Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

The Offspring are touring to support their new album Let The Bad Times Roll. They did two stops in Leeds, one to play a big gig at Leeds Arena and another to do a more intimate acoustic site at The Wardrobe.

Ironically, despite it being an album launch, I don’t think they played any songs off their new album. It was all about the classics: The Kids Aren’t Alright, Self-Esteem, Why Don’t You Get A Job, Dirty Magic and a host of others. But perhaps the highlight was Noodles busting out Come Out And Play on the ukulele.

COVID compliance was good. The venue was checking COVID passports and face masks at the door, and most people kept their masks on if they weren’t actively drinking.

Last year, Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits fame) announced he was playing a gig in Leeds. It seemed like an excellent birthday present for my dad. Thus began an agonising five-month wait where we all had to keep quiet about it, not easy when my mum’s friends were talking about how they were going. Well worth it in the end, though!

Leeds Arena has tight security on the night. Everyone had to go through airport-style scanners and put their valuables in a little tray. We were on level 2, which didn’t seem that high up until we took our seats. It also meant that I really struggled to see the stage clearly. But the audio was fine.

I saw Knopfler play in Sheffield a few years ago. Quite a lot has changed. First, he has gained in popularity. Sheffield had maybe 3-4 thousand people there, Leeds was closer to 10.

Second, this was more of a rock show. His Sheffield gig was a bit folkier and he was changing guitar mid-song to do little fiddly bits. This time he only changed his guitar at the end of each song (which is still a lot of guitars), played his more popular solo stuff as well as a few Straits classics and it was more upbeat.

Finally, he is definitely a bit older. He shuffles around the stage a little more and plays with more of a stoop. That is perhaps understandable when you are still busting our two-hour shows at the age of 69, though (not that it’s stopping Pete Townsend!).

Venla seems to enjoy music and has lots of fun kicking her piano. So, I decided to take the next logical step and get her a xylophone.

Technically, it’s a glockenspiel. But it seems to me that the skills ought to be transferable if she wants to expand to actually playing xylophone in later life.

She still has a lot to learn. For example, how to use the mallet to hit the keys, rather than putting it in her mouth.

As the smoke cleared on the terrible incident in Manchester and we were able to clear our heads, I began to reflect on the wider implications of what had happened. While such incidents are a tragedy that we would all would rather not have happened, it does provide us opportunities to study aspects of human behaviour we may not always have access to.

Take the adage, “all publicity is good publicity”, for example. It is often debated. Islam is the fastest growing religion in America since 9-11. Over a 6-week period, United Airlines share price actually went up after they got caught smashing up passengers luggage. So I wondered how this event would affect Ariana Grande’s record sales.

Hypthesis

If all publicity is good publicity, we should see Ariana Grande’s record sales increase. This is because the event would cue people to think of her. This would then remind them that they liked her music and go listen to her. Just like it being Friday cues people to go listen to Rebecca Black (sans the good music), as Johan Burger points out in his book Contagious.

So, I devised a very rudimentary experiment. I took the top five Ariana Grande songs on Spotify and recorded the number of listens they had. I then went back five days later and recorded the numbers again. To give us some control data to compare against, I also recorded the numbers for two similar artists: Bridget Mendler and Selena Gomez.

Results

The average increase in the number of listens for Ariana Grande was 2.70%. This compares to 3.29% for Bridget Mendler and 28.06% for Selena Gomez. However, as there is such a huge outlier for Gomez, it may make sense to remove that, it comes down to 6.13%.

Discussion

Initial results would indicate that the incident has not had a positive impact on Ariana Grande’s record sales. If anything, it has had a negative impact.

However, there are some huge caveats to the whole experiment that mean we cannot draw any firm conclusions from it. First, we’re looking at a really small sample size. I only included two other comparison artists and Gomez has two large outliers in her results.

Doing a percentage increase comparison makes sense because this accounts for the popularity of the artist. A simple numbers game would not make sense because bigger artists are likely to increase much faster than smaller artists. However, the percentages are not perfect either.

For one, assuming we buy into the snowball effect, even in percentage terms, larger artists should grow faster than smaller artists. Grande has the biggest following of the three so we might expect her numbers to be bigger.

Nor does it take into account other factors such as the age of the song. A newly released hit, for example, it likely to grow in listens far quicker than an old classic because the existing listens on a new song will be far lower. Then there are other factors at work. Some of the songs are collaborations with other artists, for example.

All of this means that the results here are a very rough estimate.

Conclusion

Terrorism appears to have had a negative effect on Ariana Grande’s record sales. This refutes the adage that “all publicity is good publicity”.

There are a number of reasons this could be the case. First, the negative associations of the incident may be reflecting on Grande herself. Even though it is in no way her fault, we’ll be unable to avoid forming some association. Dan Ariely discusses this in his book Predictably Irrational. People blame weather presenters for bad weather.

Second, people may feel it was now inappropriate to listen to Grande or that doing so was tactless in the light of what had happened.

