Discord3 v1.0.1 OS X Now Available... 9 Sep 2010, 4:59 am

We just pushed out v1.0.1 of Discord3 for OS X, and it is now in the AD store for download. This update essentially duplicates the update of a little while ago for Windows, fixing the infamous Fart Bug in the granular engine. It is recommended for all OS X users of Discord3.

This update also has a couple minor things addressed you wouldn't notice and one major thing you wouldn't notice. This update replaces VSTGUI3.5 with VSTGUI4, which we need to use for upcoming 64-bit janks. It shouldn't affect you in any way, shape, or form, but if you run in to anything graphics-related, be sure to drop me a line via the AD Info Line.

Next is the Axon multi-outs update, which Adam is gonna tackle tomorrow, and then the Replicant 1.5 update. I should be able to show you a design mock-up in a couple days, once I have it worth looking at.

Somewhat Ahead Of Their Time... 7 Sep 2010, 6:09 am

In 1952, Philips Industries, those zany Dutchfolk that bring us fancy new TVs and lightbulbs every now and again, saw fit to make an electronic music studio in their main R&D facility in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. This studio, which was moved to the University Of Utrecht in 1960 as part of their new Sonology Studio, and again in 1972 to the Royal Conservatory Of Music (as pictured above), still exists today as Studio BEA-5 at the Institute Of Sonology, with most of the gear in that top image still in daily use.

(Click that image to go to a Flickr set taken in 2007. Note that it is the same room, and more or less the same angle, as the top photo.)

This is, for some reason, one of the lesser known of the old electronic music studios. Obviously, we're all familiar with the BBC's efforts in that department, and the famous electronic music studios in Paris and Cologne, but BEA-5 and its parents had a reasonably profound effect on the history of electronic music, and it also has the distinction of being the Last Man Standing of bespoke electronic studios from the '40s and '50s.

An interesting sidebar: it is where Varèse created Poème électronique while working with Le Corbusier on the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair, and as such is the pivot point for the acceptance of electronic music as a valid form of musical expression, in my humble opinion.

This video is a trip. Although it's in Dutch, you get the general idea. This is the original studio at the Phillips labs before it was moved the first time, and gives a good overview of the techniques used to make music at this studio (and, indeed, the techniques in general use at the time in all the electronic music studios). The next time someone sends me a litany of "can you make Plugin X do task Y so I can spend more time with my vaporizer?" I'm just going to send them this video and say "now you have a vague inkling of an idea of how easy you have it."

Here's an interesting piece of music by Tom Dissevelt & Kid Baltan (the two dudes in the previous video), called Vibration that was also recorded at the Philips labs iteration of Sonology. That intro bit, well, slap a nice Machinedrum kick under it, and you've got yourself some minimal techno, plain and simple. Given the chronology of things, you can safely assume that the methods in the first video directly resulted in the music of the second video. Speaking of chronology, to put the age in perspective, the above track was recorded the year that Buddy Holly released Rave On. Either that, or it's on the new Autechre album. You be the judge.

Anyhow, I imagine at least one, if not several, of the daily readers of AI have visited BEA-5, and may have an anecdote or two to relate in that regard. If you'd like an excellent compilation of music recorded at the first locations of this studio, you could do far worse than to pick up Popular Electronics, which has virtually all the highlights.

Hectricity... 3 Sep 2010, 8:14 pm

Man, what a week. I've got about 85 things going on, and am trying to plow through it all. I had to get several of my photographs in to a state where they could be displayed for First Friday tonight, which involved drives to Mesa, several trips downtown, and haunting the aisles of Michael's looking for frames for some time. If you're in Phoenix, they're at the Just Breathe Gallery (and, not coincidentally, yoga studio. Every building in that area is Business XXX + Gallery, so it's not as strange as it sounds.)

That was a massive time suck, of course. I also had to go down to Chandler twice for things to do with our local Hackerspace, Heatsync Labs. This was a nerd-gasm of epic proportions, and the less said about it the better. But if you picture Phoenix as a person that is about 100 miles tall, we live around the eyebrows, and Chandler is that crust that grows on your feet if you spend too much time in a men's locker room.

