Exo – Logic Snippet by Evoc9  
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ExologicSnippet.mp3 (708 KB)

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She Only Comes Out At Night Snippet by Kent Sandvik  
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SheOnlyComesOutAtNight.mp3 (506 KB)

One of may projects I've been working on today, this is a style reminiscent of New Musik, Simmons and acoustic guitars… Have a Spectral Mystics EP half-way done, so strange stuff I will release it out for free…

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Nature’s Oil/Friend Of Cats by Catapult Of Noise  
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Nature’s Oil_Friend of Cats.mp3 (2169 KB)

Celebrating the bio-diversity of this planet, what is left and might soon be gone. 

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Trinary Universe (Extract) by Spectral Mystics  
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Trinary Universe (extract).mp3 (1672 KB)

And the first song ended up being like this. Oh well, the night is young…

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Sometimes I feel marketing is pushing new aspiring producers — the ads tell them that they need all the Waves plugins plus zillions of software (and hardware ) synths just to get started. That’s a good job of a marketing department!

Really, all you need is a good Mac laptop plus Logic (get the full Pro release). Add an Apogee One for output and some recording (guitar, voices, anything.) and a cheaper 49-key or so MIDI keyboard, pick one you like playing. Or get a smaller 21-key in case you travel around. All set. Write good songs. Don’t worry about mastering. Logic’s tool give you good enough mastering if needed, if unsure outsource it to many companies and individuals that nowadays do mastering for a reasonable price.

The total sum of all this is manageable for anyone who saves a little bit money  or works fulltime.

Did I mention that you need to write good songs?

Anyway, about three plus years ago I got a negative epiphany about the whole world of electronic music. It started during a vacation to Santa Barbara and San Diego. While we spent time at the beach and otherwise visited places, I spent spare times working on a 12-track minimalist electronic music album. Maybe spent five hours or so to put this together.

As I realized this was a no-brainer, it daunted that creating music without a challenge is not worth pursuing for me at this point of time. It’s taken me years to even get back and work on electronic music. Meanwhile I had fun with live music, playing with real musicians, guitar, bass, keyboards, singing and so on. That was a challenge as you really have to stretch out musically on-stage, no time to do fixes, nudges and otherwise rely on quantization.

So after all these years I wanted to again check the state of electronic music. Maybe was hoping that some new genre that would for us musicians create an intellectual challenge would have appeared. I was kind of hoping but didn’t expect any miracles. And so it was. Nothing new.

For me, it’s fascinating to realize that in all the musical domains, the electronic music domain has the biggest palette of sounds, patterns, melodies and arrangements available. No limits. While the musicians working in this domain are narrowing things down to small sections rather than having fun with all the possibilities. There are exceptions with some artists and bands so there’s always hope.

For example, someone should sit down and actually write good pop songs with smart and unexpected electronic arrangements. Lady Gaga is making millions with that kind of approach.

Anyway, as there’s always some glimmer I’ve started working on electronic music, releasing it with various pseudonyms left and right. But for me it’s more of figuring out how to really extend the domain of electronic music without falling into the trap of doing 4/4 kick drums with some snares and some glitches to make it electro-techno.

My youngest cat has taken over the studio, it’s her domain now.

Celestial Cookies + Umami Demo by Catapult Of Noise  
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PLTOID215Demo.mp3 (2512 KB)

Back to doing electronic dance music after three years. Phew. 

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Alchemical by A. I  
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Alchemical.mp3 (1629 KB)

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Anyway, I prefer substitute jobs and ad hoc projects of many reasons. The biggest one is that having a band together is like a marriage, you better like each other and understand how things work. Otherwise there’s just a lot of drama rather than musicianship.

I do think think that in the current situation having loose bands work much better. You put together the music, have a pool of musicians that could be configured in various configs. It resembles how the jazz bands operate in NY or LA. If the musicians know each other, how they play, it’s just a matter of re-assembling bands for various purposes. You could even get more gigs as you have more ‘cards on the table.’

