Born and raised in El Paso, TX, now I call Chicago my adopted home. When not unearthing forgotten musical gems, I try to make some time to write my own music using acoustic guitars, MIDI controllers, and electric violin.
zZounds travelled three trains stops out of Chicago’s downtown skyline to catch the sights and sounds of from Pitchfork’s annual music festival. As eclectic and interesting as their vaunted website, the Pitchfork Festival — now in its 12th year — holds the distinction of keeping the same editorial eye in their own curated lineup, location, […]
Welcome to Beat Connection, a series dedicated to promoting modern and vintage dance styles the only way we know how…by providing you a musical starting point to help you create that beat. In our previous post, we outlined a very important concept to think about when composing music: tempo. Today, we take one more step […]
With Moogfest drawing near, rumors of a new creation from Moog have been swirling. Today, we’ve learned about their newest synthesizer: the Moog Subsequent 37 CV. Handcrafted at Moog’s headquarters in Asheville, NC and limited to only 2,000 pieces worldwide, the Subsequent 37 is the result of Moog expanding on the popular Sub 37 Tribute Edition paraphonic analog synthesizer by […]
Welcome to Beat Connection, a series dedicated to promoting modern and vintage dance styles the only way we know how…by providing you a musical starting point to help you create that beat. In our previous post, we showed you what constitutes a song, providing you a basic structure you can use to arrange beats into songs. […]
Welcome to Beat Connection, a series dedicated to promoting modern and vintage dance styles the only way we know how…by providing you a musical starting point to help you create that beat. Last time we showed you the way around grid notation – essential info for understanding your way around drum machines and recording software. Today, we go forward […]
Welcome to Beat Connection, a series dedicated to promoting modern and vintage dance styles the only way we know how…by providing you a musical starting point to help you create that beat. Today, we go back to the beginning. In plain terms, we’re outlining how what you see in a drum machine translates to what you’ll find in […]
With the news of Jaki Liebezeit’s recent passing, what better time than now to take a look back at his influential body of work? Let’s begin where it began. “Communism, anarchism, nihilism” — those were the powerful words rumbling through Jaki’s head in 1968. Christening the band CAN — a move away from their original name Inner Space — […]
What’s more surprising than the revival of the vinyl record market? The revival in people not knowing what a record player or turntable is, what the things on it do, or how they work — or that record players and turntables are, in fact, the same thing! If you fit this description, don’t fret: we […]
If we know anything about these times, it’s that sacrifices — whether earned or unearned — are coming. Leonard Cohen’s whole life was one moved by sacrifice. He was the first of his generation of Polish-Jewish immigrants to look for a better life in Quebec, Canada. Born into a middle-class family in 1934, his upbringing […]