Blended Paths

I have several posts to get up here; a few on video and photo apps, one on parenting, and a random photography craft tutorial from a project I'm planning to do soon. But, I can't help but skip all those partially written posts and/or ideas for the moment and talk about something else I've become obsessed with as of late: VINYL.

I'm a music lover. It's a fact that I can't (nor would I want to) deny. I became addicted to the whole "digital" craze because of space saving and easy backup solutions. It's a lot cheaper in the long run.  You pay less for music, you buy an mp3 player (it doesn't have to be a $300 iPod!) and you plug it in and go. It's a lot more convenient. You store your files on one device that fits in your pocket, and if all your music won't fit on that device, you create playlists or select your current favorites and store it all on your computer and a backup drive for good measure. The biggest plus is the easy travel factor — you can take your music ANYWHERE and listen to it in any number of ways. There's one real drawback. It's a lot LESS FUN.

I don't remember the good old days of turntables and vinyl very vividly. The most I can remember is having one of those cute little box record players, you know, the kind that look like a tiny suitcase, and having a bunch of Walt Disney books with 45's in the back of them that played music and told the story to you as you read along. Yeah. I know. Not much to base my new obsession on, right?

So what's the real story? It's the "real" factor.

I've been spending a lot of time hanging out at this "new" local coffee shop called 318 Coffee & Bands. I haven't been able to make it to one of their Friday night live shows, but I've been to the place on a couple of band-free Friday nights. These restless Fridays are filled with the amazing world of REAL music — as real as it gets without being live -- Vinyl Night. I've noticed three things during these amazing vinyl adventures:

1. Vinyl sounds better (even though I know the gigantic and amazing speakers they have help) because you get ALL the sound. It's not necessarily all cleaned up (even NEW releases by CURRENT bands) so by "sounds better" I don't mean it sounds cleaner. You don't get the sparkly, shiny, brilliant sound of perfection — you get more of the reality of the music and the making of the music. To ME, that's better.

2. Because you get more of the reality of the music and more sounds, you enjoy the music more. It has more personality. It has more feeling. It has more heart. It has more meaning. It not only has the substance of a real and tangible piece of vinyl that you can touch to know it's there, it has the substance of what music was always meant to be — a true, unadulterated expression of self with all the flaws in tact.

3. Vinyl is happening again, so it's not as expensive as one might think. I've learned from the Vinyl Night guru that MANY artists and bands, especially the kind of homegrown bands we all love the most, are going back to vinyl and including digital downloads with the purchase of the vinyl LPs so you get the substance and the expression I mentioned previously, but you get the convenience, too — and all for the price of one. Let's face it: buying a CD or vinyl album is always going to be more expensive in the long run than digital music, namely because people can't just steal whatever they want from the Internet whenever they want to steal it, but also because online music sites that sell full digital albums for $9.99 can't be beat by CD or vinyl sales — hey, there's a cost for material in there somewhere that gets added to what the artist and then the "store" makes. So what's up — get it in your head now: it's not going to be cheap...

But, the point I'm trying to make is that sometimes cheap in the way of cost simply cheapens an experience as a whole, and since my first Vinyl Night experience I've realized how much more real the experience of music can be — much more real than plugging in headphones or my iPod to the dock, or clicking a button on my computer to open an app, and pressing play. That's gotten lost, and I'd like to find it for myself again without the shop on Friday nights being my only chance to experience it.

I don't want to toss out my iPod - I'm all for convenience in the car or on a run or on the train (an experience I'll be having soon). I'm just saying that when I'm home, I want to chill and know —- and I want my son to grow up chilling and learning and knowing — what that true musical experience from that era I cherish so much in my heart (the 60's - for reasons I can't explain because I wasn't alive then, unless I OD'd and was reincarnated) is and that it truly can be an experience where you get up and walk over to the machine to change the record or turn the record over or fix the arm/needle...that being involved in more than pressing play or saying, "go," is much more fun and rewarding in most cases than the convenience (which is generally just laziness) we've all become accustomed to.

Blessings - and enjoy your music!

C~