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.

Our kids got a Nintendo Wii today — after an early morning trying to find a store where the lien was short and they still had it. Anyway, I had to check out the sound solution — very impressed!

The stick hand controller has a small speaker, so when you for example play tennis and hit the ball, you hear the racket sound close to your ears. Same with other games, with the built-in rumble kit the controller is very natural.

In the sports games, themselves, depending on the outcome of the game, the audience has different reactions, audiowise. Sometimes it’s really dramatic, like when the last pin finally falls in bowling…

The default music in the setup section is this normal “Hello Kitty” nicety Japanese music, but when writing music for a game box, especially a generic one like Nintendo, you should not scare away anyone. Anyway, Nintendo did a very good job with this new game box.

Maybe some of you know that MacOSX ships with a set of default AU audio plugins. If you enable Audio Units in Ableton Live you should see them in the plugin devices browser.

There are multiband compressors, low CPU AUMatrixReverb, AUPeakLimiter and others.

One of the most used, in my work, is the AUHighPass filter. This is a hard cutoff filter - it will filter out anything below a defined frequency threshold.

The usefulness in production is that most of the tracks don’t need to include anything below let’s say 100Hz or so in the final mix. If it’s included, it just adds a lot of low-end rumble that will not enhance the specific track. Rather, it will all add up and cause low end energies that muddy up the final mix.

There are some exceptions. For example, in dance music you want the sub-woofer parts, bass and kicks, have the energy present. And the AUHighPass filter actually will help out, as you then carve out the lower frequencies for well-defined instruments. But for hihats, snares, guitars, synths, voices, all the low-end rumble is not needed.

I should actually make a default template for Logic and Live where this plugin is by default always included. Also, I’ve noticed that I need to put in this plugin across all tracks, otherwise if some have it, it will introduce latencies across the tracks… Thus the latencies are evenly distributed. Or, you could change the latency delay values for individual tracks to get everything back in line, but for me it’s just fastest to include this plugin on all tracks — it does not consume many CPU cycles, anyway.

I was on a business trip to New York for three days, and finally back home. Meanwhile, stream-of-consciousness thoughts about the big apple.

• Every time I got to NY I have the silly assumption that I will hate the busy city, but I really enjoy being there. It’s fun walking in a big crowd of many others, just melting in. I like the NY energy.
• There’s a Starbucks nearly everywhere, but usually on the other side of the street just after you crossed it. It saw the trashiest Starbucks I’ve ever seen, at Times Square, but at least it was open 4am.
• I felt more secure walking back to the hotel from Pacha/46st street across Manhattan than walking to my car in San Franscico in the middle of the might. Maybe it has to do with seeing far more cops around NY — hurrah for NYPD.
• That city indeed never sleeps. You could find stores open around the clock, but not B&H, that is closed during sabbath.
• I had a real immigrant feeling when I took a sight-seeing boat ride around the harbor and saw the Statue of Liberty in the late evening. This is what the immigrants saw as one of their first landmarks when they entered America. Not the San Franscico airport and an L-1 intercompany work visa that I got 16 years ago. So now I really feel like an American…
• The subway system has its quirks, some lines close at unexpected times, like Saturday evenings.
• It seems you can never go wrong buying pizza slices in NY, they all taste good!

Ok, I could not avoid making predictions, here’s the first one. I know it’s dangerous and prone to silly statements — but then one way to predict the future is to create it, or at least influence it.

We are soon at a point where 90% or more of the music created is based on anyone using tools such as GarageBand, FruityLoops, Acid, and similar easy-to-use applications. As such, it’s getting harder and harder to really find interesting music, as this pro-sumer based music typically is copying existing genres and styles, rather than taking off to new directions.

Meanwhile, big record companies are focusing more on very few artists and bands that they cultivate and re-launch in various configurations, as movie stars, TV-personas, game show hosts, and yes, sometimes also as artists playing on stage. This is what they know how to do, and they want the most out from their investments.

Which leads to a small grey area of interesting artists and bands that unfortunately neither have money, interest, or talent, to spend time doing PR, and rather spend their few working hours producing money and performing. No, having a myspace account is not enough.

