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Neil Young on Letterman 9/27/2012 A few interesting subjects came up: 1. Lionel trains 2. His new book Waging Heavy Peace 3. The audio music system PONO The Trains This is an Emmy award winning feature that portrays rock music legend Neil Young and his relationship with his young son Ben who lives with the affliction of cerebral palsy. This story gives the viewers an insightful look at Neil's personal life and celebrates the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. It is a rare glimpse into the intimate life of Neil Young and his family, which aired on Nickelodeon network. http://www.jhp.tv/jhp_new...ickelodeon His son Ben's condition led to the development of The Bridge School. The school was started by Neil & Pegi Young to educate children with severe speech and physical impairments. The Bridge School Benefit Concerts (started in 1986) were organized to raise money for the school. The concert has been an annual event since 1987. The Book Neil Young Comes Clean By DAVID CARR Published: September 19, 2012 Driving down the hill above his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, Neil Young took a deep whiff of the redwood forest momentarily serving as the canopy for his 1951 Willys Jeepster convertible. “I can still remember how it smelled when I first pulled in here — I was driving this car,” he said, recalling the trip in 1970 when he bought the place and named it Broken Arrow, after the Buffalo Springfield song. The author of some of the spookiest, darkest songs in the American folk canon seemed jolly on this late-August day. Even if he was accompanied by a reporter, generally not his favorite species of human, the motion soothed him. “I’ve always been better moving than I am standing still,” he said. Young, 66, spotted this land out the window of a plane banking out of San Francisco four decades ago and now owns nearly 1,000 acres of it. His song “Old Man” is a tribute to the caretaker who first showed him the place. “I ran out of money, so I had to sell some of it,” he said. “That’s O.K., because it was too big. Everything happens for a reason.” He kept his eyes on the narrow road through the giant redwoods. It was hard to reconcile the affable guy motoring along on a sunny day with his past incarnations: the portentous folkie of “Ohio,” the rabid anti-commercialist who gave MTV the musical middle finger with “This Note’s For You,” the angry rocker who threatened to hit the cameramen at Woodstock with his guitar. He was happy partly because he was here. “For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with it,” he said. “You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.” We would spend a few hours creeping along — he drove slowly but joyfully, as if the automobile were a recent invention — on our way there or on our way from there, the ranch where Young lives with his wife, Pegi, and their son, Ben. His longtime producer and friend, David Briggs, who died in 1995, hated making records here, deriding the hermetic refuge as a “velvet cage.” In addition to the studio, where more than 20 records have been made, there is an entire building given over to model trains, another where vintage cars are stored and another piled with his master recordings. Llamas and cows roam under cartoonishly large trees. It seems like a made-up place, an open-air fortress of eccentricity meant to protect the artist who lives there. But what it has most of all is not a lot of people. “I like people, I just don’t have to see them all the time,” he said, laughing. David Crosby, his bandmate in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, used to describe the complicated route into his ranch as “my filtering system,” Young said. Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/20...l&_r=0 The Music System Neil Young Expands Pono Digital-to-Analog Music Service Audio system could become rival to Apple By Patrick Flanary September 27, 2012 4:40 PM ET Aretha Franklin had never sounded so shocking, Flea decided last year, as "Respect" roared from the speakers of Neil Young's Cadillac Eldorado. Stunned by the song's clarity, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist listened alongside bandmate Anthony Kiedis and producer Rick Rubin while Young showcased the power of Pono, his high-resolution music service designed to confront the compressed audio inferiority that MP3s offer. Beginning next year, Pono will release a line of portable players, a music-download service and digital-to-analog conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions. In his book out this week, Waging Heavy Peace, Young writes that Pono will help unite record companies with cloud storage "to save the sound of music." As Flea raves to Rolling Stone, "It's not like some vague thing that you need dogs' ears to hear. It's a drastic difference." Pono's preservation of the fuller, analog sound already has the ear of the Big Three record labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. WMG – home to artists including Muse, the Black Keys, Common and Jill Scott – has converted its library of 8,000 album titles to high-resolution, 192kHz/24-bit sound. It was a process completed prior to the company's partnership with Young's Pono project last year, said Craig Kallman, chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records. In mid-2011, Kallman invested with Young and helped assemble a Pono team that included representatives from audio giants Meridian and Dolby, according to insiders. Once WMG signed on, Kallman said that he and Young approached UMG CEO Lucian Grainge and Sony Music CEO Doug Morris about remastering their catalogs for Pono distribution. Neither UMG nor Sony officially acknowledged those conversations. "This has to be an industry-wide solution. This is not about competing – this is about us being proactive," Kallman tells Rolling Stone. "This is all about purely the opportunity to bring the technology to the table." The title of Waging Heavy Peace refers to the response that Young gave a friend who questioned whether the singer-songwriter was declaring war on Apple with his new service. "I have consistently reached out to try to