Howl In Damnable Jingoism

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 10:25:00 +0000

Long time no see, huh.
Speaking of long times, finally some new material! Find "Down In Flames" here, and it'll be going up on the last.fm over the next week or so, when I finalise it.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 20:03:00 +0000

In the interest of self-promotion, I have put my entire back catalogue on Last.fm. Please, get scrobbling and increase the likelihood of my getting radio-plays!

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:55:00 +0000

It's not that I've had too much on my plate recently to write anything. It's more that there hasn't been enough. There's nothing to talk about.

However, set aside 75 minutes to watch this. Daft Punk are a seriously good band and their Coachella set in 2006 is now the stuff of legend. This is the whole thing including the encore (yes!) with very good sound. Listen out in particular for One More Time vs Aerodynamic, Da Funk and Harder Better Faster Stronger.

On a very related note, Alive 2007 from Paris earlier this year is coming to dual-CD in November! It will be preceded by a single release of HBFS from that recording, and the video for that will be shot by members of the audience, Beastie Boys style. I can't wait.

Meanwhile, I'm counting another 10 years until they tour again. I'll be first in line for tickets though.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:04:00 +0000

Pretty crappy update for you todayday. I have had another pop at my last track, Touch Wood. For the original I did without any reverb whatsoever both to make my life easier and to save CPU. The result of that is the clinical, flat feel of the original. This time I've gone back to my usual 3-send layout.
I've also re-balanced the whole thing, changed EQ, and added a very subtle bass guitar and a lush pad (which I'm particularly pleased with).
The result is a brighter, more polished, better-centred mix.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:45:00 +0000

I dare you to click here. Yes! New song!

The entire track spawned from a synth patch I ended up hardly using. You can hear it in the background throughout; it provides the drone in the second section. I had intended it to be the centrepiece of the track but it wasn't going anywhere.
I was on the edge of canning it when I decided to dig out the old Rebirth CD (free download!). It's really good! The 303 loop, as you can hear, hijacked the entire song.
At the time I was also missing a coherent rhythm section which Rebirth also fixed for me. The program consists of two 303s (I only used one), an 808 and 909 and it's the lattermost that provides most of the thudding kick/snare pairing. The 808 and obligatory Redrum are responsible for minor augmentation/reinforcement.

I have also found the best drum processor ever! Blockfish is one of the most fun compressors in the world in that it's incredibly difficult. From the somewhat idiosyncratic controls (a single-knob envelope?) to the pingy biting sound it's very easy to abuse and will give you the best hypercompressed material in the world if you use it right. I've found it too aggressive for more subtle vocal compression but that's what every other VST in the world is for.
Here's a tip to get you going with Blockfish on drums or a lead synth. High compression ratio, quick envelope, high saturation. Leave the makeup gain at 0 or push it up a little little bit. I leave bass-cut on for synths and off for drums, and rarely touch the air button or remove the front panel. I also prefer VCA mode for bonus vintage analog style but your mileage may vary.

PS: new music myspace! Add me!

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:13:00 +0000

In my last post I basically said Justice were lazy for letting up in the middle of †. In short, I've changed my mind. Valentine is the apex of their laid-back work to date (and there's actually been quite a bit) with a lead synth that hums and twirls its way through a series of simple yet engaging melodies.

TTTHHHEEE PPPAAARRRTTTYYY has an awful title, but it does feature Uffie, who is ultra-cool at the moment. While the instrumentation seems minimal it's actually very complex if you pay attention to it and it really suits the globetrotting (born in Miami, moved to Hong Kong, now a Parisian) girl's vocals, accentuating the growl in her sassy spoken word.

DVNO really improves with listens, as does most of Justice's work. It's got an engaging melody (Dr. Internet doesn't know who from; I'll tell you when I get the CD back) and a healthy serving of bombast. The instrumentation keeps you on a knife-edge throughout because it's quite unpredictable, and they've got an irregular distortion on the bottom of the voice, continuing the lush rumble subwoofer owners will hear throughout the album. This amounts to what's actually one of the most underappreciated songs on the album (I myself was skipping it habitually until I sat down with it the other day).

So I suggest you try those three again with a critical ear.

Also, I've changed my opinion of Wooden by SMD. I still think it's quite self-congratulatory (sorry SMD, the rest of the album's top) but it's grown on me a little. It's not wank like Scott is (sorry SMD), and it's not that good, but it's OK.

Finally, look what a bit of digging, reading inlays obsessively and the most useful yet unknown resource on the Internet has thrown up! The first MP3 on the page should shound strangely familiar. Yeah, it's crappy prog, but huzzah for fantastic sampling, bonus bonus points for Justice.
Oh, and I might be going to see them at Koko this September, if I can find anyone to go with me. I have not been the gig-goer I should have been recently. I will start regularly checking ticket websites.

