we're called The Three Leonards. We do covers of pop songs in a pastiche of mid-1980's Leonard Cohen, and yes it's pretty different than music other people make today. Folks seem to like our covers of Toxic and Rusted From The Rain quite a bit.
oh jesus, GOOD beer.
how anyone can drink sub-par beer is fucking beyond me. Drinking that stuff is just self-disrespect. I mean, I get it, but, just, no.
On another forum, I was complaining about how Microsoft was planning to remove WordPad from Win11. I was advised that installing OpenOffice or LibreOffice was an appropriate replacement. I replied that WordPad was only 3 megs large, as opposed to the recommended replacements, which are decidedly larger.
I guess not everybody appreciates tight code, but I surely do. Things like this are amazingly impressive.
Trivia moment: The original version of the music video for Rest In Peace by Extreme had segments shot in a very similar fashion, but evidently it was too similar. Since they didn't have permission beforehand they had to pull that version of the video from broadcast and replace it with this version.
Walmart is predatory, arguably evil in their business practices. They're entrenched in North America, the damage they have inflicted is already done. In many cities they are the only game in town.
Giving Meta our information is bad enough.
Allowing them to take our information even when we did not give it freely is even worse.
Advertising via Meta is even worse than that, but small businesses have very little choice between Meta and Google for that.
Buying something sold by Meta is best avoided entirely.
As of the past few years, I produce pop songs performed in a pastiche of Leonard Cohen's mid-late 80's style (when he really started to sound super cool). My buddies and I call ourselves The Three Leonards. Our covers of Toxic and Rusted From The Rain have proven very popular. They're not jazz but they're also not not jazz. The cool kids seem to like them. We've made over 20 bucks in streaming which is as close to success as you can want. Have a listen and see what madness sounds like.
As far as home studio kit goes, I run Reaper: it's just great.
Also a shout-out to ReEQ for Reaper which is free and as close to FabFilter as I need.
I have a Nektar 61-key MIDI keyboard. Just the right size. One slider on it has gone wonky but I don't use the sliders that much. I like the touchpads; they're fun.
I record vocals and acoustic instruments using a Scarlett interface and a really sweet mic from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_condenser_microphone_(Unsplash).jpg evidently from before they got bought out. I got it as a gift and it does the trick.
I have a reasonably decent multi-effects pedal from Boss that I mostly use for gigging but occasionally for studio tracking.
I did buy Diva and Kontakt and SSD and Analog Lab : they're all super handy, and are the ones I lean on the most. There are plenty of free VSTs out there to use: only when freeware/demo versions are insufficient should you consider spending money.