"The best thing to come out of Torquay since Jim Davidson's yacht."
Not really, but I’ve updated the blog a bit. I’m starting serious work on my EP, too. Look out for that shit. Here’s two sneak peeks:
The latter is some serious ground breaking shit, let me tell you.
This blog now has stupid changing banners, but I will try to fix that soon. No-one visits this dive anyway, so I don’t know why I’m writing as if they do.
Despite my last entry, cussing Macs, Windows has been driving me batshit mental recently. My Akai MPD24 simply would not work. I put this down to my Logitech webcam, which I have now destroyed. Logitech seem to install things tha you can’t get rid of – I read about problems between their drivers and Akai’s, but most people simply uninstalled the drivers and that was that. It wasn’t that simple for me.
To cut a long, tedious story short, I found this link and after some tinkering in XP’s regedit my MPD worked again.
I know Logitech’s webcam drivers messed it up, and many people’s advice was don’t use a webcam on your DAW but fuck you. I’m a bedroom producer and have one PC and a girlfriend who lives 4,000 miles away from me. I’m not going to sacrifice a webcam because Windows/Logitech/Akai are too incompetent to make things, you know, work in tangent.
My Hue HD webcam seems to work fine with it, but then again, so did my Logitech for a while. Only time will tell.
In other news, I’ve decided to cover Nick Drake’s sumptuous ‘Pink Moon’. Vocoded vocals and everything. Expect it in 2050.
First up, have some Poy:
Alpha version which Sam presented to the queen or something. The music is coming on – a few things have changed since then: levels; transitions; timings. And the ending will be fleshed out soon. Nut I’m happy how it’s coming along, and Sam’s animation is beautiful.
Completely unrelated, but I’m currently doing National Certificate music technology at college, and with any art-based course, Macs are a huge part of things. I’m using Logic 8.0 for the bulk of my work, but Reason and Pro Tools too. I was talking to one of my lecturers the other day about Final Cut Pro, and he asked me if I had a Mac. I said I didn’t. He asked me if I was planning to get one. Again, I said no. He was surprised by this. The conversation moved to trojans and porn websites, and undoubtedly Macs are better when it comes to internet safety. But, in my experience anyway, that PCs are fine if you don’t act like a durr-brain. I’ve used anti-virus scanners, spyware scanners, and I haven’t been an idiot, so I’ve been fine since I got my first PC.
Obviously, they have conked out on occasion. but Macs conk out too.
I just don’t like them. Maybe I’m too used to Windows, but OSX is a nightmare for me. A fiddly, beautiful-looking nightmare.
In conclusion: I wouldn’t mind a Apple Netbook when it is released.
I signed up for the free trial of Pro SoundCloud yesterday. I’m wondering where to store all my music. My hosting account is overkill, as I never upload anything to it, and it’s a bit of a pain to. SoundCloud seems nice, fast, and it has good features like the abilt to leave a comment at a certain part of the song – which would be nice if anyone ever listened to my music.
It is expensive, though. More than my hosting, and it’s sort of limited in the fact that I can’t host any rubbish I want.
You can find my SoundCloud here.
Hello again. It’s been a tad quiet for old 5 of 6 over the past year or something. I did a few things, but nothing of any real note.
Recently, I’ve been working hard on a soundtrack for an animation. It’s called Poy, a short film by Sam Miller; a taltented artist who I first met on the Rllmuk.com forums. It’s about a girl named Poy, whose mum dies. You can follow Sam’s Poy blog here and I’ll post demos and stuff here.
Case in point. This is the Poy animatic with my music. It’s an unused demo track, but parts will be used in the final score, and other parts may make it into future 5 of 6 songs.
I’ve added my Twitter to the right (I much prefer ‘Twats’ to ‘Tweets’) and I’ll add more stuff soon. This design is temporary until I figure out how to use goddam CSS.