Or, it could be a statistical anomaly introduced by a small sample size and fundamental flaws in the experiment’s methodological design, and that it is not representative of the wider pattern.

Footnotes

Image courtesy of Melissa Rose via Wikimedia Commons.

Venla’s first Eurovision. She was not excited about it.

Nor were the contestants. This year’s contest didn’t produce much in the way of songs I have found burrowed inside my head. I still have a fair few knocking around on my playlist from last year, so it was disappointing to see a less-exciting array this year.

At least Romania gave us some rap yodelling.

Decent year for Britain. We were on the left-hand side of the scoreboard for quite a long time.

But maybe that is a sign that we have let out expectations drop too long. We have won it five times. Great commentary by Graham Norton, as ever.

We’re only five days away from Eurovision 2017. A timeless competition designed to unite the people of Europe together (after what Germany did). Here is what you don’t need to know about this year’s competition.

Lucie Jones is singing for Great Britain

It sounds like she is about to kick into the main upbeat exciting song at any point. But she never does.

Norma John is singing for Finland

And it’s worse than Britain’s entry.

Italy are strong favourites

They’re at less than evens on Betfair. Francesco Gabbani is singing Occidentali’s Karma for them. It’s in Italian and it is a pretty fun song. Of course, Russia were at evens for Eurovision 2016 and failed to secure the victory. But far fewer people hate Italy.

Also, Italy has a dancing gorilla. And no, I don’t think it’s a Chabris & Simons experiment.

If you have ever wanted a real-world version of Guitar Hero, Rocksmith may be for you. However, learning guitar still takes a lot of practice.

Guitar Hero has proved to be a very popular game, and it was only a matter of time until people started asking “is there any way this could be done with a real guitar?”

The answer was yes, in the form of Ubisoft’s Rocksmith. You plug a guitar into your games console using a USB to 1/4” jack cable and then play a Guitar Hero-style game, with the idea of it teaching you to play a real guitar.

But does it actually work? I took Ubisoft up on their 60 day challenge: put in an hour per day and you will play guitar for life, or so they say.

Did it work? Sort of. On the positive side, I can indeed play guitar. Within a year or so of first picking it up I was good enough to join a band, if only to hold down some chords while the real guitarists played the fancy stuff.

On the flip side, it really takes practice. I played for two hours per day, instead of one. I also acquired a guitar teacher for one-to-one lessons and still it was really six months before I could play a simple song.

That ignores the fun I had using Rocksmith though. You are playing your favourite tunes, even if it is just the occasional note at first, and while the adaptive difficulty can be annoying at times, it does make it accessible to everyone. Even if it doesn’t turn you into a guitar player for life, you may find you have just as much fun playing it as any other video game.

One of the remarkable abilities of babies is to force you to throw everything that you have ever loved. This happened several times before Venla was once, again after she was born, and now more time. With each iteration, you think there is nothing more you could possibly do without. But there is. You have to keep getting rid of more and more stuff.

In general, I think this is therapeutic. However, it is not like we now have less stuff. It just means we have different stuff.

One of the latest victims is my guitar amplifier. I had a beautiful Vox AC15VR with a value pre-amp. Unfortunately, it had nowhere to live.

I have had to sell it and replace it with a small Orange Crush 20. It does look cool, but it does not sound as good. It does, however, fit in my apartment.

The moral of the story? Buy an amp large enough that it itself can become a piece of furniture you can store things on.

The July event of Sunday Assembly Leeds was on the theme of Yorkshire (it being Yorkshire Day the following day). Our speaker for the month, Mary from City of Sanctuary, spoke about the efforts to make Leeds a more inclusive and more welcoming place. The cake selection was also excellent, having had much left overs from the Humanist picnic the day before.

The Assembly Line performed as usual, just as a three piece this month. This left me as the only guitarist, but it could have sounded a bit worse.

The Housemartins – Happy Hour

Kaiser Chiefs – I Predict A Riot

I was given some vouchers for Christmas and earlier this month I finally got round to spending them. My latest edition is a chorus pedal. I was originally looking at the Arion analogue chorus. However at around £200, I wasn’t that in love with it, so I gave the Boss Super Chorus and Boss Chorus Ensemble a go.

It was a tough choice between the two. In the end, I settled on the CE-5 because it seemed to have a slightly warmer sound than the CH-1. It could have between the way I had it set up, or it could have been pure placebo, but even after extensive fiddling with the knobs I got a better sound out of the Ensemble.

I am hoping that it will be useful in creating even more atmosphere for the band. It produces a similar effect to the delay. I already have a Carbon Caby on my board, so it doesn’t add a huge range of extra options. However, in time I think I will learn how to get a nice subtle effect out of it that bulks up our sound. Or, if not, at least my Smiths covers will sound better.

I also played around with a wah, which is the other pedal originally included in my pedal board master plan. It was fun, but I am not going to worry about that for now: the board is also getting pretty crowded!