yelyah - “blurred borders 20111024” electronic
If I write about it here I’m sure to not actually carry out the plan, right?
I want to do an overdub of Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) for comedic purposes. Whether it will actually be funny remains to be seen.
Step 1: what are they actually saying?
Yeah, I’m currently kinda stuck on that one.
yelyah - “sidetracked 20111024” electronic
The 1 mp3/day thing on Tumblr always seems to come back to bite me.
What’s more common is that I miss the midnight deadline and then end up having to do a manual upload to s3 in order to “catch up”.
But then there are times like these where I have more than one track in a day to upload and so I’ve created a bunch of extra work for myself. Because frankly I’ve spoiled myself here. I copy an mp3 locally to a specific folder, make this blog post locally, and then a ruby script takes care of uploading it to tumblr and formatting the post.
But anytime that I miss the deadline or have more than 1 mp3 a day to upload, I have to go through (what feels like) this huge manual process of uploading the files to amazon s3 and making the tumblr post by hand.
Plus, tumblr is not really all that appropriate as a place to showcase music since reverse chronological is how all of the posts are displayed (doesn’t work well when you wrote your best music ages ago).
And then there’s the spam. Perhaps I’m spoiled here because tumblr was so pristine for so long but it’s become more and more of a problem.
The “X notes” thing on tumblr posts is now basically worthless since it never updates the total once the spammers have been blocked. Makes it basically impossible to tell if a human actually found something valuable or not.
And sadly the spam can be quite a depressing reminder that I’m unlikely to reach that number of likes through actual, real people.
So to tie this all up or something, some days it feels like tumblr isn’t worth the hassle. Things that used to be big pulls for me personally, like free custom domain hosting and free space for mp3s, are all stuff that I’ve since figured out how to do on the cheap (like with amazon s3, I can pull this off for literally pennies a month).
And plus, yelyah.com seriously needs to be updated. It’s basically running off the same raw files as this tumblr blog, but it hasn’t seen an update since March. Why? Well, basically, I figured out a way to use tumblr’s free mp3 hosting on my external site. But it means that I have to go through the HTML source of every post and find the link to the mp3 file that tumblr uses. Here’s an example:
http://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/400065042/tumblr_ky4nijWMIe1qzo4ep
Point here is it’s not named in a predictable way like “half past midnight.mp3”. Granted, I could write a script to go through and grab all of these links and then update my metadata, but that would require work and given all of the problems I have with tumblr’s 1 mp3/day limit, just deciding to switch everything over to amazon s3 starts looking like the preferable option.
Will I ever actually get around to doing any of this though? Given my track record, probably not.
Or probably tomorrow.
It could go either way really.
yelyah - “carbon fiber 20111023” electronic
Attempt #3 at a theme for the severe weather outlook.
This one actually worked out fairly decently since I came up with a shortened version (which is not the version heard here).
yelyah - “mitten in der nacht 20111023” electronic
This is attempt #2 at trying to write a theme for the severe weather outlook screencast and another failure in that it’s way longer than it’s supposed to be.
By my standards, this was written yesterday, but by everyone else’s standards of time, it was written this morning (it’s not a new day until I go to bed see).
I’m sure I goofed something up with the German title. I wonder if “Mitten in der Nackt” would mean amidst the nakedness.
yelyah - “feels like rain 20111022” electronic
Officially, we can call this one the first thing I did with Reason 6.
Unofficially, I’ve been having fun messing with the audio effects for the daily weather screencast I do. Ya know, useful stuff like noise gating out the box fan (it actually works surprisingly well) and then goofy stuff like turning my voice into a synth.
My original goal was to write some intro music for the weather screencast and on that front, I failed miserably since the thing weighs in at nearly a minute and a half. I was aiming for like 5-15 seconds.
Tech notes
My studio still runs Reason 4 / Record 1.0 (and literally 1.0 since I never installed the minor updates) so this one was actually done on the computer I program on.
I used this ancient 25 key MIDI controller made by Midiman (who you probably know as M-Audio) to play all of the parts (no loops on this one).
Everything is “stock” patches:
- Additive Pad
- Hybrid Strings - Mod Wheel Gator (serves as 3 different string parts - low, high, and the one with the rhythmic gate (controlled by the mod wheel))
- Nashville Kit
- Pool Shark Upright Bass
Music notes
The most difficult part I’d say was the drums. I ran into this weird situation where I couldn’t figure out where to start the fill that leads into the main beat.
