Spring’s creepin’ up. Already it’s all bra straps and iced coffees and it’s still in the high forties, that’s how rad we are. Throw your winter coat on the bumfire, wind up the whitebean and sweat to this mix, direct from the lab to the affiliates as a free download. Track list is here. Enjoy!
Hot damn, it looks like our EP has been downloaded over 100,000 times! Thanks, Internet, for handling that.
That’s it. No tech talk, no stupid jokes, no pictures of small animals. Just this lame self-congratulatory fluffing. Ha!
Also, I was just wondering how I could make Youtube videos with audio and still images and hot damn, somebody up and did it for us. Thanks, whoever you are! One thing though, dude: I don’t know anything about video, but for Pete’s sake, check your settings. The audio is horrible, and I’ve seen Youtube videos that don’t sound horrible so I know it’s possible. If there’s some special circumstance, like you’re working out of a remote ice cave with a dialup connection, accept my apologies and thanks for doin’ it. True fans keep the Jeep Ridin’.
This is why I’m done trying to market or figure out what people are into and am just making my dumb party music for whoever shows up and wants to dance: check out this dude’s Youtube channel. First of all, it’s called MysteryOfNoirGarden, which is a pretty fucking intense starting point. There’s our stuff, then there’s some sort of Social Distortion-sounding eyeliner band with a saxophone, a compilation of “bike fails” in German, some Anti-Flag, Funkdoobiest, Lil Jon…eclectic tastes, to say the least, and this is just the stuff that the guy publishes. I bet his iPod is amazing.
Oh, I lied, there’s something else here. Watch this video. I had lazy afternoon coffee yesterday with the excellent Williamsburg-based producer/bandleader J. Viewz, and in addition to being a very cool cat, the guy knows how to make some very sexy sounds. This one’s been rattling around in my head for weeks now.
Shapes like this sound cool, especially through a vocoder. Set a voice limit that makes sense and play some overlapping chords. It’s not random, but it kind of feels like it is.
Oh snap.
Look familiar? There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you fire up a month-old project, hit play and hear all your VST synths banging away while your system shrugs its shoulders, lights up a blunt and says “drums wha??”
Okay, the hand has been forced a little bit. I’ve learned more about file handling in Live than I ever wanted to know and here are some choice takeaways:
If you store and organize your samples in samplers (and you should–this guy explains why) then you have to keep the samples in the Library. Or, you don’t have to (my feet are not on the couch) but you kind of have to for a simple reason that wasn’t apparent to me until pretty recently. When you work this way, you’re using a lot of samples in every project. For every dumb blippy little hi-hat sound that you’re using, you’ve loaded 128 samples into your project. This is cool; they’re just sitting there and not really eating up resources and the tradeoff (auditioning sounds in context, through your mix bus) is totally worth it. But let’s say you do a lot of remix work or dragging clips from iTunes or whatever, and you’re dragging files into your Live sets a lot. You’re going to want to Collect All and Save so that all these files are copied into the project folder. This gets shitty when you start to do this for lots of files and every single sample variation for every single drum sound you’re using is also copied into the project folder. Disk space is cheap, but it’s not that cheap. Fortunately, Live gives you the option to skip collecting all referenced files that are contained in the Library. Nice. Now, the Library is just another big, bloated system-crashing Live Project, right? So, if I want to save all my 128s, samples, presets etc in my own Live Project called BOUNCE CASTLE that I keep in a dark, secret place on my hard drive, that should be pretty much the same thing as storing them in the Library, right? Kind of. Yes, it then has a cool icon and when you drag devices there (assuming you have Collect On Export turned on) it will collect all your samples to that project and nothing will ever get lost, which is cool. But when you’re doing a Collect All on a set you’re working on, there’s no “Exclude Files from BOUNCE CASTLE” option, meaning you’re going to be making a shitload of duplicates. This is why you have to use the Library, even though it might kind of suck