R.E.M - Looking Back, Life's Rich Pageant review

If you're a fan of R.E.M, you're probably well aware that the band have called it quits after 31 solid years of creating consistently great music, (personally I think they only dropped the ball once, with"Document", when they caved to a sound that fit the time and were a little too heavy on the 80's saxophone, but the lyrics were still solid on every tune, and there were a few great songs on that album
that didn't involve any saxophone).

For me, this is sad news, my first ever album, (on tape, listened to repeatedly on a walkman at the age of I can't exactly remember, but only a little way into double digits), was "Out Of Time", I was going to review that album as my inaugural "Tip Of The Hat" music review in honour of R.E.M's passing but then I figured everybody knows about it, and if not, has already heard allot of it, (i.e. "Shiny Happy People","Radio Song", "Losing My Religion", if you haven't you should find a way to go and do so right now, in fact here you go: R.E.M-Out Of Time), so instead I'm focussing on the album that I think is absolutely number one as far as their early work is concerned, that album being "Life's Rich Pageant".
Life's Rich Pageant was released in 1986, (the same year Bananarama released "Venus", The Moody Blues 
released their album "The Other Side Of Life" and the Bangles were walking like Egyptians, amongst other 80's esque activities that were taking place in music and elsewhere). In a time of excessive synthesizer craziness and bland pop, (some of which has a certain charm to it now, but allot of which is completely forgettable), R.E.M released a strange rock/folk poetic mix of undeniably timeless songs.Timeless in the way they somehow blend a sound that feels very familiar with an almost indiscernible something else, something that only R.E.M has, not exactly originality semantically speaking but more so a kind of other-ness, the sense that what they were doing was not influenced by any outside force, they were just doing their own thing. At the same time songs like "Hyena" and "Fall On Me" absolutely have a pop song pull to them, and at the time the album sold over 500,000 copies in the US and got a little more radio play than their previous albums, but it took the afore mentioned album "Document" to get them into the public eye in a big way, (mass popularity so to speak).

R.E.M were a little intentionally anti popularity anyway, evidenced in the obscure half Bill Berry forehead,(their plentifully eye browed drummer),half Buffalo cover art which was the exact opposite of
the common practice of putting a band on an album cover in order to sell their image rather than their music. On its original release, (and also a re-release in 1993 oddly enough), the track listings were also intentionally mismatched to what was actually on the record, when I got a copy of the 1993 re-release as a kid I realized this and made my own track list but obscurity reigned even then, I remember putting a question mark next to one of the tracks because I had no clue what it was called).
The eighth track on the album "I Believe", I've read was expected by music journalists to be some kind of final reveal of what Michael Stipe was actually on about for the last four years,(and four albums), after evading them for so long and being somewhat of a reclusive character in interviews. Instead he tells us
that he believes in "Coyotes and time as an abstract", and actually the song questions us a little, as if what he's up to is irrelevant and we need to sort ourselves out, i.e. "what do you do between the horns of the day?", (I love this line).

Every song on this album could be analysed from a dozen angles,(apart from "Superman", the final track,
which is a pure pop "Cliques" cover, which was probably put on the album as another bit of anti-popularity oddness), but analysis isn't required to fully appreciate the feeling and energy in it, and to understand on an emotional level what Stipe is trying to express. At the same time, this is the kind of album that a bit of research pays off on, for example, the tune "Cuyahoga", a song that I heard at a very young age on a best of compilation which tore my heart out at the time, and in some ways still does,(with it's bleak and honest "American Indian's were completely screwed over" tale to tell), is named
after the Cuyahoga river, which was on the western boundary of the united states in 1795, briefly, before the States spread beyond it, and has caught fire several times, the first time in 1868, because of excessive waste being pumped into it and its use as a garbage dump. This adds to the song in that you now have an image of a dead river, stagnant and decaying, and all of the meaning in that decay, the disregard for what was,adds to the weight of the words that are being sung about the people who lived and thrived there.