I might talk about Daft Punk and the White Stripes a bit quite soon. EARLY TRAILING

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 18:17:00 +0000

I've just realised I haven't talked about the recent SMD and Justice albums properly. I'll get the semantics out of the way first: both are excellent.

First under the microscope is †. The lead singles DANCE and Waters Of Nazareth (as well as We Are Your Friends, of course - though it's missing from the album) were very good, and stylistically this LP is largely in keeping with that track record. Up there with them is NewJack, a sliced-up mangled vocal disco bleep-out track reminiscent of Daft Punk circa Harder Better Faster Stronger. There's also Phantom II, a re-imagining of the DANCE B-side with a longer chord progression and strings.

Unfortunately the album loses momentum in the middle a little, with Valentine, TTTHHHEEE PPPAAARRRTTTYYY and DVNO. The first of these is slightly better and, while none are bad songs, they don't have the club-pumping atmosphere as the rest of the LP.

Stellar as DANCE, 'Nazareth, NewJack and Phantom II are, they are not the best tracks on the album. That crown has to go to Phantom (which we saw before on DANCE) and Stress. The former is utterly fantastic from the opening with a synth that sounds like a vocalised glockenspiel through the über-distorted breakdown to the bleepy fade-out. If you wanted one track that exemplified Justice's work to date, it would be this.
Better still, though, is the aptly-named Stress. It's a frankly terrifying affair with a shrieking lead violin and four (count 'em) different siren sounds. Any song with sirens is good (look at Atlantis To Interzone or Heavyweight Champion Of The World) and this is no exception. I dare you to blast it at 11.

Any song with sirens is good, and Tits & Acid by SMD has a pair. It's a totally insane track with an exceedingly pitch-shifted lead loop, chordal stabs and a percussive vocal sample ("is he saying 'bass'?"). I challenge you not to bop a little when it charges through your speakers like an underground club rhinoceros. This is a re-recording (as are all the album tracks which were previously available) and while it's generally better there are one or two elements I've missed. I suggest you track down the other version of all the tracks on the Hype Machine for comparison.

The other singles on the album are It's The Beat, Hustler, I Believe and Hot Dog. They've all been revamped for an edgier indie-rock feel, not entirely unlike early Kasabian. Standing out among these already-great tracks is I Believe. The re-recording has given it a new lease of life; it's a lot less dancey now. The original seemed to put the (very good) bassline and drums first; now the melodic vocal and synth are emphasised. It's very much in the indie realm of dance crossover, sounding like a proper new-rave tune.

It's a great shame tracks Wooden and Scott, tracks 8 and 10 (out of 10) respectively are gratuitous bleep-out sessions. We forgave them for the end of the Hustler single because it simply emphasised the song's inherent style, but there's no excuse for randomised arpeggios and boring pads on their own. Wooden suffers less landing just this side of listenability but I suggest you take the CD out a track early and forget about Scott.

On a much brighter note, opener Sleep Deprivation is an absolute stomper. I'd say it was the highlight of the album, and perfectly illustrates SMD's electro ethos. The eight-bar chord progression sits at the heart of the track, and the pulse is provided by a straightforward buzzy bassline. It culminates in a blastable chordal synth towards the very end, accentuated by keyboard stabs on the beat. I can't get enough of it, and to be honest I can't get enough SMD. Attack Decay Sustain Release is the unmissable album of this quarter (Think Before You Speak was last quarter, right?).

Epilogue: I forgot to mention the high production values on each album. Neither fall into the dance music trap of simply pumping bass and lower mids to mask the lack of interesting music further up and the result is easy-to-listen-to electronic indie. It doesn't get any better.
Oh, and the White Stripes album, Icky Thump, is good. I have been too busy to sit down with it properly but I promise I will over the next fortnight or so.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:13:00 +0000

Another song sans singing for you.

http://www.soundclick.com/util/getplayer.m3u?id=5500448&q=hi

Can you hear that vv-v-vv-vv distortion in the lead part? That was where it started: me fiddling about with step sequencers and bit crushers.
The main three-chord riff got into my head and I started using it to test the synth patches. The song went from there.
That rhythmic noise at the start (possibly the best bit of the song, I'm not sure) was actually one of the last things I added.

I hope you like it!

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 07:50:00 +0000

OH MY GOD. There's nothing to be said. It's all different, and I can't wait.

I've signed up for the beta.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 14:08:00 +0000

Also, Justice and SMD albums out tomorrow. Don't miss them.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 13:53:00 +0000

What do we have here? Another meme? This time concerning popular hippity hoppiter 50 Cents?
No, never! It can't be!