Also too, somewhere in there I managed to get 90% of the UI make-over for Replicant 1.5 done. This is our first semi-major update to Replicant, and since this is our most popular product, we're rather reticent to add or remove any features. It won't be a huge make-over like the BS1-BS2 jump. The things I know it will have:

1. New UI. It will be losing its algae-colored knobfest and getting a UI that is in line with Axon and D3. The general layout will remain the same, though, so there will be no learning curve.

2. MIDI Note Trigger. We are making it so you can fire the events with MIDI notes instead of the sequencer, if you want. Still working on the mechanics for this, but it should make Replicant play much nicer with swung (swinged?) material.

3. In addition to the bitcrush thing, we'll be adding a sample rate reduction because, honestly, why wouldn't we?

That's about it for this update. The UI is the big part. It'll also get the 64-bit Windows treatment, and get all the current VSTGUI and AU tech so that the 64-bit OS X port won't be difficult when we're able to do that. It'll be a free update for all users.

Upcoming AD Stuff... 31 Aug 2010, 12:57 am

Okay, now that the release excitement of Axon has died down, we're on to the Next Phase in our Big Plan. We're actually working on several things at once, and I'll attempt to boil them down to the essence.

1. Discord3 OS X update. There will be a minor update on the OS X side of Discord3 shortly; we've got some internal re-working, plus a minor bug fix. We have decided to not release 64-bit versions of OS X at this time, as the 64-bit port of AU is essentially impossible with our current working methods. We need to wait until the compatibility layer we used for Discord3 (and Axon) has been updated. We have successfully built a 64-bit OS X VST of Discord3, and we'll release as soon as Cubase 5 64-bit is stable and public on the OS X side.

2. Axon Update. We're adding multiple outs, counter reset on transport stop, and a couple other requested features to Axon, along with some minor bug fixes (mostly relating to Logic). This update will be both sides, and is a ways away.

3. The Next Product.

EDIT: Read the comments.

This isn't a new product per se, but rather a significant update that will combine and deprecate several old products. One of the problems with our relatively large product line is that doing line-wide updates is disagreeable in the extreme; our intention in that regard is to reduce the number of products we offer, so that we're able to better deal with the fairly regularly timed body blows emanating from Cupertino.

So, this product, as yet unnamed, will be a multi-effect consisting of the engines of Liquid, Fluid, Vapor, and Phase Two. You will be able to select any one of those engines per instance, and the whole will be lovingly wrapped in a stereo delay. In this regard, it will be similar to Discord3, in both layout and operation, but rather than three different pitch shifters, it will have four modulation effects. The delay will be routed slightly differently, more like a send effect than inline as it is in D3, but that's a design decision that is down the road a bit.

For purchasing, we haven't decided on a final price, but we will almost certainly hew to our current major effect price of $59. The way upgrading will work will be that for each of the four individual effects you own, you'll receive a $10 discount from the price. So if you only own, say, Liquid, your price for this plug-in will be $49. If you own Liquid and Fluid, your price will be $39, and so on. We will, as I mentioned, be deprecating the four plug-ins in question.

If you have any thoughts on this combo-platter, now's the time to make yourself heard; otherwise, we'll forge ahead.

Axon Tutorial #2... 26 Aug 2010, 3:41 am

Here's the second video in my 6-part "How To Run This Little Fucker" series. In this one, I show a little more in-depth about how to make connections, and the rhythms that result. I changed the format a bit to make it less wordy than the last one, which was apparently causing some problems.

Automatic, Systematic, Hydromatic... 23 Aug 2010, 6:26 pm

Movin' right along around these parts. Various things, in no particular sequence:

1. In order to facilitate the 64-bit OS X versions, we apparently need to use the bleeding edge VSTGUI 4.0. I'm pleased to report that Adam has successfully built Discord 3 using VSTGUI 4, which required a lot of changes in our internal GUI code that took him the majority of last week. The only thing remaining is updating the compatibility layer we use to turn VSTs in to AudioUnits. This layer uses something called HIView, which is the Carbon API windowing system. We need to change it to something called NSView, which is the Cocoa windowing system, as there is no 64-bit Carbon. We don't know exactly how complex that's going to be, but we're sanguine about things at this juncture.

As soon as the 64-bit OS X versions of Discord 3 are out, we'll have a fairly rapid update to Axon, then turn our attention to the rest of the catalog. I'll update as is necessary.

