Roland has probably taught me more about sound synthesis than just about anybody! Back in the day, I used to spend hours deciphering the patches he made for the original Nord Modular synth.
Years later, and not much has changed. Roland has been sharpening his genius programming skills and is now offering a mind-blowing package of innumerable patches that open for listening with a single click in the included Nord Modular demo software.
I've been slowly working my way through these beautiful aural constructs and am enthralled again as I was a decade ago, inspired to create fabulous monstrosities of my own! Equal parts tutorial, demonstration and resource, Roland's Soundlab II is a fantastic project.
Highly recommended even if, like myself, you don't have a Nord Modular G2. :)
My Universe is a sentient thing. (Though, not by any definition, a deity). It just is what it is, something like a "mind", though this mind is beyond ours, contains ours and is contained by ours in a fractal embedding/repetition. So-called "religious experiences" of universal oneness or equivalence (or even more mundane epiphanies) are merely junctures when these fractal curls of Mind momentarily align and the illusory mind/self we cling to is temporarily eclipsed.
It's just hard to "step back" from everything sometimes.
As some of you know, my dad's health has been extremely poor recently - he had a fall early December and suffered a terrible brain injury. For now I'm managing all his affairs. :(
My own health is decent enough but I have chronic pain from a number of conditions and am now battling bursitis and tendinitis in my shoulder.
...it's just a bit much at times.
...things at work are nuts now too as I'm doing someone else's job now in addition to my own as they broke their leg.
In the meantime I haven't been able to do any promotion for Stealing The Sun because of circumstances. It's on the back burner for now but I hope to get to it later this year...STS is the best thing I've ever done and I think it deserves a chance.
Well, it's been a long road from March 2009 when I started this project but Stealing The Sun is finally released. Cheers!
Stealing The Sun is the album I've been wanting to make for the last ten years. Filled with a wide spectrum of synth textures and embellished by my voice, it's an exploration of epiphany and change viewed through the lens of modern electronic pop.
Diverse elements like the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, Native American traditions and Greek mythology combine into something strange, personally engaging, and hopefully "greater than the sum of its parts"
The CD and Digital Album is currently available through Bandcamp.com though CD Baby, iTunes and Amazon will soon follow.
The above streams don't really do it justice as they are only 128k mp3s - higher quality MP3s as well as FLAC downloads are available in addition to the CDs: http://carbon111.bandcamp.com/. Please note all CD purchases get a free instant download in the medium of their choice so you can enjoy the album while waiting for the CD to hit your mailbox.
Stealing The Sun is packaged in a four panel digipack. All the artwork is by yours truly.
For seven people who buy the CD, I've got a little surprise in store - I'm doing a random drawing from the first batch of CD sales for some swag, including a shoulder bag, a clock and five t-shirts:
For the gear-interested, the instrumentation is as follows:
Silver Thread - Ensoniq Fizmo and Waldorf Q provide backing pads, Korg Oasys is bass and string sounds while Digidesign's "Boom" provides percussion.
Breathing Machinery - Korg Oasys does Piano and Wave Sequencing, Weird Pads are NI's Absynth and, except for some clickety bits from Digidesign's "Boom", all the Drum Sounds and Rhythm Beds were done in NI's Absynth.
Subterranean Bathers - Ensoniq VFX is the voxy pad, Korg Oasys is piano, drums and everything else.
The Initiation - Lead Drones are from the SCI Prophet 600, Piano is Nord Stage, Pads are provided by Nord Wave, and Metallic Stabs and Drums are Korg Oasys.
Luna - The Nord Stage is on "distorted lead", Nord Wave on "grungy Santur" and Oasys on drums and "ambiance".
Walden - Waldorf Microwave XT is synth lead, Nord Stage is all pianos, Absynth4 and Alchemy provide ambient beds and Korg Electribe ES-1 is drums.
Stealing The Sun - All pianos and synth sounds are Nord Stage, drums are Korg Electribe ES-1.
The Big Room - Sync lead is Nord Wave, Grungy synth organ is Nord Stage, Pads are Korg Oasys and Drums are Digidesign's Boom.
Strangeness - Drums are provided by Korg Electribe ES-1, everything else is Waldorf Q.
