wire to the ear

Automaton Overview Pt. 2 - Effects… from Audio Damage on Vimeo.

I like Ableton’s Beat Repeat plug-in , Monome hardware, the iPhone and random sequencers so how am I not going to fall in love with Audio Damage’s new plug in Automaton? It was released over the weekend for $49 and is available Mac/PC VST/AU. On Twitter, Audio Damage’s Chris Randall proclaimed this was their fastest selling plug-in to date.

“Automaton is a unique look at buffer effects, allowing you to experiment with artificial life within your DAW. With four separate effects (Stutter, Modulate, Bitcrush, and Replicate) driven by a cellular automata sequencer, Automaton is capable of adding subtle seemingly random fills and “humanizing” effects, but if you like, you can crank the sequencer up to eleven, and watch as your DAW becomes a petri dish while Automaton makes complete hay of the track you’ve inserted it to.” - Audio Damage

Check out the Automaton discussion over at KVR: click here
Follow Chris Randall on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Chris_Randall

Audio Damage: Automaton

It’s clear online music collaboration has potential. Mixmatchmusic came out of beta this week and there are a host of other similar services including Splice, eSession and digitalmusician.net. Electronic Musician magazine has an article online comparing a bunch of them but it’s from October 2007 so keep in mind things change fast online. To read the article: click here

Channelflip.com is a net “TV” channel full of tech stuff and they have profiled yet another competitor in the online music collaboration space called Rifflet. For any of these to succeed in the long term they need to be free (ad driven and paid pro-accounts sound good to me), beautiful, fast and have a strong community.

Have any of you tried any of these services? How was your experience?

What’s my secret to making music? I let my Gummi Bear friends do it for me! Normally they are camera shy but today they let me take photos of them recording a song. There are 10 photos and captions in total so be sure to click “Continue…” to see them all!

Red and his twin brother (also named Red) team up to add more noise into the signal chain of an Electrocomp-101 vintage analog synthesizer.

Green helps Orange change the Control Mode to Envelope 1 on an Electrocomp-101 synthesizer.

Green and Red need some inspiration before they go back to making music so they lie down for a bit on a Roland SH3 synthesizer keyboard and stare at the studio’s acoustic cloud.

Yellow and Red team up and jam on a Vermona DRM1 MKIII drum machine. Yellow changes the resonance on the snare while Red messes with the highpass filter on the lazer zap.

Continue Reading “Gummi Bears Make Music.”

What if there was a website where you could upload a song and then add more cowbell to it? Wouldn’t that be amazing? What if you could listen to tons of other songs people uploaded that they added more cowbell to? Well you can! Head over to morecowbell.dj for all the goodness.

“More cowbell” is an American pop culture catch phrase originally derived from an April 8, 2000 Saturday Night Live comedy sketch about the recording of the song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult. The sketch featured guest host Christopher Walken as music producer Bruce Dickinson and Will Ferrell as fictional cowbell player Gene Frenkle. In the television special Saturday Night Live: 101 Most Unforgettable Moments, this sketch is moment number five. - www.morecowbell.dj

Here’s the original skit on Saturday Night Live. At first I thought this was going to be stupid but I admit this had me cracking up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhSkRHXTKlw

photo credit: Daniel Y. Go

So it’s official: The Horrorist is endorsed by Propellerhead Software. I, as you know record under the name “The Horrorist” and today the box of goodies you see in the above photo arrived at my studio. I also managed to get one of the bands on my label Ionic Vision the same deal.

So how does one get such a good proposal? To be honest it’s kinda like getting laid by a female… You stay nice, friendly and available and when they are in the mood it happens! When I was in college at Suny Purchase I spent my free time in the music department hanging out with John Selway, Scott Richmond (Satellite Records) and Jack Elliot. During that time, the early nineties, the rave scene was beginning to take over the NY area. John invited me to techno parties in Long Island where I met Frankie Bones, Adam X, Heather Heart, Dave Trance and many more. I’m not sure how it exactly happened but I ended up at the recording studio of a guy named James Bernard who had a techno act called Influx. Ah… bingo you say! James Bernard I know that name. Yep hold that thought…

Flash forward fifteen plus years, 75 singles, 3 albums, 3 studios, a move to Berlin, a pro-audio blog and some grey hair. A band on my label Things to Come Records called Ionic Vision was coming to perform in Germany. I met them at Club Maria and did a quick video interview with them to help promote their new single. During the interview they got all gushy about how great Propellerheads Reason is. I wholeheartedly agree Reason is the bees knees and the video went up on the internets. I mentioned to Andy de Decker (one of the band members) that I should send it over to Propellerheads and did just that.