2. A bit outside the purview of this site, but for those of you that find my photography explorations interesting, I opened a Deviant Art account, the which you can find here. I'm only putting my current run of "serious" works (my dip- and triptychs, basically) up there; the majority of my photographic output will still go in my Flickr account as always. Slightly related: I got one of these the other day, an example of which you can see above. Fun little camera, and a hoot at a party.

3. Yes, the other Axon videos are coming.

4. Musically, I'm mixing the last RT60 song this week (it is, in fact, open on my music PC right this minute.) This record needs to be released on vinyl, but due to the heavy front-loaded costs, we're exploring various options in that regard. One idea we've had is to have a separate Bandcamp item that gets the download, with a pre-order for the vinyl. If anyone has any different ideas in that regard, I'd love to hear about them. I've also got the next Micronaut EP, Capacitor, on deck (it's about half way done) and the Many Moons (Selections 1998 - 2008) LP, which contains new-mixed versions of several Micronaut tracks, plus some unreleased stuff from the early days, is nearing completion as well.

5. And finally, today is the 7th Anniversary of the founding of Audio Damage, Inc. Yay, us, and a huge thank-you to anyone that ever bought a plug-in from us!

Fucking Physics. How Does It Work? 19 Aug 2010, 6:26 pm

Hey. Remember me? It's been a while, I know. But you're used to it. You know how it is after a release. Lots to do.

Anyhow, I couldn't let this beauty slip by without a comment. It seems this fellow, using his Naim audiophile rig, can easily hear "greater low-level musical detail and presentational improvements in the soundstage and the ‘air’ around instruments."

Now, trying to talk sense to an audiophile is a quixotic task at best, but I'll give it a whirl.

Dear Mr. Steward:

Despite what you may think you heard, speaking as someone that is heavily involved in the technology (and physical act) of music creation, let me state for the record that it is physically impossible for the SATA cable that connects your hard drive to your motherboard to have any bearing whatsoever on the "air" or "soundstage" of the music you listen to, unless that cable has experienced catastrophic failure, in which event, you won't be hearing any music at all.

Mr. Steward, I'm sure you're a very nice guy, who is only trying to make a living writing about that which you love. In that, at least, you and I are the same. In this article, however, you're either lying outright, or you're demonstrating the old human foible of hearing what you want to hear at the expense of the truth. It is fundamentally the same as a Christian or Muslim professing faith. "It doesn't have to be true. It is enough that I believe it to be true."

Since you're obviously not clear on the technical details, your "music," which is in fact a data file, is not really "passing through metres of CAT-5." It's not a physical thing that has to travel from Point A to Point B, possibly in a tiny dump truck. Networks, hard drives, and data files don't work like that. It isn't like speaker wire, where one could conceivably make an argument for quality (when, as you and I both know full well, the only thing that really matters is size and conductivity.)

In short, there are too many variables, up to and including the barometric pressure and relative humidity in your house at the time of your listening, to make any quantifiable statements about "soundstage" and "air." All of these variables happen AFTER your D/A converter, though. Suffice to say that there is no possible way that an audio file streamed off a hard disk, assuming that everything is working correctly, can be affected by either the SATA or CAT-5 cables. It simply doesn't work that way. You can consider everything before your D/A converter as a constant in any equation.

In closing, Mr. Steward, I would like to thank you for taking the time to inform us of an exciting new product, but it would be wise to consider that your obviously vivid imagination is playing a role. Either that, or the company gave you either product or money to say that nonsense. In any event, this deeply flawed article has called in to question virtually everything you have published, unfortunately.

Sorry 'bout that.

EDIT: Stretta had something to say on this subject as well. 'Tis here.

The Usual Monday Bullshit... 16 Aug 2010, 6:31 pm

The initial release hullabaloo of Axon has died down a bit, so things can start returning to normal. It's an interesting function of the division of labor in Audio Damage, Inc. that when I'm relatively idle, Adam is usually working hard, and vice versa. My busy times book-end the release cycle of the product (design and sales) while Adam's busy time is the couple weeks immediately prior to release.

For the first 24 hours of sales, Axon was our fourth most popular of the 30 plug-ins we've released. However, I think it's interesting to note that of our four most popular first-24-hour products (the Discord3 update, Automaton, Tattoo, and Axon, in order) the difference between first and fourth is only 10 units.

