[ myBADmusic | musings & stuff ]

Early hard disk in Glasgow

Thu, 31 May 2012 09:32:42 -0400

"Why don’t more people start their own business? Normal people are pessimists. They often see..."

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:18:35 -0400

“Why don’t more people start their own business? Normal people are pessimists. They often see no reason to try something new. Most of the time they’re right. What they don’t realize is that being wrong 99% of the time is just fine. You only need to be right once.”

Uncle Sam kicked out of Canada: “An empty house is better...

Thu, 03 May 2012 19:56:45 -0400

Uncle Sam kicked out of Canada: “An empty house is better than such a tenant as that.”

"Life is a bit like a long call option: It has a beginning and an expiration date, even though we..."

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:44:19 -0500

“Life is a bit like a long call option: It has a beginning and an expiration date, even though we don’t know when that might be. It may be a long- or a short-term contract. It has theoretically unlimited potential. But time decay eats away at it, day after day, and often potential is wasted.”

Photo

Fri, 27 May 2011 01:32:55 -0400

Creating thumping bass lines

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 01:01:00 -0400

Use the adjective that you prefer: thumping, rumbling, or just plain FAT. If you listen to electronic music, especially of the danceable variety, you probably enjoy the sensation of the clean, fat bass sounds vibrating in your auditory canal. But as a music producer, how do you create this?

First thing’s first, get good monitor speakers or headphones — i.e., something with a flat frequency response so you can well, monitor, what you are doing. (They are called monitors for a reason!) Typical consumer headphones that emphasize the lower frequencies are just going to fool you into thinking you’re making great thumping sounds, when in reality they might be quite puny.

Now on to the tip… It’s mostly an art, rather than a science, but here’s a good starting point:

Start with a square or triangle wave.
Filter out as much of the harmonics as you can using a low-pass filter. You should end up with something close to a sine wave, but not quite. (Or else we would have just used a sine wave!)
Change the amplitude envelope so that you get a fast (sharp) attack and a slow (long) sustain. If you want to get fancy, add a very short blip/peak at the beginning of the curve.
Using an equalizer (or other full spectrum filter), boost the low frequencies, but cut away all frequencies below 20 Hz (you can’t hear them anyway, and they’re not good for your speakers at high volumes)
Experiment…

The next thing thing you need to know is something called “ducking” (no quacking involved), but that’s for another day. Google it. In essence: You don’t want your bass line playing at the same time as your kick.

A call for submissions: Any audio recording made during Toronto's Nuit Blanche

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 04:00:00 -0400

It’s unlikely that I was the only one periodically taking out my iPhone to acoustically sample small slices of Nuit Blanche last night. When looking over your digital loot from last night, if you find some recordings, would you care to share them with me? It would be a nice bonus if you can recall what general area (or zone, i.e. A/B/C) you were in when the recording was made. Also, include your name if you want to be credited. I’m going to attempt to make a quasi-musical compilation of everything I receive and release it online. Subscribe to my mailing list or follow me on Twitter to be notified.

Submit your recordings here

[2010.12 Update: This project idea is cancelled due to lack of interest. To try again at some future event, with better publicity and more advance notice…]

Darkstar - Gold. Track from the new album North, to be released...

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:08:27 -0400

Darkstar - Gold. Track from the new album North, to be released soon at www.Hyperdub.com

Quiz: Are those MR or CT scans?

PVT (formerly known as PIVOT) will be releasing their new album...

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:48:00 -0400

PVT (formerly known as PIVOT) will be releasing their new album “Church With No Magic” in a few weeks. They’ve made the MP3 of the track “Window” available for free here: http://pvtpvt.net/window

This is a very nice combination of electronic tools (Novation LaunchPad, a MIDI keyboard, and wonder what software DAW… likely Ableton Live) and analog performance (including human voice, which of course is inherently analog). This is just an example of where live music is heading in the future.

Luca Ricci - Seven [BADmusic Remix]

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:19:10 -0400

Luca Ricci - Seven [BADmusic Remix]:

Just for fun, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and submit a ”minimal” remix of Luca Ricci’s upcoming release “Seven” (referring to the so-called seven deadly sins). [Listen here]

One shouldn’t expect too much from a remix competition as one never really knows what type of sound the label is looking for. Even worse, some artists/labels even use remix competitions to get ideas for “original” tracks they haven’t even created yet. That being said, they are good ways to exercise your musical creativity and focus on completing a full track (a common habit for any musician, especially those in electronic music, is to have a large of number of bits of songs, little riffs, etc., waiting to be finished at a later date). A good way to evaluate a worthwhile remix contest is to examine the prizes; in my opinion the best prizes are not gear, nor sample packs, or even money, but co-releases on the upcoming EP or album. In the end, it’s about getting your music heard after all!

Happy remixing…

Bad music kills. Nice marketing by a music pubishing firm.

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:09:46 -0400

Bad music kills. Nice marketing by a music pubishing firm.

More women than men like my music? My latest track (Diurnal...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0400

More women than men like my music?

My latest track (Diurnal Voices) has been playing on a social web streaming radio system for about a week, and as of today more females have been clicking the “like” button than men. I wonder what it is about this song in particular, or perhaps it says more about the user base of that site…

Does anyone know “Box Fresh”? There’s a guy in...

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:33:00 -0400

Does anyone know “Box Fresh”?

There’s a guy in Toronto who goes by the moniker “Box Fresh” and I’d like to give him proper credit for using his voice in my latest track. Then there’s also “Doug”, but I think he’s in Seattle…

The good old days of science...

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 06:20:00 -0400

Reading about the great vibrating string controversy; a vituperative scientific dispute of the mid-1700s, drawing into battle all the leading mathematicians and physicists of the time, which is to say, d’Alembert, Euler, Bernoulli, Lagrange and (later) Fourier.

Univox SR-95 rhythm machine as an Ableton Live drum pad

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:36:00 -0400

Univox SR-95 rhythm machine as an Ableton Live drum pad:

Here are the sound samples from the Univox SR-95 (aka Keio MiniPops MP-7) drum machine packaged up as a drum pad in Ableton Live 8.1.3 (not backward-compatible with earlier versions).

The Univox SR-95 was an analog machine from the 1970s famously used by Jean-Michel Jarre on his Oxygene album in 1976.

All sourced samples are 44.1 kHz, 16-bit wav files. They were not individually normalised so that the original balance between all sounds is preserved.

Whiney Ah Synth Voice - Custom Image-Line Harmless synth VST...

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 23:23:00 -0400

Whiney Ah Synth Voice - Custom Image-Line Harmless synth VST preset

Today I was playing around programming Image-Line’s Harmless VST synth. It’s relatively new subtractive-additive synthesizer — yes, that sounds like an oxymoron! Here’s the link to download the preset I made and tested in the above audio file; feel free to use it however you wish. Save the file in the “Presets” folder found in the Harmless install directory): FXP file