MUSIC: Your questions answered

R J HOLLAND … Huge, tough, heavy rock band in the late sixties with some of the best musicians in the business. Tim Bogert, bass guitar and vocals Vince Martell lead guitar and vocals Mark Stein Hammond organ and vocals Carmine Appice drum and vocals. Their sound was big; thunderous drums, the wailing Hammond organ, […]

ALEX JOHNSTON writes … Yes, indeed. ‘Revolution 9’. Commonly agreed to be the Worst. Beatle Track. Ever. A blot, we are constantly told, on an otherwise great album. And, I mean…it’s hard to disagree. The Beatles were a band whose signature trait was not that they were the heaviest, or the most complex, or the […]

Alex Johnston writes … Yes. It was actually three days after the album’s release that Hendrix played it at a concert in the Saville Theatre. Memorising it, incidentally, is a feat well within the powers of even a middling rock musician. ‘Sgt Pepper’ the song isn’t exactly complicated, and Hendrix—a hugely gifted rock musician—had been […]

Eric Johnson answers It’s a little-known fact that Rory Gallagher nearly joined Bill Wyman in the Rolling Stones after guitarist Mick Taylor walked out following a series of blow-ups with Keith Richards. In January 1975, Rory was invited by The Rolling Stones to come and jam/audition with The Stones in Rotterdam after Mick Taylor had […]

PATRICIA P WRITES … Paul usually doesn’t write in first person but has on some occasions. The song wasn’t written about himself and Jane Asher. They were actually on vacation together when Paul wrote the song. The song was written in 1966 while Paul was 24. He seemed to be a bit young to write […]

A study by Japanese researchers that Sad music might actually evoke positive emotions. Sad music might actually evoke positive emotions reveals a new study by Japanese researchers published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology. The findings help to explain why people enjoy listening to sad music, say Ai Kawakami and colleagues from Tokyo University […]

Joseph Charles, Musician It wasn’t what I’d call a feud; they each took swipes at each other in 1974, and that was it. Rundgren criticized Lennon rather harshly in an interview with Melody Maker magazine. A few choice quotes: “John Lennon ain’t no revolutionary. He’s a fucking idiot, man. Shouting about revolution and acting like […]

Alexander Musarra writes … Let me first generalize pop music. Popular music generally focuses on having a good, danceable groove, and a simple, melodic hook. Popular music is also relatively short, 3 minutes being average. Harmonically they are generally diatonic (within the major scale) with little, if any modulations (change of key). Progressive rock, on […]

Editorial note: We’ve no idea. We never met him. But we did sniff around on the Web and found this: Barry Moore, I’ve been reading extensively about the Beatles for a few years now. I definitely know more than the average …Answered March 8, 2015 According to Tony Barrow, who worked for The Beatles managing […]

Paul McGowan writes: We all love live music recordings and work hard to get our high-performance audio systems to sound like the real deal. But how can modern music recorded on multitrack machines and studios ever be considered high end or even close to live? Watch Now

MICHAEL PAULL writes … Before getting into this, a few facts to consider: -Ginger Baker is a drummer who is deeply admired by many of the most iconic drummers in the business. The guy could play. So for what it’s worth, when he, on a rare occasion, happens to say someone else is good, he’s […]

FM writes: this is a brilliant question. The majority of audiophiles know nothing about output impedance. Since the question is specifically about the effect on Sound, I’m going to try not to get too technical. A solid state amplifier will have an almost unmeasurably low output impedance, close to zero, i.e. .0001 ohms or thereabouts. […]

MDM writes: Gilmour spoke about The Wall in an interview. He stated that he really liked entire album, except for the “Vera Lynn stuff.” I assume he was referring to all the theatrical songs, including Nobody Home, Vera, Bring the Boys Back Home, etc. As for Waters writing all the lyrics and most of the […]

When Jimi Hendrix and his Gypsy Sun and Rainbows band took to the stage, the timing was pretty lousy. With everything that had gone wrong during the Woodstock festival on the second day, the crowds rapidly decreased in number. What had been approximately 400,000 people in attendance, had been reduced to about 30,000 or so. […]

AP writes: I’m not sure you can say it’s much better mixed than their other albums, but it certainly sounds better than most contemporary albums and that’s largely down to Geoff Emerick. The Beatles changed engineer after Rubber Soul – Norman Smith left EMI and became the manager of Pink Floyd. Geoff Emerick replaced him […]

RS writes: Apparently he was, after the recording off the Live Evil album. Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler accused Ronnie James Dio and Vinnie Appice of going into the studio and turning up the volume level of their parts on the recording tape. That was their grounds for letting them both go. I suspect they […]

NA writes: Strangely, one of Bowie’s most (in)famous alter-egos, had a very short shelf-life. He moved from the blue eyed soul of Young Americans – what he called “plastic soul” – in the tail end of 1974 through 1975, into the Duke in 1976 for Station to Station and his Isolar tour of the same […]

TR writes: For me it is George Harrison’s Somewhere In England. The studio album prior to that, George Harrison featured 5 tunes that even today are a joy to listen to, including “Blow Away”, “Not Guilty”, and the terrific “Love Comes To Everyone”. Somewhere in England was bland. Felt like Harrison was on automatic. No […]