...Dealing with prepress issues now but the album should be out before too long. I'll let everyone know (as soon as I do) when it will be available as CDs and as downloads.
Most of the noise is Serge Modular with the exception of one Alchemy patch and the drums, which are Digi's "Boom" thru a bit reducer.
I'm going to diversify the drums more between chorus and verse while fixing their stereo image, add some hand percussion and stick a bridge in (that I've already recorded). A couple more Serge lines and two vocal tracks and I'll be done...probably.
Some days are better than others...
Loss is such a hard thing to deal with as there is nothing to "get over". The Lost remain lost. The empty spot in your life remains... :(
My respect and awe for those of you who are parents is profound.
Married at a late age with health concerns and a problematic gene pool, it was never really a realistic choice for me.
My music and my art take what little "extra" time I do have and are, for all intents, my "children". Pale shadows in comparison to real children...but it's all I have to offer other than myself.
What an amazing journey on a beautiful yet uncertain road.
In the meantime unfinished tracks will be removed from this blog. I'll replace them later as they get polished and prepped for the CD and Digital Download release.
Due to the high mortality rates, the famous Kanoobang™ burger chain has decided to change their marketing slogan to "A burger worth dying for" a spokesperson said today.
This has come just three weeks after the media furor over the leaked revelation that Kanoobang™ burgers were made entirely with fossil beef, strip-mined from ancient bovine deposits in environmentally sensitive Wyoming and Oregon watersheds.
Environmentalists are still picketing Kanoobang locations in many states. The FDA and EPA have taken no stance as of yet.
In addition to my music DAW and Softsynth PC, I have an all-purpose PC I use for Photoshop, Gaming, web browsing, DVD burning and what-have-you. The old machine I was using was getting pretty long-in-the-tooth so it was that time again...time to piece together a new computer! I love doing this!!! ^_^
This was also the perfect opportunity to finally upgrade to a 64 bit OS and now that the specter of Vista was behind us, Win7 was looking pretty good.
The sheer amount of power you can get these days for $1225.00 boggles my mind - this relatively modest machine replaced a five year old pentium D machine that cost me twice as much to build and was an absolute slug by comparison.
Here's the specs:
Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz Quad-Core CPU (clocked cool and stable @ 3.6 GHz)
Intel DP55WG LGA 1156 P55 ATX Intel Motherboard
ZALMAN 120mm 2 Ball Low-noise Copper CPU Cooler
Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB Solid State Drive (OS/boot)
Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200 RPM SATA II Hard Drive (apps, storage)
Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200 RPM SATA II Hard Drive (backup)
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 SDRAM
Asus DVD-RW
PNY GeForce GTS 250 - 1 Gigabyte GDDR3
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
...and I already had a nice 4U rackmount case & PS from my earlier build...though, because it was an older PS, I needed to spend about three bucks on an adapter for secondary power to the video card. The D-400-6 rack cases from IStarUSA are fantastic BTW!
The DP55WG is a basic board but with some surprising extras like SPDIF audio, onboard diagnostic LED readout and external bios reset button. I've been building my own PCs for a couple of decades now and have found that pairing an Intel board with an Intel processor and decent cooling makes for a very stable system, even in this case with the quad-core CPU clocked to 3.6 GHz.
Been using this machine for about a month now and, so far, it tears through every app I've thrown at it. DVD encoding takes minutes instead of hours now. Some of the most demanding photoshop filters take only moments and I'm getting very high frame rates (at 1920 x 1080) for Fallout 3 and TES4! Haven't had a single crash, lockup or bluescreen either - this has been absolutely rock-solid! I give Intel and G.Skill high praise for this.
The only thing I'm still not happy with is my keyboard...so I've ordered something special. I'll blog about it soon. ;)
Just for fun, this is me in my studio ten years ago. Tali was one year old.
The Waldorf Micro-Q had just been released. It and the Microwave XT were the centerpiece of my studio. I was using a couple of Bose patio speakers for monitors.
"Silver Thread" from my forthcoming album was used as a Guinea Pig, trying out the free video software in Win7. It's basically a slideshow of a number of my CG images.
