Junai: Archive

Jun 26th

Saturday - Marauder | junai Second day, second...

Jun 25th

Maunderer | junai An ambient shakedown of the...

Jun 24th

Jun 1st

May 24th

Feb 13th

Japanese Rock for Fucks Sake... →

…is the name of a decent blog, the subject of which you can probably guess, and which is worth checking out whether or not you have any interest in the genre. The link goes to one of my recent faves (which, I should note, I actually bought on CD), Yosui Inoue’s folk-rocky Kori no Sekai (World of Ice). But there’s a load of other stuff up there, from pop to scary 70s psychedelia...

Oct 12th

Analog Industries Tattoo drum machine →

I’m more of a hardware than software user when it comes to percussion, but Analog Industries’ Tattoo drum synth and sequencer looks like something I could get into using. The ability to have envelopes that modify each drum sound over the course of a pattern, plus the randomization that’s one of AI’s hallmarks, sound like they could be very musically useful.

Oct 8th

First thoughts on the new Korg Wavedrum

1. Built very solidly, though it understandably makes a certain amount of noise when you whack the hell out of it. The casing is metal, which surprised me initially but I imagine is necessary to withstand the whacking. 2. The included samples are crisp and the presets layer multiple sounds nicely to give some tonal variation depending on how roughly you go at it. If you’re habitually...

Oct 2nd

Too much.

Current reading list: Queen of Candesce, by Karl Schroeder The Neddiad, by Daniel Pinkwater Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter Gofun-go no Sekai, by Ryu Murakami 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami More music soon, I hope, when things stop getting in the way.

Jul 4th

Record

I think Propellerheads protest far too much about the usability problems with most DAWs. In fact, the interface for Record looks like a lot more clutter than I’m used to in Logic, as others have noted already. I used Reason for quite a while and liked it, but I did find its interface inflexible in some ways, notably its vertical tallness; with wider screens becoming the norm I often found...

May 12th

Extreme sample stretching for OSX →

Had a quick play with this OSX port of Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch and, while the interface is a little rough, it seems stable and the ability to stretch a sample of a few seconds in length into literally hours of sound is fascinating. It’s a fun process listening back to the stretched versions and picking out interesting bits for use elsewhere, too. (via Waveformless)

May 12th

May 10th

1,039 notes

So, to work.

I’ll gloss over the radio silence around these parts recently, if you don’t mind, since “normal service now resumes” posts are, for the most part, tedious. Suffice it to say that I’ve had a slightly difficult couple of weeks. As for progress, I have one new song 99.5% written (I literally need to fix the tune for the last line) and am battling an unduly complex...

May 10th

Apr 14th

Watch

Ironic that I should have watched this at about the same time the iTunes Store premium pricing came in. As Reznor notes, you can pretty much get any item of music for free these days on the web. Demand elasticity is no longer predictable, it’s infinite. Unlimited downside if you’re unlucky, or greedy, enough to put prices up beyond what people are willing to pay. Break the business...

Apr 8th

Mar 31st

Not that you want any cold...

…but you definitely don’t want the one I have. After a day of endurance, 24 hours’ sleep and another day of endurance, I am now coughing sporadically, cannot breathe through my nose, am seeing double and feel that slight sense of unreality you get when your body temp is out of whack. Have written half of two new songs in the midst of this, but cannot sing worth shit. So a bit...

Mar 31st

Watch

Mentioned this briefly on Twitter, and it’s by no means recent, but I thought it was worth a repost here as I found it immediately motivated me to get deeper into Quartz Composer. In short, it epitomises what a tutorial should be—it quickly allows you to do something cool that both gives a hint of what further possibilities lie ahead, and is worth showing off to people. In this case,...

Mar 28th

Week Two

I should note that these are Martian weeks, made up of Arctic days, and should not be confused with any normal Earth unit of time. But wince-inducing excuses aside, the next song has finally got a head beyond other similarly half-formed ideas. The hungriest tortoise in the plodding race toward the lettuce, if you will. Working title is “Last Train”.

Mar 18th

By the way

It’s pronounced joo-nigh. Rhymes with “you fly” or “blue pie” or “shoe dry”.