All of these four products have a long, long way to go before they'll catch either Replicant or Dubstation, so it's not necessarily time for a party, but the risk we took by releasing Axon seems to have been worth it, and for that, we're extremely thankful. For the record, on the list of all opening day sales, Dubstation is 24th, and Replicant is 7th. Just goes to show that the opening day has nothing to do with final adoption of the product in the production community's mass consciousness, but is more a function of our ability to build excitement and anticipation, I believe.

Anyhow, OS X 64-bit versions of D3 and Axon are next out the door (don't know how long that will take; our couple of half-hearted attempts at 64-bit OS X builds met with a lot of errors), along with an update to Axon with some bug fixes and various features requested like multiple outs. In my ubiquitous free time (what ever will I do with myself?) I'm piecing together a selection of tracks from the first decade of Micronaut, and mixing them again for more modern sound and technique, and releasing the whole to Bandcamp here in a few days. So watch out for that. Also, 2/6 of the Axon Video Series should be done and up today. And so on and so forth...

OH AND... There's a new free kit up at Beatserv, and they're having a back-to-school 20% off sale. Go forth.

Axon Programming Tutorial 1 Of 6... 12 Aug 2010, 3:40 am

Here is the first of the six tutorials I'll do for Axon. This one is a super fast overview of the Neuron Sequencer programming method, for people that want to see it in action. I'll go way more in depth in Pt. 2, showing how to make more predictable beats, multiple senders for fun and profit, and how to get the most out of external triggering.

Axon: The Process (And How It Isn't An ANN)... 10 Aug 2010, 7:32 pm

I have to take my wife to the dentist in a bit, so it's going to be a few hours before the first Axon programming video is up. In lieu of that, I'll take this interlude to talk about how Axon came about, for those of you that are interested, and some of the theory behind it. It all started when I bought the excellent O'Reilly book AI for Game Developers. After the success of Automaton (which turned out to be one of our more successful plug-ins) we spent some thought cycles pondering other ways to implement some sort of rudimentary AI in a music context. The book is mostly about simple path-finding, following, and "find your way home" algorithms, but there was one chapter which (greatly) simplified the concept of artificial neural networks (ANNs) that I found quite intriguing.

Now, the problem with an ANN in a music context--and it has been tried; the pages of Computer Music Journal are rife with nasty-sounding examples--is twofold:

1. The context is generally not appropriate to the learning process that ANNs require.

2. The results, whether you're applying them to sequencing or sound design, are uniformly unlistenable.

I broached this subject with Adam as a possible path of exploration, picking an incredibly bad time to do this (we were in the middle of Tattoo's lengthy and frustrating troubleshooting process) and he was... uh... not excited. He pointed out Nos. 1 and 2 in short order, and that was that.

HOWEVER!!!

When I have an idea in my teeth, it won't be taken from me without a lot of slobber and jumping about, in a most dog-like fashion. The main hurdle to overcome to make an ANN full of techno is to make it so you don't have to teach the fucking thing. So I went to the basic idea of what an ANN node was; essentially, when you strip away all the academic bullshit, it's a few nested if/then/else statements. IF these conditions are met THEN fire a pulse, or ELSE figure out whether we need to change our IF to compensate for the outside world being a strange and wonderful place.

Now, Adam has a fascination with all things hexagonical, and in order to sell him on the idea, I knew hexes would have to be involved. I then opened up Pd and went to work, trying to come up with a hex-based system of counters that would allow user interaction but not need to be taught. I came across some interesting work done by some guy (which I can't find right now) that augmented my ideas in this regard, and tied the output to a whole mess of simple FM synths, and the result is as you see here:

This is, for all intents and purposes, Axon, except in Pd instead of a VST/AU, and without a shiny GUI. There are only six voices, as I didn't give the center timing node a voice, but the general idea is fundamentally the same. I actually prototyped the UI in TouchOSC to run it on my iPad, and the TouchOSC UI is, in layout anyhow, what you see in the Axon UI now.

Of course, this bears no relationship to an ANN any more. It is really just a set of interconnected counters. I called it the Retarded Neural Network, because it was a collection of simple neurons, which did operate in a network, and it was retarded, inasmuch as it couldn't be taught. Obviously, it would be in fairly poor taste to use this as a bullet point, but that's what it is in my mind.

An actual operating instrument that produced unique and interesting results and that was (sort of) easy to program, and furthermore (FURTHERMORE!) had a hexagon in it, well, it was just a matter of time before Adam caved. As soon as D3 was done we decided to make it, and after a spirited argument on the semantics of the words "artificial neural network," whereupon I agreed that it wasn't one, we were off to the races.

