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August 14, 2005February 7, 2009 by Brendon J. Wilson

Anti-Karaoke

On occasion I pretend to be a guitarist. Honing my solo improvisational skills is a difficult task, especially given that half the time I’m practicing on my own without the benefit of a band to provide the backing track. Practicing scales or jamming over top of CDs is one approach, but there’s only so much you can do. Sometimes I use Transcribe! to loop sections of CDs without lead guitar, but that can get really repetitive and limit the usefulness of the exercise.

Recently, it occurred to me that what I really want is the equivalent of karaoke tracks, but for guitar. Imagine if you could buy electronic versions of a song with one of the instruments removed from the track. Guitarists could mute the guitar track; drummers could mute the drum track; bass players could mute the bass track. Musicians could go to a web site, pick which instrument they wanted removed from the master recording, and purchase and download the result in GarageBand format.

Sounds like a nice way for the record industry to pick up another bunch of cash from its massive back catalog. Add in performance rights and high-end versions of the tracks that allow the performer to tweak the mix themselves to create a “professional” version for working solo musicians. Of course, longer term, I expect artists will shortcut this whole process and release their source tracks for free directly to the public as a way of encouraging remixes (just like Trent Reznor did with his recent album).

Take it one step further, and you could totally transform the idea of karaoke clubs. Instead of just having karaoke where people get up and sing, you could have karaoke nights where individual musicians could play without needing to assemble a whole band.

August 8, 2005February 7, 2009 by Brendon J. Wilson

Canadians Get “Straight” To The Point

It’s being reported today that two straight Canadian guys are going to get married just to prove a point about gay marriage. And avoid paying some taxes.

Cue the Apocalyse in five…four…three…two…

Doubtless, the neo-conservative segments of the American political spectrum find themselves in a moral dilemma. I can hear their internal monologue already: which would make God happier – achieving eternal salvation, or a lower tax bracket?

Tough one…especially if you believe God is a Republican. (Which, for some reason, reminds me of line from a Tragically Hip song: “Don’t tell me how the Universe is altered, when you find our how He gets paid”)

But where there’s controversy, there’s opportunity. If you’re like me, you spent a fair chunk of your university years living with members of the same sex (called “room-mates”). All those wasted tax-savings! If only they’d had same-sex marriage in my college years – a quick prenuptial agreement and a civil marriage to Kevin (call me crazy, but John, Jesse and Sean weren’t my type) and we could have kept all of our meager internship earnings for ourselves. Hell, had we taken legal guardianship of Kevin’s brother, Jamie, we could have even scored some stone-cold sacrilicious Child Tax Credit dollars!

I think I just identified the solution to the Student Debt Crisis – get married to your roommates and reap the tax savings until you’re debt-free. Some enterprising young lawyer out there is already whipping up a boilerplate prenuptial contract for this purpose and about to make a killing.

Of course, this only works if you’re smart enough to get a pre-nuptial agreement in place before you move into your off-campus pad with your buddies. If you don’t, one has to wonder whether the concept of common-law marriage might rear its ugly head just as graduation rolls around. After all, after living together for over three short years in Canada, me and my room-mates might technically be considered married under common law (or to have achieved common-law status, as it’s called in Canada). If you thought a graduation party hangover sucked, try paying alimony to your four, same-sex, bigamist college room-mates on top of Canada Student Loan Payments.

Of course, this move will only pave the way for the true concern of the neo-conservatives – that, for some reason, people might want to use the same-sex laws to forge (or perhaps graze) a path to allow them to marry farm animals. Why, I can’t imagine – plentiful farm subsidies, perhaps?

(And on a somewhat unrelated note, please welcome my almost-but-not-quite bigamist same-sex college room-mate, Kevin Cheng, to Silicon Valley. He started at Yahoo! this week.)