Frequency

25/10/2022

11/10/2022

John Lee Ho**er: "And one thing Will Moore kept pounding into my head: play from the heart and the soul. Don’t think about no scales: twelve, sixteen and eight. Play the way you feel And I did that. But I also learned how to play with good timin’, with scales and bars. After I learned the way he taught me to play, it felt so good, people loved it so much that that was the way I did it. I can do it perfect, real perfect, but it wouldn’t be me. He said, ‘Just play until you just feel it in your heart and your head. Forget about the book, the scales’ . . . and I did that. And I really loved it. I can turn round and play scales, count it all, 1-2-3-4, 8, 12, 16 . . . I learned all of that, perfectly. I can do it. But when I get to feelin’ good, I can jump anywhere and don’t think nothin’ about it. That’s the way I am."

Buddy Guy: John is John, and the way he play is John Lee Ho**er, and if you don’t study the man’s music, you think he’s wrong. But as far as I’m concerned he’s not wrong, that’s John Lee Ho**er . . . he’s playin’ John Lee. I mean: in the beginning of time, who wrote the four bars? If John Lee hadda come along, we probably wouldn’t have four bars, we’d’a had just any kind of bar: three-and-a-half bars, five: just as long as it fits. If the shoe fit, it’s comfortable. If it don’t fit, it’s not comfortable. That’s the way I think he feel about his music. That’s the way I feel about it, you know. I think I got advantaged by not takin’ my music in school, because I’d’a probably been hung up on this ‘he chang in’ too fast’ or ‘he not changin’ fast enough’ and all that stuff. I don’t pay that no mind. As many records as he sold on ‘Boogie Chillen’, I go along with his changes [laughs].

Murray, Charles Shaar. Boogie Man

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

01/06/2022

On May 31, 1961, Jimi Hendrix became Private James Hendrix.

It all started when Law enforcement authorities twice caught Hendrix riding in stolen cars and when given a choice between spending time in prison or joining the Army, he chose the latter and enlisted.

After completing his basic training at Fort Ord, California, the Army assigned him to the 101st Airborne Division and stationed him at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

In November 1961, fellow serviceman Billy Cox walked past the service club and heard Hendrix playing guitar inside. Cox, intrigued by the proficient playing, which he described as a combination of "John Lee Ho**er and Beethoven", immediately checked-out a bass guitar and the two began to jam. Soon after, they began performing at the base clubs on the weekends with other musicians in a loosely organized band called the Casuals.

That's Private Hendrix, 61 years ago today.

30/05/2022

Howlin Wolf in Chicago 1975

30/05/2022

Remembering the blues legend Aaron Thibeaux "T-Bone" Walker (May 28, 1910 – March 16, 1975)
Walker played in carnivals as a teenager — singing, dancing, playing banjo, accompanying such well-known blues singers as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, and learning how to put on a show — a skill his daughter Bernita says he mastered.

"He would do the splits in time with the music that he was playing. And his facial expressions were just phenomenal. And the women would scream and holler. And even the men were clapping like, 'Go, Bone.' And I would just sit there smiling because that was my dad doing those great performances."

But T-Bone Walker was also a ground-breaking blues guitarist, says one of those who's followed in his footsteps: guitarist Duke Robillard.

"T-Bone Walker single-handedly developed the style and way to play blues on electric guitar that was totally different than anything that had been done before," says Robillard. "He used a lot of double timing in his soloing, which at that time was something only horn players did, you never heard a guitar player do it — very unusual and very innovative. He'd be playing actually twice as many notes per beat." - NPR

Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive

29/05/2022

Charlie Musselwhite: “The blues don’t make you feel bad. The blues lift you up. The blues help get rid of that bad feeling. Life can be hard, but in the meantime, let’s party.”
“At first, I was going to all of the clubs just as a blues fan, and I wasn’t asking to sit in. I didn’t tell anybody I played. I was happy just to be there. These guys ­- like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson - just thought of me as a fan, because I’d request tunes,”

“But one night in this club called Pepper’s Lounge, Muddy’s home club, this waitress I’d gotten to know real well told Muddy, ‘You oughta hear Charlie play harmonica.’ That changed everything. He insisted I sit in. A lot of musicians hung out at Pepper’s, and they heard me playing with Muddy, and they started offering me gigs. I was about 18.”

by Dan Taylor
The Press Democrat
Photo by Rory Doyle

23/05/2022

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) with his mother, Lucille, in 1943.

Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music".

Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at the age of 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville then Nashville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world's highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.

Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began."

HONORS & AWARDS

Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band's three studio albums, Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland, among the 100 greatest albums of all time, and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth greatest artist of all time. In Seattle, November 27, 1992, which would have been Hendrix's 50th birthday, was made Jimi Hendrix Day

A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated to Hendrix on November 14, 1991, at 6627 Hollywood Boulevard. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005.

Hendrix's music has received a number of Hall of Fame Grammy awards, starting with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, followed by two Grammys in 1999 for his albums Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland; Axis: Bold as Love received a Grammy in 2006. In 2000, he received a Hall of Fame Grammy award for his original composition, "Purple Haze", and in 2001, for his recording of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower". Hendrix's rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was honored with a Grammy in 2009.

The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp honoring Hendrix in 2014. On August 21, 2016, Hendrix was inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan. The James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix United States Post Office in Renton Highlands near Seattle, about a mile from Hendrix's grave and memorial, was renamed for Hendrix in 2019.

22/05/2022

“My song are usually personal,” Jimi Hendrix said. “I was glad, for instance, that ‘The Wind Cries Mary,’ which meant a lot to me, wasn’t a big hit.” According to his friend and manager Chas Chandler, Hendrix wrote the song for his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham.
Speaking with the BBC in 2013, Etchingham recalled Hendrix writing the track following a fight they had. After Etchingham went to spend the night at a friend’s house, Hendrix hung out at home and penned the tune using Etchingham’s middle name Mary. “Somewhere, a queen is weeping,” he sang in the recording. “Somewhere, a king has no wife.”

“It was a nice, sad song,” Etchingham told the BBC. “He was obviously a bit upset.” In an interview posted on JimiHendrix.com, Chandler said the band recorded it the day after Hendrix wrote it. If that’s the case, the fight would have been very fresh in his mind.

“I wouldn’t like [‘The Wind Cries Mary’] being kicked around like any old Dave Dee number,” he told The Gown. (Dave Dee had a number of hits in the ’60s with tracks like “Bend It.”) In the end, it worked out as Hendrix hoped, if you consider a top-10 hit in the U.K. to be no big deal.

As for the recording itself, you have to marvel at what Hendrix achieved in a few minutes. And don’t sleep on the contributions of Redding and Mitchell. According to Chandler, Hendrix only played the track for them a few times before they began recording.

-Eric Schaal
Photo by Bent Rej

13/05/2022

On this day in 1967 "Are You Experienced"by the Jimi Hendrix Experience was released in the UK. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest debuts in the history of rock music. The album spent 33 weeks on the UK charts and 106 weeks on the US Billboard Top LPs chart.
Incredibly, Hendrix had only just arrived in London on September 24th 1966, hooked up with Redding on the 29th, and auditioned Mitchell on October 4th; nine days after Mitchell joined the band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played their first-ever gig at the Novelty cinema in Évreux, France, kicking off a four-date tour opening for French pop singer Johnny Hallyday.

Given their recent formation, the “Hey Joe” session was a challenging one for the musicians, but it effectively set the sonic template for what would become Are You Experienced. “‘Hey Joe’ is a very difficult song to do right and it took forever,” Redding recalled in his autobiography, Are You Experienced. “The Marshalls were too much for the mikes and Chas and Jimi rowed over recording volume. That ‘loud,’ full, live sound was nearly impossible to obtain (especially for the bass) without the distortion, which funnily enough became part of our sound.”

(Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

09/04/2022

Just like many singers, Tina Turner started off not liking her voice. In an interview with Gayle King from CBS News, Turner said, “You know, in the beginning, I didn’t [like it]. I thought it was kind of ugly because it didn’t sound like Diana Ross. But then afterwards I thought, ’Yeah, it sounds like the guys’.”

Turner opened up the female rock vocal sound with her edgy tone. She pulled on influences from blues, funk, gospel and soul and singers such as Etta James, Ruth Brown, Hank Ballard, Big Mama Thornton, James Brown and Mahalia Jackson. Sometimes described as having an “androgynous” voice, Turner’s naturally deep voice was incredibly flexible and robust. She loved using a wide variety of vocal qualities and had a wide range, recording notes as low as F2 and as high as F6. You can hear her using qualities such as yells, whoops, growls, grunts, cry, sob, rasp, belt, chest and head register, mix, and speech.

