Who is the King of Pop?

Overview

One of the first questions about pop music that occurred to me was: is Michael Jackson truly the king of pop, as he was often called? If not Michael, who is the true king1 of pop? At an intuitive level, it seemed to me that being the king broke down to two main factors: the king should have the most hit songs of all time, and the king should have been a dominant presence on the charts for many years, such that you could barely listen to pop music without hearing one or another of his or her songs.

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50 Years of Pop Songs

Like many, I was deeply immersed in pop when I was growing up (for me, the 80s). I then abandoned it for more esoteric stuff for a while, spending the 90s mostly listening to industrial, techno, and electronica. In the last ten years or so, I’ve returned to pop with a new appreciation for the genius of a perfectly crafted pop song.

When I came back to pop, I formed a couple of crotchety-old-man theories about how contemporary pop differs from its forebears. I’m a cautious person though, so before ranting about the kids today, I decided to collect some data and test my theories. The result is an exploration of the last 50 years of pop songs. As it happens, I haven’t yet finished my original driving question about pop song meaning; my explorations of “popularity” are linked below.

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The Sound of 2013

At the end of every year, pretty much every music critic, blogger, or enthusiast makes their list of top 10 songs or albums of the year. I usually don’t, but in 2013 I explored a lot more music than usual and decided to make a list too. There are a few differences between my top 10 list and most people’s though: (1) it is songs I discovered, rediscovered, or just listened to a lot in 2013; (2) it has 12 songs on it; and (3) it comes out in August instead of December.

In 2013, I made an effort to break out of my music habits of the last 20 years and listen to a lot of new music (thank you, KEXP, SoundHound, and Spotify). As I listened, I collected a mostly-unfiltered playlist of stuff I heard and tracked down. Toward the end of the year, I made two more lists: The Sound of 2013, the stuff I listened to and enjoyed enough that they define the sound of the year for me, and The Best of 2013, my absolute favorites.

Honestly, I probably could have just made Jagwar Ma’s “Howlin” the “Best of” list and it would be just as true. Howlin is easily my favorite album of the year and the best new thing I’ve heard in years. An old favorite, New Order’s “Movement”, makes an appearance as well, because I spent much of the year delving deeply into the sound of that album.

Anyway, for those without Spotify, here’s the “Best of” list:
– Jagwar Ma – Uncertainty
– Ana Tijoux – 1977
– The White Stripes – The Hardest Button to Button
– Wax Tailor – Say Yes (feat. ASM)
– Soft Metals – Tell Me
– Jagwar Ma – What Love
– New Order – The Him
– El Perro Del Mar – Hold off the Dawn
– Deltron 3030 – Pay the Price
– Weekend – Oubliette
– Phoenix – Everything is Everything
– Franz Ferdinand – Evil Eye

Adelman-inspired Desk Lamp

After I built my version of the Adelman Chandelier, I started experimenting with different designs, including this desk lamp.

Inquisitive desk lamp

Parts

  • 1 cluster body – item BOLG3
  • 1 8″ pipe – item PIBR08-OX8
  • 1 6″ pipe – item PIBR06-OX8
  • 2 5″ pipes – item PIBR05-OX8
  • 1 2″ pipe – item PIBR02-OX8
  • 1 1/2″ brass nipple
  • 1 nut
  • 2 balls
  • 1 switched lamp cord
  • 1 half silver bulb
  • 2 brass swivels – item SV140
  • 1 socket – item SO10045
  • 1 brass cup – item CU578
  • 1 brass reducer – item RE1/8FX1/4MS
  • white wire, black wire

Peter Hook and The Light Play My Favorite Albums Ever

I didn’t even know where to set my expectations for seeing 1/4 of New Order and his new band (about whom I knew nothing) playing two (actually three, since they got in most of Factus 8) of my all-time favorite albums. It turns out it was great. The Light are terrific — everybody was really good, and it was fun watching them. The only weak link really is Peter Hook’s singing, which is not so much that it’s objectively bad as that it didn’t feel like a good fit for New Order songs. Bernard Sumner always had a sort of light voice and higher range, whereas Hook (particularly 30 years on) is lower and gruffer. Anyway, the band was great.

Part of the pleasure was just hearing all those favorite songs played live and loud, whoever’s playing them. But for me, the greatest part was that I’ve been listening to Movement a lot lately and trying to figure out who was playing what, really listening to New Order as a 4-piece playing band rather than as the mad scientists of sequencers and drum machines and so on. So it was great to watch what The Light was doing and hear how it all went together to create the songs I know so well. Plus, whenever I’ve seen New Order, it’s been in a large venue where I was miles away. Here I was ten feet from the stage and could see everything. I imagine it was a little bit what it would have been like to see them live in 1982-3.

Hearing the songs off Movement was probably my favorite part, since you hardly ever hear those songs and I’ve been really immersing myself in that album lately. “The Him” might have been my favorite, since I just covered it, and I love the breakdown in the middle. Everyone started cheering and I was like “IT’S NOT OVER YET!” Of course, PC&L and Fact8 contain some of my all-time favorite songs as well; hearing the sequenced part of Everything’s Gone Green break out was a high point. All the musicians were great; I really need to go listen to my Monaco albums again (a lot of the same personnel are now in The Light).

