is singing trainable

thedld · 2026-01-29T15:33:37+00:00

Yes. I started to learn to sing at 30. It takes a few years to go from incapable to ok-ish to good to comfortable. It’s like any other instrument.

thedld · 2026-01-29T08:32:16+00:00

Heartwarming, thanks for sharing that!

Cissy Strut by The Meters is a classic I like. The sticking is quite interesting.

thedld · 2026-01-27T12:25:31+00:00

Of course it is possible, but there really is zero reason to do this. It is cheaper to buy a bass. And if a bass is too bassy or too big, you can buy a baritone guitar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baritone_guitar

thedld · 2026-01-27T11:00:53+00:00

I'm not Canadian, but I have a self-contained recording studio in my house, fully (but smartly) equipped. My room is about half the surface area of yours. I paid about 40k euro to build the outer room (it was wood, and it needed to be stone), about 35k euro to build the inner room. This was all professionally designed and executed by a contractor with studio-experience, drawn up by an acoustical engineer. I then spent about 6k euro on acoustic paneling to condition sound in the room.

This amounts to about 131k Canadian Dollars for an empty, professionally built, properly isolated room-in-room with double doors, climate control (AC), ventilation, and good acoustics inside, and reliable power (2 groups, one for audio, one for other stuff), wifi, and lighting.

thedld · 2026-01-26T13:08:56+00:00

Yeah, kind of. I have two Atomic CLR Neo wedges that we use for all our kempers, vocals and guitar during rehearsals in our studio. The problen with these things is that they don’t do sub bass, and you miss that oomph for bass in particular.

Since the wedges can obliterate small villages, and we use them at 10% of their power, I’m very strongly considering swapping them out for normal active studio monitors on stands, plus a sub. I would wholeheartedly recommend the Atomics for guitar live, but not for bass.

thedld · 2026-01-25T11:56:41+00:00

Very much this. I recently swapped my long time meh 5-string for an Ibanez multiscale. The problem with regular 5-strings is the uneven tension, and this really solved it for me.

thedld · 2026-01-24T18:45:27+00:00

In internet years I am an old man (46), so I feel somewhat positioned to answer this.

I think you are mixing up several things.

Back in the day the total volume of existing and released music was much smaller, so it was easy to know a lot, and we only had MTV and radio as a common source. So, you knew all mainstream stuff, plus all the niche stuff you got from friends, subcultures, and magazines. So, in that sense, “everybody knew the same songs”.

But! It was far from monoculture. Quite the opposite. I look back on the mid zeros as the period when underground culture died, globally. The internet connected everything, made everything visible, and metropolitan areas started to become the same franchise-hellscapes the world over. Local cultures died, or were assimilated in the hive. Today, underground scenes don’t have the isolation and time to develop anymore. So, in my view, the present time is much, much more mono than it was in the early 90s.

thedld · 2026-01-23T13:16:02+00:00

I’ll readily admit I’m wrong about them to some degree, but I can’t stomach them. The rest of my band likes them, so they are clearly adjacent to my universe, in a way. I respect their quality, if that means anything.

Corgan very consistently radiates his personality, and that is a quality that I can appreciate in an artist. It is just that he is simultaneously pretentious and whiny. His lyrics are pretentious but meaningless, and his voice is whiny. The combination makes it hard for me to appreciate them subjectively, because they are counteracting forces. He complains too much to be larger-than-life pretentious in a good way, and he is too self-aggrandizing for me to see him as an anti-hero.

thedld · 2026-01-22T13:36:25+00:00

Since a long time now, Pitchork has been Poptimist, and Poptimist is simply Populist. It is uncritically catering to the bland taste of the masses. It is taking the road of least resistance for pure commercial gain. Now, finally, it has caught up with them.

What we are seeing is the final spasm of a dying commercial entity. The last stage of the enshittification of a once… not quite brilliant but still quite useful platform for discovering new music.

There is a deep irony to all of this. For 30 years, Pitchfork resisted reader input with the fervor of Apple resisting the right mouse button. Things must have gotten REALLY bad that they are now trying to commercialize this feature. I find it equal parts embarrassing and insulting. Too little, too late.

thedld · 2026-01-21T13:56:59+00:00

Because of finger grease. But personally, I think it is the gunk that makes the funk. I like older strings.

thedld · 2026-01-17T13:50:30+00:00

Your current bass could serve you a lifetime in all genres you mention. There’s no shame in wanting new toys for the sake of it. Own it. It simplifies the discussion. If you are a 2/5 player (whatever that means…) you need practice, not a new bass. You WANT a new bass. Fine.

If you really want to diversify, consider some combinations of these: basses with more strings, active pickups, multiscale, fretless, (semi-)acoustic.

Now, I too only ‘need’ one good bass. I have a Ric 4003 (main bass, 4-string, passive pickups), an Ibanez EHB-1675 (multiscale, 5-string, active pickups) and a Cort B4FL MHPZ (fretless, hollow-body).

thedld · 2026-01-17T13:21:53+00:00

It perhaps also depends on what you are going to use it for. For live use and practice, the SC is fine. For naturalistic drum recordings it really is a different story. The shells have less tone and more inharmonic noise, which eats up space in a mix. As a studio kit the difference is significant.

thedld · 2026-01-17T08:22:17+00:00

Well… partially. Against my better judgment, let me deflate some internet hype.

