I’ve been planning on doing this for weeks, and I pushed it forward and forward, until tonight… Anyway, now the blog and the main web site are the same. Easier for me, and I think for everyone.

If you have existing RSS subscriptions, they should work, thanks to the magic of Unix symlinks, if not, email me and complain, same if you encounter anything odd…

I think some other links might also be broken, but the duct tape of symbolic links should fix that along the way.

Anyway, in other words, WordPress is both my blog software as the main asset service for everything on my site just now.

I had to switch to a new theme as I upgraded WordPress to 2.2.2, and the old theme stopped working. That happens, but this new theme I found today is better as it handles widgets and so on, and I’m in the middle of customizing it.

However, I noticed that the img tag paddings don’t work unless I go in and edit them via the editor, seems that the image padding is now saved in the database rather than picked up from the css. That means that I need to go through each entry and update the information. Just now the padding between images and text is not honored, so it’s too close, and I’m a perfectionist concerning easy reading of web sites.

This all means that for any of you who subscribe, and you don’t have ‘ignore modified postings’, you will later tonight get a listing of 266 or so modified entries. Sorry, but it’s better to do this today than postpone it.

It’s always a challenge to keep up to speed with software changes, indeed. But it’s better to do it early than later, I’ve learned the hard way.

I’m just now working on a set of Ableton Live demos to be placed up on YouTube. I was hoping they were ready tonight, but it’s important that they are good, and I think I need to redo the whole operation tomorrow.

A couple of notes. I’m using Ambrosia Software’s Snapz ProX that is now a universal binary. It’s a great program, but the provided kext module crashes now and then… But otherwise it’s very easy to put together video presentations, after you get the right settings in place.

It’s also a matter of rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. First I thought I would do a separate sound track and add this into the video, but it’s more natural to talk and show at the same time. But to do this requires that everything will work out, and I’m no actor. I need to speak far more slowly, especially with an accent that might distort the words. Also, it’s important to tell exactly what I’m doing at each step.

Fortunately my son had an unused USB headphone/mike setup, the mike is decent, not good, but it’s handy when working with my laptop.

Anyway, I will try to publish something tomorrow evening!

I was hoping to start looking into new Ableton Live betas, but they seem to have broken their nice tradition to release something each summer. I should write more about Live, in general. Meanwhile, here’s a series about music and money — it’s good to see where we all are heading. I would expect any musician at some point would like to be compensated for some of their work, not that releasing free music is nice, anyway.

This just posted article is a good summary of the oddnesses with the performance fees here in USA concerning radio versus net streaming. Basically, radio performances will not generate any royalties to the performer, only to the composer. The concept is that radio play is PR for the artists. Most of us would argue that those times are over by now with the advent of Internet.

It’s indeed time this is changing. In the electronic music world, it’s not that common to have separate composers and performers, usually it’s the same person or band. Anyway, I think the more clear trend is that the labels will have less and less to operate with concerning the royalties from performances. Another reason why big labels are in big trouble, as their business models were based on selling plastic platters and trying to sneak in with contract issues related to publishing rights.

What could you do just now? Well, to start with, if you create music, join any of the royalty companies, BMI and ASCAP are the big companies here in USA, and each country in Europe has their own specific royalty groups. There are some rules, but usually it’s something like that the person or band should have N songs available for public consumption. And remember, MySpace entries should also count.

The reason I recommend this is that these big royalty companies are the ones that will take care of all the lobbying, politics, administration and so on. It’s easier to let them handle it, than you get specialized in royalty legal issues, that might even differ from country to country.

It’s hard to know how much you could earn, but in some European countries radio play could generate more money than you expected.

I’m a member of BMI, as long time ago I liked their online registration system, but ASCAP is also good and they also have online registration now, Frank Zappa belonged to ASCAP, for example. Usually it does not cost anything to belong to these groups, but it could take some effort to justify that you are a performer with published material. You also need to show your social security number, tax id, and similar things.

After this you need to be very diligent and register any of your compositions on the service. Just now, at least with BMI, it asks for basic info such as title, artist, and additional info about the released product, length of time, and so on. Usually it takes me about 3-5 minutes to fill in the needed information.