Now, to be clear: the goal of these sorts of things is not to replace the creative process, but rather to augment it by producing results that you fully control, while leading to things you wouldn't have thought of on your own. In this respect Automaton and Axon are two peas in the same pod. While Automaton has a fairly robust randomization feature set, it is, at its root, fully controllable and repeatable, just like Axon.

Audio Damage Axon Now Available... 10 Aug 2010, 12:57 am

'Tis here.

The Office? I'm Out Of It!11!!!1ONE! 6 Aug 2010, 6:06 pm

The new AD product is at RC1, and is out to the full AD NFR list for poking and prodding, and I am taking my first day entirely off work (or, well, driving back and forth from Idaho) since the middle of February. The missus and I are heading to L.A. for the weekend, wherein I will dote upon my nieces and eat good food and do the things men do when they're not working, whatever those things might be.

Interestingly, I just looked at the weather for Manhattan Beach, and the high temp today is (on the Fahrenheit scale) just about half of what it is here -- Mid 60s there, 110 or so here. This will no doubt entail wearing things like pants and a coat, and maybe even shoes instead of flip flops. Let's see... where did I put those socks? I know I have some...

My point here is that I acclimated to the warm (okay, I'll go ahead and say "hot," you raving pile of pussies) weather here fairly quickly, and now when I even see temps like "67" my internal thermometer is going "WARNING WARNING YOU WILL FREEZE TO DEATH!!!"

Well, on the bright side, it's a wet cold.

Anyhow, no gear talk for me until Sunday. No business talk. None of that. I'm taking my proxy children to Legoland. Don't break anything while I'm gone.

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here... 4 Aug 2010, 11:41 pm

A brief public service announcement: in going over the "opportunities" on the YouLicense.com site, I just came across this little tidbit from Pureplay Music:

WE ARE CURRENTLY LOOKING FOR ARTISTS THAT ARE NOT REGISTERED WITH ANY COLLECTION AGENCIES, I.E. ASCAP, PRS, PPL ETC. ALL GENRES CONSIDERED. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR A RANGE OF NEW INSTORE MUSIC CHANNELS.

Now, if you don't have long experience licensing music to various sources, that "not registered" phrase is something to really watch out for. For those that might not know, I'll try to explain this as simply as I can:

When a licensing house wants unregistered music, it's not because they're going to get some "better deal" where the licensee doesn't have to pay performance royalties. EVERYBODY PAYS. All stores in America pay. All radio stations. All nightclubs. All TV networks. Virtually anywhere that commerce and music intermingle, that business pays royalties to BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC. That money is already there. Your job is to get your share of it.

What this licensing house wants to do is register your music as if they wrote it. It's a common scam at the low end of this business, and the sync fee isn't where the money is; it's in this fact. There are two halves to performance royalties: the publisher half and the writer half. If you're your own publisher (like me) you get both halves, and thus receive at least one check from ASCAP/BMI/SESAC a month.

There is no earthly reason to give up this money, as it's just sitting there waiting for people to claim it. If you wrote music that is worth getting licensed, and you take some $50 one-time payout for it, rest assured that the entity that licensed it registered it with whichever service their publishing company is a member of, and are busily collecting both sides on your behalf.

So please, please, please take the time to learn about how licensing and its attendant royalties and buyouts work. This is a fairly consistent and easy way to make money as a musician and what Pureplay Music is doing is the equivalent of 3 Card Monty. You can't win with their method. Pureplay can take their "empowering artists" catchphrase and ram it right the fuck up their own anus.

The Smell Of Victory... 29 Jul 2010, 7:16 pm

We're so close with the new AD product I can practically taste it. Adam is doing the OS X builds today while I assemble all the materials we need to sell it. The only things remaining are some minor housekeeping, presets, and the manual.

I'm not dropping any more hints at this moment, except to say the following: it is a sequencer/synth (groovebox in the pidgin of our business, although I believe that term is mis-applied, as it doesn't really groove, and it certainly isn't a box). The UI is blue, it is quite strange--the strangest plug we've ever made, and that's saying something--and people that make IDM, ambient, and minimal will be exceedingly happy with it.

