I had intended to spin my first set made up of tracks I produced myself, however I didn't feel the party was the right atmosphere for it so I decided to spin a set made of house and techno mostly.
I had purchased a few new tracks from beatport during the week so I was well equipped in terms of fresh beats. Bought a track from Timewriter that I had heard about on Lars Behrenroth's Podcast, featured on www.deepershades.net There's no track listing to this mix and quite frankly I don't know where people get the time for all that prep work. I barely know if I'm ever going to spin at a party let alone pick out a track listing beforehand? Get outta here. Here's the mix...enjoy
After a whole bunch of messing around with the arrangement, I've finally made a final arrangement for my latest track titled "Injection". What I mainly messed with in comparison to the last version was the timing of the LFO. After having listened to the variations for hours I can't really say that I'm able to listen to it objectively and determine whether it flows or not, you be the judge.
As always, this track is available for guests to listen freely, but you have to registered and logged into the site in order to be able to download this track. Please click here to register.
I often write about great tools or services over on my business website, but this recommendation needs to be mentioned here.
The service is called "Soundcloud" and basicaly is one of those cloud solutions where you can share a virtual space that's geared specifically towards people trying to share their music, or have a space they can exchage music with others.
I saw it on the nuskoolsbreaks.co.uk forum as one of the users was posting his music there and where I have my own space and don't really need this, I'm sure tons of people ARE going to find use in this.
Check it out for yourself by going to their website:
http://soundcloud.com/dropbox
You can send me files by going to my personal dropbox labelled beatmassa.
I must admit I've really been getting too distracted lately when it comes to making music. It's easy to sit down and mess around for a few hours and think you've accomplished something. In reality the only real success is if you manage to put a track together, arrange it and perhaps even go over it a few times and do another final arrangement.
I must say that I'm very disappointed to see how slow Last.FM is reacting to racists slurs on their community based music website. My girlfriend alligazm recently registered to the site and soon there after a user from Russia left messages on your profile pasting the "N" word over and over again. I'm not hyper sensitive to racism as most Americans are, but I do find that over the line.
I've decided to start a wiki for this site again to help document some of the things I'm working on. As I wrote in my last post, I'm currently in the process of putting together a live set with my friend Lexer where we are trying to incorporate everything we feel could be useful.
In light of our ongoing work, I've installed the "Audiophile Wiki" where visitors to the site can follow our progress, read up on certain procedures and utlimately can chime in with methods they're learned or taught themselves.
Being Audiophiles ourselves, we're constantly browsing the internet for fresh information on new techniques and our current aim is to be able to send midi controller data to an external laptop, which is running visualization software. You can read more about this in the wiki article which doesn't have a lot of information in it as of now, but should be filling substantially as the days and weeks go and we start building it.
A while ago my good friend Lexer started coming over at least once a week, where we basically just get together, get high and jam out with the audio gear. For many years or I should better say ever since I moved to the US, I've been doing things alone.
My background is actually such that I used to just be the singer in an industrial band, with a nack for writing drum patterns. When I moved to the US I had to start from scratch though and that also meant that I had to start getting my own thing going on, from understanding Computers and the software that's needed, over to trying to understand sound engineering and various other aspects of audio production.
Since I've made plenty of tracks I figure it will be a nice change to start working on something with someone else, not entirely relying on my input but on what we can accomplish together.
We decided that various things would be of interest to us.
Building another tracks and content to prepare a live set.
Start recording automation for various tracks that are nearly complete.
Do weekly recordings for some type of podcast show - not 100% on the scope yet other than the fact that we're sure it's supposed to be music - hah!.
What we've also done though, is to start routing some of the controller data sent out from the midi host, in this case my old Windows XP running Ableton Live 7 over to the macbook pro of my friend. The software we're sending this information to is called Quart Composer and if you want to read more on it, you can go to their website and check it out.
What can I say, life's good when you can get new toys for leisure time. Though I've been producing music for ages, I've only recently gotten into DJ'ing and up to now I've always had to rely on other people's setup.
It always makes me happy to find DJ's and Producers that are following down the same path as I am. I must admit I have it a tad more difficult than a DJ that's signed on a record label, simply due to the name recognition they of course enjoy and with that of course comes the attention needed to run a site with traffic and activity, but whatever.
Spectrasonics has released another beast of a software platform for audiophiles like myself. The release is 9 DVD's strong and from what I've heard from other musicians and producers, it's worth every bit of the hype.
News