As a result your song will also get a so called ISWC song identification id that are sometimes used with download services, and might play an even bigger role with future net-driven royalties and so on. Note, this is different from the ISRC id which is a track-based ID system, and usually the ISRC number ranges are provided to record labels, but anyone who has a label should get access to your private range.

Yes, this is not a music-related posting, I will send that one out tonight, but it’s a good topic for any creative person sitting most of the time in a studio, and noticing their waste line go up over time. Overweight is bad, bad, leads to all kinds of side-effects, higher blood pressure, triggers other kinds of things the body can’t handle. And you want to make music until you are super-senior, right?

If you work within 5-10 miles (7-10km or so) distance from work, use a bike. If you bike 40-60 minutes every day, and stop at traffic lights, and again pedal quite a lot, it’s like going to the gym every day for close to an hour. But you need to get to work and back, anyway, and you do two things at the same time, saving time for studio work!

The more you walk around at work, the better. Take lots of breaks. It’s interesting that if you work standing, you move more around, loosing more calories, than constantly sitting. It helps with your back, too. Always use stairs rather than the elevator, unless you work in a high rise, not fun walking 20-40 levels of stairs. When parking a car, place it the furthermost from the office entrance, plenty of space, and forces you to move more.

If you eat a big lunch, or dinner, it will just cause it harder to get rid of such calories, not to speak of being tired after the lunch. Take smaller portions.

Drink a lot of water, the stomach is happy it’s full and does not complain. Carborated water a.k.a soda is full of calories, by the way.

And never, never do what I did, went back to Finland and tried to remember my childhood days by eating candy I used to purchase when I was a kid…

OK, here’s the current system how I organize my projects on the disk, and I’ve used it for over three years, and sometimes deviate from it a little bit, but hey, nobody is a robot. I learned it from an article I read long time ago, and it was modified, and I suspect if someone else wants to do something similar, you will make a variation of it.

The whole idea is to keep track of the project status in folders with clear sub-folders, and move them from one state to another during the lifetime of the projects.

I have a top level folder called Recording. Inside this one I have four top-level folders called: 1-Attik, 2-Production Material, 3-Work In Progress and 4-Shelf (the others are for Live and Logic temp recording material). Attik is where I place things that will just gather dust and I might or might not need it in future. Production material is anything I really think is interesting and should be moved to work in progress soon. However, that material could easily get back to the Attik, too. Work in progress is where the active projects reside. Shelf is the final resting place for finished projects.

Inside each one I have the exact same sub-folders, DJ Mixes, Interstitials (short one minute tracks, Performances (DJ recordings), Remixes, and Tracks, There’s also sometimes a Film and Effect section. Biowaves is a forthcoming podcast series, hint hint.

Inside these I have each project with a running number and a prefix, I use KX<four-digit number>, KX is from prefixes I’ve used in private programming projects.

When I then work on individual projects, when I do backups I just drag this same sub-folder to another hard disk, the KX<zzzz> number is the one that will indicate the project. I now also put a short name after it as it’s easier to remember project names than numbers.

Anyway, the trick is to move the projects from one state to another, and also be brave and move things to the Attik in case you know certain projects will certainly just gather dust in the future.

Oh, one last note, inside the project folders I also have a small info folder called “Samples not archived”, so I know which project I have gone through and archived into my SoundBank. Maybe I need to explain how my Soundbank looks like next!

Ok, back home, and it will take me another day to get used to the California time zone as well as the lifestyle.

A couple of comments about traveling. I actually got inspired at the Helsinki airport and worked out 35 minutes of a forthcoming Pretty/Gritty/Strange mix. It also helped to have access to a power outlets.

Over in Stockholm I could not find any, I suspect they were locked behind the walls. As for Chicago, that place is just so super-busy and crowded, no way to do much work.

All said, it’s a shame that airports hide or don’t provide power outlets to travelers. We do pay aiport fees as part of the ticket, after all. Even the issue of paying big bucks for a short time of WiFi is silly, but with WiMax I think that issue will be quickly resolved.

I don’t mind the security checks and so on, not even that most airlines don’t provide much on the plane if you fly economy. But power outlets to charge iPods, laptops and so on, please… I even think all seats on all the airplanes should have power outlets, it should not be so hard to put those in today.

