General Info edit

Well for those who are interested in knowing a little bit more about me, I guess I could direct you to several places on the internet. But I reckon this is prolly the best way to describe myself >>>> (hee hee) 'Cause this is indeed who I am, for which I make no apologies ;)

K, so what else is there to say about myself that I haven't already covered? Well I am, for my sins, like many of you I suspect, a bit of a perfectionist. Hence my editing activities here on Wiki. (It certainly beats taking the pills that's for sure.)

That last bit was a joke btw ;)

...although I'm sure there are many...(hee hee)

As for music? Well although I was most definitely a 'rock chick' in my youth, and loved nothing better than to travel up to London on a frequent and regular basis to do a bit of headbanging (usually at the Hammersmith), my musical taste seems to have mellowed a great deal over the past 25 years.

Whilst I will confess that I am extremely proud of the fact that my neighbour, 10 years my junior, had cause to text me recently to ask me if I wouldn't mind turning my music down just a tad (apparently she couldn't get an answer at the door), my 'metal' days seem now to be all but behind me. Part of my own personal music history as it were. Don't get me wrong, I can still be caught rocking out on the odd occasion to a bit of Sabbath, Zeppelin, Purple, Scorpions, Bad Company, AC/DC, Whitesnake, possibly a bit of Hawkwind, The Who (yeah, not metal I know, but you gotta admit great nonetheless), just not so very often.

A great artist I've got into in the last few years is Dave Grohl and his band, the Foo Fighters. MCR aren't bad neither and I quite like some of System of a Down's stuff. As for British bands? Well you can't beat Oasis, Stereophonics, Coldplay, Radiohead. Yeah, I suppose it would be fair to say that I listen to a lot more mainstream stuff now than I did years ago. I like to think that my listening habits reflect the fact that I have evolved, matured, etc. However I strongly suspect that some of my younger friends would put it more succinctly and say I've just become a boring old f**t (lol).

Whilst my listening habits may have changed, one thing that has remained constant over the years is my love for live music. Only now it's not the heavy guitar driven headbanging music of my youth, it's the acoustic stuff. Because if an artist/band can't cut it live, stripped of all the wonderful computerised and electronic special effects, then in my opinion they can't cut it at all...

My love for the 'unplugged' is I guess what led to me becoming a big fan of 'Live Lounge', a regular feature on UK's BBC Radio 1. Hosted by Jo Whiley, 'Live Lounge' exhibits well-known artists performing one of their own songs, and usually one by another artist, in an acoustic format. The cover songs are often from a completely different genre to that which the performer originates, and thereby offer a new and interesting perspective on the original songs. I believe that I probably have one of the largest collections of recordings from these sessions - currently numbering some 260-300 tracks. The covers performed during these sessions are my particular speciality. Needless to say, I don't just collect these recordings, I research them and correctly tag them too (lol)!


My Other Favourite Sites edit

LyricWiki - The absolute best lyric site on the web! If you're a music lover, why don't you come on over and check us out? You never know, you might even get the bug and want to help out there too. If you do, please stop by my page and say 'Hi'.

Jango.com - Since the demise of Project Playlist I have found Jango. And it's great. It could be better, more personalised, but I ain't complaining. It creates radio stations for you made up of the artists you select. It also adds a few tracks by new artists that Jango are helping to promote, but these are usually very good. Like Project Playlist you can also post your playlist on your social networking webpage, or any other website that allows for this, for your visitors to listen to.

Allmusic - A metadata database about music. The network of writers includes over 900 music critics who review albums and songs and write artist biographies. Allmusic claims to have the world's largest digital archive of music, including approximately six million songs fully digitized, as well as the world's largest cover art library, with over half a million cover image scans.

Last.fm - An internet radio and music community website. Using a music recommendation system known as "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user's computer/portable music device. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page. The site offers numerous social networking features and users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm's music library.

MusicBrainz - A user-maintained community music metadata database. MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained according to a common style guide. As of Dec 31, 2007, MusicBrainz contained information about 350,718 artists, 534,986 releases, and 6.3 million tracks.

Discogs - A community-built database of music information. Discogs is one of the largest online databases of electronic music releases and is believed to be the largest online database of releases on vinyl media. Across all genres and formats, over 912,000 releases are catalogued. It also features listings for over 768,000 artists and over 77,500 labels.

Amazon - A popular feature of Amazon is the ability for users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. I personally find this aspect quite helpful. Amazon's extensive music catalogue and the ability to listen to song excerpts are yet further reasons I use this site.

YouTube - I don't consider this needs explaining (lol). I also find this site pretty useful for helping to verify music tracks.

4shared - In my opinion this is the best free online storage site. No problems uploading and no waiting times downloading files either (unlike some other sites I could mention - lol).

BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge - As stated above, the Live Lounge is where invited artists come into the studio to perform one of their own songs, and usually a cover of a song by an artist outside of their normal genre, live and 'unplugged'.

Wiki Pages edit

Links edit

User:Redxx/Sandbox

Notes edit