Tag: 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!

  • This takes the cake: To the audiophile, this $10,000 Ethernet cable apparently makes sense

    Wow. This is some ser­i­ously messed up lan­guage used to describe ‘premi­um-grade’ Audio Eth­er­net cables — yes, you read that right, Eth­er­net cables for the Audi­o­phile mar­ket. My word… All insu­la­tion slows down the sig­nal on the con­duct­or inside. When insu­la­tion is unbiased, it slows down parts of the sig­nal dif­fer­ently, a big prob­lem for very…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Setting up the Gadget

    In my pre­vi­ous post I talked about the Gad­get synth suite by Korg. Well, I kinda flailed around until I got some­thing I liked. Per­haps I should have watched this You­Tube video on it before flail­ing and I may have made bet­ter progress. Learn from my mistake 😀

  • 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.

  • WeeklyBeats — a year long project

    Over the last few years I’ve been try­ing to learn more about music pro­duc­tion. This has been an on/off interest of mine with real motiv­a­tion driv­ing me toward any learn­ing struc­ture. Last week that changed. I found WeeklyBeats.com — a web­site that encour­ages you to pro­duce — any type of music — one cut per…

  • Godspeed Commander Hadfield

    Cana­dian astro­naut, space enthu­si­ast, edu­cat­or, social media sen­sa­tion, and now enter­tain­er? Yep, those are just a sampling of the roles that Com­mand­er Chris Hadifeld ful­filled dur­ing his 146 day post­ing to the ISS as Sta­tion Commander. His Soy­uz cap­sule returns to Earth tomor­row even­ing, but as a last sur­prise, the Com­mand­er released this video rework­ing of…