The problem came down to that it sounded out of place depending on how much context was given…
See, I’d start the playback about 3 measures before I was going to play, and then I played it live where it felt right.
But if I started playback earlier in the song and listened to it from there (so more context), it always felt like I was coming in too early. It made it very difficult to troubleshoot because, to me, it sounded very different depending on where I started playback.
I think part of the issue was also that I was recording to the click track, but listening back without it. The theory being that the click track provided a rhythmic grid which made the fill sound like it was in the right place.
Thinking about the click vs. no click thing led me to the solution I ultimately used to “fix” the timing. Instead of going straight for this tom pattern, I play some hats a measure before hand. For me, it seems to have fixed things.
I’d still like to figure out how to write a proper intro for the weather screencast. Maybe tomorrow.
yelyah - “freitag 20111021” piano improv
Friday isn’t quite over at this point, but dare I say it?
My Friday curse is apparently broken.
So here are the stats:
- 4 Fridays IN A ROW something really bad happened
- 3 out of 4 were caused by things I had no control over
- none of what happened had even been something I had thought of previously
And the last bullet point led me to this bizarre game of my trying to guess every negative outcome (for instance, in deciding where to eat, I imagined that the place would get held up at gun point while I was there).
But see, because all of the other Fridays involved bad things that I never would’ve foreseen, by predicting all of these bad things today, it meant they wouldn’t happen… because I had already thought of them.
And by those very laws, it also meant that I was safe from having a heart attack or being diagnosed with a brain tumor.
All bets are off tomorrow though.
yelyah - “the other world 20111020” piano improv
I suddenly got in the mood to listen to some of my old stuff and it brought up the following question.
Am I really that flat or have I just been listening to too much autotuned crap?
Obviously, I must be somewhat flat to notice it at all, unless I can blame it on my being hypercritical of my own voice (a lovely thought in a way).
Autotuning kinda begets more autotuning. That’s the problem.
If I remember correctly, I’ve only ever autotuned my voice on one song. Part of it was convenience: I had inconsistent access to the software. And then part of it was that in 2009, I actually put it on my yearly goals to not use autotune all year long.
But on the one song I’ve used it on. The non-autotuned version… just ewww. It sounds lifeless and unenergetic. Dead. Something.
And so that’s the begetting problem. The more you use autotune, the more you expect autotune.
But then again, what about musical styles? Like, if we were to look at genres that focus on real instruments versus those that are synthesized. Theoretically, a “normal” vocal is gonna sit much nicer with real instruments because those instruments aren’t necessarily going to be pitch perfect either.
And even with electronic music, back in the pure analog days anyhow, there could be pitch differences from somewhat fritzing hardware or tape malfunctions.
But is autotune maybe almost mandatory in the days of synthesized, perfect-pitch music?
And here’s a side question, if I can tell I’m flat when I play something back, then why can’t I tell I’m flat when I’m actually singing and could do something about it?
I have perfectly good ears. Apparently it’s just that my brain shuts off when I sing.
Yeah, that’s my theory.
yelyah - “hello winter 20111019” piano improv
Winter is here.
I woke up this morning and my bedroom was in the 50s.
THE FIFTIES.
For reference, I kept the house around 60 last winter and was absolutely miserable. 50s are off the chart on the miserability scale (my spell check tells me I’ve made up a word).
I at least know something I didn’t know last year. It’s the key to surviving frigid indoor temperatures. Fuzzy blankets! And lots of them.
The problem of course is that then the only comfortable place to hang out is in bed. All winter long.
Why can’t humans hibernate?
yelyah - “musical noise 20111018” piano improv
Winter is coming.
I remember that I was still hanging on to trying to wear shorts all through October last year.
I’m pretty sure winter is coming way sooner than last year. One of these days I’ll actually figure out where to get some historical temperature data.
Until then, all I can say is dayum it’s cold!
yelyah - “one way mirrors 20111017” piano improv
It’s a car crash in musical form.
I was kind of dumbfounded when I goofed up as bad as I did. Ya know, that really long moment of “do I just crash or keep going?”
If you listen to this piano piece and can’t figure out where the car crash is, then I guess I can say that all of this improv practice is paying off.
See the conclusion I’ve come to when it comes to playing piano is that it’s not about striving for perfection. If you’re me, you’ll never get there. No, the goal instead is to sweep all of the inevitable mistakes under the rug.
It’s the art of “I meant to do that.”
