands in the world for free. Not everyone’ll like the music, but it’s not like it cost you anything. Except space if you have automatic downloads enabled (which I don’t, I use iTunes Match and stream instead), and you can always just remove the album from your device(s). It’s a fuckup, but not a big one, and not even remotely serious. There are more important things to worry about.

    (more…)

  • Megadeth, Arizona

    From the story behind Megadeth, Arizona, pioneering promotional website some 20 years ago:

    So even though no one had a clue what I was talking about, I wrote a proposal to create a “virtual cybertown in cyberspace.” It would be called Megadeth, Arizona—based on where the band lived and recorded their album.

    My boss, Lou Mann, the Senior Vice President of the label, actually signed off on the proposal and gave me a whopping $30 grand.

    He had no idea what it was for, and I can guarantee you… neither did I.

    Great read.

  • Pricing digital products

    I love books and music, and every now and then I watch movie. These three types of products belong to markets being disrupted right now, which means there’s a lot of moaning and whining and fear mongering going on, as well as a lot of problems when it comes to adapting.

    Pricing is one of these problems.

    • I buy most of my books from Amazon and almost all of them are Kindle ebooks.
    • I buy music on vinyl and from iTunes, as well as use Spotify for streaming music on a daily basis.
    • I never ever buy movies and you won’t catch me in a cinema if I can help it, but I have been known to rent movies from Headweb.

    The system works then? Nope, because the pricing is way off.

    (more…)

  • Because it sounds better

    I’m a hypocrite and I admit it, at least on principle. You see, I have no problem whatsoever to drop the famous “it just sounds better” explanation when it comes to music and vinyls. Because it does, it sounds better. The sound is just so much more alive, more real, more natural.

    Which is bullshit, at least most of the time these days. Because although you can digitally remaster any album and claim that it is the best sounding version yet, that is part of the problem. Classic albums from the vinyl years were recorded and mastered for the format, not for super-crisp CDs or hardly compressed MP3s. (more…)

  • A perfect Monday with Alice Cooper

    Welcome 2 My Nightmare track list:

    1. I Am Made of You
    2. Caffeine
    3. The Nightmare Returns
    4. A Runaway Train
    5. Last Man On Earth
    6. The Congregation
    7. I’ll Bite Your Face Off
    8. Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever
    9. Ghouls Gone Wild
    10. Something to Remember Me By
    11. When Hell Comes Home
    12. What Baby Wants
    13. I Gotta Get Outta Here
    14. The Underture
    15. A Bad Situation
    16. We Gotta Get Out of This Place

    Some awesome tracks on Alice Cooper’s latest album, made available just recently. You can buy it from iTunes or listen to it from your favorite streaming service. So far I love it.

  • 100 Spotify invites – claim yours!

    Want an invite to the excellent music streaming service Spotify, now available in the US? Then you’re in luck, because I’ve got 100 of the things that I will pitch out via Twitter, my Facebook fan page, and Google+, as well as right here on TDH.me.

    So, what will you have to do to get a Spotify invite then, one of these mere 100 I’ve got for you guys? (more…)

  • Epic cello version of "Smooth Criminal"

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlVbEclPj4c

    So where do I download the song? Wow.

  • Beatles on iTunes

    To me Beatles on iTunes is something of a yawn (I’ve already got them in my music collection), but it is a principle win for Apple. If we’re really really really lucky this is a turning point for the music industry, a sign of things to come. But I doubt it.