Archive for the ‘Project Status’ Category
So next is to pack down the clothes and take the whole family down to South California for a couple of days. It’s so easy nowadays to travel and keep a smaller studio with you, it’s just plain, plain amazing — and I was born and raised with a cassette recorder where I taped over the recording head for weird overdub experiments. And then later I had a Fostex 4-track that was worn down by weird experiments. Nowadays you could do 24-bit, even 5:1 productions, just using a laptop. It’s then another matter if something happens during a vacation, I’ve had both positive and negative experiences of working with music during such a period. Anyway, it beats watching boring TV channels in a hotel room!
My goal is to spend 80 hours of doing anything related to music, mixing, new tracks, uploading promos, just all kinds of things on the backlog… To make it more challenging, we are off for a Southern California vacation four days next week, too. Anyway, you could do a lot of work with a laptop. Yes, that also includes posting more entries to this blog. Even if I don’t reach the goal of 80 hours work, at least there was an attempt. Sometimes it’s good to set huge goals, and see what will happen. Another outcome is that I need a lot of 80% done material so I could fix them up during December and January and release tracks, so it looks I’m very busy, while it’s just a lot of material already cooking. It’s a good trick to always keep something around, close to being finished, and you could this way have a steady release cycle.
Anyway, I don’t want to talk about something that has not been released yet, but stay tuned as they say — the whole thing should go out tomorrow. All I could say that this is the channel I will use for exporting a lot of my crazy music that’s just now on the hard disk. Hmm, Royal Sapien has a twitter account, maybe I should add one. At the same time, my wife and I did one of those evening walks/talks, and we discussed how artists nowadays are so scattered due to all the the interruptions from Internet, cable TV and other similar sources. For example, Franz Schubert died at the young age of 31, but he produced over 600 pieces of music. If he had access to Internet and DVDs, hmm, I would not think he would have focused on producing all that music… And… His music was scattered all across his friends’ pianos, but they were collected and released. I think this is the problem many of us producers have on another scale — i.e. we have tons of material, but due to various reasons we can’t release it all commercially. And it’s a shame it gathers dust, as music is to be listened to. Anyway, stay tuned!
One big problem with massive tracks is that there’s so much, and it’s easy to overload the mastering section so that for example Izotope Ozone and similar stages to build the final compressed product sounds far too mushy. I ended up going through all the tracks and decreasing each level with one dB to tame it. Also, unlike Logic, in Ableton Live you cant’ just select all volume levels, and drag one down and the rest comes along. You need to do each one separately. Also, if there’s automation concerning mixing levels, you need to go in and edit those by hand, again. Sigh. But it was worth it. I also encountered interesting MIDI clip bugs that I should report to Ableton. If I edited one clip that I had copied from another part, both clips changed, very annoying. Anyway, it’s done and sent out to the promo sites, and so on. Next, I will take a vacation, sorry if there are not so many postings during the next 19 days. I will spend time at a small cottage by the sea with my MacBookPro and a MIDI controller, and have audio fun. There’s a lot of work when I get back, we just switched to a new aggregator for our label, and I need to redesign the label web site, and send out more music…
I have a snippet preview of Part Two over at the label web site. I also spent a whole night remastering a very old 23 minute long track that I still don’t know what to do with it, an attempt long time ago to make symphonic musical pieces using electronic dance music elements. That’s the curse of material, it’s either a style you don’t know you could push out any longer, or not yet. Or, is very different. It might go to a possible LP collection of some kind. But it was indeed interesting to look at old stuff and do a new take of it. I need to learn and get back and redo material, or clean it up, instead of always starting with something new… Anyway, I will get DNA Tones Part three done, and then off for a vacation!
I sent it out one the normal promo roundup that we do at the label. I hope to get interesting feedback, if it’s more of ‘neutral keep up the good work’ it’s not good. Either ‘wow’, or ‘I don’t get it’. I like polarizing feedback. I have a couple of similar tracks that are in the early production rounds, as well as I need to create another track tonight. As for the podcast series, I did an earlier mix, but got chicken, as I suddenly got interested in more maximal music styles, and the current netlabels are good, but I don’t want this podcast to be yet-another-minimalist mix-podcast, so I need to throw out the net and find more variable electronic music. Send me email if you know of any interesting netlabels or artists that do such music — the closest I could explain what I’m looking for is ‘Orb on drum machine steroids’, or ‘what if Frank Zappa did techno?’ As for promo marketing, same thing, let me know if you have any fresh ideas? I think we need to use some very clever web marketing to reach out further, so bounce any ideas, and I will listen. More about this all later, too!
I have not been able to do much work due to a nasty back problem that manifested in March. It’s still hard, but I learned that not doing anything is worse with the recovery versus moving around. The other thing I did was to elevate the space where I work (soon even new table legs) so I could work standing. This helps a lot, and it’ best in the long run, anyway, as the back is not compressed as when sitting. Recommend it! Otherwise, I finally warped the tracks for a new series of electronic music I was hoping to launch in April, and it looks more like May. It’s a periodic podcast with really interesting music, as what I think is interesting, from various netlabels and new producers. The tentative name is Biowaves. This way I hope to promote good electronic music that is available out there, just need to go out and hunt for it. The other thing was that I put together a new track for PlanetoidPark release, called DNA Tone, something about music coming out from DNA or something similar. The title came from this nice band generator web site, check it out. This track is a combination of techno meets old-time progressive music meets wacko melody short loops with tons of reverb that I like to do with Ableton Live just now. I need to go through it a couple of more times, clean it up, and send it out on the DJ promo services later this week. Contact me if you want to remix it, as I need a couple of variations, like one that is more techno/Berlin/mechanical in nature. That and read more science fiction! And yes, I have a backlog of label work that I need to get through this incoming week. |
|
Ok, I have close to half a Gigabyte of freshly made snippets of audio, loops, bass lines, patterns, all kinds of weird Reaktor experiments, and much more. It’s a snap to copy over this new sound bank to my MacBookPro’s hard disk, and pack down my midi controller, DVD with the latest audio SW that I have (in case I want to install something specific), a couple of cables, my headphones, and that’s it.
I got the whole next week off. Typically I get a vacation, have big plans, and then I just goof off, reading books, watching old movies and so on. This time it will be different.
What’s happened recently. Oh, I had to figure out a strategy concerning releasing material and mixes for the next 12 months or so, and finally have this figured out. The first part of this all should come out tomorrow, as a bigger download. I’m a big fan of downloaded free material from artists, and I have so much stuff on my hard disk that needs to go out. As a good example of a similar artist that exports his material, see the 
Ok, just finished DNA tones, Part three, there’s a 
Ok, what’s going on… I finished DNA Tones, Part two, in a trilogy where I try to do biological dance music of some odd reason… Bio-acid music is the last one in this trilogy, and I’ve done half of it. This was kind of bumpy electric house or something similar, the first part was more elevated techno, or progressive techno. Usually I have a hard time describing styles, as I try to mix and match, and invent as much as possible instead of listening to the top-ten and copy the styles.
Ok, I finally finished DNA Tones, Part One, 
Blogs actually stand for web log, a log that is updated by the author about what is happening. Just to show that I’m not sleeping on the sofa in my studio, not that I have a sofa installed there, I will do weekly updates to let know what I’m working with at this point of time.