I knew James Bernard worked at Propellerheads and from time to time I cracked a smile when I saw him demoing things on YouTube. I would say to myself, “There’s that Influx guy. Dam he landed a cool job!”. So I was pleased when I found out he was the one in charge of artist relations and more pleased when he was the one who emailed me back. Without me asking he offered the endorsement deals.

So what can we learn from this tale?

1. James Bernard kicks ass.

2. Propellerheads kicks ass.

3. Being nice to people and putting your work out there gets free stuff. (And laid by females)

This arrangement will be good for you too because I will be posting more Reason tutorials, videos and Refill reviews.

So far I can tell you the 15″ laptop bag is very nice. The area where you hold your laptop is well padded and smooth so you don’t need to use one of those crappy inner sleeve things. It’s made of “polyester ripstop” which like it’s name: feels like it won’t ever rip. It also has a rubber handle, zippered pockets, a mobile cell holder and key ring.

Check out more photos of the bag and goodies: click here

Listen to James Bernard’s music: myspace.com/jamesbernardmusic
Visit Propellerhead Software: propellerheads.se

This week saw the release of the new Waldorf Blofeld keyboard synthesizer. I was thinking about posting the info here but since all the other music tech blogs have it up I thought why bother. I do like that it has sample playback and a nice German white/steel design but something in my mind whispered “booooring!”. I know the synth is well capable in the hands of a good songwriter but I want something in my studio that’s a bit more unique.

This morning I did my usual coffee and troll through the mighty Matrixsynth blog and saw the photo above. The Kawai K1M is a 16 voice digital sound module from 1988. I pretty much like any record released that year so this thing has to sound good. Of course this is completly subjective but I bet if you made a song using only K1M sounds it would very interesting.

I have a Yamaha TX81Z hooked up in my studio and even though I have several FM soft synths when I use the real thing people pick out the sounds it made and ask about them. So even if you have the software Wavestation or FM8 you will get a different color by recording something like the K1M into your DAW.

There is always a risk when buying used gear but if it works out you’ll never have to pay for a software update. The best thing? It’s got a $75 USD Buy it Now price! Check out the auction: click here

Check out some user reviews of the K1M at Harmony-Central: click here

via Matrixsynth

Adobe has released a beta for it’s upcoming version of Soundbooth that will be part of CS4. It has a very cool new feature called Speech Transcription. You record some vocals and Soundbooth then generates text for the words. If you then search a word it will show you along your waveform where it was spoken. Unfortunately, Christopher Breen over at Macworld says that the transcription is far from perfect. However, I still think this is an amazing feature and I hope Adobe can perfect the results.

“You have the option to choose High (slower) or Medium (faster) transcription, and if you have multiple people speaking, the program will attempt to identify each speaker. This isn’t a speedy process. Transcribing a file at the Medium setting works in just about real time—if you have 15 minutes of audio to transcribe, it takes about that long to create the transcript.” - Macworld.com

I feel like our move to an all digital world is entering a “next level” where data detection is incredibly useful. Recent new products such as Melodyne’s Direct Note Access, Google Piccasa’s Face Recognition, Evernote and hardware like the Eye-Fi (auto geo-tagging) card all come to mind.

Lynda.com has some free videos showing off some of the new features in Soundbooth CS4: click here

To for more info and to try the beta head to: labs.adobe.com

When MP3 sales and distribution took off many artists broke the chain between themselves and greedy record labels. All a band needs is music, a little artwork and initiative to get their music onto iTunes, Amazon or Beatport. But what about your fans who still want Compact Discs? In the past you would have to manufacture a minimum of 100+ units. After spending about at least $300 (eg. Discmakers Short-Run) you would still have to deal with fulfillment to your customers (shipping, tax, returns).

Createspace which is owned by Amazon.com has launched a print on demand (POD) service for CDs. You sign up at Createspace.com, send them your music (snail mail only), artwork, set the price for the CD and viola it’s for sale at Amazon.com. Of course Amazon takes a cut: $4.95 fixed charge per CD and either 15% of the total price if you sell the CD via your own E-store or 45% if it sells from Amazon.com. So for example, if I send Createspace an album/CD and want it to sell for $21.95 and someone buys the CD at Amazon.com I will receive: $4.95 $7.11.

You will make less net profit than if you manufactured and sold your own CDs and more profit than you would by any major label record deal. A key advantage is if it turns out that only five people buy your CD you don’t loose the money you spent manufacturing 100 copies. If it turns out you have a lot more fans than you thought and you get 3000 people buying your CD you don’t have worry about getting more manufactured and then running to the post office a few hundred times!