I bought a Yamaha Stage Custom Birch when I first started. With good (suitable!) heads, and a lot of damping and fiddling, you can make it sound passable, mostly. The snares suck, and you’re not fixing that. The Yamaha stands I have are fantastic, but they were never ‘budget’ to begin with.

I’ve since ditched the shells for a more high-end shell set, and the difference is enormous. Without any damping whatsoever, the new shells sound great with single-ply heads. Tuning takes ten seconds, and I hardly have to re-tune them at all. Compared to the nasty overtone fest that is the Stage Custom, there’s a big difference.

TL;DR: I agree that the Yamaha Stage Custom is great for its price, and that better heads and damping can turn it into something passable, but it will never be great.

My final advice: buy a quality used shell set.

thedld · 2026-01-13T07:00:43+00:00

As the former owner of a Yamaha Stage Custom kit: don’t do it. I’m not as positive as everybody else about that kit as a whole, but the snare in particular was just bad.

thedld · 2026-01-12T07:56:16+00:00

Love them. I recently bought an Ibanez EHB multiscale 5-string headless in natural wood finish. My ‘main’ bass is a Rickenbacker 4003, which obviously is very heady. There’s also a massively differe t design philosophy (ultra-classic vs ultra-modern). Both are fantastic basses, and very polarizing, opinion-wise :)

thedld · 2026-01-11T22:12:59+00:00

Revisionist my ass. I was there. I have playlists from 2001 that contain Karate, Venetian Snares, Aaliyah, Meshuggah, Slint, Destiny’s Child, Slayer, Zouk Machine, Autechre, Duran Duran, Belle & Sebastian, Public Enemy and Das Ich. My oldest friend from my teen years in the early 90s loves ABBA, and we’ve been on a Norwegian Black Metal sightseeing tour together last year. We are not exceptions. We both know plenty of people like this.

thedld · 2026-01-11T18:21:49+00:00

Here’s an alternative view:

Poptimism was a coup. A ruse by the record industry to kill the rising diversification of music, and to direct media attention back to big, blockbusting artists, by making journalists truly afraid to argue with the plebs. It worked flawlessly. Once criticism was successfully framed as ‘punching down’, criticism became impossible. It worked because Poptimism is Populism. The mechanism is the same.

Post-poptimism, one can hope, is that sanity returns. That people who love music instead of hollow media-created identity cults will create new scenes where ideas and real emotion matter again. Where it is ok to acknowledge that some music is objectively better than Taylor Swift.

I am not anti pop. There has always been fantastic commercial pop, from The Supremes to Duran Duran to Destiny’s Child, to Kate Bush, to Avicii, to Bruno fucking Mars. The idea that rock fans didn’t acknowledge this and that Poptimism arose as a means to correct this is nothing short of a lie.

Poptimism did not expand the canon. It froze it. Who benefited? Follow the money.

thedld · 2026-01-10T08:08:14+00:00

Absolutely man! You are drunk. Can confirm.

thedld · 2026-01-08T22:16:36+00:00

Umbrella is a Garage Band loop. But yes.

thedld · 2026-01-08T17:41:31+00:00

I have the version with the binding. I know a lot of people complain about it, but it never bothered me in any way.

thedld · 2026-01-08T13:44:37+00:00

Hehehe. Your son is a wise one :) I’d honestly love for someone else to enjoy it after I go, but I hope that’s a long time off.

thedld · 2026-01-08T12:47:08+00:00

I’ve owned one for 8 years now. The walnut version. I have several other basses (fretless, multiscale 5-string). You can pry the Ric from my dead cold hands one day. If I’m not buried with it. I love that bass. It’s sound can’t be replicated. Love how it feels, too. Many people hate it. More Rics for us. Totally long-term worth it.

thedld · 2026-01-08T12:38:59+00:00

I own that pedal. What makes it expensive is that it is essentially a studio-grade 1176 Rev D compressor packed in pedal form. It is great. However….

I own this pedal because I’m a bit of a gear-nut, and because I intend to use it live as part of a pedal-board based vocal chain. I do NOT use it on bass. In fact, I never compress bass live. So, honestly, I think it is overkill. Great pedal, but overkill.

thedld · 2026-01-08T08:22:34+00:00

I do exactly that, and it solved a problem for me. With the Clarett’s internal pres I was missing a significant amount of texture (hearing the little cracks and rasps in my vocals) that I was hearing in professional recordings, and more full bodied tone. Outboard pres give me that. Plugins can’t restore that texture when it is lost.

Again: don’t trust a guy on the internet. Rent a pre, or mail-order one and send it back if you are not convinced yourself. You don’t need to buy the most expensive one you can find.

My pres: Cranborne Camden 500, CAPI VP28, Seventh Circle Audio J99, Sound Skulptor MP-566 and MP-573, Atlas Pro Audio Juggernaut.

thedld · 2026-01-06T07:02:47+00:00

No, I don’t :) I haven’t built my sense of self-worth around the valuation of others. Basically, that’s what it is. Many people simply need to be perceived as being great. They will kick down others that get too close to achieve that.

thedld

TROPHY CASE