Over the recent holiday shopping season, U.S. artists and labels saw a 140% increase in tape sales over the previous year.
Bandcamp saw a 46% increase in cassette sales and the largest cassette tape manufacturer in the U.S., the National Audio Company, saw a 20% increase in its commercial tape duplication business.
This continues an upward trend for the company, which did more business in 2014 than at any other previous point since its factory opened in 1969.
While it's still a tiny sliver of overall music consumption the seemingly counterintuitive revival of cassettes shows no sign of slowing down, even as streaming music subscriptions explode. But why...
[Photo:
Steve Maw]
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If you liked this edition of
Mike Overly's
12 Tone Music Newsletter, forward it to your friends. and
'til next time, play and have fun, I'll be listening!
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Guitar strings are uncomplicated. They are simply a piece of material - gut, nylon, steel, or alloy - worked into a specific shape for a specific purpose. And by looking at the properties of the material, we can better understand what's going on when we hear that dreaded plink and snap. Ultimately, string breakage boils down to three main issues: trauma, fatigue and corrosion.
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"
Guitar EncycloMedia is written for the guitarist who has been playing for a while, but is seriously hampered by the feeling that they "don't know what they're doing." Guitar EncycloMedia provides the perfect solution to this problem by efficiently presenting the theoretical basis of music in a way that is clear, easily applied, and does not require the reading of staff notes or TAB." -
Randy Roos, Associate Professor of Guitar, Berklee College of Music, Boston, MA.
Dramatically improve your playing by easily learning all the chords, scales, arpeggios and modes necessary to improvise something uniquely different every time with every song. With over 323 pages,
Guitar EncycloMedia is total fretboard knowledge in one book!
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Written by
GRAMMY® Nominated Music Educator
Mike Overly -
Guitar EncycloMedia is as essential as your instrument!
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WATCH THIS
The Ibanez Tube Screamer is one of the most loved, copied and modded overdrive pedals of all time. The pedal has been issued (and reissued) in numerous variants over the years and found a place in the rigs of players like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Kirk Hammett, Gary Moore, Steve Vai and many others. This brand-new video hips us to four fun facts about the Tube Screamer, including info about the pedal's origins, electronics, variants and more...
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In this Pat Martino guitar lesson, the jazz legend shares with you an inspiring re-mapping of the fretboard that is radically different from what is typically taught. "The guitar is structured like no other instrument," states Martino, "and it unveils itself in a unique way. This lesson may forever change how you visualize the way harmony, melody, and improvisation all function...
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GREAT GEAR
Tape Echo History
Early attempts at using electronics in making music weren't just meant for amplifying instruments or recording. Translating sound through circuits also inspired attempts to recreate natural sound phenomena like reverberation (reflected sound you hear less than 0.1 seconds after the initial sound) and echo (longer, near-exact repeats of entire phrases). What surely must have mesmerized canyon-wandering humans 20,000 years ago inspired equal wonder among the engineers of the 20th century.
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ARTIST AWARENESS
A few years ago, I was trying to figure out if audio resolution was a perceptible thing or just a bunch of baloney, so I invited some teenagers over. I played songs they had chosen in three different formats: CD, MP3, and vinyl. They had no opinions about the sound quality, and were weirded out by the equipment. After fifteen minutes, the girl turned and said, "Wow." Maybe a spatial relationship had been sensed, frequencies detected. Nope. "This is the first time I've ever listened to music without doing something else," she clarified!
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