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List Price: ?17.99
Amazon Price: ?8.99
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Customer Review: A little clunky
I got quite excited when I read articles about this book. It has not really lived up to my expectations. It tells you about people who hear music in their heads, people with perfect pitch who lose it and vice versa, people with tinnitus and so on. The trouble for me was that in the end it becomes just a big long list of notes on the patients Sachs has treated. I could have used a bit more context, or even philosophical speculation and wonder. But the author is a medical man so he confines himself pretty much to the facts. And he reams them out - the patient experienced this, the patient reacted like that…. Its fascinating material but in all honesty the book is not well written. It is more academic than I had expected. Of course some people will prefer that. I didn’t. Some of the snippets I read in reviews and magazine articles were quite intriguing, but when I got to the full book I found that many of them remained snippets - a footnote about a piece of shrapnel in Shostakovich’s head is a good example. Its just a couple of sentences and you want to know more about it but you are left unfulfilled. Maybe I had too high expectations of this book. I don’t want to be too negative as its a perfectly OK book. Its just not anything like as interesting as it appears.
Customer Review: Disappointing introspection
While I have been a fan of Oliver Sacks, I am beginning to realise that a lot of his books seem to be constructed so that they can be easily divided into magazine articles (or they at least appear that way). I have read the first few chapters of Musicophilia only so far and to be totally honest, as a musician with training in the neurosciences, I found it interesting as a subject. However, the book is not well written. It has long segments of rather egocentric introspection and navel gazing. I wish it would focus more on the case studies and have a much more consistent approach to the subject. It is convoluted in parts and much of it seems to lose it’s thread and drift into talking about other things, especially at the end of chapters. While Oliver Sacks is undoubtedly an intelligent man, I think that maybe he has neglected the advice of editors and been allowed to do so because he has sold so many books in the past. I bought the book in hardback and actually regret spending so much on it.
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Customer Review: Amazing value for money
I bought Ejay Dance and Dance 2 many, many, years ago and got a lot of pleasure from those items, so I came to Dance 7 VMS with interest. The first thing to say is that this package is amazing value for money - it does a lot more than earlier versions and the developers have done a fantastic job. The .pdx format is gone and instead .wav files are used and the audio-quality of the sounds is excellent. There are a few instruments and effects [although they’re not plug-ins in the sense of VST plug-ins, they do a reasonable job]. There’s no midi of course and you wouldn’t expect it for this price. The interface is very impressive looking - much more slick than the earlier versions. There is also a lot more versatility because you can import your own samples [actually I haven’t worked out how to do this from my sample cds - I can load the wav files onto the sample palette in file manager, but they never show in song mode so I think I am doing something wrong here - but let’s just say I didn’t find that bit very intuitive. ] OK - so what are my reservations? Well it is a less ‘immediate’ then the earlier versions. Although the audio quality is impressive, the loops themselves are - well a bit dull - I found it harder to build a pumping track than I did on the earlier versions. The interface does look really good, but it isn’t that practical. So for example, when you have chosen your loops and are arranging them in the song, there are no text names on the loops themselves, just a sort of cool muted design. To see the names you, have to move your mouse over the loops, one by one, and this takes ages when you are just scanning the song area for the one you want. The rest of the interface is similar - even with the tool tips it isn’t that easy to get around. The help files aren’t great that great either. The naming of the drum loops is, I’m afraid, a weakness. There are an impressive 192 house drum loops, [and 128 more trance loops] and they are quite varied, but they are named house drums 001, house drums 002…. house drums 192. Naming is hard I know, but can’t you even give us a clue?! Its hard to remember which loop you want to go back to when it is just a number from 1 - 192. To be fair, you can rename them yourself though once you have got them on the palette, and when you rename a loop on the palette, all the instances in the song take on the same name - neat! So would I recommend this? Well yes! - despite my reservations - it is still a worthwhile product and probably, unlike the earlier versions where you sort of exhausted them after a few weeks, I think this one will reward you because there is quite a lot of depth to what you can achieve, with patience. I would probably give this 3.5 stars if half stars are allowed. 4 is a bit generous, but 3 would be a bit stingy.
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Freaky Flyers - Complete package - 1 user - PlayStation 2 - German
The Velvet Underground (Icons of Pop Music)
Customer Review: Are the Velvets as serious as this book? Yes.
I’ve collected all the Velvets literature that I know exists and yet I found this book to be a fresh take on the band that made New York cool. There are so many angles to consider that you begin to wonder how such a complex group like the Velvets could produce something so simple as Sister Ray. This book explains it. I had to check out some things but I found them to be right, and there are pages of footnotes that are really fascinating in themselves. There’s some annoying stuff - was Nico really so witty? - and I don’t get the ending, which is too smart for the likes of me, but on the whole it’s a great ride, like Lou Reed’s ‘Heroin’.
Customer Review: The Velvets. A serious Witts-ism
It must be a near impossible brief to write something aimed at both music undergrads and the `general reader’, which this book claims to do but I think Richard Witts pretty much manages to pull it off. `The Velvet Underground’ is the first in a series of books on pop icons, (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and others are to follow) which not only examines the musical, social and cultural influences on `The Velvets’ but which proves to be at one and the same time a downright enjoyable read.
Although set against the background of Manhattan’s down town drug culture, this is no seedy romp through the under belly of the 1960s New York music scene. This is a serious book in which just about every aspect of the band’s genesis, demise and subsequent influence on punk, post punk and rock music is covered. Each Velvet in turn is subjected to detailed scrutiny in terms of background, his/her gravitation to New York City, musical interests and experiences, influences felt, and contribution to the band and its radical sound-world.
Cale’s Experimentalism and his association with the avant-gardist La Monte Young and The Theatre of Eternal Youth, probably receives the most overtly academic analysis, but Reed, Morrison, Tucker, Nico, Warhol and Morrissey are also fully scrutinized in a clear, cogent and well argued challenge to much of the myth and hyperbole which has grown up around this `confluence of misfits’ (Witts).
Serious it might be, but anecdotes a-plenty and some sharp comments stop it slipping into too-dry academic commentary. (There’s a very funny Witts-ism following a Nico quote which I won’t reveal. You can read it for yourself.) So, as long as the general reader who picks up this book has a somewhat serious interest in music or The Velvets, I doubt he will be disappointed. And if the undergrads ever get around to opening the cover, even they might come away having learned something pertinent 