assist Apple with true audio quality, and I have even shared my high-resolution masters with them," Young writes, adding that he traded emails and phone calls with Steve Jobs about Pono before the tech king's death last October. Apple declined to comment on whether a collaborative or competitive relationship with Pono exists. Apple's Mastered for iTunes program, which launched last year with the release of Red Hot Chili Peppers' I'm With You, requires mastering engineers to provide audio quality based on a listener's environment – such as a car, a flight or a club. Those dissatisfied with Apple's AAC format argue that it still represents a fraction of the high-resolution options that Pono promises to deliver. Engineers have debated the value of sound quality for years. In early June 2011, after filing a handful of trademarks for his cloud-based service idea, Young traveled to the Bonnaroo Festival to perform with Buffalo Springfield. While he was there, he invited fellow musicians into his Cadillac for a Pono demo, including members of Mumford & Sons and My Morning Jacket, and videotaped their reactions for a potential marketing campaign. "Neil's premise is cool, and I think it's exciting as a traveling musician," My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James tells Rolling Stone. However, he adds a caveat: "I think that's somewhere that he has to be careful: I've already bought Aretha Franklin's 'Respect' a lot of times. Do I have to buy it again?" While Young acknowledges in his book that existing digital purchases will play on Pono devices, he points out that his service "will force iTunes to be better and to improve quality at a faster pace." "His reasons are so not based in commerce, and based in just the desire for people to really feel the uplifting spirit of music," Flea said in defense of Young. "MP3s suck. It's just a shadow of the music." http://www.rollingstone.c...e-20120927 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Music for adventurous listeners tA  Tribal Records"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5EYIJmixPw
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Neil YOung is one of those artists that I have always wanted to get more into ...
just alittle overwhelmed with his catalog i think ... dont know where to start etc .
I love the story of his child ... and how "down to earth " the guy seems ...
As a father with a special needs child , I feel a special bond with him - and i dig his music too ... and I have trains too (tho they are gathering dust lately lol ) . Colonel Angus may be smelly. colonel angus may be a little rough . but deep down ... Colonel angus is very sweet. |
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Improving technology is a beautiful constant! But I think the mistake we all make sometimes is implying that what is naturally coming, evolving is going to rescue us from our own stupidity. It's like me sneering at someone enjoying 1080P video (2 megapixel) when 4K (8 megapixel) or 8K (33 megapixel) are just around the corner. Almost all MP3s are encoded at a level far above AM or FM radio, yet that doesn't make radio an inferior choice because it isn't capable of taking the studio on the road. I look forward to the day when your music can become a holographic image that turns your living room -- or whatever street corner happenstance finds you -- into something virtually undetectable from an actual live performance. I'll be dead, but it's still a comforting thought knowing that it's coming. And per usual, theAudience provides information that is far superior than most of today's din! Thanks. | |
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Thanks for this post t/A. I wanted to know more then that small Letterman bit because I have nothing but respect for Neil Young. | |
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Long time fan here. He is a very talented artist. I would really like to read the book.
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Whenever this question comes up, my take is to always start at the start. Generally, with an artist that has survived this long in the industry, it can be an interesting journey. Especially if it's someone that doesn't put out the same record over and over again. The material can always be sampled via YouTube or other sources.
"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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ty for that ... i will do that ...
Colonel Angus may be smelly. colonel angus may be a little rough . but deep down ... Colonel angus is very sweet. |
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Hey theAudience, long time ...
Yeah, I saw the episode of Letterman with Neil Young, there was a heap of stuff packed into a quite small segment, but fascinating. You filled it out really well thankyou !
1. Lionel trains: Neil Young, "I developed a Model Train control System for Lionel Trains, and a Sound System..."
3. pono:
I read about this 'exciting' new 'Technology' on another forum, the first question was; "And who collects the money ?" Another: "Did he say what codec the files he will be selling will use? FLAC? "
I have no idea, I doubt many people out of the Project do.
And more; "... Am I the only one thinking this, but do we REALLY need another proprietary, closed source audio codec?"
I'm sure Neil Young is sincere, he has canned MP3's forever for their low quality output; but... PONO does have to have a comercial endpoint at which a profit is made to build all the Infrastructure, I doubt Neil would fund the whole project.
Initial reports sound very exciting however.
Be interesting to: 1.) Hear it !! , and 2.) See what Apple's iTunes reaction is. Only time will tell !
Basically the concept of the PONO Sound is taking a Digital Recording, and making it as close as possible to Analogue, it seems.
Here is an interesting page on audio sampling, etc.
[Edited 10/10/12 9:35am] ~PClinuxOS~  I've been here longer than I care to remember, ... I drop in from time to time, ...  | |
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For someone who's always screaming artist/musicians need to be proactive!! I wish Mr. Young the best in his new endeavor.