Moby showing up (he came on for part of the encore and sang New Dawn Fades, Transmission, and Ceremony) was unexpected. He sounded fine, but his jerky sort-of Ian dance was disturbing. What was really weird though was the large men who appeared and started freaking out as soon as he came on. OMG MOBY!!! Really? You’ve just watched Peter Hook play classic New Order for two hours and you’re freaking out about Moby?

Set List:
In a Lonely Place
Procession
Dreams Never End
Truth
Senses
Chosen Time
ICB
The Him
Doubts Even Here
Denial
Cries and Whispers (Mesh?)
Everything’s Gone Green
Age of Consent
We All Stand
The Village
5 8 6
Your Silent Face
Ultraviolence
Ecstacy
Leave Me Alone
New Dawn Fades
Transmission
Ceremony
Temptation
Blue Monday

Connecting the Akai s950 and VX-90

Following up on my last post about connecting Akai samplers and synths with their proprietary 13-pin cable, I managed to get it working polyphonically with my s950 and VX-90. I expect this would also work with the AX-73 (which is virtually identical to the VX-90) and the AX-60 (which is similar) synths, and with the s900 and s612. Based on what worked for me and stuff I’ve read about people using the s612/AX-60 combo, I suspect all the units with the 13-pin connection work (somewhat) similarly.

How to get s950 voices to be processed polyphonically by the VX-90:

  1. Connect the voice out of the s950 to the sampler in of the VX-90. I found one on eBay described as “for Roland cable GKC-3 13-pin” — it’s a knockoff of a Roland guitar synth cable. If you get some other cable, make sure pins 1-7 are connected (1-9 to get all 8 voices).
  2. Connect the MIDI out of the VX-90 to the MIDI in of the s950. Not the thru! The VX-90 is going to transform the midi notes you send it before passing them on to the s950. If you want to be able to run the s950 without the VX-90, you’ll need to be able to reroute its MIDI input.
  3. Connect the outputs of the VX-90 to your mixer or amp.
  4. Set the VX-90 MIDI channel to 1 (edit, parameter 70). Set the s950 MIDI channel to 1. You can probably use other channels, but the two are actually going to communicate over multiple channels, so it’s easiest to just set them at 1 and let them do their thing.
  5. Create a patch on the VX-90 with sample input (parameter 06) set to ON and A/B balance (param 07) set to 100 (or at least 50). Set assignment mode (param 50) to POLY and portamento (param 51) to 0. For starters, open the filter up all the way (cutoff, param 10, to 100, and resonance, param 11, to 0).
  6. Create a program on the s950 with a single keygroup containing a simple synth sample, with the filter wide open (to 99). Duplicate this keygroup until you have 6 identical keygroups. Set the midi channel of KG1 to 1 and its output channel to mono 1. Set KG2 to channel 2 and mono 2, and so on.
  7. Select your sample patch on the VX-90 (the midi mode that communicates with the s950 is only enabled when you select a patch with sampler input set to ON).
  8. Send the VX-90 some midi notes. You should hear the s950 sample playing through the VX-90. Make sure when you run through a series of notes, all the notes are audible and that when you play a chord, you hear all the notes simultaneously. Play with the filter (param 10) to see it processing the sampler output. Assign some envelope modulation to the filter cutoff (param 13) to hear independent filter processing for each voice.
  9. To tweak your program on the sampler, edit the keygroups with KG set to “all”, which will change all 6 keygroups at once. Of course, you could give them different settings if you want a sort of random note effect.
  10. Play with the A/B balance (param 07) to mix the sampler with the internal oscillator. By turning the tune knob on the front of the VX-90 you can get a nice detune going between the two. You should also be able to put the VX-90 in DUAL or UNISON mode (param 50) to get extra stacking. If you just want to use UNISON, you actually don’t need all the keygroup hoo-ha on the sampler; that’s just necessary for polyphonic operation.

Why does this work? When the VX-90 is in sampler mode (i.e. when the current patch has sample input enabled, param 06) it spreads its midi notes across 6 channels, one corresponding to each voice. If you send it a series of notes on channel 1 and monitor the output (the  s950 has a midi monitor function), you’ll see the notes come through on channels 1-6. The s950 program is set up to receive on those 6 channels and route that note through the corresponding output in the 13-pin cable. The VX-90 and s950 have to be in sync this way to make sure the sound from the sampler goes through the corresponding voice that is being played at the same time.

Akai Samplers and Synths

For a while, Akai was making both samplers (s612, s900, s950) and analog synths (ax60, ax80, ax73, vx90) and they had this proprietary system for connecting them — a 13-pin cable that lets you run multiple channels of output out of the sampler and into the synth, allowing the sampler’s voices to be polyphonically processed by the synth’s analog filters and so on. This sounds like a great setup, so I was surprised when I recently scored an s950, vx90, and 13-pin cable to find very little info on this online, aside from the s612/ax60 combo. After a bunch of experimenting with my setup, I decided to record what I found for posterity.