DJs, radio personalities and other music influencers will have an opportunity to find such talent and present their material in various forms, at DJ shows, podcasts, radio presentations (in the few cases there are decent radio shows outside the FM radio world, maybe with satellite radio). We need more music lowers such as John Peel (was), John Digweed, and similar music-centric talent finders. Actually, as music consumers we should demand this to happen — or vote with our money and listening statistics.

Below is my collection of Flickr photos for August. I used a technique described here how to embed the actual slideshow in a blog entry. The other trick was to tag all the August entries with 2006 as a tag. My Flickr account is here.

Hey, I forgot I had a free google pages account, so I updated and fixed that one tonight. It’s always good to cross-link web pages.

The address is sandvik.googlepages.com. I have 100Mb of disk storage, and unlimited bandwidth, so I’m thinking about uploading loops and other things other musicians would like to download.

As a matter of fact, tonight I also reinstalled Logic 7.2.2 and other SW synths on a new G5 system, so I did a quick test, and saved the results as a loop. It’s up there: Electopia. Feel free to do anything you want with it, and if you produce something, it would be fun to hear the results.

Anyway, if you have a chance, I would recommend getting a google pages account. Only issue — for me — is that the actual page editor only works with Firefox (and IE), not Safari.

This is an interesting entry in Thomas Dolby’s blog. It’s about how he has much more control over how to produce music and videos, including a new DVD on the recent live tour, when he’s no longer hostage by the recording company (meetings, schedules, crazy demands).

Well, it also helps that Thomas Dolby is an established arist with a fan base, and the recording company originally put out the money for the establishment. I think that’s the biggest problem for new artists, they like the same kind of freedom that Thomas Dolby writes about, but due to the plethora of content out there, it all drowns in the masses unless you have a massive marketing drive sponsored by a big recording company.

Anyway, I’m a long-time Dolby fan, used to spin his records as a DJ in the merry 80:ies. The closest seven degrees of separation I had with Thomas Dolby was that he was the CEO of Beatnik, and I worked at Staccato Systems with a very similar sound platform for computers and embedded systems, so we were competitors.

This is a set of photos I took a couple of weeks ago in Encinitas, California. Seems I’m the only one that has used a Flickr tag by the name of rockbandfeet.

The band, Custard Pie, played at the beach, and I started taking the normal ‘rock band photos’, but got bored after a few minutes, and instead focused on their feet. Maybe there’s a way to tell how the rock band is by just observing their feet… The more they jump, the more fun it’s watching the band — unless you are a band like Kraftwerk or New Order — most likely the feet movement factor is extremely minimal, then.

I’m always going through musical phases, Miles Davis, Country Music, Frank Zappa…
Just now I’m entering into a phase of Franz Schubert. His life story is fascinating, you could read about it at this wikipedia entry. Basically he died at the age of 31, and only about 100 of his compositions at that point had been published. Meanwhile, he was a big creative force that produced a lot of music — here’s a list of the works. Impressive, or what.

I’m using emusic to purchase and download Schubert music, by the way –
trying to collect all his piano pieces and listen to them at work with my iPod. That’s the initial plan. More about his music later.

As part of my new job I’m working with photo software, so I had to learn how to take photos — the best way of course is to take a lot of them and learn from mistakes.

So I have my own flickr account, feel free to browse the contents. I’m trying to upload something each working day. There’s also an RSS feed with the material.

One nice bonus with the images is that I could use them at this web site, and with other projects, too.

Had 16 tracks suddenly in my folder with interesting music, so I put it together, kind of melted into a dreamy remix, a lot of hypnotic dreaming progressive house, or something similar.

After 30 minute I just had to add in music related to how machines dream, so it’s a dream theme. Just need to figure out a good title related to dreaming, now.

Actually, after finishing this first take, I did a google search to find more about colors, music and machines, and found this interesting article, so the name of this mix is most likely The Dream of Color Music.

Also need to sleep (and dream), and then get back tomorrow and do a new pass with fresh ears and clean up anything that supposedly sounds good just now.

Scrambled Hackz is like Ableton Live for video and audio. This is just in the earily days. Expect this application evolve a lot, and other similar packages appear!

See this page.

Alas, not available yet. It uses Pure Data, better check out this software audio system environment.