But, there's always a but.
1. There's FLAC 2. Are MP3 really all that inferior or could it be poor mastering of MP3's and/or devices used to play MP3 songs?
3. Really how much can the human ear discern?
I would assume there's a market for the Pono for discriminating audiophiles. I think Apple has moved consumers to a place where they expect a device to do more things than play music in high fidelity. If Young had hit the market with the Pono a decade ago things may have played out differently, but I'm skeptical his Pono could challenge to Apple.
-----------excuse my typing its hard for me to see on a little screen when I"m editing my text.
[Edited 10/16/12 0:26am] | |
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1. There's FLAC
Yep, FLAC is about as good as it gets for Digital (01010101) I believe personally. Warning: Technical Jargon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.flac "...Since FLAC is a lossless scheme, it is suitable as an archive format for owners of CDs and other media who wish to preserve their audio collections. If the original media is lost, damaged, or worn out, a FLAC copy of the audio tracks ensures that an exact duplicate of the original data can be recovered at any time." "...An exact restoration from a lossy archive (e.g., MP3) of the same data is impossible. FLAC being lossless means it is highly suitable for transcode e.g. to MP3, without the normally associated transcoding quality loss."
MP3's actually are lower quality than existing formats such as FLAC. Neil Young's project is to try to take formats that are Digital, back to a state as close as possible to Analogue. His belief being: ( My analysis, explanation) the flow of the Analogue sound is continuous, contiguous. Analogies to nature can be made, like a stream of water, the wind, making my post read like I'm a hippy,
However, Digital is a system where all signals are handled mathematically and everything is either 1 or zero. Instead of the continual flow of Analogue, there is an On /Off state.
As you said;"could it be poor mastering of MP3's and/or devices used to play MP3 songs? " Yeah, sure. It is however the fundamental 1 or Zero nature of Digital sound which is the Dynamic that's most important.
If you have Ten's of thousands of dollars for devices to play back Digital Music it can sound great !
When CD's and CD players became the new way to listen to Music, I felt hurt. It was so simply a market driven situation; everyone had a record player, so industry got us all to buy CD's and the technology that went with it. MP3 players were cool, so small. There's people who have probably never heard Music except through those tiny five cent ear plugs. Or the terribly over-priced 'i' whatevers.
3. Really how much can the human ear discern?
Good point. if you've grown up with Subwoofers breaking the little hairs in your Ear that vibrate and translate sound to your Ear, then brain, possibly it doesn't matter, However:
Suppose we'll find out for ourselves soon enough.
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Hey FLUX, long time!
I've got a call into some of Mr. Young's peeps to see if I can get any intimate details...
Music for adventurous listeners
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I just bought my FIRST Neil Young cd!
He is one of those guys who, while I know is as respected as any artist in rock, I have just not really liked on an aesthetic level. Like so many feel about Dylan. But I also have not listened to a single album of his all the way through. So when I saw Harvest for $4, I figured it was time.
So far, I kind of like it. Some songs I know and already like, some are new to me. But I don't really hate any of it. My Legacy
http://prince.org/msg/8/192731 | |
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G'Day Mate, you've still got your passion for all (good) things Musical I see.
Heck, were have I been, time has flown by ... I used to love this place, great to stumble on your post Mr. 'Audience'.
Hi NDRU, Neil Young has had such a long career, it's maybe hard to discern which piece to indulge. "Harvest for $4, I figured it was time." I think that's a great place to start. He was, if I can be so bold, initially an Acoustic player, when he was Solo. Great Lyrics, Melodies, acoustic guitar, harmonica. Young began performing as a solo artist in Canada in 1960
I have to look into the Buffalo Springfield, I never really got into them, before my time.
Back in the '70's, go to a party and a 'Neil Young record' came on, like Harvest everyone would sing along, to the sugary, twangy, lovely songs during that time. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young had a double Live Album which I loved, 70's era.
There are some songs of Young's which are haunting, perplexing:
Some favourites
"Rust Never Sleeps" (Movie / Album) kind of bridged him into the 'Grungy' stuff. Nothing so frightening these days seeing Neil Young with his old Gibson electric Guitar, stumbling around the stage with his unique tremolo infused heavily distorted sound, big smile on his face.
I've only just embraced the early performances by Dylan, the genius of his Guitar style. I used to just "Not get it." Prefered the Hendrix versions; wonderful how something has changed in my perception and love watching the live versions of his early performfances. Complex.
p.s. Sorry to stomp off Topic all over this thread
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Thanks for Flux for breaking it down until its broke.
We shall see, I'm a sucker for gadgets anyways. | |
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You're welcome. Actually I didn't realise what a huge Life Neil Young has had once I started looking around; ended repeating what 'the Audience' had posted anyway. OOpsy, my apologies.
We live in exciting times ... PONO ?
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