bradgrier.com

Category: Music

  • This pile of gear is starting to come to life… and a list of vinyl test albums

    An old turntable, a new cartridge, and a list of awesome albums to pick up. What's not to like!

  • The Mood Mosaic

    The Mood Mosa­ic albums are a series of com­pil­a­tion albums that fea­ture a col­lec­tion of eclect­ic and diverse music from vari­ous genres and eras, often arranged around a cent­ral theme or mood. The first album in the series, titled “The Mood Mosa­ic — A Touch of Vel­vet, A Sting of Brass”, was released in 1996…

  • Aphex Twin releases 110 tracks for free on SoundCloud

    [sound­cloud url=“https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/76952354” params=“auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=“100%” height=“450” iframe=“true” /]

  • Teenage Engineering designed a set of incredible pocket synthesizers that cost $59 each

    Very cool! High qual­ity yet afford­able. Very min­im­al­ist. Worth check­ing out! But that all changes with the launch of the Pock­et Oper­at­or synth and drum machine series, a set of three cal­cu­lat­or-sized music-mak­ing tools that can be yours for less than $200 total. “Our goal was to make a synth that cost $49,” says CEO and…

  • Lesson One: Major Scale

    Ok, this may seem a bit weird to reg­u­lar read­ers of my blog, but I’m going to be archiv­ing my course­work in my Berklee/Coursera pro­grams on this blog. Per­haps someone else will get some value out of it, or offer hints or sug­ges­tions for improve­ments. Either way, it’ll make it a very easy ref­er­ence to me…

  • (TYPE A OR B) WeeklyBeats9

    Weekly­Beats sub­mis­sion for week 9. I may have gone over the top on this one. Intro is very heavy handed. Exper­i­mented with the new Z3TA+ synth for iPad, as well as the cur­rent stable; Thor, Sun­r­izer­XS, Nave, and a little Magel­lan. Lots of pans. Some com­pres­sion. A big exper­i­ment in many ways.… I hope you enjoy!…

  • WeeklyBeats7 — Cold Night

    Cov­er for my latest sub­mis­sion to Weekly­Beats 2014. Wanted to go for an atmo­spher­ic sound again, some­thing more ambi­ent. Maybe this worked. Maybe not, but it came out as a com­plete unit. Also tried stick­ing to a small ‘band’. In this case used instru­ments from SampleTank: Blue Phaser elec­tric piano, Xpander Phat synth pad, Cos­mic…

  • Cool Thing: A browser based Theremin

    Well, it’s not really a Theremin but more of a sound toy. Yes, it’s a great dis­trac­tion and some­thing to piqué the curi­os­ity of your cube­mates. HTML5 based, it’s a very cool imple­ment­a­tion. The author states he’s work­ing on an update that will allow you to play along with your own music.. cool! Check it…

  • WeeklyBeats5 — The Conversation

    My latest sub­mis­sion to Weekly­Beats 2014. Had a lot of tech­nic­al chal­lenges with this one. Slower beat required more con­sid­er­a­tion of instru­ment selec­tion and place­ment. Also had to get vari­ous samples to sound ‘good’ at this beat and dis­covered the mud­di­ness that can be intro­duced by tweak­ing the sample fre­quency. Not a great tune, but…

  • Gadget and Claire

    This week’s Weekly­Beats cre­ation — I had no idea what I’d be doing this week. Then Korg went and released the cool Gad­get app for the iPad and I knew I’d be using it. A few hours later, some futz­ing around in Gar­age­Band for the drumkit, gui­tars and mix, and it’s done. Thanks to my drum­mer…

  • Experiment in Atmospherice

    Well, I was dis­ap­poin­ted that I did­n’t have more time for my third (weekly) sub­mis­sion to Weekly­Beats — but it’s my own fault that I let my time get away from me this week. In the time I had, I man­aged to stitch togeth­er a few tracks and make a sal­vage­able attempt at an atmo­spher­ic bit.…

  • Flightline

    The latest image for an upcom­ing com­pos­i­tion exer­cise with Weekly­Beats. It’s fun to make the music AND envi­sion an album cov­er for the tune. Image cap­tured with my iPhone and edited with my iPad. Flight­line should be is live on the WeeklyBeats.com site Janu­ary 12th around 5pm MST now.