I've been a big fan of down-tempo electronica ever since I discovered Zero 7's Simple Things in an FYE about thirteen years ago. I can pretty much listen to anything (music is fun!), but I've always found myself coming back to down-tempo and the like.

Lately, I've been digging through various Youtube music compilations, like Homework Radio and ChilledCow, and it's so good. I still like to find new artists (the local college radio is great for this), but I still find myself coming home from work and throwing on a compilation like the one's mentioned above.

So, I was wondering if any of my fellow Tilderinos liked this sort of music too, and in the spirit of creating discussion, I figured I'd ask! Ya dig?

:)

Hey everyone!

So I've been writing poetry and ghostwriting lyrics for friends of mine for nearly a decade at this point.

Due to recent life events, I've gotten back into the hobby of writing my own songs.

Up til now, it's been entirely topline work. Sifting through instrumentals online until I find one I can't help but write for, then staying up until four am driving around for a couple nights and churning out lyrics. I've recently grabbed an entry-level DAW and a couple courses aimed at producing my own instrumentals. I'd like to be able to go beyond writing lyrics and get to a point where I can cover the whole process. It sounds fun to me to put money aside and casually build up a home studio! :)

One thing that's caught my attention recently is the different vocal styles that a lot of artists have. Not just in their delivery, accent, etc. but also in the way that the tracks are edited! Pardon the lack of jargon, but for some examples:

I notice artists like Hålsey tend to have a very "crisp" kind of sound,

artists like Joji tend to have a more "echo-y" sound,

and artists like Lil Peep do this cool thing where it sounds like he triple-layers his voice to give a more dynamic sound to his songs.

Are there any books or courses online I can look into to learn vocal editing? I follow along with YouTube channels like Roomie and Andrew Huang, so I've seen them play around with AutoTune a few times, but that's the limit of my knowledge.

Thanks!

I no longer listen to the radio, nor do I discuss music much with friends. My favorite hometown station even switched to Christian rock. So now I'm no longer discovering any new music, and I have no idea what's good. What do you do to keep up with what's good these days?

Here it is, the first album of our listening club: OK Computer by Radiohead. This is the first of the odd week classic-focused posts, and you get get further details on this project here. I'll stop spamming ~music with posts about this now, we'll only have one a week from here on out.

Here's the place to discuss your thoughts on the record, your history with it or the band, and basically talk about whatever you want to that goes along with OK Computer. Remember that this is intended to be a slow moving thing, feel free to take your time and comment at any point in the week!

If you'd like to stream the album, it can be found on most streaming platforms here.

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Vote on next week's album here, we currently have a 7 way tie that needs to be broken!

Gorillaz has a new album coming out next week, is anyone else really excited?
Some of the singles already released from the album:
Humility - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5yFcdPAGv0
Sorcerez - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40xG4bMr9F4
Fireflies - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCet4yrfp4o
Lake Zurich - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JpPpSc7bs
Hollywood - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgwE94KZJ7E

Of them, I think Fireflies has to be my favorite. What's yours?

Alright, so in the ideas thread, several of you expressed that you'd like / it would be more active if we went for a listening club that goes for something more general. As I think ~music is in a bit of a rough spot right now and needs a little more to bind it together, I'm going to try and have a bit of a hybrid solution that can hopefully be interesting for a lot of us.

Again, the idea is to come together and listen to the same record each week, discussing our thoughts on that album over the course of that week in these threads. For now, let's make our goal to build a community and become familiar with the thoughts, tastes, and musical histories of each other!

For every odd numbered week, we will listen to an acclaimed or important album of some kind that will hopefully have far-reaching appeal. I'm going to exercise my own judgement in picking these out of the qualifying albums, but expect them to be the OK Computers, A Love Supremes, and Illmatics of the world. If and when we reach a point where we've exhausted too many of these classics, we can restructure or retire this listening club.

For every even numbered week, we will listen to a more obscure record as voted on by the participants of the thread. For an initial guide, as stolen from @Eva, we will define "obscure" simply as not being certified Gold (or anything higher, of course). This is of course a very loose definition of the term, but it's at least a concrete starting place. As ~ gives us a raw vote count, we will do this through voting on comments. All nominations must be made as a reply to my top level comment. Everything else will be ignored, and this will help keep things organized once this voting occurs on a thread that's dedicated to its own week's record. If it becomes necessary, we can vote on an external platform.

I'm open to suggestions on how to change this process, but let's try to run it like this for a little bit. I don't want to get caught in that loop where you have so many tweaks and find so many flaws that you don't end up doing anything at all.

The first thread will be posted tomorrow (Thursday the 21st here) and will continue on from there weekly.

When we start our first record, feel free to listen, comment, and vote throughout the week. ~ gives us an opportunity to bump things and keep discussion going for a bit longer than Reddit, so let's take advantage of that where we can.

Okay everyone, so with the grand total of one response (and being informed that it's apparently been discussed before) saying there's interest in setting up a listening club, I'm going to try and get something going. Even if it's just a few of us, it seems like a fun thing to me.

For anyone that doesn't know, a listening club is pretty much what it sounds like, we choose an album and all listen to it over the course of the week, with discussion on it occurring in the weekly threads. Over the club's length, the idea is generally to better understand the subject of the club, usually being a genre, movement, or era.

There's a few ways to go about deciding what to listen for these. We could go by outside lists, allow users running listening clubs to curate their own listening lists (my preferred method just because it's so easy to set up), or vote every week for the next record. The last option seems the most natural, but also requires a certain level of community involvement that may not be reliable, and it gets a little bit awkward before the hierarchy system is running / before we have a trust system or community moderators.

So, what do you guys think? How would you like to see these organized? What should we start with, since a general "all music" listening club doesn't seem quite right? Do you want to participate in these at all? I'm willing to manage anything yall want to do, but I would personally love to do user-curated ones and run my own hip hop essentials club. Of course, that requires trusting an individual to do their own thing, which may not be where we want to go...up to all of you.

We're at roughly 7 days since the last weekly thread, so here's another! Imo we should have more regular threads like these, if anyone has ideas then drop them here! Personally I like the idea of doing "listening clubs," where we choose an album for the week, all listen to it, and have a regular discussion thread for every week. If there's any interest, I would love to run a hip hop focused one, though I could definitely do a lot of other genres if the desire was there. Anyway, drop a comment if anything like that sounds appealing to you!

Shamelessly copying my own prompt for this one:

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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!

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

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

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