Mar 17th

Watch

An hour in your embrace

Mar 15th

Mar 14th

Watch

The Motus Mavis Star Synth. Puts me somewhat in mind of what modders might get up to if you let them at the Tardis’s centre console. Via Matrixsynth.

Mar 11th

Geek notes

A little premature given we’re still at the demo stage, but just to go through what’s making the noises on the recording: Floating-around-your-head bleeps: A blippy analogue sound from a Tenori-on processed through a bitcrusher, pitch shifter, LFO-controlled filter and delay. Drums: From the iPhone, using an app called IR-909. I do own a real TR-606, but this whole thing was done in...

Mar 10th

Twitter

I’ve opted for a widget in the site’s sidebar rather than importing tweets as blog entries — less annoying overlap that way, I think.

Mar 10th

Whew. Partial demo of first track up: http://is.gd/mIxu

Mar 10th

A teaser...

…or rather, a partial demo. This evening I trashed what I’d worked up thus far and started afresh—for the better, I think. Sung into a MacBook mic, so a little rough.

Mar 10th

1 tag

Week one: An hour in your embrace

All right, so this is me finally getting back to near the intended schedule. Words first. Believe me, my trigger finger is sweating like hell as I post this. React as you will, but getting to this point has taken buckets of an entirely different kind of sweat. What’s below is, of course, subject to change in favour of something that may come to seem better. Audio to follow soon, now I...

Mar 9th

Hayfever holding off. Time to barricade studio door for a couple of hours and see what transpires.

Mar 8th

Found one of the sweet spots on the Chimera bc8 where it produces terrific game-effect-style squirdling noises.

Mar 8th

Hayfever impeding vocal recording but tomorrow should rain, I hope. More practise time, anyway.

Mar 8th

Remaining cheerful in the face of adversity

Well, it’s not as serious as all that. But a stunning onslaught of hayfever is making any kind of reasonable singing impossible, so I’m going to wait until tomorrow (when hopefully it will rain) and try again before I put up any audio. May be my imagination, but my voice at the moment sounds like it’s been put through a bitcrusher; made grainier by the pollen, as it were.

Mar 7th

How’m I supposed to sing with my pipes gunked with all this hayfever-induced oomska? Not making fkin Donald Duck record. Taking pills.

Mar 6th

Up too late working on words after dinner. Tomorrow: shoot some video, do some recording, and post everything, I hope.

Mar 6th

Weather forecast this morning was “100% chance of rain.” If you mean “it’s definitely raining at the moment,” yeah, I’d noticed.

Mar 5th

Never assume based on a few words that someone is an arsehole. Only when you have conclusive evidence may you kill them.

Mar 5th

Mar 4th

Proof that U2 are past it: the techy lyrics in “Unknown Caller” are about the computer, not the network.

Mar 4th

Was having a grim evening until I noticed that the Tenori-On refers to sample sets as “samplings”. I have a low laugh threshold.

Mar 4th

Huge demonstration in Shinbashi today in the pissing rain. Probably about harsh firing practices. There but for the grace, &c.

Mar 4th

Mar 3rd

Well, here goes nothing: I’m making an album. The fine print: http://is.gd/lzPr

Mar 3rd

1 tag

Big ideas

So, here goes. I have a tendency to be lazy and not get anything finished unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’s not a trait I’d like to be stuck with forever and I intend to get rid of it in at least one sense. I intend to make an album this year. In order to achieve that instead of procrastinating and creating lots of half-finished ideas, I’m going to set a few...

Mar 2nd

Nothing like an early-morning forecast of “an 80% chance of rain or snow this afternoon” to get you psyched up for the day, is there?

Mar 2nd

Finished a tough first draft of lyrics to first song. Some nasty expedient stuff in there, but you can’t perfect what does not first exist.

Mar 2nd

Drained. Glass of wine, Anathem, bed. Never go to sleep on a fight; always sleep before you edit. I am so full of cheap aphorisms today.

Mar 2nd

Someone has promised to take a “proper” profile picture so I can put the drum machine shot to rest. Cue ugly mug exposure anxiety.

Mar 2nd

Out of the office early to make up for the Sunday night stint. Coming home during daylight something of a novelty.

Mar 1st

BeatMaker is slowly starting to click for me as a scratchpad arrangement tool. But it’s still primarily rhythmic rather than melodic.

Mar 1st