{"id":685,"date":"2002-11-03T22:48:37","date_gmt":"2002-11-04T06:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/11\/03\/685.html"},"modified":"2002-11-03T22:48:37","modified_gmt":"2002-11-04T06:48:37","slug":"20-discs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/11\/03\/20-discs\/","title":{"rendered":"20 discs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, stressed one night and unable to focus on work, I decided to decompress by shopping. Specifically, I decided to go look online for CDs I've been thinking of buying. And the first thing on my list was the Rise Up Singing<\/cite> teaching discs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rise Up Singing,<\/cite> in case there's anyone who cares but isn't familiar with it, is a group-singing songbook published by Sing Out. It contains lyrics to over 1200 songs, (including 750 copyrighted songs that they got rights to use for a tiny fee): showtunes, traditional folksongs, some rock, lullabies, a few rounds, lots of political (leftist) songs by topical singer\/songwriters, etc. There are guitar chords for most of the songs (in, apparently, a somewhat odd\/unusual notation, but I don't know anything about that), and discographies listing recordings of the songs, and notes, and translations, and so on. And a fabulous index. It's a great resource, but it's missing one thing: actual music. If you don't know the melody to a song, you're out of luck.<\/p>\n

Enter the teaching tapes. The people who put the book together did a set of cassette tapes on which they recorded the first verse and chorus (and sometimes a bit more) of each song. Yes, every one of the 1200 songs in the book. It was a lot of tapes.<\/p>\n

And now they've transferred those tapes to CD. A 20-CD set that teaches the tune to every song in the book. I first saw the CDs at WorldCon last year in Philadelphia, but didn't have enough cash on me to buy the whole set; I bought one of the discs, but I seem to have lost that one (probably it was one of the ones I lost on the Utah trip, sigh). But now you can order the whole set via credit card online, so I did.<\/p>\n

The discs arrived Friday; I happily transferred about half of them to MP3 at work in the background while working. And then I forgot them at work, sigh. Typical of this past week.<\/p>\n

I stopped at work and picked them up on Saturday on the way up to the East Bay for a birthday dinner. Ripped the rest of them to MP3 this afternoon while reading submissions. A friend suggested that Sing Out ought to release them as MP3 CDs (which can fit something like ten times as many songs); that's a cool idea. I'll have to remember to suggest it.<\/p>\n

It's a little odd to have these mixed in with the rest of my music in iTunes; startling to be listening to and enjoying a song and then have it fade out. I may well end up moving them to another folder or something so they won't play as part of my random mix. But it'll be nice to have them all handy.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, at least two of the discs in my set appear to be damaged; lots of skipping in most of the songs on each of those. I need to try them in another CD player to be sure it's not just my computer, and then maybe get them replaced. Sigh.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, stressed one night and unable to focus on work, I decided to decompress by shopping. Specifically, I decided…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}