IM IN UR VIDEO
SHAKIN MAH BOOTEH

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 09:52:00 +0000

I have discovered Ableton Live. I've used it in a remix I did of a Reason jam with a friend. She did the playing and I did the clicking.
The only original parts you hear in that track are the lead (hers), the bass (hers), the main drums (mine) and the background synth (mine). The rest is from Ableton's loop library (except the phased guitar near the end, that was a Reason loop) - and that was only the 'Lite' OEM version, not the full shebang. The extra drums and that background synth were exactly what was needed to infuse the track with the energy it was previously missing.
The time-stretching is amazing. Even at radical tempo changes the quality is acceptable, with minimal flamming - the loops stay dead-on locked to whatever tempo you set.
I already had most of a track structure in place by the time I brought Live in, but recording was intuitive and immediate, just bringing in loops, hitting record and clicking buttons when I felt like it. I can see how it would be used as a live tool, and how you'd go about writing an entire track with it, especially when combined with a more capable host (I'm already a Sonar user, remember).

So if I didn't have a list of purchases for the next 12 months already I wouldn't hesitate to make Live my next big buy. As it stands I'm saving for the Korg Legacy Collection, Komplete, a new preamp, some decent reference monitors, and a CPU/graphics card/motherboard combo. So at the moment it's stuck at the bottom of the list. Oh well.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:45:00 +0000

Universal Truths Uncovered
Part 1

Ben Hodgson wrote:
Jesus was a bit of a girl to start with.

Lucy Pimm wrote:
what do you mean he was a bit of a girl??!

Ben Hodgson wrote:
he WAS a bit of a girl. Look at his silly clothes and his sandals and his silly beard.

Ben Hodgson wrote:
And his girly hair

Lucy Pimm wrote:
and the way he was brutally killed, took that like a man i feel...he put up with a lot!

Ben Hodgson wrote:
inside he was all "when I'm in heaven I'd love to go shopping and buy some shoes"

Ben Hodgson wrote:
"read Heat magazine and eat ice-cream straight from the tub"

Ben Hodgson wrote:

"while watching sloppy late-night movies on the telly"

Ben Hodgson wrote:
Stop the press, Jesus likes Casablanca

Ben Hodgson wrote:
and Ben & Jerry's

So there you have it.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Wed, 30 May 2007 07:40:00 +0000

Photoshop is the sex.

Though to be fair it was just MS Paint. Photoshop is just a word. I'm too poor.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Mon, 28 May 2007 16:08:00 +0000

So was anyone at Good Shoes' kinda-secret gig at Morden Park Bandstand?

Despite the awful weather (which begot a bad view - too many umbrellas) it was great fun, though the crowd took a bit of time to get going and they couldn't play guitar properly because of the cold.
There were about 100 people there - just their Myspace friends who'd been bothered to read the bulletins, lived in the area and dared brave the elements. They played more or less the whole album.

I couldn't get any photos because of the aformentioned umbrellas but I'm sure plenty of people nearer the front did. With any luck they'll stick them here for the likes of you to see. If you were there you couldn't have missed me. I was under a big bright yellow Young Knives umbrella (that's TYK beneath it), wearing jeans and shoes from about four years ago (the nice ones were all wet from having gone outside this weekend), and a waterproof. Hmm.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sat, 26 May 2007 12:29:00 +0000

It had to be done.

Click for the Flickr page and various sizes.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Wed, 23 May 2007 09:57:00 +0000

I can't wait for June 18, when Simian Mobile Disco release their album ADSR (Amazon, since Banquet don't have a link up yet). I've been collecting tracks from my favourite indie remixers for about 8 months now and I (along with most other music bloggers, it seems) am waiting rapt.

The SMD 101: Simian split up a couple of years ago. SMD had formed with James Ford and Jas Shaw (owner of possibly the biggest synth in the world) as a DJ side project at first, then started making electronic party music.
With the first release of 'I Believe' and later 'Hustler' (which was an underground club hit) they Happened, and a remix of Magick by Klaxons propelled them onto the remixing scene with a bang. They've also recently been getting around with mix CDs, and Ford has been producing left right and centre, including Klaxons and Arctic Monkeys.
Now signed to Wichita, which incidentally also has The Cribs, who I talked about yesterday, as well as Bloc Party among others.

This post was catalysed by an email that arrived about 10 minutes ago from their mailing list (sign up from the myspace), announcing 3 big musts for any fan.

