Tagged: music

You might not have heard of John Hammond, but in terms of cultural significance he was arguably the world’s most influential record producer.

At the beginning of his career in the 1930s, largely because of his deep convictions about racial equality and civil rights, Hammond helped shape the the jazz scene.

The Pines find comfort in rural and urban America.

Iowa natives Benson Ramsey and David Huckfelt formed the band The Pines after a chance meeting in Arizona. The pair quickly relocated to Minneapolis, Minn., where the band is based today.

Ramsey says that he and Huckfelt were first drawn together by a love of regional music and the blues.

“We were obsessed with blues music and folk music,” Ramsey says of his early days with Huckfelt.

Makers of pop music have always engineered their songs to sound big and loud. Motown records, for instance, have a legendary, huge sound. Sometimes, though, loudness can be overdone, and this problem seems to be getting worse.

The technology behind this is a device called a compressor. Its job is to keep a volume level consistent. This is great when you want, say, a vocalist to remain audible above the other instruments.