and there are a ton of reasons why you might want to separate your church and state. For example: I do Ableton/Pro Tools stuff for my day job. I compose music and do sound design for videos and TV spots and stuff. I have all my Library crap on a big thumb drive so that I can access it on the work machine, but it’s a bunch of my own stuff, from my own studio, and I don’t necessarily want to leave it all hanging out on the work computer–it’s my stuff, it’s part of my own workflow and I use it at work but I don’t want them claiming ownership of every sound I’ve ever made if things one day go sour. It would be like them trying to confiscate your neck-pillow and gel wristpad and family size bottle of Dayquil (brought from home yeah) when you quit, but I’ve seen it happen so I watch my ass. Also, I like to keep all the copies of my library pretty much in sync and keeping the number of copies to a minimum helps with this. Now, I don’t need to be carrying around every single grand piano and timbale sample from the factory Live Library, do I? I have Suite at my studio, they have Suite at the work studio, I’m a Lebowski…all those sounds are shared between systems anyway and it seems lame and redundant. I’d like to just bring my BOUNCE CASTLE in my bag with me but I don’t think I can have all these different types of cake and eat them all too. So I drag this albatross of a library around with me, pony up for the big thumb drive and it’s not that big a deal. More to come on this subject. Fascinating, huh?
Speaking of Silent Library, check out this awesome episode featuring CRAZY NICK where he gets shot with a rice cannon and tazed by a midget.
Holy hell, it’s getting serious again! If you know what this event is, you’re going to be there. If you don’t, click around or ask somebody and get yourself to Red Hook on March 24 to be a part of the madness.
This thing has grown by leaps and bounds in the few years since its humble beginnings on the frozen, poorly lit Red Hook cobbles, When I was a young sprout back in the lawless frontier days of 2008, the racers (yeah me) were still dodging cars and buses, running from cops, packing saps and switchblades and frame pumps, sucking on amphetamine cough drops, negotiating time-critical slip-n-fall favors from bums for packs of smokes…In a few short years, organizer Dave Trimble has made this thing super-legit, with tons of great sponsors, wads of cash, luscious podium girls, celebrity backers, champagne cannons, Russian pyrotechnics, professional racers, and of course the legendary afterparty, featuring the loud new floorshaking sounds of FAKE MONEY, coming correct with that signature dirty dark roasted blend of superdigital funk, nasty electro, sweet homegrown originals and remixes, a little spitshine and that’s that. See you out there!
March 24 / The Bell House / 55 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
MORE DETAILS COMING SOON.
There is some really cool DSP stuff out there for guitars. There are a lot of guitar players in the world and the big software guys are competing for their business. There are some killer values to be had, even for non-player producer nerd types…
I got Guitar Rig 5 a while back as part of the Native Instruments 50% off Halloween sale or whatever holiday that was. I blew the bank that day, my only regret is not getting FM8. (Never buy anything full-price from them if you can afford to wait a while; they’re always having sales and if you play your cards right you can probably get a steep discount on whatever you want to buy from their online store.) It seemed like a good deal at $100 and it totally was. I work out most of my basslines and melody ideas on a crappy old Electra 4-string and right off the bat it was nice to have a bunch of different amps to play with. And they absolutely load this plugin with toys. A lot of the amp-modeling and cabinet stuff is nice to use on leads and drums (for the latter, usually in parallel with a clean signal) but there are also a bunch of compressors, EQs, distortions, flangers, phasers, a tape delay, spring reverbs, octave doublers and crap like that. It’s all very colorful stuff, not exactly transparent or subtle but a serious bang for the buck, and it can do wonders for separating otherwise homogenous mix elements. Just sayin’.
Also worth checking out is The Long Goodbye on Netflix (thanks to Staggeredly for the reminder). You can crib enough style points from that bad MF Elliott Gould to allow you to sail through your 20s and 30s as the coolest guy in the room.
