wire to the ear

I’ve been recording music since 1989 and each year since I’ve saved my songs, stems and album covers on Cassettes, DATs, Zip Disks, CDs, DVDs, assorted hard drives and even in the cloud. Today with each new important music social network or online music retailer that arrives I have to upload my entire catalog again. The past few times I’ve done this by digging into all the old CDs repeatedly. Today I put an end to that madness. I purchased a portable bus powered USB 2.0 drive that is the new grand central station of all the music I ever created (and all the music on my record label). Each release is in its own folder containing the song in all formats, artwork and remix files. When it’s time to upload to Trackitdown I have 320kpbs MP3s using the Lame encoder ready. Beatport? No problem Wavs are at hand. Oh yeah, I also keep 30 second previews saved too.

This is a novel idea but I feel good that I finally got around to it. I think this massive futz was just in the nick of time as my old Tascam DA-30 DAT machine was making squeaking sounds. The next step is to use SuperDuper! and regularly clone the new baby. It’s true that someone could steal my entire music catalog all in one swoop but those interested are already doing that online (har har). I put a .txt document on the drive titled Contact_Me.txt. I hope if the drive ever does get lost, stolen and found a nice person will be kind enough to reach me. I’m considering also encrypting the drive. I’ve heard Leo Laporte on the TWIT podcast mention software to just that. What was it called again? As long as it’s not too tricky or kill the performance of the drive why not.

So what exactly did I get? I’m in Berlin so I walked down to Alexanderplatz to Mediamarkt and grabbed a Western Digital “My Passport” 160GB bus powered USB 2.0 drive. I know Firewire would be a bit faster but I am purely just using the drive for file storage and I have more USB ports than Firewire ones available. This drive was only 67€, anything with Firewire was over 150€. Check out the photos of this thing: click here I know its geeky to look at hard drive photos but this thing is uber nice. It’s white, tiny and has a white LED power light that also blinks when the drive is in action. To top it off it came with a short white USB cable.

Comicon was last week so I got inspired to make some strips for Wire to the Ear. I hope you find them somewhat entertaining. Feel free to share and repost them. I used the excellent Comic Life Magiq from Plasq. You can download the high resolution PDF of all four strips by: clicking here

Or view the next three after the jump…
Read “Four synthesizer comics from Wire to the Ear.”

The next release on my record label is by French DJ and producer Stamba. I am remixing one of the songs called Deviation. All the tracks on the release are what you would call darkwave, ebm, techno. Don’t you love all these sub-genres? Take a listen:

I recreated his original song in Ableton Live, keeping his vocals but using all my own sounds. Some of the gear and plug-ins used include a Jomox Mbase-01, Vermona DRM1 MKIII, Audiorealism Bassline, Korg Legacy, PSP Nitro, Fabfilter Volcano 2, assorted TC Powercore dynamics and Sugar Bytes Effectrix.

We have released the remix samples under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. If you want to grab the samples for your own fun head to the discography page for this release at Things to Come Records:
thingstocome.com/discog/TTC-017

The full release will be available on August 4, 2008.

When I was starting college I worked at The Gap in Greenwich, Connecticut. For those who don’t know The Gap is a nation (world) wide clothing store and Greenwich is one of the richest towns in the United States. The president of the entire company lived in Greenwich and would come into our store. He would show up without any warning which meant our store had to be spotless at all times. My manager would actually make me take sticky tape, get on my hands and knees and use it to pull lint and dirt out of the carpet in the dressing rooms! I also spent countless hours cleaning the glass, steel racks and folding giant walls of jeans.

I guess the intense retail store boot camp has stuck with me because I like to keep my studio ultra clean. I’m on a permanent war with those dust bunnies that collect near electric wires. For the floors, windows and furniture I use the usual chemical infused products with stupid names. However, for the equipment and screens I only use warm water and a soft cloth. This seems to be the conventional wisdom for what’s best. I used to buy canned air but I realized it’s not worth the price. I don’t smoke so I can make my own dam wind.

One product I love is Goo Gone which nicely gets rid of any sticker residue. Hmm what else? Oh yeah if some jerk tags your mailbox or metal door with a Sharpie nail polish remover gets it right off!

What do you use? Do you have any tips?

photo credits: CraftyGoat and kerim

Have you ever bought a piece of gear or software you really didn’t need? Of course you did. Did you ever feel bad after you bought it? Did you ever feel bad before you even hit the buy now button? You knew you didn’t need it but you still went ahead. I’m guilty as charged and I know you are too.

As musicians we should be the most frugal group no? After all ASCAP isn’t much of a union in the way the Screen Actors Guild is right? We are left to fend for ourselves. No 401k plans, medical insurance or even social security. We have do put it all away by ourselves.

“My arms do things oblivious to my wishes and my orders. Buy. Buy. Buy more now!” - Soft Cell, Persuasion.

Large companies feed us adverts pandering to our wish to make great songs. However, it’s almost never the gear that’s going to make that happen. Piano lessons maybe but a new audio interface or filter plug-in… no. If you want to see gear lust in extreme effect look to the forums at Gearslutz. Threads go on miles long with people chatting about stuff they can never afford. I swear I feel dirty reading about which $1200 pre-amp sounds the best (Great River by the way!).

In truth it feels great to give in and be dirty; to purchase something I don’t really need. To open the cardboard box, remove the shiny inner plastic bags and smell new plastic and silicone. You can almost see drool in my Vermona DRM1 unboxing video. Should I be hard on myself? As an American I was raised to be a consumer. Is it my fault I have these feelings?