So, don't expect to hear much from me until it is released. We're in the final Death March phase of the operation and I'm sitting in my darkened office muttering the St. Crispin's Day speech to myself. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

Some Numbers... 26 Jul 2010, 6:17 pm

As promised, here's some initial numbers for Resistor, the EP I put out on Bandcamp last week. (If you're just joining us, scroll back a couple posts for the full skinny.)

Plays
Bandcamp has a fairly extensive stats system, and shows you the difference between plays on the site and plays via an embedded player, and also shows you how many people played the whole song versus people that just played part of the song. I personally don't think that latter information is useful, unless the partial plays far outweigh the normal plays. In this case, they do not, so we'll just lump 'em all together.

The long and short of it is that I got 7,255 individual song plays. This is naturally heavily weighted towards the front of the album, with Metatrak alone getting roughly 40% of all plays. This isn't surprising in the least, as you all do what I do, which is listen to the first 10 seconds of the first song, and make a snap judgment on whether to listen to more. The embedded plays (plays from either here, CDM, and Matrixsynth, the only sites that embedded the player to the best of my knowledge) accounted for almost exactly half of all plays.

Sales
In 10 days, I received a total of 148 paid downloads, for a total of US$655.17. This works out to an average of US$4.42 per download. As a pay-what-you-want album, this bit is significant, I think. The first and second days, the vast majority of the payments were US$5.00. For the most part, anyone that contributed more, I probably knew them, either as long-time fans of my oeuvre or people I talk with often. The average has gone down significantly in the last couple days, as have the purchases in general, but right now, we're at US$0.09 per play when you put everything together. This is a very high number by any metric you could care to name, and in that regard I count the Bandcamp experience as an absolutely smashing success.

I think it's worth mentioning a couple of things at this point:

My third SMG album, Burn, sold 64,000 copies its first year of sales, and is now up in the quarter million range, according to Soundscan. The amount of actual cash money I received in artist royalties from that? US$0.00. So, in that respect, Resistor is a far more successful record.

The actual cost of making the EP is tougher to pin down. It's pointless to figure in the cost of the gear itself (roughly US$28,000 at current values) as I didn't buy it expressly for making this collection of songs. I also don't value my time in dollars earned, but rather in accomplishment. Time that doesn't result in accomplishment (that I can point to and say "see, I made this!") is time ill spent, and thus a cost, in my stilted worldview. But since the time spent on this resulted in the accomplishment of the release, it is at parity in this particular case.

If I was to relate these figures to the release of an actual CD, like we would have done as recently as three years ago, this would be an incredibly dismal failure, I wouldn't lie to you. But the obverse is that my wife and I didn't have to fight over cover art and bios for a couple weeks, we didn't have the massive front-loaded costs of the pressing, and we didn't have to package hundreds to thousands of CDs and go wait in line at the post office several times a day for a week.

I purposefully did essentially no promotion aside from my post here, Twitter, and asking Matrix to put up a blurb. Peter Kirn put up a nice post on CDM of his own volition, and there are some various other mentions here and there, as well.

Which brings us to the next phase. Now that sales are essentially idling, I'm able to do individual promotions and see the direct effect, and I'm looking for some suggestions and ideas in that regard. What would be the proper course of action at this juncture? We have a little money we can spend on advertising, but I'd rather keep it in the free realm, for obvious reasons.

Trainwreck... 23 Jul 2010, 6:23 pm

How I start my day:

Step 1: Stumble bleary-eyed to the bathroom and do the things that Men Do in the bathroom in the morning.

Step 2: Get a Lo-Carb Monster, my MacBook Pro, and a pack of cigarettes, and go outside on the porch to properly EQ my nicotine and taurine levels so I can function in polite society.

I'm actually still in the middle of Step 2 as I write this, so it might be a little gamier than normal. I was perusing my RSS feeds just now, and I've set up several search feeds for Phoenix Craigslist. One of them has "Drum Machine" as its string, and today it gave me this little gem:

Roland TR-505 Drum machine/Sequencer $200

This is another piece of my collection that I regret to let go but I haven't been using it much in the last couple years and I'd rather get some $'s out of it and have someone making use of it as part of their collection of classic electronic musical instruments. [...]. This unit is still very popular for its cool sound and its old-school Roland sequencer which has a "feel" that has no comparison. A lot of pro's still insist on using the 505 as a click track when working with Pro Tools because it adds a little life to your music as opposed to an ultra-modern click track (metronome) which has absolutely perfect time, the 505 and 606 have very close to perfect time but tend to have a little bit of "push and pull" to them that is the sound and feel of classic hip hop and music from the golden age of MIDI :)

