Archive for January, 2008
For me it was to get a bass guitar and a bass amp? Why? Well, I got recently to a point when doing digital dance music where I realized that most of my time I spend with polishing and fixing audio material on a screen, mostly using my own loop snippets. Even worse, taking out nuances such as sloppy playing and so on. It makes the music exact, but there’s no breathing in it. In addition, mostly with keyboards you really don’t get that much variation across a song played, especially if you use copy-paste to line out song structures. With a bass guitar, I could have small timing parts that I deliberately create in order to get to the groove pocket. I could use my fingers with all kinds of variations to change the sound. I could put in different strings, experiment with my amp simulator in my Line 6 LD150, and so on… I kind of missed that part. In addition, it’s fun playing with other musicians, of all kinds. Sitting by myself in a studio became somewhat an isolated experience. The sum of it all is sometimes much more interesting than the single-person total control of a production. There’s nothing wrong to expand and learn playing guitars and so on. I’m an ex guitar-player, even ex bass session player (used to do hundreds of gigs back in college days), but it’s been 25+ years since I last seriously played bass. Anyway, getting back to bass playing has been fun, indeed.
The other footnote in the Last.fm announcement was that unsigned artists could also upload music for streaming and get a little bit revenue from anyone playing the song. I don’t know how much, but I suspect it will be tiny amounts. It’s interesting. Pandora does not have the same deals in place, so it could only stream inside US, just now. And it tends to repeat itself. So if you like to possibly hear the same tracks and be frustrated now and then, use Pandora. If you want to hear any music, but one track only three times, use Last.fm. Somehow I think consumers would prefer something between these two extremes.
Recently we saw for the first time the back side of Mercury. Similarly, electronic ambience artists work with musical palettes that explore and show us the first glimpses of new audio experiences. The artists and bands in this podcast explore such new avenues using modern musical tools. BioWaves 010 Track Listing:
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I will actually write a short series of ‘getting the mojo back.’ I think this scenario happens to a lot of artists, from time to time. For me it was a combination of working long days and weekends and not having enough energy to work on something completely different in the evenings, as well as another thing I will mention in a later posting. Anyway, how to get the mojo back if you feel your creativity has stagnated, or you just feel you are on the wrong track and nothing happens? One way I solved this was to once again rip in all my tracks from every CD I had, but this time I was selective and only ripped in material that I felt was special and different. So most of the mix CDs were excluded. While adding in classical music, old rock music, soul, reggae and so on was something I wanted to do. Then via iTunes I just dumped it all into an iPod and set the iPod in shuffle mode. Yes, it sounds like Kent of all the people finally got the idea behind iTunes/iPods, but for me it was the concept of hearing Schumann one minute, Bjork the next, then Rush followed by XTC and a little bit Fixx and Simple Minds, and then Swayzak. Those kinds of odd combinations made me appreciate all kinds of musical ideas, and get new ideas how to progress with new productions. More mojo stuff in the next posting!
Dieb’s Wandschrank starts with drum-machine improvisations on a tech house track. Leonid’s When vithco is played continues with tribal-influenced melodies. This leads to the strange section; first Choeny’s Subbasal which is an exercise in strange delay minimalism, and from this to q’s bobo which even Frank Zappa would be proud of. Craig Mcwhinney’s Gold Rush is a solid techno house tune with a very ambient sound. Then Heiko Mor with Toploader continues with an minimalist melody track. This then leads to Mandy Jordan’s Man at Gobi, a techno/minimalist track with a very describing name of the sound. Denoize’s Take Time is like a political electro manifesto. Skitish and the track Perplexity then continues with the steady upbuild of the energy, leading to Juno6 and Salamis, a very intriguing use of a simple wave pulse with all kinds of variations. This is then continued with Moshimoshi’s track Taxi bus, where various patterns are cross-related. Next is Nick Zero and Schlummertrunk with a sound that resembles film track music from the future. James Hammer and Gain An Hour then adds more energy to the overall build-up, which is then ended with a section of more chilled music, starting with Sumergido’s Embalse, William Field’s The Ruby-Leif and finally closing with Modul and Complete, where from a big set of excellent remixes I picked up the Madstyle remix. BioWaves 009 Track Listing:
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So I fired up my newly installed iTunes collection and looked through material. It was actually very interesting. For example, the Ultravox Rage in Eden album had bpm values from 73bpm to 150bpm, and many tracks were 140bpm or more. In many cases the tracks sounded faster than the actual bpm value, using all kinds of classical tricks such as syncopation. And this was true of many other similar albums of this time. Now, it seems we are stuck in the 128bpm rot in the concurrent electronic music, especially in the dance music world. Maybe it’s a practical issue concerning the dancing audience and having the option to increase the bpm during the mix. But it’s for me a little bit sad that we don’t really make use of various tempos in music today. It seems few dare to change this model. Anyway, especially if someone is working on an album, I would strongly recommend to just break all the rules and use tempos from 60pm up to 180bpm. That would be refreshing. Now, having even radical tempo changes along the track would be even more intriguing. Classical composers used tempo changes, even microscopic ones, along their compositions. While we are locked to a fixed tempo, ack. |
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This is part two of how to get the mojo back, creativity, inspiration, you know that feeling where you really are in the flow and want to make music.
Kind of. See 
This is a special ambient music episode.
Phew. This was intense. I was drowning in a bigger software project, but finally we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. So sorry for the long delay concerning new postings.
In this episode, jazz-inspired tech house, simple scales, wacko productions, sinus wave techno and much more.
My wife wanted me to make another mix for running purposes. That it inself is usually a challenge, as runners, depending on their pace, like something like 80-95 bpm. Finding tracks in that range that are not ballads is a tough job, unless you use the 160-180bpm tracks and those are super-fast. In addition she wanted music from the eighties, from the European 