I’ve done well in the music business but the price of life has increased by a third in just the past 48 months. No one is paying me a third more. It’s time to put down the credit card right? Yet if I had the new Oscitron my new song could be a hit and then…

photo credit: Keegan Jones

Here’s an obvious but useful tip that will work in any DAW. What if have an external hardware device that does not allow Program Change control? How will you remember what preset you were using for a specific song? Easy: Name the clip or channel the patch number.

I’ve been using this method with my new Jomox Mbase 01. As you see above the clip is named r31. One thrilling things about the Mbase 01 is how the massive kicks really pump any sidechains. Lately I will have more than just one channel being sidechained. When this is the case you can’t freeze or render the kick without after re-sidechaining everything to the new rendered kick. This is why I just keep the Jomox “live”.

A good way to practice your music making skills and possibly get noticed is to enter a remix contest. It’s also a good way for label’s to procure a “free” track that sits above the average remix. My old friend John Selway sent me an email this morning:

hey man

how’s things? we started Serotonin records again and we’re doing a contest with FOEM.info for an upcoming release.

http://foem.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=255&Itemid=97

maybe you’d consider giving us a nod on your blog..?

best,
J

I met John in the early 90s at Suny Purchase. He lived down the hall from me and I heard the sound of a Roland TB-303 coming from his room. Only a few weeks earlier I was at club Mars in the Astro Turf room listening to a British DJ play Acid House for the first time. I remember that night being so blown away and wondering what the hell equipment made those sounds. John was more than happy to let me in on the secret and within a week I bought my own 303 from Rogue Music in NYC for $350. Back at school John and I started a band called Disintegrator. We had 303’s and 909’s synced to Atari’s and Amiga’s using a Roland SBX-80. We also hacked audio outputs onto a bunch of electronic toy guns and started playing live.

A DJ named Frankie Bones from Brooklyn returned from a gig in the UK. This wasn’t a normal DJ gig for him as he witnessed the birth of the Rave Scene and he was determined to show everyone in NYC what he experienced. He opened a store called Groove, a bunch of record labels and got the first techno events going in the USA called Storm Rave. This was the beginning of the Rave scene in New York. Everyone knew this was the beginning of something new and John and I had Disintegrator demo cassettes with us at all times. It wasn’t long before we met Frankie’s brother Adam X and a Jimmy Crash. They had a new label called Direct Drive and offered to release Disintegrator. At the time I had no idea I would still be doing this 16 years later!

So back to the remix contest. There are two tracks to be remixed this time: Schismism and/or Facts by Synapse. You can remix both tracks or only one. Two remixes per track is maximum. The contest ends on August 31, 2008. The prize is at least one original vinyl release on Serotonin, one remix in exchange from Synapse, Vinyl from the Serotonin backstock and some T-shirts.

For more info:
selwaymusic.net
myspace.com/serotoninrecords

I visit a great forum at vintagesynth.org to see what old toys people are using. There is a thread going on titled, “Roland SH-3 (not 3a) questions and value.” which I have been following. I own a Roland SH3 so I’m always curious to see how rare it actually is. I’ve mentioned before on this blog that Roland was sued by Moog over it’s filter design in the SH3 and shortly after released the SH3A.

Forum members have been contributing audio samples to see if there is a real difference between the 3 and 3A so I decided to upload a set for of my SH3 for everyone to check out. Each same is pure Roland SH3, no compressor or any effects. Recorded directly into a Motu 828 using Ableton Live. You can download the 24bit Wav files in a .zip or listen to the 320kpbs MP3s batch encoded using LAME and Techspansion’s great AudialHub.

The audio player will play each sample in succession:

You can download the high resolution Wavs by clicking here:
Roland_SH3-24bit_Wav.zip

Roland SH3 by Oliver Chesler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

You can also see some videos of the SH3 in action in my studio: click here

I’m happiest when creating songs for fun. Music that doesn’t have to fit anyone’s expectations. Constantly those recordings are my best. Remixes fall in the “oh man why am I doing this” category. I really pull my hair out trying to bend someone else’s vision into my own. For the most part if a song is great to start with it won’t need a remix. Sure there are super rock or melodic songs that need to be made into club hits but most of the remixes I get offered are already electronic.

Today I’m remixing a guy named Satronica. He’s one of my good friends from New York. He’s working on an album for Lenny Dee’s Industrial Strength Records. The song titled “Revenge Plan” is vocal heavy. The way he sings is pretty weird, almost an Arab chant style. I’m still trying to figure out how to mash the vocals into a tight grid. I may end up cutting each word up and throwing it into Reason’s NN-XT.

Because the vocals are so strong I don’t feel the need to keep his original music so I fired up some new toys and here’s a clip of what’s on the machine today.Keep in mind it’s just the synths and basic beat at this point. Purely amateur time so far:

The kick is Jomox Mbase 01, the main synth is the Voice of Saturn being sidechained with the key using Ableton’s compressor, later I add in another two copies of the Voice of Saturn channel but detuned left and right. The lazer zap’s are from an Audiorealism ABL. The drum roll is D16’s Drumazon and Devastor also sidechained with the Mbase 01. The snare is loaded into Native Instrument’s Battery 3 and if from a freebee disc I got with Computer Music magazine a few years ago.

It’s not nearly where it will end up but I thought you’d like to check in on the process. Writing this post gave my ears a few minutes break.

“Hey can I be in it?” - the little sister

“Yeah you can dance.” - underneath0skin

“That’s like your basic techno beat right there.” - underneath0skin

Yes it is kid. Your already better than 90% of the fools out there. This brings back a lot of memories playing with the first bunch of music gear I got. My little brother and I used to rock out in the basement. There are cassette recordings of it all somewhere. Someday I’ll find them and be amazed.