  • The 13-pin cable is just a multi-channel audio connection
  • Each sampler voice corresponds to a single channel in the cable
  • The s612 has 6 voices, and the s900 and s950 have 8 (not sure about s700/x7000)
  • In the s950, a simple program with one keygroup assigned to “all outs” will get sent out the cable, apparently rotating through the 8 channels. Assigning the keygroup to a specific out will seemingly always send the audio out the corresponding cable channel.
  • In the s950, the individual channels are indeed monophonic (i.e. the do correspond exactly to the 8 voices). A later event will seemingly always cut off an earlier one.
  • The vx90 has six voices and apparently only listens to the first 6 of the 8 cable channels. So if it’s hooked up to an 8-voice sampler like the s950 that’s rotating through its voices, every 7th and 8th note will be dropped by the vx90
  • The s950 seems to have no way to assign a keygroup to a set of outs (i.e. outs 1-6). You can assign to a single out or to all (or to left/right, even/odd, but that doesn’t help).
  • If 2 keygroups are assigned to outs 7 and 8 while a third is assigned to all outs, the s950 is not smart enough to prevent the all group from sometimes using voices 7 and 8 and therefore cutting off those notes. So you seemingly can’t trick it into just using 1-6.
  • Since individual keygroups can be assigned to specific outs, a multi-keygroup program (e.g. a drumkit) could be set up to only use outs 1-6.
  • However, even if you get the s950 to not use outs 7 and 8, there seems to be no way to ensure that, on receiving a midi note, the s950 and vx90 will choose the SAME voice channel to use. So the notes still won’t line up.
  • The s612 and ax60 combo apparently address this by having a midi mode where the voices are controlled on 6 separate midi channels so that the two units can be forced to allocate the same voices. Presumably if you can put the ax60 in this mode, you could do something similar with the s950 by assigning keygroups to multiple midi channels. I don’t have an ax60 and don’t know if this is true.
  • If the vx90 is in unison mode (i.e. all 6 voices stacked), it will pick up audio on any of the 6 cable channels, so that works. Of course, this is just using the vx90 as a single monophonic filter on the s950’s output, which could be accomplished with any external filter.
  • You could also presumably make a cable that would wire a single audio channel to all 6 voice inputs in the 13-pin cable, allowing the vx90 to be used as a monophonic filter when in poly or dual mode, for whatever that’s worth.
  • The upshot is that, as far as I can tell, the whole Akai-sampler-synth connection thing is mostly bogus and unusable, unless you have an ax60, or just want to use the vx90 unison mode.
  • I believe everything I say about the vx90 applies to the ax73. I don’t know about other synths that may have the 13-pin connection.

Adelman Chandelier

A clickable copy of the parts list from the DIY Lindsay Adelman chandelier. Here’s another example with a lot of discussion in the comments.

From grandbrass.com

From indexfasteners.com

  • 2 plug buttons – item 5S48lS4K5900 (not for sale there; I skipped them entirely)

From amazon.com

From mcmaster.com (products not directly linkable)

  • 1 box or wire connectors – item 7108K32 (not shown on the diagram)
  • 10 feet of white wire – item 7587K138 (not shown on the diagram)
  • 10 feet of black wire – item 7587K133 (not shown on the diagram)
  • 1 electrical tape – item 76455A21 (not shown on the diagram)
  • 1 wire stripper – item 7660K14 (tool not shown on the diagram)

Other useful bits

  • Fixture mounting crossbar – item CB1/4
  • Universal mounting plate – item CBU2

Books, August 2012

**** Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game. I’m not sure how I never read this book before, but it was as good as everyone says.
**** Frank Herbert – Dune. Another one I shockingly never read before, and also really good. Now I have to see the movie, and read the rest of the books.
* Olaf Stapledon – Star Maker – I started this one, forced myself through it for a little while, but could not muster any interest in it.
*** Keith Roberts – Pavane. Good alternate-history story (actually, a collection of interlinked stories), in which the Catholic church still controls Europe and much of the world, suppressing much science and technology, with a coda that has a twist. An interesting exploration, though as a series of short stories, it doesn’t pull the reader into the characters as much as a single novel would. The stories also felt more poetic or fairy-tale esque than realistic, leaving me feeling somewhat disconnected. The twist at the end is thought-provoking but doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
*** Robert Charles Wilson – Spin. An interesting gimmick to build a science fiction novel around, hampered by too much attention given to interpersonal relationships that I had no interest in. Not that I don’t want interesting characters in a science fiction book, but these were neither very convincing nor very compelling. Still fairly readable.
** Peter Watts – Blindsight. I really liked the narrator, a person whose social inhibitions lead him to feel like he is simulating being human and to become an excellent observer. And the classic slow-discovery-of-alien plot was fairly intriguing — until the end, which just didn’t work for me. It was neither very convincing nor very interesting. And there wasn’t enough good stuff that preceded it to make the book something I overall enjoyed.
* Knut Hamsun – Mysteries. What a shitty fucking book. It’s “modernist” and “existentialist” which means that when you read a bunch of nonsensical ramblings from an unappealing, unconvincing, and uninteresting protagonist, you’re supposed to be moved by it and thereby question the underpinnings of society, or something. Or, you know, not.