“A person defined by his consumption can’t ever make a living doing what he likes.” — http://tynan.net/produce
Ran out of time without nailing down all the lyrics or even the direction. At one point, this little ditty was about the Apple v. Adobe kerfuffle—hence “Flash! No Flash! Crash! No Crash!”
I figure it’s better to post incomplete work rather than give up on the project altogether, but I’d be lying if I said I was happy about it. Well, except the rhyming dictionary solo. That part fucking rocks.
Lyrics—such as they are—at the Bandcamp page
This was tough.
This morning, I had no song and only a rough idea of a melody. I wrestled with the lyrics for hours and hours until I hit upon the lullaby idea. While this was fruitful I won’t lie: Writing about how I feel about my kid had me crying like a baby for a good part of the afternoon. There are a lot of vocal outtakes with me choking up.
I’m too insecure in my lyric-writing ability to release something so lyrically naked under normal circumstances, but I ran out of time. So here is me with no impenetrable lyrical abstraction. Please don’t kick.
Gearwise, I recorded vocals, guitar and tambourine through my trusty Rode NTK straight into my MBox Pro 2. (I know, I know—the sad thing is I actually have a much nicer mic preamp.) The piano, organ, and Mellotron sounds came from my Nord Electro 3, and the Xylophone and toy piano sounds are from the Reason factory soundbank. (That awesome toy piano sound in the outro is actually a Thor preset!) The bass guitar is, I’m embarrassed to admit, from the Reason Bass ReFill. I just didn’t have time to play real bass this time. Recorded, mixed, and mastered in Propellerhead Record.
Only fifty weeks to go!
So, yeah. I turned 39 last week. This sort of thing has an effect on a guy—the gem in my hand starts glowing (or is it stops glowing?) in twelve months. Fifty-two fucking weeks.
So, faced with this milestone, I figure it’s not enough that I decided to do an Ironman (in 204 days!) before my fortieth. Now I’m also attempting a Jonathan Coulton-inspired “Song a Week” project.
If you’re not familiar with Jonathan’s story, you’re probably not reading this or you’ve been in a coma/meditation retreat/sensory deprivation chamber for the past few years.
The idea is, as a cattleprod to my moribund musical output I’m forcing myself to write and record a new song each week and get it out by midnight (in Arizona) on Friday. All the tracks will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license (see the badge below for details) so you’re free to share copies with friends, make new stuff out of them, sample the bejeezus out of them, etc. Under the license, you’re required to give me attribution, and you shouldn’t try making money off them (are you paying attention Timbaland?)
More importantly, if you make something cool out of any of the songs uploaded, I’d love to hear about it. Hit me up at agillesp at gmail dot com.
I also intend to make the project file for each week’s track available for download, so if you’re using Propellerhead’s Record + Reason, you’ll be able to open up the song’s project files and get at raw tracks. With any luck, I’ll have the hosting and bandwidth for this part of things sorted out before next week’s track is released.
Anyway, here’s week one’s effort, “It All Starts Here”. I hope you like it:
This work by Art Gillespie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at artgillespie.bandcamp.com.
I still can’t quite believe it, but it’s official: iPad supports USB audio.
And there was much rejoicing.
It’s all in this message on coreaudio-api, but here are the high points:
The only commentary I can think to add is the obvious: This is going to be huge.
Yeah, old news, I know. Bear with me. Or not. Whatever.
I had a great discussion today with a friend in the MI business about Ohm Studio and the following came flying out of my mouth unexpectedly:
The collaboration is cool and all, but what I’m really excited about is the cloud-based versioning and implicit backup. I mean, can you imagine writing software without version control? But what is making recorded music if not creating software? If you skew your perspective a bit and look at a DAW as an IDE, then compare it to best-of-breed IDEs you see some obvious missing features we should’ve had for years. The sort of things no self-respecting software developer in the world would work without.
(Is it appropriate to blockquote yourself? Fuck it.)
I didn’t know I thought any of this, but I certainly agree with my self, or my id, or subconscious, or Plato’s ninety-nine-cent-perfect-idea-store, or wherever the hell this sudden insight came from. As an aside, I could write a whole book on how valuable it is to have conversations with really, really bright people as often as possible. It’s not just what they tell you, it’s how you think when you’re engaged with someone ridiculously smarter than you are. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the advice to never be the best player in the band.
In any case, centralized version control and backup is a great start to getting recording engineers/musicians the same tools software engineers have had for ages. I applaud the OhmBoyz innovation on this front. Here’s hoping that the established DAW manufacturers will ape the shit out of it like they did with Tracktion’s ‘Freeze’ feature back in the day.
But one day, pretty soon, you’ll realize that you haven’t used your laptop in days. That you tend to grab your iPad first whenever you need to visit a website or answer email. That your laptop never leaves your desk anymore.
About a year ago, I wrote an Automator action that converts audio files to mp3 using the LAME framework. I’ve been using it long enough that I think it’s ready for public consumption.
The action is compiled 32-bit/64-bit Universal so it’s compatible with Automator on Snow Leopard running in 64-bit mode. However, on Snow Leopard you’ll also need a Universal build of the LAME framework, which I’m providing until someone tells me I shouldn’t.
Download LAME.framework 32-bit/64-bit Universal
Need an expert iPhone/iPad/Mac OS programmer who specializes in audio? Get in touch!
“[…] Carly Starr, head of international marketing at Sub Pop, replied more precisely. What does indie mean? “Nothing,” she said.” — Is Indie Dead? (via Marco Arment)