Now, whatever with the 505 itself. It is obviously not a favorite of, well, anyone. This is largely because it sounds like shit, and is most assuredly the red-headed step child of the TR family. (We only say this because we've never heard Madonna's infamous TR-404.) Whether it's worth $200 -- and it's not -- is between this guy and the witless sap that buys it from him. Since this is Phoenix, that witless sap has probably moved to the San Fernando valley by now, and is currently working as a grip on Anal Amateurs 49.

(Cue several comments from people that own a 505 and are trying to make themselves feel better about paying actual money for it, plus the mandatory "it sounds awesome circuit-bent!!!")

Pro Tips: There is no "golden age of MIDI." The 606 doesn't have MIDI. No self-respecting hip-hop producer would ever admit he used a 505 on a record. Pro's [sic] don't use the 505 as a click because of its "feel." It has no feel. It's a 505.

Seriously, dude: just because it has "TR" in the name doesn't make it magic, and no amount of con on your part is gonna change that.

Time Keeps On Slippin' Slippin'... 21 Jul 2010, 6:43 pm

I feel bad about leaving that previous post up for 5 days, especially since Matrixsynth just turned five (CONGRATS!) and he posts more in a week than I do in a year. In my personal opinion, though, he needs to be medicated. He's making the rest of us look bad.

Anyhow, the Bandcamp experiment is a smashing success. I will say that we used to move a lot more units when we printed real CDs and stuff. On the other hand, it was a gigantic pain in the ass to pack and ship them all (Hello, four trips to the post office in one day) and it's really, really nice to have making the album itself be the hard part of the operation. I'll put up a numbers post as soon as I have a bigger pool of data, but suffice to say that my experience with Bandcamp is, on the whole, quite positive.

The album is also in iTunes now if that's your thing. Since the audience here is largely musicians, a majority of whom have released music digitally, I won't go in to the vagaries of why I'd rather have a Bandcamp purchase than an iTunes one, given the choice, but it should be fairly obvious even to run-of-the-mill consumers.

And our newest game show: Feature Or Bug? While we build these AD products, there are a lot of cases of Shit Just Not Working Right. I'm generally in favor of trying to harness the event for repeatability, and Adam is generally in favor of making everything so it doesn't, like, crash and stuff. Somewhere in the middle is where our product line lives. Now, before all the "I'm with boobs" comments come, which will make Adam look bad and me look cool, it is worth mentioning that the bug that resulted in that particular audio file is absolutely not something that can be included in anything. It's a seriously unstable situation, and making the customer's system freeze up is generally accepted to be a Bad Thing.

But that said, it does sound kind of cool, doesn't it?

Resistor... 17 Jul 2010, 3:27 am

I just put the finished Micronaut EP, Resistor, up for sale on Bandcamp. The Micronaut page is here. I put it up for "pay what you want, at least a dollar," as I'm relatively interested to see how it works out. The Bandcamp site is fairly easy to work as such things go, and gives you a nifty embedded player to use, to wit:

<a href="http://micronaut.bandcamp.com/album/resistor">Metatrak by Micronaut</a>

I'll also be placing the album in Tunecore as per usual, to spread it to all the other services. Once it has been up for a month, I'll do a "Numbers" post like you often see the big iPhone devs do, so you can see exactly how it worked for me, as a relatively known artist. (Relative to, say, my sister, who is not.)

Regarding the album itself, it is what I feel are the best tracks of my weekend work over the last year and a half. I completed 15 tracks in all, but (as I hinted in the last post) I feel that the majority of them were quite derivative. I'll probably put them in my Soundcloud account for interested parties.

Most of the instrumentation in these tracks is hardware. Adam often says that his day job is software, so when he makes music he wants to use hardware, and I'm beginning to be of the same mind. When you've spent the entire day staring at a monitor tweaking presets, there's something inherently more visceral about grabbing a knob and getting an immediate and satisfying result. This isn't to say that "analog" is an important aspect. While it's true that the majority of synth sounds you hear come from the MKS-80, Source, TETR4, Mopho, or CS-5, there is a fair amount of digitalness in these tracks as well, in the form of the TX802, TX81Z, and AlphaSyntauri. (Most of the pads on these six tracks are Syntauri, which will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with that box.) Anything that sounds like a piano is a piano, namely the lovely Yamaha CP80B that takes up half of my office. Drum sounds come from a variety of sources, but in most cases are either the TETR4 or a real 909 I had borrowed for a while in PDX. There is some Tattoo, notably in DSP3 and Metatrak.

