christian renz // bassist

Not only are The Beatles known to be one of the most popular and influential pop bands, they are also known for the rather complicated rights management situation surrounding their songs. Until today, there is to my knowledge no legal way to buy their songs via download, because the negotiations e.g. with Apple/iTunes were aborted. That is, until yesterday, there was no legal way.

The NRK (the Norwegian public broadcasting company) has come to an agreement with the Norwegian performing rights association TONO that allows them to offer podcasts with up to 70% music content for download publicly for up to four weeks. And they make use of this new agreement to publish a rather likable 2001 radio series as podcast: Finn Tokvam and Bård Ose comment on the creation of every single Beatles song every published. In chronological order. In Norwegian. And of course each podcast episode contains the full song itself at the end.

So subscribe to the podcast quickly before the recordings disappear from the server again. NRK wants to publish all songs by end of January. The Beatles might not be everyone's cup of tea, but for musicians, they are a must-know in terms of op history. There's some background information in English at the end of an article on the NRK website.

A big thank you to Spreeblick for digging out this pearl.

Drawing by HMK.

There's a few nice people that leave comments quite regularly. However, until now, the means for discussion in this blog were a bit limited: First, I had to publish all comments manually (to protect myself from spam), and second, there was no easy way to know about new comments (apart from the list of newest comments at the right).

To enable the immediate publishing of comments, I added reCAPTCHA to the comment form. If that causes you any problems, please let me know.

In addition to that, I created a new feed for comments left on this blog. If you subscribe to it, you will see the newest comments for all articles. It was a matter of two minutes due to the Movable Type documentation. I guess this is the best solution so far. If you have some ideas for improvement, please let me know!

(Sorry, this is untranslatable.) Heute zusammen mit dem Müsli verspeist:

Rohr•ohr•zucker

I have mentioned before that I was working on an article for Musicians' Life gearbeitet. It took me a bit longer than I thought, because a lot of things came up before christmas, but now, the Review of the “Urban Contemporary Gospel” Sample Library by Big Fish Audio has been published on the website.

At the end of a year, most people's thoughts are on resolutions, things they want to change in the year to come. I spent the last night at a Silvester party with my friends, and one inspiring thought that stuck with me was that it is important to look back and be thankful for the good things that happened during the past year.

So today we spent the day reviewing the good and the not so good things that happened during the last year, and thinking of the things that we want to achieve in 2009. It was an inspiring and relaxing day.

For this blog, 2008 has brought about some changes as well, as I have made the transition to a new domain and a slightly different blog concept. Writing something on the Internet is fun only if somebody reads it, so today I want to use the opportunity to thank all of you readers out there, and also thank you for all the comments that you have left. I appreciate your comments a lot. Have a blessed and happy new year 2009!

Via Kompoz, I got to know Ollie Green from Scarborough (UK). I played bass for one of his tracks.

On December 20th, he published his album “Hold On” using BandCamp. You can give the album a listen and download it in different formats. The track I played on is called “Party Fuel”. The low bass lines are played using the Electro Harmonix Bass Micro Synthesizer which I had bought a short while before.

Ollie Green: Hold On

“I gave some money to a man on the street, and I'm feeling good about myself.” (Christmas Time Is Here)

If you already are fed up with the omnipresent Christmas feel, I recommend you give the Christ-Must Album by YPJ & FVC a try. It's a fine, ironic Gospel/HipHop album that's produced excellently. And bassists will especially like the bass solo version of “Dreaming of a White Christmas” (inclusive wah wah effects).

You can download it for free via their blog entry on Myspace.