I am glad to announce a feature that may have been long awaited: from now on if you insert Instagram or Facebook video links in your posts, they will display as videos after submitting the post. The function works for these sites as well: Tiktok, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Soundcloud, Spotify and of course as always: Youtube.
Some glitches may happen, this feature is still under development. If you notice an error let me know.
One known glitch is that if you post multiple Facebook videos in the same post, it may happen some won't appear. You need to insert those in the next post then.
If all goes well, soon, inserting Facebook Posts will also be available, I am still working on it.
Due to recent upgrades the forum might ask you accept cookies as part of a privacy and security measure. This is a recent requirement by Google to ask for you decide if you want to accept the cookies or not (choose whichever you feel like). You can make your selection in the popup window appearing. I am working on to be able to skip the display of that popup in spite of Google requiring it, but during the next few months we need to live together with it. Thanks for you patience!
My friend is in Congo and is collecting money to make a DVD video lesson with Bijoux Bass of Zaiko. They need to collect 500GBP. If you would like to donate please message me in private message here in the forum, any little amount helps. You will get a free copy of the lesson once it is released. I will notify you about that.
You may know guys I am in contact with Mboka Liya, and I told him about a special guitar, and since then he is absolutely excited about that. Recently I am not on top financially, if I had some spare money I would buy it for him right away. But that guitar is rare, and I was lucky to have found it just now in England, where he lives. It would be a very good chance to buy it now, as I wouldn't need to ship the guitar to him from abroad, that would mean 2-300 GBP extra cost. I decided to ask you guys about whether you would be willing to donate for that guitar? I can assure you it is something you haven't seen before and represents a whole new spectrum that has not been seen in Congolese music yet.
The guitar costs 710GBP with shipping. Me, I can donate 50GBP alone, if there would be another 13 participant who would be willing to donate 50GBP, I could buy the guitar right away.
The donation would go to my PayPal account, maybe partly to my bank account in the UK or US to avoid tax. You know me guys well from here, I won't steal that money, cos where would I hide as the admin? As soon as the money is there I buy the guitar. If the purchase fails for any reason, like someone buys it sooner, I send you the money back to where it came from.
Contact me in private if you would be willing to donate, if 13 person apply, I send the details out for everyone to what to do and also create a follow up post here.
In return the minimum that I can offer is that Mboka will of course mention the names of the donators on one of his new songs or even albums if he creates a full disk of songs, plus I can send out his 2 DVD lessons in downloadable form for free to anyone who donates.
There was a shop called Diego Music at this address in the past: 53 Rue des Poissonniers, 75018 Paris
Recently I inquired about a release from a shopkeeper in that district, and he directed me to Diego Music. But when I check in Google Street View it seems to me that shop is closed. Do you have any info about that shop?
I am posting this because I wanted to learn this song (Bana Sec-Ado) from keyboard players from Congo and other related countries, but strangely every of them misinterpreted the famous keyboard theme. So in the end I had to figure it out myself. Fortunately, with AI around, I could extract the keyboard from this song. Having the keyboard only, one can load it into a spectral editor (like Spectralayers Pro) and the secret will reveal.
I decided to share these here if anyone would be interested and willing to learn it. Fortunately a quite clear recording survived on tapes, so it was an easy job for the AI. Here is the (1) version without the keyboard and (2) with the keyboard only. They are in sync, so if you load them in the spectral editor as layers, you can switch either on or off and analyze the song.
There is a great good quality tool online that lets you separate music files to instruments. I tried other ones before, they did a bad job, this one is very good however. Of course, quality comes with subscription only, you need to pay for it. By accident, I found a hack to be able to use it free. Anyone interested? If yes, let me know and I put a description here.
There is a charity group that is running a campaign on Gofundme for helping poor kids in Congo. I know the girl who is the boss personally, this is a legit thing not a fake fundraiser. If you feel like support their campaign, even with just a few dollars:
I remember there was a discussion here or somewhere else about where sebene came from. Apart from who says what, today I found some interesting addition to this topic, wondered if you noticed it already.
By accident Google showed up an LP for me in the search results today, one that I never heard of yet: the title is Kasongo! and it is a record from 1957 from East Congo. I was surprised to see on the back, that next to the songs the genres are also listed, and some songs were marked as: Sebene. I thought WOW I need to listen, firstly because rural recordings are not common from those days, secondly because it even has sebene music, and I was surprised it was already an acknowledged genre at that early age of Congolese music. And very interestingly, the songs sounded as I expected from a sebene or something similar:
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