Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Music

Parental Albums

Are there albums or songs that remind you of your parents? When I think of my parents and music, there are pretty clear associations.

For Mom it was Chicago’s “Greatest Hits 1982-1989” album. I remember her putting that album on while she cleaned the house. (It’s not available on Spotify but somebody built a playlist to piece all the songs together.) I think she had this one on CD and we didn’t get into CDs until the mid 90s.

And Dad? I remember riding around in his Ford Probe listening to the “Happy Together” album by The Nylons. That one got a good workout. I know he loved the 8 track system in his Gran Torino Sport, but I was too young to remember the music that got played in there.

Random sidenote: The song “Happy Together” was used in Ernest Goes To Camp (easily the top movie of my childhood) and since Dad was always playing The Nylons, I assumed that they had written the song. Nope. It was from a band in the 60s called The Turtles. So now I get why they had to sing that specific song to the turtle to get it to unclamp from Ernest’s nose. Whew, took me a while (decades) to get that one. It’s the movie that keeps on giving.

benmartens June 23, 2017 Music

Piano Playing

I played a piece on the piano at church on Sunday for the post service music. It occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve ever posted a video of something like that so here you go. This is actually from one of my practice sessions earlier in the week. It’s a combination of Christ the Lord Is Risen Today and Hallelujah from Handel’s Messiah.

benmartens June 12, 2017 Music

Last.fm

Spotify is some of the best money that we spend every month. It’s awesome to have easy access to “all” the music. A while back, I clicked the button in the app to keep a history of all the songs that I listen to on my Last.fm account.

Now that i’ve been using this for a couple months, it’s fun to see my listening trends. You can actually view my profile too, but here are some of the stats I picked up.

Top artists:

  1. Ben Folds
  2. Jonathan Coulton
  3. Amos Less
  4. The Senat
  5. John Mayer

 

Top albums:

  1. The Senate – Live at Solstice
  2. Ben Folds – The Best Imitation of Myself
  3. Jonathan Coulton – Best. Concert. Ever.
  4. fun. – Some Nights
  5. Howard Shore – The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring

 

Top Tracks:

  1. The Shins – Caring is Creepy
  2. Matt Nathanson – Come On Get Higher
  3. Tyrone Wells – Use Sombody
  4. The Barr Brothers – Even the Darkness Has Arms
  5. Matt Hires – Honey, Let Me Sing You A Song

 

I don’t quite understand how they do these calculations. For example, if I’ve listened to the “Live at Solstice” album 40+ times, why aren’t those tracks in my “top tracks” list? But regardless, I can wholeheartedly recommend all of that music. It’s a pretty good cross section of what I listen to at work. I don’t have that feature enabled when I play music at home or on my phone since then I would be flooded with Elijah’s music.

benmartens March 17, 2017 Music

Caspar Babypants Framed Photo

Last fall we all went to see Caspar Babypants at the Neptune Theater in Seattle. Elijah has been to a lot of kiddie concerts but this was his first “real” concert where there was a ticket purchase and a theater, etc.

At the concert, we bought some artwork and had it signed by Chris Ballew (Caspar Babypants.) The artwork was done by his wife, Kate Endle.

It was pretty cool to get an autograph but I stupidly got it on the plastic covering for the photo. It’s kind of hard to display that. So the next time Tyla and Elijah went to see Caspar, they took Elijah’s concert ticket from the Neptune and asked him to sign that.

This simple project took me FOREVER but I finally got it framed and hung on the wall. I want to have a smaller frame for the ticket hanging separately from the artwork, but given how long this simple task took, I figured I should just get part way there.

Thanks to Chris and Kate for making great music and artwork!

casparphoto

benmartens April 26, 2016 Family, Music

Easter Service Videos

Easter Sunday usually entails a special service with a bunch of extra music which means I generally try to do some video recordings for our YouTube channel. I’m trickling them out one at a time on our Facebook page, but you can see them all right now if you’re interested. We have some very talented musicians in our church! If you’re into organ music, our organist, Wyatt, is giving a free concert at the church on Friday night at 7:30pm. This concert is part of his organ PhD requirements at UW.

benmartens April 8, 2016 Music

Vitamin String Quartet

vitaminstringquartetThe DJ at our wedding introduced us to a group called “Vitamin String Quartet”. As the name implies, they are a string quartet. They play covers of popular music. That was the music he used during the dinner. If you aren’t paying attention, it just sounds like classical music, but every once in a while it catches your ear and you realize what song they are playing.