Similarly if you look into the facts behind the song "The Flowers Of Guatemala" such as what an "Amanita" is, you'll discover that it is in fact the genus of the most poisonous mushroom in the world, which is used to induce hallucinations, and that in 1954 the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government because they were restricting US corporate interests,(The United Fruit Company),and installed a military dictator who slaughtered a whole lot of people, ("there's something here I find hard to ignore, there's something that I've never seen before, Amanita is the name, they cover over everything, the flowers cover everything"). Again, the meaning is not direct but the references add to the weight of the song, flowers on graves maybe? References to the urban myth that the CIA worked on secret hallucinogenic bio warfare projects in the 60's, (actually I met an ex-marine who was convinced that was fact), maybe?

This is music that somehow avoids the inherent wankiness of obscure lyrics by not caring if you understand or not, because it's not about knowing references, (finding them is fun, but even then you sometimes don't get a particularly clear answer), or being some kind of history nut, Michael Stipe isn't looking down his nose at you, he's singing you a song, his own way, and the passion in it is obvious.
In conclusion I'd say that if you haven't heard this album, and you're a fan of interesting lyrics and music that isn't easily pigeonholed then you should get a hold of "Lifes Rich Pageant", because it'll be one that you come back to allot. Quality music for sure.

P.S: A mention should also be made,(for the uninitiated), of the excellent voice of one sir Mike Mills, and the genius method that R.E.M sometimes use of having two sets of lyrics running one under the other which is most noticeable in "Fall On Me"in this album and reappears in later albums, (i.e. Michael and Mike's conversation as a doomsday preacher and the moon in "The End Of The World As We Know It"), again and again, because it works really well. If you get your hands on the later re-release from iTunes there's a whole other disc full of tunes and early demos of the songs on this album where Mike's voice is a little more level with Michael's and you can hear what he's singing more clearly, it's beautiful stuff.

Guitar Pro 6 review

Guitar pro six is a guitar TAB/music notation software for writing and reading tabs and sheet music. It also functions as a learning tool to some extent because you can play back and play along with guitar pro tabs at any speed you like, meaning you can use it to slow down a song,(by changing the tempo), while you're learning it, and gradually speed it up as you become more familiar with it. This would be a great method to teach your brain how to sight read tab, or even music, but if you're not that dedicated this software is still fun to play around with and useful for other things.

Guitar pro enables you to fairly intuitively compose tabs for your own music and can also be used to read,(and learn), tabs for a ton of songs that other people have posted on the Internet for free. The programs interface is fairly straightforward, down the right hand side of the screen you have 6 little tabs to click on, the first being a notation button signified by a traditional little note symbol, to be honest a first this section scared me a little, as a non music reader there were a whole lot of unfamiliar symbols here but eventually after a little read of the guide that comes with the software and some playing around it didn't take long to get used to how they all work and what they're for. That said, if you're dealing with simple 4/4 time tab you can just use your arrow keys or your mouse and the number buttons on your keyboard to write tab without any other details, but it pays to play around because you can do fun stuff like add wah and different kinds of picking and fade ins and outs and panning and the like.

The second tab is a picture of a guitar and this is where you choose the midi instrument that'll play back your tab, you can loop your tab and click on different instruments to see how they sound, some of these are bog standard midi sounds but some of the wind instruments are pretty nice and the synths are OK. You can add a capo and change your instruments tuning and also the style of playing in this section, the options are pretty extensive but not so much that you get lost in them, guitar pro offers extra sound banks for around $8 each too but what you get with the program is enough really, not that $8 is out of the question if you really wanted more variety,(I bought the drumkits add on, because you only get no choice basic percussion sounds with the software as is). Without buying any extras you get three kinds of guitars, (electrics with single coil pickups, electrics with humbucker pickups and acoustic guitars), basses, keys, bass synths, brass synths, lead synths, pad synths and sequencer synths,(the synth sections are a little light on, one or two instruments each, but I figure this program is made for guitar players so synths are not the focus here), strings, brass instruments, reeds, pipes and last but not least idiophones, weird name, but it just means instruments that make notes via percussion rather than other means. Most of these instruments sound fairly decent, though you'll always have that midi fakeness, that too clean or too dirty sound that you get which works for synths because they're supposed to be like that.

