Archive for December, 2007Maybe you’ve seen this posted a couple of times, from Washington Post:
Well, I think this is just one spokesperson who spoke herself into her foot. Anyway, even if RIAA and the Anyway, even if they got this into a low, how could they keep track of millions, not not speak of billions of users? It’s very simple, digital material could be cloned as much as you want. The only way is to make consumers willing to provide money for music. Law enforcement and digital protection tools are always doomed to fail. If there’s one more thing I hope to happen next year is that the music industry will finally get in tune with the consumers. We like DRM-free material, and also don’t like someone keeping track of what we do behind our backs. I really don’t care how this is done, by a tax on CDs or ISPs compensating artists, eMusic style services, iTunes, and so on. But something consumer-friendly is better than what the five five are trying to achieve just now — give up your old and non-working ideas.
In general, if a web page is hard to understand and use, it will mean that few will bother exploring the page… Anyway, Autechre is soon out with a new album, hurray. They’ve done all, glitch music, minimalism, and so on, a long long time ago. Actually their Wikipedia entry had a very interesting note:
Yes! I just finished another BioWaves episode (010) using Ableton Live and I used a couple of non-standard transitions that I thought would be fun talking about. To start with, BioWaves the podcast is not done live, of many reasons. I’m always running out of time to get the episodes done, there’s a lot of work, selecting tracks, doing artwork, finding urls to the tracks (sometimes that takes a while as the MP3 files or web sites don’t have enough information.) There has been many cases where I’ve pulled out one track and added a new one, a day before release. There’s a certain pattern I try to keep concerning track selections (more later.) And I try to play each track three or four minutes without any editing. To do the actual episode live would just add another level of complexity. Anyway, I will mention how these techniques could be done in a real live situation, and if I play live, I indeed play live, no cheating there. Anyway, enough excuses.
In my case it was just pure luck that the first track ending I’ve selected randomly had a nice washout sound, while the other track then continued happily with its beat.
What to do? Well, my standard trick is to take down the bpm levels as part of the ending track where there are no drums, and hopefully no fast patterns such as arpeggiators. Slow melodies are the best. By taking down the BPM levels — sometimes even 20 BPM or more — few would notice it. If there’s still something unnerving about that dramatic BPM drop, I could add in ping-pong delay och a big reverb effect that further masks out the big drop. You could also easily do this in a live situation, just find the right spot. If you don’t have one handy, make a loop or a clip with something that could be used to taking down the BPM levels and loop this around. Which leads to the third trick I use from time to time. I really want certain tracks to play together. Usually it’s easy, but there are always some problem Again, in a live situation you just loop a part, or have a handy Ableton Live clip around and use this one when fading out one track. You could also use a loop for fading in a starting track. Or loops for both cases. As you see in the picture above, I even used two very short loops for the fade in case and two longer loops for the fade-out. I’m afraid someone might protest about all these artificial transition techniques. That’s fine. Ultimately it’s really the audience that should make any judgments if they like the mixes or not. Actually my hidden agenda with this posting is to inspire other producers and DJs to use non-standard transitions — the fade in/out is so boring and predictable nowadays…
Techno has evolved and is continuing to evolve. It has influenced many other electronic styles, and there’s a cross-pollination going on between techno and minimalism, as well as in other areas. Here’s a snapshot of various techno-flavored net label releases where techno is present, but it’s not what you parents would call techno. BioWaves 008 Track Listing:
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A classical one that shows up frequently is that someone first asks how to do mastering of tracks, and then later someone tells: don’t do it, better let professionals handle it for you. Then there’s either a reference to a mastering house, or the poster is promoting his or her own mastering services. So it’s clear what’s going on — direct marketing and trying to steer customers towards them. Usually such marketing is nasty and just backfires. Another variation is when someone asks about how to use a specific product, plug-in, amp, and so on, in a somewhat different scenario than expected. Let’s give this example, using a keyboard amp as a bass amplifier. Some might say, that’s silly. However, a lot of modern keyboard amps go down to 30Hz or below, and work just fine, and with a pre-amp in front you could key in all kinds of amplifier models where all you need is to amplify the pre-amp settings. What happened was that someone had not even tried out keyboard amps, do don’t know enough information about such scenarios, but still just post something about not doing it, as everyone is using specific bass amplifiers…. Actually, in a good discussion someone might later reply that watch out for open-ended cabinet constructions, the bass levels might destroy the cabinet and so on. Or then someone is telling that using a specific plug-in in a certain way creates bad sound. While maybe the whole idea behind the plug-in is to distort the sound in a certain way, and that’s what others want to use it for. There’s really no objective answer today concerning how people use effects and plug-ins to achieve all kinds of sounds. And that’s fine. There are all kinds of variations of answers; you might distill the problem ones related to laziness, hubris, subjectivity, not knowing but still answering to get more postings on a forum (me too posts), and so on. It’s good people provide advise on blogs, forums and mailing lists. However, you always need to do a little bit thinking yourself and see if an answer makes sense or not. Nobody is perfect (that includes me.)