Createspace allows you to buy copies for yourself at the wholesale price of $4.95. If you want more than 50 units the price per unit goes down.

So what are the disadvantages? As of today Createspace only gets your album on Amazon.com not any of their international sites such as Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr. Your international fans will have to buy the CD as an import. This is a big issue for me as more of my fans are based in Europe. Createspace discs are burned onto CD-Rs. The back of the CD maybe tinted Green or Blue. I am not 100% sure about this so I emailed Createspace to find out. I will update this post with whatever answer they give me. Does it matter?

You could argue that record stores won’t stock POD (print to order) CDs but let’s face some facts here: Soon there won’t be any brick and mortar record stores!

A nice aside is you can opt into MP3 sales and your album will appear in the Amazon MP3 section. Lastly, I would like to get a bit liberal on you and point out that manufacturing only what we need will help save the earth. What better reason do you need?

Update: I heard back from Createspace concerning the backside color of the CD-Rs. Here’s what they said: “Thank yo for contacting us regarding our products and services. The backs of the CDs are silver and blue.  We are working on producing a uniform product that consists of silver back only, however at this time we are producing both types.” - CreateSpace Member Services

photo credit: Silus Grok

I am finally free of all obligations other than to finish my next album. It’s a good feeling especially because these last two remixes had me pulling my hair out. Satronica’s remix for a song called Shout will end up on Lenny Dee’s Industrial Strength Records. Originally he sent me a song called Revenge Plan but after remixing it twice and still not being happy with the end result I told him to send me something different. This brings up a point: Trash the stuff that you do that’s not great! There is a mountain of average crap out there. I spent a week remixing Revenge Plan and I put those files in my trash and emptied it twice! If I don’t love the remix I’m not going to torture the rest of you with it.

For the song “Shout” Matt (Satronica) only sent me vocals. The biggest nicety in this remix is the automated TC Powercore Chorus/Delay plug-in on his voice. As you can see in the faded orange circle above I spent a good amount of time tweaking the envelope breakpoints to catch certain syllables he was screaming and have them shoot off motion wise in different ways. When the Chorus is tight is has a modern Hip Hop vocal sound. I also like what I was able to to at the breaks using Effectix. Using only the Loop parameter I was able to make it seem like the song is slowing down and breaking up. What else? Ah yes, I like the 80s tom fills but those are standard in almost any song I do these days. Take a listen:

I decided to have my Italian pianist friend Gabri help me with my remix for Belgian band Implant. Their song “We Are Noise” was a simple but effective electro verse chorus type of diddy. I wanted to make it a bit darker so Gabri took their somewhat simple melodies and expanded them using several tracks and different synths. Gabri always picked his favorite VST ReFX Vanguard (Gabri is also a trance producer :)).

After Gabri left Berlin I spent a good amount of time taking each new synth line and dumping tons of effects on them. With today’s CPU power I like to add one 4-5 things to each channel and just let me ears pick out the tasty colors. For example I added Izotope’s Trash and Fabfilter’s Volcano 2 to several of the synth lines. A great thing about Volcano is it’s ability to generate internal feedback. You can hear it rolling along semi-randomly in several sections. The drums are from my new and beloved Vermona DRM-1 MKIII. Lastly, I used Simpler quite a bit on the some vocal parts automating the start and loop times. Take a listen:

Thanks as always for taking a listen. I wish I could put the full songs up here but I don’t have the rights. Now it’s time for my own tunes!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QPMvj_xejg

Here’s a guy who spent more time in front of a microphone than probably anyone you know. Don LaFontaine was “the movie guy”. He is the voice you hear in countless movie trailers saying, “In a world full of…”. Don passed away on Monday at the age of 68.

“Donald LaFontaine (August 26, 1940 – September 1, 2008) was an American voice actor famous for recording over 5,000 movie trailers and (according to his website) over 350,000 television commercials, network promotions, and video game trailers. His signature voice was perceived as being both ominous and sonorous. His nicknames included “Thunder Throat” and “The Voice of God”. He became identified with the phrase “in a world…”, which has been used in movie trailers so frequently that it has become a cliché. He also parodied this cliché several times, most recently in a commercial for GEICO insurance.” - Wikipedia.org

I remember seeing a documentary about his work and noticed he had his own home studio. Over the period of his life he was a recording engineer, film editor, producer, and writer. He was also known to take the time to send fans personalized voice recordings. I wonder if he had a favorite microphone.

For more info: www.donlafontaine.com