The next two tabs however can change that midi sound to make it more interesting,(and in all honestly I'm a bit of a fan of straight midi sounds, they take me back to my childhood Gumby viewing days), you can add and play around with and reorder 14 amps, 44 effects,(some of which have pedals you can position with your mouse to change the levels on a specific effect, which is really fun), and 9 master effects units like ambiance and room dynamics and EQ and the like, the tab is an overall EQ and dynamic filter that works on your song as a whole,(i.e each individual track can have different amps and effects but the final master effects effect every track). For somebody who loves tweaking like me this amount of tweakabity is great, you can definitely get a nice sound of this program.Each track you make can be panned left or right and it's individual volume changed also with some pretty straight forward knobs and faders at the bottom of the screen.

The next tab is a chord maker/finder, if you click on the little add sign you can either use your mouse to manually create a chord and the program will find a name for it and a bunch of related chords or you can click on one of the notes and chord types in the lists on the left of the chord box and you'll be given a bunch of corresponding chords in different positions to choose from. You can then click on the chord button to add that chord to your tab or if you've already written it in to add a little chord chart pic to the top of your sheet of tab as a reference,(you can remove this if you like while leaving the chord in your tab by clicking the chord button on the right that you created by choosing or manually creating a chord but it seems like a good idea to leave it there), this is definitely useful for strummy type songs or even for copying a chord in for picking purposes so you can copy and paste your notes from it and remove it when you're done. The chord adding process feels a little convoluted at first but once you get used to it it's a good thing.

The last tab on the right is a little microphone and this is where you can type in lyrics or notes and the way the software then places them over your tabs is OK, you can chose where your lyrics start from in the tab and lyrics are placed over notes or chords and the space bar is used to skip a note or chord, however a little more control over this would be nice, it does the job but I think lyric placement is a tricky thing that if you really want to get right you should probably do by hand anyway. But you can also use this to write notes over your tab,(i.e "play this part softly"). You have five lines to write over your tab too, which is probably more than enough, but it would be nice if you had the option to add more, even though you would probably never have to do that. 
In the tools section above your tab you also have a digital tuner, a scale finder that can tell you what scale your selected piece of tab is in,(great for people with very little theory knowledge like myself who want to be able to say to musicians with theory knowledge,"this song is in A", say, and then hear them make up a kick arse lead or bass line or piano part based on that), you can transpose you tabs up and down automatically, you can choose which strings you want to let ring out and which you don't and you can do the same for palm muting.
You can also add percussion, use an instrument panel,(from the "view", drop down menu),to see where the notes and chords in your tab are supposed to be played on a guitar neck and export your tabs as GP5 files,(the previous version of guitar pro), as MIDI tracks for more endless tweaking in a DAW like Cubase or Fruity Loops, as an XML page,(which is some kind of universal exchange format for music scores), as a WAV file or as a PDF document or PNG,(slightly fancier image file than a jpeg, but you probably knew that). You can also import midi files, xml tab pages, power tab files and tabledit file,(I assume these last two are similar programs for tab editing), and guitar pro will read turn them into its own tab files, this is especially cool for taking a midi track you've made elsewhere and creating written music from it.

You can also write tab and then add a track for another instrument you have no clue how to write music for and paste your original tab into that instrument tab and it will be transcribed for you, this is great if you want to get other musicians to play what you're writing. You can also use midi input from a keyboard or a midi guitar,(Fretlight guitars have a bit of a partnership going on with Guitar Pro also but I use a yourock guitar because they're cheaper), to create tabs/sheet music of what you're playing, while you're playing it, which is really cool, it takes a whole lot of work away if you know how to play something and want to create tab for it without having to sit down and write it/type it in.Unfortunately you can't hear what you're playing through the guitar pro sound engine, you have to use the output of your midi device, but this is fair enough, the rate at which this program can keep up with midi input probably means that while it's doing that it can't do much else.
Guitar pro also have an iPhone/pod app that you can use to write tabs on the go and then use itunes to extract and open in the desktop version, I use this too because I'm a sucker for music related apps, its obviously not as complex as the desktop version but its what convinced me to buy the desktop version because it was still pretty great.
At this point in time Guitar Pro 6 costs about $50, which is pretty good, considering it does more than just what you would assume, (i.e. write and read tab).
Click on the link below to have a look at it on Amazon.

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