To my profound disgust, one of my beloved ADAM P11a monitors died over the weekend. The internal amps were both distorting and crackling horribly, rendering it completely useless. I was so furious at first as this was the last thing I needed while in the midst of mixing the new album. In the end, I suppose I figure I did okay, getting almost seven years out of the ADAMs. I'll most probably get the faulty one repaired if I can find a decent tech in the area without a months-long waiting list but, in the meantime, I desperately needed new monitors.
I spent most of Saturday at my local Banjo Shack inflicting an entire CD's worth of my rough mixes on two very patient sales guys. Unfortunately, my budget was only about half of what it was when I got my ADAMs so I had to be extremely thrifty as well as critical.
I had almost settled on a pair of KRK VXT 8s but every one of the four units I tested had some weird flaw - a silent tweeter, a fluttery woofer, an intermittent high-pitched whine, etc. It has completely soured me on KRK as a brand. Shame, because the VXT 8s looked to be a perfect fit.
The M-audios I tested colored the midrange too much, the JBLs had too many "bells and whistles" adding much to the cost and little to their functionality, the Events were too colored, the Mackies weren't in stock, etc...
My final choice was a bit of a revelation for me. After hours of listening and re-listening, I finally ended up settling on a pair of Yamaha HS80M monitors. I had been prepared not to like these as Yamaha modeled their aesthetics on their famous NS10 grotboxes, white woofers and all. Sound-wise though, they were a welcome surprise with a very flat response and nicely revealing of the subtle flaws in my test mixes. At less than $400 a piece, the price was seriously too good to be true - especially considering the sound quality. Suffice to say, I left with two largish boxes on a hand truck.
So far these HS80Ms have been perfectly lovely in the studio, much better than I had hoped in fact! The HS80Ms have a slightly more "forward" or "aggressive" sound than the ADAMs but, so far, haven't been fatiguing, even during long mixing sessions. Working with them has been an absolutely painless transition so far. They're not overbright and the response seems very flat all the way down into the lower bass regions though there is a noticeable rolloff around 50hz or so. I hate to admit it but, in some ways, these are more helpful to me than the ADAMs have been. Placement of instruments in the stereo field seems more accurate and the bass extension seems more detailed, allowing me to fit "bassy" instruments together better with less overlap. The "sweet spot" is a lot wider than what I've grown used to as well. I've had a chance the last few days to remix a number of my tracks and check their translation on other systems and have been getting great results!
I should mention that despite my exuberance, the new monitors aren't perfect - nothing is. The HS80Ms' tone is a trifle agressive as I mentioned before. They're not razor-flat either...but no monitor I've ever tried has been. You just have to decide if it's good enough for you and will the mixes translate? If the answer is "no", there's plenty of other monitor choices. So far neither of these things has been an issue...but I'll be sure to say something if it becomes one. But, for now, the honeymoon ain't over yet. ;)
We'll see how these "budget" monitors hold up but, so far, I'm completely floored by the quality/price ratio on these things. I'm even starting to get used to the ugly white woofers.
As some of you probably noticed, I got myself a Soundcloud account. It's made managing my online music much easier. One upshot is I can make entire albums of work available now.
Last year's instrumental chill album "Shadow" can now be listened to in its entirety:
Silver Thread was composed with Ensoniq Fizmo, Waldorf Q, Korg Oasys and Digidesign's Boom softsynth. The vocals are all me again.
Past the hour when little girls should dream The road is silent, the hills are steep Your wings are heavy with dust and sleep You're miles afar from places you should be
Follow my voice along this silver thread Follow my voice along this silver thread
Incense trees grow along dim lanes A shadow city full of candle flames Fly on and on my Abyssinian maid Leave Kubla Khan to history"s fate
Follow my voice along this silver thread Follow my voice along this silver thread
My house is warm and the time is late Dip your wing and find this path safe Little bird flies down to a sunless sea What draws you on to set your heart free?
Follow my voice along this silver thread Follow my voice along this silver thread
I think one of the most interesting Initiations is the "Walkabout" Rite Of Passage when one is forced to finally rely on no one else and accomplish a task that tests the limits of one's spirit. When the initiate gets home they are then full members of the society, having gone through the same trial as everyone else. A magical transformation through finding one's self in the wilderness.
My new song, The Initiation, is an echo of this.
Lead Drones are from the SCI Prophet 600, Piano is Nord Stage, Pads are provided by Nord Wave, and Metallic Stabs and Drums are Korg Oasys.