Anyway, the forum no-spam text field check for the bass forum was very clever, or what! PS: You need to know how a bass is tuned…
Well. It was a culture shock for me, especially after a long time of either purchasing digital tracks, or chasing interesting material on net labels. To start with, phew it was dirty business to handle old CD covers, albums and so on. I had to wash my hands when I came home…. Secondly, how icky is it to purchase something without a decent chance to hear the tracks? To be fair, you had play stations for the new material, but for used stuff there was no obvious way to listen to the CD? I guess I could drag over a big pile of material to the one controlling the PA in the store and ask them to play 20 second snippets of each track… Other observations? I was surprised to see so little vinyl available, especially used vinyl. That side is really dead. In addition, now close to one third of this store was dedicated to new and used DVDs and other non-music related stuff. I’m sure Rasputin Music will be around for a long time. For me, I just gave up even purchasing 1 dollar CDs, and I rather spend my time looking for music using electronic services on Internet. It’s very clear indeed that material music stores will go the way of smaller book stores. When I moved to the Bay Area there used to be a specialty book store around every corner, used books, SciFi, computer books and so on. Now there’s mostly Borders and Barnes&Nobles super stores, and they are pinched in by Amazon, too.
We start with going through new minimalist material, showcasing how this genre could give rise to many different interpretations. As an interlude we examine two indie electro tracks. After this we enter the world of techno where glittering cities at night and customized Hondas with sub-woofers rule, ending up with a transformation to tech house and showing how techno and tech house today are very much integrated into each other. Finally we will end with more chilled music, showing how talented artists could create soundscapes with all the modern tools available today. BioWaves 007 Track Listing:
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big recording industry is suddenly changing their policy, there’s so much from past related to them supporting this activity so that any attempts to change their policies will be tough. Unless they get the congress behind them, which I doubt.
See 
The second technique has to do with how to handle very dramatic BPM changes. In my case it seems I have nailed down a certain pattern on the one hour shows where there’s a build-up to the 50th minute. From that forward I want to take the pace down, play various chill and otherwise non-standard dance music tracks, and those are usually down to 110BPM or below. While the build-up was up to 130BPM or higher.
cases. The trick I use in those cases is to make a short four-bar or so loop of the ending track, and let this one loop for a while. Meanwhile I fade out this track and let the other come in, either via a filter, or just by plain volume fade outs/ins. By finding a good loop point that works across the whole fade makes this much better. This is especially useful for tracks with very complicated endings, and where you even can’t fade out/in as it starts to suddenly sound strange at some section.
BioWaves episode eight, a special techno edition.
After a while when you have read enough postings, you start to get an inner system of catching postings that actually have an indirect or otherwise misleading nature. I give you an example of a couple of those that I’ve seen in all kinds of variations out there in music-centric forums.
I created an account on 
I have not visited a classical record store for a very, very long time. One of the few existing ones here in the Bay Area is 
BioWaves episode 7 showcasing netlabel and unreleased produced material available on Internet. Entering the universe of new minimalist productions, indie electronics, techno and tech house with drive, and rounding up, or actually chilling down, with slower interesting tracks.