So Helsinki Airport is for me one of the top airports now, and Arlanda one of the worst.

OK, finally I have a DSL line I could use every day, so I could access the web, update this blog, and so on. It was not so hard to survive without high bandwidth Internet for seven days, but it was tough, too.

Above is a view from the cottage where I’m staying here in Western Finland just now, for another eight days. Nice, or what. I will later upload an image of my portable studio setup inside the cottage.

Like a writer, I’m trying to maintain a pace of having a quota of work done each day, like three kind of tracks, or three kinds of mixes, each day. Usually something is done, but it’s not exactly what I expected. That’s the problem with quotas. But at least it feels like I’m getting something done on this vacation, that and reading through a big pile of books that’s been collecting back home… Anyway, more soon.

Ok, what fun did I do the last hour? While working on DNA Tones, Part Three, I had a set of tracks playing the same MIDI clips — it’s one of those power-techniques to have multiple instruments playing the same lead, bass, and others. Heavy rock bands have known about this trick since the early day power chords.

Anyway, what I started doing, see image, is to deliverately shift the notes in the various same MIDI tracks, some would play now and then a couple of semitones above, or below.

This made a very interesting arrangement, sounds like some of the instruments are jamming now and then, and then falling back into line.

I just had to remember to cut the midi clips here and there — they were looping, so if I pushed one note up, it could have caused problems earlier in the total mix of the tracks playing.

You could also place one of the arpeggiator plug-ins into one of the tracks with same midi info as let’s say a bass line, with pushing it up one octave, and this way also get all kinds of interesting variations using the same MIDI data.

I installed last night a WordPress plugin called Live that in real-time lists requests to the blog, where they came from, search strings, referring sites and so on.

It was fascinating watching this in realtime. To show one odd example: someone was querying for “Biggest hits on Something/Anything”, the Todd Rundgren LP this blog was actually named after, and got here.

Also, I posted an entry about Reason 4.0 when I saw it was released, and immediately due to the magic of Google and my fast sitemap generation, many queries about Reason 4.0 ended up here.

Of some interesting reason, the studio image is something that ends up being queried via image searches, the image file name is studio_2.0.jpg, wonder if that has to do with those queries?

I’m happy to see a lot of RSS feed hits, so people use RSS feed services (if you don’t know, click on the info on the right side for bloglines and similar tools to read blog entries without the need to always poll this site).

I didn’t see much traffic with commenting, hmm, need to make sure more readers comment, that’s half of the fun with blogs. To start with I need to change the template so the comments are on the same level as the postings. So, who knows what that globe is in the picture, where is it located?

To summarize, I think I now know of all kinds of less ethical ways to drive traffic by using keywords and titles people search for. However, I don’t like that kind of marketing, myself.

I just finished reading the Sounding Off section on the last page of one of the latest Sound on Sound magazines, and I must say, I agree with the author about the issue of missing melodies and tunes in productions.

Either I’m now officially one of the old generation and don’t get it, or I’m one of the ones in the next wave of electronic music. Sometimes that barrier is hard to define. Anyway, I really do think that after all the years of loops and minimalist atmospheric sounds, there’s again room for creative tunes and melodies in the world of electronic music.

It’s not that it’s been dry with tunes, there are many good song writers in the electronic music world — heck, just now I’m listening to Solvent’s Science with Synthesizers that has a wacko and fun tune. But after listening to hours and hours of mixes recently, it’s really hard to sometimes find those fun melodies that stick to your ear.

Hmm, I even had to purchase my wife Nik Kershaw’s collection of hits just to refresh my brain about how a good songwriter is operating.

Anyway, I could be either right or wrong, but my prediction is that in this age of anyone putting together dance tracks with fifteen Apple Loops, those who could write tunes and interesting melodic variations might suddenly be the kings in the country of the audio blind. Stay tuned.

I had an intuition today, just wondered what happened to Goodwrench and his radio show at a local college radio station — KFJC — here in the San Francisco Bay area? I used to listen to his programs nearly every Friday evening between 1994 and 1999, and then the show ended. And what a show it was, he played Detroit techno, the latest/greatest, Autechre, Mouse on Mars, early day trance and progressive house, and anything interesting electronic-music wise.

