Music

This is a progressive enhancement I wrote from scratch with vanilla JS. Easy for JS wizards, but I’m not a JS wizard, so I’m proud of it! twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Tinnitus Tracker now has audio embeds on show pages. Here’s an upcoming one I’m especially excited about: tinnitus.robweychert.com/2019/06/22/tor…

rumz.org v3

If Rumsey Taylor is not on your radar, this is an excellent opportunity to rectify that error.

Hindsight 2070: We asked 15 experts, "What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?" Here’s what they told us.

Most of these are more aspirations than likely outcomes, and one is included in a rather transparent attempt at ideological diversity (see if you can guess which one!), but an interesting collection… See more →

Three day weekend. Brand-new records from @Enforcermetal and @otobokebeaver. 👍🏻

I expected learning musical notation to be like learning another language, and it is. But unlike learning a phonetic language that uses a familiar alphabet, music’s symbology constitutes its own unique alphabet. And while its symbols can be interpreted vocally, they’re just as likely to be interpreted with an instrument (in my case, a guitar). Rather than an English speaker learning Spanish, the process is more like an English speaker learning Arabic and translating it… See more →

I thought I’d eventually have to travel to see them, but Uranium Club is coming to me, and friends, I AM EXCITED. tinnitus.robweychert.com/2019/06/27/ura…

There were definitely more men in their 50s at this show than I expected to see!

I went partly because I enjoy Colleen’s records and partly as something of a recon mission: As I’m focusing more on making music again, singing and playing power chords live over canned backing tracks is an approachable performance goal, and I wanted to see how well a pro could make it work. Colleen’s biggest strength is her songwriting, and… See more →

Back on the horse. My thanks to Ronnie James Dio for powering me through the last half mile.

Good evening. To whom it may concern, this evening’s apartment cleaning will be soundtracked exclusively by DLR-era Van Halen.

alexa how can i tell if theres a bustle in my hedgerow

You Are Not a Tool

To me, that combination of many things — of not being tied to one particular tool — is where the power often lies.

The Tragedy of Baltimore

In 2017, it recorded 342 murders — its highest per-capita rate ever, more than double Chicago’s, far higher than any other city of 500,000 or more residents and, astonishingly, a larger absolute number of killings than in New York, a city 14 times… See more →

I was correct to assume that Steve Albini giving a tour of Electrical Audio is a great way to spend a half hour. youtu.be/NwkF3-JmSeA

RIP Scott Walker. May we all learn from his example and find the courage to follow our muse into uncharted territory.

It’s easy to ding this doc for its nearly three-hour run time, which seems self-indulgent. I don’t think its length is one of its strengths, but I didn’t find it to be a slog either. Mostly I just enjoyed hanging out with its characters and hearing their stories, and I was especially tickled to hear members of the apocalyptic Neurosis geeking out over how much they love Green Day. Being something of an outsider who… See more →

If I speak
at one constant volume
at one constant pitch
at one constant rhythm
right into your ear
you still won’t hear twitter.com/robweychert/st…

The new @otobokebeaver single makes me happy and I’d like it very much if they played some non-festival US dates. otobokebeaver.bandcamp.com/track/dont-lig…

So much sadgasm in the reminiscences flooding @thetrocadero’s mentions right now. 😭

I’ve spent more time at @thetrocadero than any other music venue. I don’t go much anymore, but hope it stays afloat. tinnitus.robweychert.com/venue/trocader…

Just this week I wrote about how @thetrocadero’s old handbills inspired the design of my new site. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2019/03/c…

Well this is a massive bummer. No official word yet, but apparently @thetrocadero is closing. phillymag.com/news/2019/03/1…

Thanks to Tinnitus Tracker’s many browsing options, there are more than 1,000 lists of shows on the site, making the show list the most prevalent design pattern. It was clear from the start that this would be the case, and the design of event listings is something I’ve given a lot of thought as a designer and music fan, so it was the first thing I explored in early sketches and mockups.

My initial… See more →

Spent the afternoon listening to @JesseSykes while driving across the desert. 😌

Hello, dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

I owe you a belated “Happy new year!” since I failed to get this newsletter out the door the past two months. If you’re desperate to see the links that never made it to your inbox during those months, you can find December and January (along with every other edition) on my site.

In February, I finally launched Tinnitus Tracker, a live music diary I’ve… See more →

Leah and I discovered, roughly seven years after the fact, that we were at the same Soul Coughing show in Philly in 1998, long before we met. This Mike Doughty show was a fun opportunity to kind of recreate that night as if we had actually spent it together.

Soul Coughing was perhaps the most unique band to find a larger audience during the permissive major-label alt-rock boom of the ’90s, and to my ears,… See more →

Best internet of the year so far. twitter.com/electrolemon/s…

Dude at Chipotle just gave me an unsolicited briefing on what hip-hop was and how it was ruined. I am now prepared to take your questions.

Earlier this month I launched Tinnitus Tracker, my last big personal creative project left over from 2018. That frees me up to get down to business on my main creative goal for 2019: making music.

I’m a lifelong music fanatic and always wanted to be able to call myself a musician, but I didn’t get around to really making an effort until about ten years ago, when I started taking guitar lessons. I had to… See more →

Hello, here is a Stevie Wonder drum solo for your Thursday: youtube.com/watch?v=iBA4vW…

Pretty excited about the first post-launch update to Tinnitus Tracker: tinnitus.robweychert.com/2019/05/28/bjo…

Reading aloud from my music theory homework. Every time a grand staff is mentioned, @ChamberMonster declares, “You shall not pass!”

“Something changed in me that year. It made me just not want to make music.” Imagine how many women can say this. 😞 nytimes.com/2019/02/13/art…

If you dig that cassettes site, here’s an old love letter from me to mixtapes, complete with downloadable mixtape: v6.robweychert.com/blog/2008/01/r…

😍😍😍 twitter.com/brucel/status/…

I did it. I made the most Rob Weychert thing. tinnitus.robweychert.com

In the spring of 2015, Last.fm, a social site that tracks users’ music listening habits, gave subscribers a sneak peek at its upcoming redesign. The first thing I noticed was that the Events section, which I had been using for a decade to catalog the shows I went to, was gone. It was reinstated when the redesign was publicly unveiled a few months later, but the temporary evaporation of my data was a good reminder:… See more →

“In a tight, compressed space, music can get asphyxiated.” nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opi…

Whatever bullshit awaits, Brian Downey’s drum fills will get me through it. youtube.com/watch?v=NCA1yC…

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

Can anyone recommend a good guitar teacher or school in NYC? Primarily rock but preferably well versed in a variety of styles.

What would it take to organize a mass boycott of the secondary market for event tickets?

Today’s radio station: open.spotify.com/user/spotify/p…

Ian MacKaye thought his bass was broken. Darryl from Bad Brains picked it up. “It wasn’t the bass.” I think of it when Leah uses my kitchen.

why is @kennyloggins not the spokesman for @1Password

Kudos to @MsRebeccaBlack. 8 years later, virtually every morning, I open my kitchen cabinet with a “Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal.”

What we now call mixtapes are cool but I wish I could still use the term unambiguously as it was originally used.