I went to see Joanna Newsom at London’s Somerset House on Sunday. It was beautiful, and she was enchanting, but you probably already know that. As I’ve heard her ‘… and The Ys Street Band’ album, I was initially disappointed it was just her and a big harp (she moved to a big piano for a few songs) but that soon went away as soon as she began strumming the opening chords of ‘Bridges & Balloons’. A solo performance made it much more intimate, and it made everyone concentrate on her amazing harp skills and outstanding voice. I’ve never seen a crowd of 1,000+ people as quiet and transfixed on one person before.
It was also an excuse to test out my Zoom H2 digital recorder. I captured one of her new songs, and it sounds pretty lovely. It’s not perfect – there’s me adjusting the mic between my legs at the start, some wind, and the levels aren’t perfect, but it’s better than watching it on YouTube. The song itself is just beautiful; one of my favouries, and I can’t wait until she releases it. Download
If you’re English, you might have seen a certain Slim Fast advert within the past six months. If you’re not English, or just don’t watch television (in which case you missed Bianca Jackson dressed up as a giant prawn) you can see it here.
This advert is pretty well-known over here; it’s become a cult thing, like Kia-Ora’s “too orangey for crows” or something, and whilst on YouTube I saw some witless school girls performing the advert in the playgroud. I still have no idea why people make videos like it, but I digress.
It’s some song. I think it’s incredibly insulting to women – insinuating they only want to lose weight eat chunky chocolat and look at their fat arse all day – but it got me thinking about the life of a commcercial jingle writer. Slim Fast is a pretty big thing, and the thing got TV play, so it’s not all bad, but at the same time it has to be a depressing occupation. writing and making this shit.
The guy (not girl, let’s face it) probably started his career in an edgy punk band called ‘The Sane Effect’, throwing glasses and tipping over his mic stand in some dodgy London pub. He played a few gigs, destroyed a few stands, sent off his demo to Sony, and ended up writing the lyric ‘losing weight I can enjoy!’ with a Parker pen in his cushy studio with red Tannoy monitors.
I’m going to end up like him, although my contract won’t be with Slim Fast – it’ll be with the Torquay House Movers, where I’ll write a naff jingle for them, something involving a MIDI trombone and the funky drummer loop. How many musicians that are jingle writers wanted Warp to come up to them and shoot a big load of cash into their open mouth?
Then I saw this recent McDonalds thing advertising their new American burger – the McWashington Beefy or something – which featured a man dressed in leather playing a guitar and ‘rocking out’ hilariously. Was he the founding member of failed punk band ‘The Cunts From Hele’? Did he tip over his mic stand, piss on the snare drum, and then sign a contract with McDonalds to play the part of ‘washed up rockstar’? I suspect he did.
I’ve been slacking off from my duties. I had a new EP brewing, but my PC arsed out and now I have nothing. But I will try to make stuff soon.
Since last posting, I’ve been featured on an Irish radio station. The gorgeous Chequerboard was invited onto Donal Dineen’s ‘Small Hours’ show on Today FM. Chequerboard spun a few tunes, then spun my tune, and I was pretty happy. It brought me no new recognition, but still. I WAS ON THE RADIO. The night after Edan was on it! Excellent work, James.
Hopefully my computer is working now, so I’ll get started on some new material. Who am I even talking to?
You can, if you want, download my new remix. It’s a remix of Father of Syn’s superb ‘Spider Legs’, which features a lovely pizzicato melody. My version does away with the pizzicatos, but the melody remains, and I’ve added the following: sine waves; a sample of a train; little bleeps; nothing else of interest.
It’s probably my best produced song so far. Wowsies!
The Yamaha Tenori-On is… well, I don’t know, exactly. It’s a small box that has LEDs on, and when you press these LEDs it makes noises. The results are a bit like Nintendo’s excellent, but limited, DS sound-a-thon Electroplankton (what has happened to the Wii version?). It looks like a lot of fun, and eventually it could change the way people make – and perform – music.
If you go here you will most likely see an interview with Norman Fairbanks, and a link to his new EP he made entirely with the Tenori-On. It’s good music, too. Ambient, chilled stuff that reminds me a lot of Ninja Tune’s Rainstick Orchestra, only with less real instruments. It’s good sleeping music, and that’s a better compliment than it sounds.