I still have boxes of cassette tapes recorded from those sessions I think under my bed or somewhere in the house.

Anyway, just for fun I went to the www.kfjc.org web site and found to my astounding surprise that he’s back, since summer 2006. His new show is on Saturday nights, midnight to 3am. But that’s fine, I could use WireTap Pro or something similar to pre-record it, as this radio show is now also broadcast:ed over web, see this link, and it should also show up in iTunes Radio, Eclectic subsection. KFJC is a really wacko radio station in case you are interested in alternate music. But I look forward to listening to Goodwrench, might even send him a couple of promo CDs this time. Here’s also a link to his latest track listings — seems to be an eclectic collection of old and new, indeed.

Follow-up. Ok, listened. It was fun! I never realized how much more interesting a program is if the MC talks about the background concerning various artists and labels. I think he also heard that he will do special programs about for example the Cologne techno movement, goodies!

I took the playlist and header over to eMusic to get samples of artists I’ve had not sampled yet: Atropa, really wicked Japanese glitch electro, Reinhard Voigt (good to hear someone could have fun with techno, i.e. Sex Mit M. Mayer), good techno, Pablo Bolivar’s Simulated Physics, Natural Frequency by Irresistible Force, and much more. This is another reason why I think a directed radio show with information about artists and music is good, and eMusic plus the artists now earned money by such radio show marketing.

Which leads to stupidity such as this, sometimes I wonder if RIAA and the big record labels *really want to make money*, or just want to keep their company BMWs.

I read this interesting blog entry by Guy Kawasaki about customer feedback. Customers who could give feedback to products or services give higher evaluation to the service or product.

So hey! Give feedback below about what you would like to see me cover. I’m open for any ideas.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about writing more about the state of electronic music, look into various new synthesizers and their usage models, and dump out more Ableton Live and Logic tricks when I encounter them in the studio.

Feedback is good. It’s just sometimes hard to accept it. One thing good to learn is that if you don’t get feedback, you really don’t know where you are going. It might be that the whole track or product is ignored, or has the wrong feeling of one or the other kind. That’s why I really like sending my tracks to the various DJ promo pools that are out there.

However, if you ever seen Rashomon, a good Japanese movie by Akira Kurosawa, about a scene in the forest that is played back four times, with four different interpretations, you learn that nothing is objective. If you know yourself that what you’ve done is good, or special, just go with it. Usually such pioneers are recognized. But listen carefully to feedback, it might give you insights you never thought of yourself.

Also, when giving feedback, be honest. I’ve seen so much gratitude feedback out there, style “good work, keep up with it”. Sometimes it’s to not create enemies, sometimes for personal PR, really. If you get honest, valuable feedback, cherish it, there’s less of it out there than you think.

Hi, I did an early promo track last night, the results are up on myspace.com.

My myspace account is myspace.com/kentsandvik. Feel free to link back in as a friend.
Myspace is interesting, indeed. I was adding as many of the abletonlivedj.com myspace users, as many have posted their myspace accounts, and for a while MySpace thought I was a bot so it requested me to type in those funny letternumber combinations from a picture…

Also, my www.kentsandvik.com web page has a total new redesign. It’s good to redo the web design from time to time, looks more refreshing. Also, it was time to remove old stuff and think over the content. Going back to MySpace, seems that’s a good channel for streaming out new promo material from now forward.

FYI, I just updated the blog Wordpress version to 2.0.5. I didn’t see anything odd, but in case something happened, let me know.

Also, the configuration is set that the first time someone comments, it needs to be moderated. After that any subsequent comments from the same address will be immediatley accepted — this is just to avoid spam commenting to the site, so be patient in case your comment does not show up immediately. Otherwise, oh, please comment, that makes the whole effort more enjoyable for everyone.

As for future posts, I have a big pile saved, mostly about music production, and about starting small music labels, all kinds of things good to know…

If anyone knows of similar music production DJ blogs, let me know, I could start adding back links to similar sites so those reading this part could also find similar web sites.