A Zane Lowe session tonight (23rd May) on Radio One from 7pm BST. If you miss it it'll probably be available online for an indefinite period.
A re-recording of 'I Believe' with Simon Lord (also formerly of Simian), to be released on the album and as a single this July.
A live video of Sleep Deprivation (to be track 1 on the album) with exceptionally good sound. It's a synth geek's wet dream, I tells ya.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:56:00 +0000

MUSIC!
http://www.soundclick.com/util/getplayer.m3u?id=5370600&q=hi
Think SebastiAn with influences from The Verve. Yes.

It still needs a title - if you have any ideas stick'em in the comments.

Oh, and also The Cribs' new album is more or less everything I'd have asked of them. Fantastic.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:14:00 +0000

Ambient music?

This was written in about 2 hours with just 5 instruments (all virtual again). SONAR and Absynth are the stars of the show, but Reason provided the percussion and bass, while FM8 provided arpeggios. I wrote it with looping in mind: it's to be played over and over (obviously seamlessly) in, for example, an art gallery.

It is, of course, CC (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike); so if you want to (for example) soundtrack a YouTube video in the background I'd be flattered.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Fri, 04 May 2007 18:26:00 +0000

I've decided to upload my whole back-catalogue (or at least, everything I could find that I'm allowed to post) to Soundclick for you (and also self-promotion).
That, of course, means my BBC News thing (which I talked about the other day) has been pushed to the bottom of the list. You can still find it easily here though.

It's all under Creative Commons' Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. That means you can sample from my mixes however you like, so long as it stays under this license, you say it was my work to start with, and you don't make money. If you want the original files, just email me. My somewhat cryptic email address is below - simply remove the spaces and replace certain symbols.

po ors od (at) gma il (dot) co m

Sorry for the confusingness, it's to avoid spam email robot things.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:47:00 +0000

As promised: NOVELTY-TRANCE!
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=674211

It's the only one on the page right now. By the time you read this it may or may not have been cleared for download but you can definitely stream it. You've got to like the BBC News tune to start with, I think, because the beeps are a little on the repetitive.

How I wrote it? Listening to the BBC News jingle and adding instruments around B flat as it progressed. I may as well have called it 'fun with pattern sequencers'. I also used randomization on the second layer of drums.
It was, to be honest, the logical next step from my theme & variations on the Channel 4 News jingle what I done for GCSE. That was epic stuff.

I might, if I can be arsed, sort out EQs and compressors and upload a final, properly mixed version. That one's really only my initial 'scratch-pad' - the drums are the only bit that's properly polished. Sounds good enough to me though.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:53:00 +0000

I've been getting to grips with Kontakt (my new toy) lately. I decided to dig out the old Stylophone I got from the charity shop years ago and sample that as an introduction of sorts.

I had loads of fun totally mangling the sound with all sorts of modulators and forgot what I was doing. I ended up starting again to keep the samples clean and monophonic. I set it up so that spinning the modulation wheel on the controller keyboard would switch it between vibrato and straight which was quite a task for a beginner.

Kontakt iself? I liked the fact that all the sound-shaping features are simple to get to (if I were a PR-man, I'd say "at your fingertips") and it naturally leads you into some quite advanced sampling techniques as you begin to need them. "I want to have this guitar feed back and then segue into a brass section with a pretty extreme LFO" - engage the brainium and it's a pinch.

The presets are fun, too. There's, for example, a guitar which plays an entire chord around two notes on a keyboard with a complicated strumming pattern. A naturally morphing synth with the slow movement of an Absynth patch. The list continues.

My sample pack is here, for those who're interested.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:18:00 +0000

Oh, and Favourite Worst Nightmare is pretty much exactly what I was hoping it to be. That is, not disappointing.

I would say the average quality of songwriting is better than that on Whatever... (that was an awful title), though the highs aren't as high or as frequent as the first. Having said that, Brianstorm is probably one of the Tunes of the Year so far.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:15:00 +0000

I'm pointing you this way today.

When I can be bothered, I'll give you my remix of the BBC News jingle. It's a BANGING RAVEY TRANCE CHOON or something. To me it sound like minimalism that's been made shorter and more news-y. I'll tell you about it on Wednesday.

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Awesome) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:20:00 +0000

http://www.5secondfilms.com/

I have laughed out loud in the last couple of minutes at approximately the same rate as I will tomorrow watching Peep Show.

Many posts in the last few days. Still trying to work out exactly what this blag is going to be for. I don't want to populate yet more places with my inane rambles.
Yet, perhaps that's a good thing creatively speaking. If I do a lot I'll get something funny, perhaps.

I have been writing off-the-cuff gags lately, and signalling them in the next sentence. We need to make these things obvious to educate the humourously challenged among us.

Favourite Worst Nightmare out in a few days!