Create Digital Music has some great videos and information (1, 2) on the Dr. Who Theme. Here's one with the composer:
And here's one with Delia Derbyshire who was responsible essentially for "producing" the theme and giving it so much of its sonic character:
Whenever I feel frustrated with my audio setup here I'm going to re-watch that video.
I got some great feedback for my Bad Sign mix (that I'm working on implementing) so I've posted a mix of Certain Death as well.
It can be a little confusing for me deciding what's a technical decision and what's an artistic decision, but it's great to get some feedback from fresh ears.
Mugshot (thanks JB!) almost does what I want as a central identity feed aggregator (see my Temple of Ego post). But it's missing a few things to make me happy:
Are there any other services like this out there?
Did you know that Vampires Are Alive?
(via onetonnemusic)
Because I'm lonely I'm going to try posting mixes of my new album tracks in my forums for feedback, commentary, crushing of my spirit & motivation, etc. You can check out a new mix of Bad Sign if you're so inclined.
I may make the forum private in the future, I haven't decided.
This is a great and very effective hip-hop anti-piracy PSA from 1992:
Also you may be wondering what MC Double Def DP is up to now.
Apparently Edward Furlong (the boy from Terminator 2) makes music.
My genius integration of bbPress and WordPress accidentally shut off anonymous comments on the blog here. Anyway you're all free to comment about OfficeMax and black metal again without signing up for an account.
I think everyone should thank me for upgrading my Picasa Web Albums account two days ago to get a little bit more than 250mb storage. Today they gave all default accounts 1gb storage just to make me regret my purchase.
Also what is it with services not offering refunds? World of Warcraft and Picasa have both told me that they're "unable to provide refunds" lately:
We're unable to provide refunds, so we encourage you to try the free service before purchasing additional storage.
Well I uh... did that. And then you quadrupled the amount of storage on free accounts a day and a half later.
These FCC complaints against Prince at the Super Bowl are fantastic:
It was obscene to show Prince, a HOMOSEXUAL person through a sheet, as to show his siluette while his guitar showed a very phalic symbol coming from his below-midriff section. I am very offended and I would preffer not to have showed it to my 4 children who love football. One of them has hoped to be a quarterback and now he will turn out gay. I am actually considering to check him for HIV. Thanks CBC for turning my son GAY.
Yes!
Ran into this in the shower the other day:
No major issues? I'm not sure I'd go that far.
Say hi to Maya Mia.
I've got some new forums, go check 'em out. I'm running bbPress. It's not as sexy looking as Vanilla but it has tagging, better RSS feeds and integrates with WordPress nicely. I like the layout more as well.
The integration with WordPress is the main reason I switched. I want to offer "bonus" stuff on the main site for users who are logged in and this seemed like the best way to do it.
Importing the old forums was a nightmare of course and I'm still cleaning things up. Your old accounts should work. Let me know if you run into any problems.
Found this gem on the Ween news page today:
I'm kind of overwhelmed by the amount of demos we've received for consideration at Chocodog Records. At the moment I'm behind a little due to the touring, but I've listened to every one that's been sent so far, and it hasn't been pretty. Here's pretty much what happens when you send me your demo. Usually me and a couple of friends get together at the ween studio around 10pm and drink beer and watch baseball. After awhile I'll say "hey I have this bag of demos sent to our p.o. box, let's check 'em out", and my friends will then groan, knowing that we're in for hours of torturously bad music. We go through the pile of envelopes, first we laugh as we read your bio, then we laugh at your photo (if you sent one), then we put on the cd and prepare ourselves for the worst. We give each track about 30 seconds to see if it sucks so bad that there's no hope of it getting better, if this is the case it gets immediately thrown in the trash, if it's mediocre, we'll listen for a minute and then skip to the next track. If that's mediocre too, then it gets thrown in the trash. After about 45 minutes of this process, all hope is generally lost and there is a really bad vibe in the room. The critiquing process gets shorter and tempers start to rise. We usually then will put on the best cd we have lying around, like Earth Wind and Fire or some other music where the people actually know how to write songs, sing, and play their instruments. This helps to cleanse our ears. So if you'd like to submit your music for consideration you can do so by sending it to Chocodog Records p.o. box 669 New Hope, PA 18938
Great.
This week I'm trying out micro-blogging: Twitter and Tumblr.
I like the casual approach of both, but Twitter requires more work than I'm really willing to give such a tiny thing. I like how it works as a chat channel via IM though even with only Scoble and Chris on there it got too noisy for me to handle. Google Talk status messages work fine as a "what's up" kind of thing and I don't have to deal with a whole new friend network.
Tumblr is fun for casual blog crap I wouldn't put here or in del.icio.us or over on In4mador!. Adding stuff to it is a multiple page procedure though (their bookmarklet doesn't do chats or quotes) and I'm not quite sure what to do with it or why I'd keep at posting to it.
des at Hometracked has an excellent post called The RIAA is not evil, an even-handed response to Gizmodo's proposed March RIAA boycott.
The article is a great summary of a lot of things that have annoyed me about anti-RIAA tech activism for a long time. I liked it so much I even posted it to Digg, which is something I never do.
This Piracy Kills Music short film is pretty heavy on style:
It's a little short on facts though. I'm not sure I buy that there are less artists making a living off their music than pre-1999 (kinda seems like there are more artists than ever these days) and it also makes no mention of the plummetting costs of recording and distribution. (via Ursi's Blog)
As I was plodding along working on my album today I wound up reading a lot of posts about the death of the album (1, 2, 3).
I thought the album was dead when I started putting my music on the net years ago. I didn't even bother releasing an album until a few years later ("people just want to download mp3s!") but I was totally wrong.
I don't have much artistic or romantic attachment to albums but I do think there's a practical aspect to them. Assuming it's not one good song plus eleven songs of filler, I'd rather have 45 minutes of entertainment from an artist I enjoy than 3 minutes. It's the difference between watching one episode of a series versus the whole season.
But I don't see why it has to be exclusively albums or singles, it's the future now, they can co-exist! I think as budgets shrink, artists become more independent and audiences diversify and fragment, it's harder to decide or define what a worthy "single" is. That's what the filtration of the Internet is for, that's why file-sharing is awesome. The hits will bubble to the top.
Do you want each song to be focus-grouped before you get to hear it? An album's still a pretty good vehicle for putting out a batch of songs and seeing what spreads.
For the next month if you buy anything from my digital download store I'll send you out a free shiny Brad Sucks button. Check it out:
(Fingers not included.)
If you've already bought something just email me your mailing address and I'll get one out to you.
Setting up all this live show stuff is officially kicking my ass. I am angry and hurt and tired. I'm about ready to put together a live show of me configuring software for an hour and a half and call it "Working-on-a-Performance Art".
My mind is blown -- BLOWN -- by how annoying this all is with the tools currently available. I'm jealous of DJs. It's like nobody designing software wants anyone to change chords mid-song anymore. "You mean you have two SEPARATE chord sequences in a song? That's unsanity!"
I got some emails from musicians using Live who feel similarly and Peter Kirn from Create Digital Music listened to me cry on the phone. Matt from Flux Minor shared his live Ableton project with me. His approach was to render individual channels (drums, bass, etc) of the entire track instead of recreating it loop-based as I was.
It gives you less flexibility but he assured me they haven't felt the need to alter arrangements on the fly while performing. So I ran off in that direction as it sounded a lot easier. I was four songs into the rendering and recreating process when I realized Ableton Live can only send program changes to external gear (like my GT-6) at the launch of a new clip. So if you're not setting it up all crazy like I was before you're SOL for program changes.
Guess I'll go kick something.