She could manipulate her upper range to imitate high electric guitar like notes. Often as she sang in belted ranges her voice became quite nasal giving her a brassy/saxophone tone that could cut through the band.

While not always singing with a perfectly healthy technique Turner obviously did understand something of vocal health and was cognisant of its limitations. She said to Janis Joplin on their first meeting, “Honey, you can’t continue to sing like that or you’ll have no voice […]”.

Turner used her voice foremost to express emotions, tell a story and feed the music. Whatever she was doing with her voice Turner managed to sustain a very busy career up to the age of 69, always dancing and always in high heels! - iSingmag

Photo by Peter Lindbergh

03/04/2022

Simply "The World's Best Sound Deadening Solution" for automotive and recreational audio installation

31/03/2022

18/03/2022

SOME FACTS ABOUT MUSIC'S GREATEST LYRICIST:
[] Haggard was born in Oildale, California, toward the end of the Great Depression.
[] The family moved to California from their home in Checotah, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression, after their barn burned in 1934.
[] In 1946 Haggard's father died of a brain hemorrhage. Nine year-old Haggard was deeply affected by the loss, and it remained a pivotal event to him for the rest of his life.
[] His childhood was troubled after the death of his father, and he was incarcerated several times in his youth.
[] Older brother Lowell gave his guitar to Merle when Merle was 12. Haggard learned to play it on his own with the records he had at home, influenced by Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell, and Hank Williams.
[] After being released from San Quentin State Prison in 1960, he managed to turn his life around and launch a successful country music career.
[] He gained popularity with his songs about the working class that occasionally contained themes contrary to anti–Vietnam War sentiment of some popular music of the time.
[] Between the 1960s and the 1980s, he had 38 number-one hits on the US country charts, several of which also made the Billboard all-genre singles chart.
[] He died on April 6, 2016—his 79th birthday—at his ranch in Shasta County, California, having recently suffered from double pneumonia.

18/03/2022

"There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres." - Pythagoras

18/03/2022

On-U Sound will be hosting a very special evening to celebrate 40 years of existence - it's possibly the only time all these amazing artists will be together under one roof!

Please join us at the Forum in London on April 30th 2022.

Tickets here: https://bit.ly/36qJaGs

14/03/2022

"The writings of the old school, on the other hand, dealt with the nature of the human instrument; they went back to the very foundations of human sound-generation. Nothing was taken for granted, least of all the normal processes of everyday speech. Nothing was described in terms of subjective sensation; in the whole of Manuel Garcia’s writings it is hard to find a single mention of the kind of sensation which a singer may expect to feel when singing. This does not mean that Garcia never used this method of teaching; but it certainly suggests that he realized the dangers of putting sensations into books. The difficulty here is that the sensations of singers arise from a combination of the workings of individual cerebro-nervous systems and an individual gift of what may be termed “sensory awareness”; and the more closely the singer tries to analyse these sensations the more misleading they can be. When a whole group of great singers attests to what may be called an ‘overall’ sensation, the evidence is often of great value, but the process of taking sensations to bits in order to see how they work is dangerous. The great Lilli Lehmann wrote a book on these lines, in which she attempted to clarify the analysis of her sensations by means of a number of carefully executed illustrations in line and colour. The book is quite incomprehensible, even to an experienced singer." – Kelsey, Franklyn. “The Riddle of the Voice.” Music and Letters 29.3 (1948): 238-248.

12/03/2022

Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock's official music video for 'It Takes Two'. Click to listen to Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/RBDJSpot?IQid=RBDJTT...

11/03/2022

By Clive Young. The legendary facility is “on a mission to reinvent the large-format studio business,” says Stephen Webber of BerkleeNYC.

01/03/2022

28/02/2022

SoundDecor develops wall and ceiling products that provide exceptional acoustical control.

11/02/2022

Yo! Bum Rush The Show was released 35 years ago today...Public Enemy No. 1...

07/01/2022

By Clive Young. Plati and Keppler explain why Bowie shelved 'Toy;' the impact of its online leak; and how it was rescued from digital oblivion