This entire album was mixed to stems, out to my Mytek 8x192. I used the internal summing buss of the Mytek to sum the stems. I have a Dangerous D-Box, but I feel that the make-up amps in the Mytek (which have a rather API quality to them) add a nice color that the incredibly transparent D-Box lacks. The only two reverbs used are Eos and my Lexicon 300 hardware unit. Since I use the Lexi as a digital insert, and it basically predates the thought that someone might want to use a higher sampling rate than 48, that's the rate I work at. Obviously, the AD line gets a heavy workout here, and I also use the H8000FW as a pair of inserts. Usually you'll hear that on the pad sounds, as that's where it's happiest.

Nerdgasm aside, and on a personal note, whether you like the music or not is utterly unimportant to me. I finally feel (after four full-length albums and one EP, natch) that I'm finding a voice for the Micronaut project that matches my internal music. I'm pretty happy with these tracks and their abstract nature. Next up is the final mixing for the RT60 album. We're not putting that out in public until we can get vinyl pressed, though. Essentially working out how to pay for it at this juncture.

Once More In To The Breach... 16 Jul 2010, 5:44 pm

Man, this was a tough week. I find myself at (or possibly over) the limit of the number of individual things I can successfully focus on. We've got the next AD product chugging along, I'm doing some contract software work for another company, I'm trying to finish DronestationX, I am one mix away from having this Micronaut EP done, and somewhere in there we managed to ship off a metric fuckton of t-shirts and an MKS-80, and I wrote my monthly column for Computer Music.

Sometimes I don't have any issue with this many plates spinning. We managed to release 8 full length albums of my own music (plus quite a few records from other people) in the first half of the '00s while I worked a full time job. Social life? Not so much, but it was Chicago. Half the year was a wash because of shitty weather anyhow.

Nowadays it's tougher, though. Ever since we moved to Portland in February of last year, I've had terrible anti-completionist syndrome. (The dreaded ACS!!! O NOES!) I start a lot of songs, but I don't seem to finish many. Well, that's not strictly true. We're one track away from the holy Finished land on the RT60 full-length, and that track is mostly recorded. I have actually finished about 15 tracks for this Micronaut EP; it's just that 10 of them didn't make it past my internal A&R dude for whatever reason. (Mainly that reason was "this sounds like a Chosen Lords outtake...")

Anyhow, long story short, my shit is a jumbled disaster right now. My office looks like Hurricane Cables And Floppies passed through, immediately followed by Tropical Depression Empty Monster Can. It's sort of a fractal mess, where every individual pile of shit is a mess unto itself, continuing down to the size of a rack screw. I've found that going down to the bare metal is really the only solution to this scenario, so as soon as these two albums are completed (O, Happy Day!) I'm gonna go to Home Depot and rent myself a front-end loader, clear this shit out and start new.

Weekend Update... 12 Jul 2010, 4:23 am

Some various things to report upon, in no particular order:

1. I put my MKS-80 up on the 'Bay. 'Tis here. Pool not included. That bad boy is done sold.

2. My lovely and talented missus is packing the Full Of Techno shirts as I write this. All the US orders will ship bright and early Monday morning; I would be shocked if they weren't in your greedy little hands starting Wednesday. The non-US ones will probably go out Monday evening or Tuesday morning at the latest.

EDIT: All USA orders have shipped. Foreign orders will all be out Tuesday morning.

3. DronestationX, the iPad version of Dronestation, is nearing completion. I've added a few features, and given it a UI much more suited to the iPad's form factor. I'll be submitting it to Apple at some point this week, and at some point after that it will either be approved or not.

4. In Phoenix, 5" long flying cockroaches fall from the sky. We were having a dinner party when the first one showed up, and one of our guests was all like "you'll probably never see another one again. They're really rare." Well, I guess we're just lucky then, because our back yard is starting to bear a striking resemblance to Klandathu. It's really, really unpleasant.