How can I say from where Light just shines out of there These eyes that wear no mask There's nothing left to ask And nothing left to hide It's black up in the sky The stars have all gone napping Who can say just what's been happening?
I'm not your hero anymore I'm just The Fool You have to stand alone this time Or be destroyed
As gentle as a dove And with a serpent's love You have to leave me here There's nothing left to fear Now find your own way home All journeys made alone Through darkness and cold air You know I'll meet you there
I'm not your hero anymore I'm just The Fool You have to stand alone this time Or be destroyed
Through darkness and cold air You know I'll meet you there Through darkness and cold air You know I'll meet you there...
I think most of us in the "developed" world forget sometimes how good we have it, focusing on what we want rather than what we are lucky to have. Shattering cataclysms like the Haitian quake can really drive this home when you see people who had very little be reduced to people who have nothing.
Recently, a friend clued me in to Shelter Box, a nonprofit org supplying shelters and supplies to people in desperate need. Every $1000 they get buys one "Shelter Box", containing the following:
• One ten-person tent, including two fabric interior privacy partitions, outer fly-sheet and repair kit. These tents are considered ‘winter suitable’ by international relief standards.
• One 49 gallon box (The ShelterBox) initially the container for delivery of the materials listed below. Once delivered, the box takes an all kinds of uses and can be used as a water tank, food store, table, even a cot.
• Vinyl insulated sleeping mats and lightweight thermal blankets. More compact than sleeping bags, these mats and blankets have multiple uses. The blanket can also be fashioned to catch water, as a tarp, while the mat also serves as a ground ‘table’ for meals, or tent rugs.
• One pack of 180 water purification tablets or a water purification kit; and one 5 gallon flat-pack water container (Each tablet will purify a full container of water providing 1,800 gallons of clean drinking water which should be sufficient for a family of ten for up to three months).
• Two 2.1 gallon, collapsible, plastic water carriers.
• Children's activity kit-simple school supplies, stickers and coloring book.
A place to live and the means to provide some self-sufficiency amid devastation is a priceless thing.
In this day and age when people are afraid to give because so many so-called charities are skimming too much off the top for "administrative" purposes, it's refreshing to find a solid organization that takes a different tack.
I admit I'm a bit of a slow pony when it comes to keeping up with bleeding-edge entertainment phenomena, but a new trend of fun web-based media has piqued my interest.
I think it may have started with web-based comix like Jon Rosenberg's wonderful "Goats" which burgeoned until collected volumes were showing up in bookstores everywhere. Then the phenomena moved on to animated shorts like "Happy Tree Friends" or Dave Lovelace's unabashed "Retarded Animal Babies" both now available on DVD. Things that once only had life on the web, now are beginning to have a commercial life in the "real" world.
With recent Web-to-TV transitions like the SF extravaganza "Sanctuary" or Joss Whedon's Web-to-DVD comedy "Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog", things seem to be in full bloom.
The most recent manifestation to hit my radar is "Riese, The Series".
Riese is an exciting and engaging action-driven story about a mysterious femme fatale wanderer and her faithful wolf companion. The Riese phenomenon was helped along with a fierce viral web campaign featuring a virtual scavenger hunt of sorts across the internet. The better-than-average production values are evident though it's still obviously a lower budget affair. Relatively inexpensive HD video cameras like the breakthrough "Red One" and cheaper computer-based visual effects are beginning to blur the line between "budget" and "quality". This can only be a healthy thing, putting the means of professional production in new, adventersome hands.
The thing I'm finding most interesting with this new web-spawned media is that a small creative team, usually only two or three people, have complete control over story and character - a far cry from the watered-down-by-committee/dumbed-down-to-the-lowest-common-denominator dross that comprises the majority of the network shows these days. When the creative control is in fewer hands, I think the end product really shines as a unique beacon with tons of character.
Riese is a good example of this. While still falling easily into the dystopian fantasy/action mold, there are creative touches that make this quirky enough to stay engaging and give it a touch of class that is usually "polished away" in the mainstream media. If the lack of budget shows through occasionally, well that just adds to the charm I say.
The media "Goliaths" would do well to take note of the doings of these independent "Davids" now practicing their craft on the World Wide Web.