Check out their music on your favorite streaming service, but one of my favorites is their Jason Mraz album. I also noticed that they have a “Geek Wedding” album which is a bunch of love songs from geeky movies like Lord of the Rings. Tyla is lucky we got married before that album was released.

benmartens December 17, 2015 Music

Moving From Groove To Spotify

spotifylogoTyla and I have been enjoying our Groove (Xbox Music) subscriptions. They work well on our phones, computers, Xboxes, etc. I have three main complaints about the service:

  1. I use it to play music through our whole-house FM transmitter. It crashes/stops pretty frequently and I have to restart it about once per day.
  2. There is no sharing of playlists. This is a huge negative for me. Sometimes I want to make my own lists, but very often I just want a curated list that somebody else generated. Or maybe I want to use the playlist that Tyla made of Elijah’s favorite songs. There’s no way to import/export or share playlists in Groove.
  3. There’s no family plan. Everyone buy’s their own subscription at full price.

With these thoughts in mind, I think we’re going to join the rest of the planet and switch to Spotify when our current subscriptions are up later this year. The first family member pays full price and additional family members are half price. It’s easy to switch but the only real pain point is moving our playlists over to Spotify. Manually recreating them would take forever.

There’s no great way to do this, but if you’re a geek, you can probably follow my vague instructions:

  1. Fire up Chrome. Browse to music.windows.com and open your playlist.
  2. Scroll down to make sure the whole playlist loads (it only grabs 50 songs at a time.)
  3. Press F12 to open the developer tools
  4. In the Elements tab, right click on the root HTML node and choose Copy.
  5. Paste that into notepad and save the file.
  6. Now you need to parse out the artist and song info. There are tons of possibilities here, but I used Power Query in Excel. Basically I filtered for the types of rows that had Artist and Titles. I stripped out all the extra info and voila. I built out a table with two columns: Artist and Title.
  7. I copied that table and went to Ivy. That site lets you create a Spotify playlist. It looks up each one of those songs in the Spotify catalog. You’re probably not going to find all of your songs in the Spotify catalog since the catalogs are different, but most of them will probably work.
  8. Ivy gives you a button to click that copies the playlist to your clipboard. Then you create a new playlist in Spotify and paste your clipboard into that playlist. Voila!

Easy? Nope. Hacky? Yep. But it saved me a bunch of time. There is an SDK for Groove but it doesn’t look like you can easily get playlist contents for a specific user. I started trying to code it up, but this was faster and I’ll never need to do it again anyway.

benmartens October 2, 2015 Geek, Music

Music Tastes

goodmusictasteIf I flip on some music, I generally turn to a country station. But over the last few years, I’ve become more and more frustrated with country music to the point where I installed my own FM whole-house transmitter to play the country music that I enjoy. Today’s country music has strayed a long way from it’s roots and every song is about a truck in a field with a bonfire.

I’m a grumpy old man. I get that. But it looks like I’m more normal than I thought.

A study from a few months ago shows that people around my age “discover less-familiar music genres that they didn’t hear on FM radio as early teens, from artists with a lower popularity rank. Second, listeners are returning to the music that was popular when they were coming of age — but which has since phased out of popularity.” I’d say that sums me up pretty well. The study also shows that if you are male and/or a parent, the effect is increased.

So I may be a grumpy old man, but at least I’m not alone. Get off my lawn!

benmartens September 22, 2015 Commentary, Music

Country Isn’t Country

top40countryRant: As if we needed another sign that I’m turning into an old man, I no longer enjoy country music on the radio. Thankfully I don’t have to listen to the radio very often, but when I do, I struggle to find anything to listen to. I’ve listened to country for a long time but today’s country music is ridiculous. Every song is about a party in a field with trucks, bonfires and beer. How many songs about that do we really need? And why on earth are you using autotune in your country songs? This has been happening for the past 5-7 years but it’s completely gone now. It’s a new genre. I’ve given up hoping and waiting for the good stuff to come back and instead, I have my in-house FM transmitter playing a huge playlist of country songs from the 80s and 90s.

Grump grump harrumph. GET OFF MY LAWN!

benmartens May 1, 2015 Music

Kids’ Music

Caspar-BabyPantsElijah loves music. He especially likes to listen to it in the car and when each song ends, he immediately makes the sign for “more.” Finding kids music that doesn’t make my head explode is a challenge, but we’ve locked onto a couple good singers so far.

  • Caspar Babypants – This is Chris Ballew who is/was the lead singer for Presidents of the United States. He lives in the Seattle area and now spends most of his time writing music for kids. He does lots of small, free shows which Tyla really enjoys attending. One of our favorite albums is his cover of a bunch of Beatles songs that have a fun kids message to them. I love the idea that Elijah and I are both enjoying listening to the same guy as we grow up!
  • Raffi – This is more traditional kids music, but he has a good voice and does a good job with his songs.

What else is out there? What albums do you fire up when your kids want music? I’m especially looking for ones that adults don’t mind!

benmartens February 19, 2015 Family, Music, Uncategorized