June 2011
3 posts
May 2010
1 post
February 2010
1 post
October 2009
3 posts
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...
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.
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...
July 2009
1 post
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.
May 2009
4 posts
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...
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)
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...
April 2009
4 posts
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...
March 2009
36 posts
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...
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,...
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”.
By the way
It’s pronounced joo-nigh. Rhymes with “you fly” or “blue pie” or “shoe dry”.
An hour in your embrace
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.
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...
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.
Whew. Partial demo of first track up: http://is.gd/mIxu
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.
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...
Hayfever holding off. Time to barricade studio door for a couple of hours and see what transpires.
Found one of the sweet spots on the Chimera bc8 where it produces terrific game-effect-style squirdling noises.
Hayfever impeding vocal recording but tomorrow should rain, I hope. More practise time, anyway.
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.
How’m I supposed to sing with my pipes gunked with all this hayfever-induced oomska? Not making fkin Donald Duck record. Taking pills.
Up too late working on words after dinner. Tomorrow: shoot some video, do some recording, and post everything, I hope.
Weather forecast this morning was “100% chance of rain.” If you mean “it’s definitely raining at the moment,” yeah, I’d noticed.
Never assume based on a few words that someone is an arsehole. Only when you have conclusive evidence may you kill them.
Proof that U2 are past it: the techy lyrics in “Unknown Caller” are about the computer, not the network.
Was having a grim evening until I noticed that the Tenori-On refers to sample sets as “samplings”. I have a low laugh threshold.
Huge demonstration in Shinbashi today in the pissing rain. Probably about harsh firing practices. There but for the grace, &c.
Well, here goes nothing: I’m making an album. The fine print: http://is.gd/lzPr
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...
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?
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.
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.
Someone has promised to take a “proper” profile picture so I can put the drum machine shot to rest. Cue ugly mug exposure anxiety.
Out of the office early to make up for the Sunday night stint. Coming home during daylight something of a novelty.
BeatMaker is slowly starting to click for me as a scratchpad arrangement tool. But it’s still primarily rhythmic rather than melodic.