What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I've always been kinda partial to Meghan Trainor. Just in the sense that sometimes I will once in a blue moon listen to All About That Bass. I heard she released a new song (Still Don't Care).

I want to like that song but something about it feels off.

If I listen to All About that Bass, I figured it's been modified in post-production with whatever artists use to make themselves sound a bit better, but when I listen to Still Don't Care, it feels like the amount of auto-tune being used is substantially higher. Like it sounds like more fluff or fake or something. But I am also by no means a singer or someone who has any idea what goes into making a song so maybe I am completely off.

Am I imagining that Still Don't Care is using auto-tune to a higher extent?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Virgin

This album is a banger. Very different in character than her earlier work, much more mature and introspective. I enjoyed her earlier music in the "oh, if it's on the streaming mix I will listen to it" but this album is something else.

I connect to most songs first through the lyrics, then through the music, so here's a lyrical sample.

From Hammer, opening song:

There's a heat in the pavement,
my mercury's raising
Don't know if it's love
or if it's ovulation
When you're holding a hammer,
everything looks like a nail

Bonus, two songs from her previous album. Solar Power that I love, though I feel Virgin is stronger as an album.

Stoned at the Nail Salon

Well, my hot blood's been burnin' for so many summers now
It's time to cool it down, wherever that leads
'Cause all the music you loved at sixteen, you'll grow out of
And all the times they will change, it'll all come around
I don't know
Maybe I'm just
Maybe I'm just stoned at the nail salon again

Secrets from a Girl (who's seen it all)

Welcome to sadness
The temperature is unbearable until you face it
Thank you for flying with Strange Airlines
I will be your tour guide today
Your emotional baggage can be picked up at carousel number 2
Please be careful so that it doesn't fall onto someone you love
When we've reached your final destination
I will leave you to it
You'll be fine
I'm just gonna show you in
And you can stay as long as you need
To get familiar with the feeling
And then when you're ready, I'll be outside
And we can go look at the sunrise
By euphoria mixed with existential vertigo?
Cool

I've got a few albums and songs that feel like they were made just for me, simply because they are obscure.

• Freedom by M-Fuge/Centrifuge - An album produced in the late 90s for a single year's program of Southern Baptist summer camps - one I didn't even attend. It's got some pretty simple but surprisingly well produced praise music. I don't believe in God, but it's a good comforting listen to me.

• They Eat Their Own - The one and only album from the very short lived band of the same name. Full of 90s grungepunk rock. Includes "Like a Drug", which actually was very briefly popular, but the rest of the songs in the album clearly didn't get the same level of attention that that song got. But the roughness is kind of appealing in it's own way.

• The entire discography of Cool Cavemen - Once again, another band that was popular enough to get signed with a record label, and actually released a few albums. They still make the list because as hard as it is to get people to listen to Funk/Rock fusion music, it's even harder to get them to listen to French music, even when their best songs are in English. I almost didn't bring them up because they're still big enough to make it onto Spotify.

I've got tons more I could talk about that are much more obscure, but they're not quite on the same scale and quite a bit more niche. Just take a look at the last album I purchased on Bandcamp.

How about you? What's some music that you like that nobody else in the world seems to be aware of?

'Tis the season, and it's nice to sit down and listen to some traditional Christmas carols in a cozy candle-lit room with plenty of biscuits. And sometimes it's nice to hear more modern takes on these ancient (and not so ancient) classics.

Unfortunately, whenever I look for this sort of thing, what I usually find is really bland CCM — some woman breathily singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" so slowly I can feel my life draining from me with every beat, a completely unnecessary modern bridge replete with painful key change, and so on. I know this stuff can be done right — Annie Lennox's Christmas album is a great example of taking classic carols and setting them to new music in such a way that it can completely change how you hear them. But finding more stuff in that vein is surprisingly hard.

So does anyone here have any suggestions or ideas for modern takes on classic carols that actually try and do something interesting?

I have about a week of funemployment left before I start my new job, and one of the things I picked up this month was FL Studio to see if I can make a song. Does any have any tips/tricks or any recommended video tutorials? If it helps, I have some background in music theory and I play a couple of instruments and have a preamp setup with line in's and stuff.

https://www.powercomposer.net/

I am not affiliated with this project, I just think it's awesome and deserves more publicity.

Power Composer is a piano-reel-style MIDI editor built in the Godot game engine (though it is a tool, not a game). It's intended to be lighter and more accessible than a DAW, but still quite powerful. The dev has been quietly working on it for a while now and just recently made a free early-access Windows build available!

I've been keeping an eye on it ever since it was featured in the Godot 2024 showreel, as I've wanted something like it for a while. Several years ago, I was playing around with Chrome Music Lab's "Song Maker" so I could use it in my classroom. I ended up having such a great time that I got incredibly sidetracked and spent a while just writing stuff. I know the grid-based sequencer isn't a novel concept, but something about that particular configuration just clicked with me.

Ever since then, I've been searching for something similar but more capable that still clicks in the same way. I tried Bosca Ceoil, LMMS, and a couple DAWs' MIDI editors, but nothing quite did it. Then I saw Power Composer. Now that I can actually try it, it's just as comfortable as I hoped! I'm a classically-trained music teacher and have been writing/arranging with software like Dorico for years, but something about sequencers (and Power Composer in particular) just feels more freeing to me than traditional notation.

It is not open-source nor is it planned to be, which is a bummer because I'd love to contribute, but I get it - being paid for your work is nice. No word on the release price or timeline yet.

The dev seems like a good guy. In addition to the website above, Power Composer has a Youtube channel and a Discord server, and he is actively taking feature requests and bug reports on the latter.

I've been exploring it a bit and I'd be happy to answer any questions people have about it! Really enjoying it so far.

So there used to be this vibrant community on macjams.com where DIY musicians congregated to share their music, collaborate, offer advice and constructive criticism, etc., but the site shut down in 2019 with nothing to take its place. Every couple of years, I'll start the search again, but I haven't found anything that scratches the same itch anywhere on the web. There are a few subreddits that attempt to create the same atmosphere and scope, but the overwhelming majority of content I've found is spammed out with self-promotion and endless empty threads.

Has anyone found a community similar to Macjams that I've missed or overlooked?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.