Happy New Year!

New music is on its way. I swear. How soon will it come? I’m not really sure, but I have the majority of the recording done.

In other news, I just moved and have a brand new recording space. I am no longer a bedroom musician. I am now a guest room musician. When I’ve got the room together, I may post photos.

I got on a little promotional kick. I noticed that Frankie is all about The Sixty One lately, so I gave it a shot. It turns out to be an excellent concept for a music site. I could try to explain it, but it suffices to say that it’s a site with a point scheme that rewards artists for posting good music and listeners for promoting good music, allowing them to post more and promote more.

Here is my profile page. After a week, I’ve achieved some modest success. I’ve reached level 4 with 32 listeners, which is nice. Being level 4 lets me upload a few more songs, so I’ll be doing that over the next few weeks. It’s always exciting to reach new audiences. Consider me a T61 addict.

Here are some profiles of people I know: Frankie Big Face (and his listener account), John Benjamin’s Band (and his listener), and then some kind of T61 celebrity Glenn Case (and his super listener).

I also decided to check in on Last.fm and was very disappointed. I mean, I understand that I did a bad job choosing a band name that was unique, but it’s very irritating that Last.fm doesn’t provide any way to differentiate between bands with the same name. From their FAQ:

It is currently not possible to disambiguate artists with the same name, which means that if an artist shares their name with at least one other artist, they will have to share one Last.fm artist profile.

So at least four of us ADDs or Adds or A.D.D.s get to share the same bio, song list, label list, related artists list, photo gallery, etc. The result is a bizarre frankenstein profile that fully represents none of us. Fucking brilliant, Last.fm. Also, I may have started a wiki war on the bio.

Slightly adding to the annoyance is that I know I was the first Add on that site. Oh well. Boo hoo. I never did register, so it was mine to lose, I suppose. Now I have registered, and I created a label to upload songs as. I would rather upload songs as the artist Add, but someone else has claimed the right do that. (Yes, it’s confusing that we seemingly all have access to the profile but still only one has upload rights.) I’m going to upload all my stuff in the hopes of bumping up the listen counts of my songs and perhaps mostly retaking the artist page. No offense to the other Adds, but I want it, and Last.fm apparently insists that we fight over it.

Amazing VST alert! DSK’s virtual saxophone sounds excellent. Play chords with it and get your Tom Waits on. I know I will.

Ok, let’s try this. I’ve uploaded a ZIP file of high bitrate mp3s, one for each track of my “Flagwavers” multitrack session. You can throw these mp3s in a session and it will sound like my mixed version of the song. The tempo is 112.5BPM, though you may need to move the tracks around a bit to get them to line up with your grid. The file is 60mb.

So please, download away. And if you make a good remix, let me know and/or send it to me at jefffal@gmail.com. I’ll post it.

http://www.archive.org/details/AddFlagwavers-RemixPack/

Design update: still not done. I’m working on it…. Actually, that’s a lie. I’m not working on it, which is why it’s not done. But I WILL work on it. Soon, I hope. By the time it’s done, there will be a main nav link to the Add Wiki that I’ve set up. The main goal for the Wiki is to supply lyrics and chords to the curious. I’m not about to systematically go through and write up every song (hey, I can’t even finish a superficial redesign), so I figured I’d give you the reader the opportunity to write up my songs for me. And if you get something wrong, I will probably correct you. For instance, Tessa, I feel bad breaking it to you, but my song “It’s Always Something” isn’t so sweet as “In the rush of a lovely dream, your wink would set my weak heart free”. In fact, it goes “In the rush of a lovely dream, your WEAK WORDS set my weak heart free”.

So that’s the intended use of the Wiki, but as it is a Wiki and all, feel free to add anything to it that is relevant to me and/or my music. One thought I’ve had is to start a “Notebook” section where I deposit my half-written turns of phrase so that other people can add their own phrases and then maybe it’ll evolve into a stew of inspiration. But that’s just a thought.

I bought a little USB keyboard, and I’ve been playing with a cool program called Bidule. It’s a super flexible modular… um… music environment? You may have seen this sort of program before — Buzz, Audio Mulch, Energy XT — but it’s basically music-making via flow chart, which is much cooler than it sounds. In the interface, I can wire the MIDI from my keyboard into my mellotron effect — or I can wire it into both my mellotron and a bass synth — or I can wire it into my bass synth and also into a MIDI effect that turns one note into a chord and then wire that chord into the mellotron. And then I could wire the bass and mellotron into a loop recorder that’s synced to the drum loop I’ve got going on. Anyway, you get the idea. I don’t think I would record many songs this way, but this method could work wonders in a live environment.

I’ve tried several programs that do this sort of thing, and Bidule is the best fit for me. Every program has some feature that confounds me and keeps me from doing exactly what I want, but Bidule makes it easy to customize things and do some pseudo-programming, so I’ve been able to overcome the problems I’ve encountered so far. With any luck, this isn’t the last you’ll from me regarding Bidule.

P.S. While I was exploring my options in this realm, I discovered the amazing Jesusonic, the easy-to-progam plugin format. It’s sort of embarrassing that I hadn’t realized how great Jesusonic was, considering that it’s a feature of REAPER, my DAW for the past 2 years. My dream now is that someone will make a modular Jesusonic host. I would be all over that.

P.P.S. This isn’t the final redesign. Don’t panic.

Hullo. If things look weird, it’s because I’m moving things around on the site. Hopefully, it’ll all look better shortly.

For a while, I’ve wanted to post the “source” material for my songs in a way that those who wanted to could remix/reuse it. I’m sure if I got around to doing this, I would do it via ccmixter. I’ve got two major hurdles though. The first is, as it always is, finding the time to actually package my stuff in a form that someone else could use. The second hurdle is that I can never decide what that form would be. At this point, I see two options: A) mix down each individual track from the session and post all of the tracks as high bitrate mp3s or B) mix down each track but then cut them up into loops, allowing me to post them as wav files.

The perfectionist in me isn’t crazy about either option. Option A compromises audio quality and makes the parts a little less convenient to drop into an entirely new context. Option B forces me to cut out large sections of tracks that might only subtly change over the length of the song. Option B also makes it harder for a would-be remixer to reconstruct the original song, whereas Option A would make it possible to just blindly drop all the files side by side into your favorite DAW.

Anyway, I’m torn. And being torn makes me lazy about doing it in the first place. Thoughts?

Good old Brad is releasing his second album soon. I guess my voice is going to be on it. If you want to hear my contribution in a different context, MC Jack in the Box has made a campfire version of “Out of It” by Brad Sucks.

My most favoritest of all VSTs are the ones from Tweakbench. All of my Nur Ein songs (the last four) use at least one Tweakbench plugin. Tapeworm, a mellotron emulator, is my first choice synth sound these days. I also use Maelcum for delay and Cairo for the “How Soon Is Now” sound. There’s also Triforce, which emulates the sounds of an NES - I want to work that into my stuff some more.

All of these plugins sound great, and what’s more, the interface is really nice. Nice-looking and easy to use. It seems like most VST designers get caught up in the idea of emulating the look of hardware as well as the functionality, and they end up making these godawful interfaces that I just kind of have to suffer through. Tweakbench plugins make me feel kind of happy while I use them with their very simple look and bright colors.

Here’s an interview with Aaron Rutledge, who makes the Tweakbench plugins, and he seems to agree with me on the VST GUI front.