There are bands like U2 that just seem to work year after year, and they also had their internal drama. The worst that could happen is that the band members show up for the obligatory show or album recording. After that they again part their ways. So it’s really an artificial band situation, as well.

This of course works if there’s some kind of monetary outcome from the work. Or if you are/were someone like Frank Zappa, just playing in his bands lead to lifetime fame.

So back to the drawing board. Here is version number two! This time the iPhone (or iPod Touch) is hooked to a RadTech SLAM clip case that I got online for $7. This has a clip in the back that could be hooked to various possible support structures.

What I figured out concerning the boom stand mics and the single straight ones is that there has to be one single place where to attach the support structure. Well there is one — the XRL connector for the mic cable! What I tested out was using a document clip, those you use to clip together lots of paper, the big size. I attach that to the XRL connector, bend the clip pins over and hook the SLAM clip case to the top one. I use the bottom clip pin to support the case so it’s nicely aligned. I think the second picture shows how it all works.

So the end result is a system that is cheap, quick to set up (sometimes, as with jams, important), robust enough and also as invisible as you could have it concerning lyrics in front of your eyes.

Which leads to eye sight. Most of us that are somewhat, eh, older, we lose the short sight over time. My son could easily read the text in the iPhone from the distance close to the mic. I could barely read it. What’s the solution? Well, it’s cool to have sunglasses on-stage when performing and now I have a real need for them. In other words, from CVS and similar drug-stores you could get sunglasses that are bi-focal, the lower part has reading-glass strength lenses. The upper part is transparent.

The last thing I’m still working on is the lyrics delivery system. I set up a special email address on my ISP so I could send lyrics to an IMAP server — rich text emails. These I could then arrange in folders online and then sync these over to the iPhone. This means I have backups out there and could download them to any iPhone or iPod Touch in case I need to do it. As well as constantly sending over and updating my lyrics setup.

I’m sure I will be working on version 3 based on the experiences I have with this setup, but as the Japanese know, kaitzen (constant improvements.)

Post – Psy Punk by Kent Sandvik  
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post-psy-punk.mp3 (338 KB)

Short un-mastered snippet of the work I did tonight for the third
song. Post-psy punk. Album should be ready end-February, that’s the
plan, get it done, out through the door.

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Extract From Wz – 11 by Kent Sandvik  
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WZ-11.mp3 (1805 KB)

Cleaning up a lot of old projects for licensing purposes later this
week, here’s one, I didn’t have a title so I called each one WZ, from
1 up to 16 the weekend I did those. This is section 11.

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Choral Music From The 31Th Century by The Saratoga Transfers  
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Choral Music From the 31th Century.mp3 (3005 KB)

Had to test my Apogee One with an external cardoid mic….

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It is of course natural to reflect that things were much better at that time. We had the first MIDI-controller synthesizers and the field was wide-open for any kind of experimentation. The New Wave movement in England produced Simple Minds, Ultravox and similar bands with a new style. And yes, we had plenty of hair.

Well, to be frank things were neither that utopian. Synths cost a fortune. Today by getting Logic Pro (or Logic Express) you get thousand-times more synthesizer options than long time ago. Not to speak of really having the chance to do the whole production in your home studio rather than using a Fostex-4 track as the scratch pad and moving it to an expensive 16-track analog studio for final production.

To release music you had to press singles or maybe an album; that itself was an investment. And 7″ 45RPM singles don’t exactly sound that nice.

To get any kind of decent media attention you had to work via a label that had the connections and money for decent PR. No Internet and web sites, exactly.

If you wanted to play a cover and learn the chord structures you were sitting by a tape player and moving the song back and forth to sort things out, rather than typing a string into Google and get the full tablature from N different sites. Not to speak of all the YouTube videos showing any kind of technique, or AudioTuts.com and similar sites that have tons of tutorials, rather than sitting long nights in the studio trying to figure out how to do things. And no forums, you had friends you might ask for advice, provided they knew something.

Sometimes I feel that this age makes it too easy to do music — one reason why fewer professional musicians and producers bubble up as it it no longer an arcane art known by the few. Then again we live in the age of empowering all consumers with media production.