Category Archives: Music

OK, Amazon MP3, I love you.

Although I had for the past several years been an unabashed devotee of the iTunes Store (it’s Apple, after all), lately I’ve been finding myself buying more and more of my digital music on Amazon MP3 instead. Why? Let me enumerate the ways:

  1. No DRM. (OK, surprisingly enough that one doesn’t really matter to me that much, but I definitely prefer not having DRM.)
  2. Higher quality. iTunes does have “iTunes Plus” which, at 256 kbps AAC, is higher quality than Amazon’s 256 kbps MP3. But 256 kbps MP3 beats 128 kbps AAC, and it’s not tied to Apple. (Again, not that I care on the last point.)
  3. Cheaper. Yes, cheaper! Almost always! Individual tracks are sometimes 89 cents instead of 99 cents, but I usually buy the whole album, and so far I’ve found that if the album has less than 10 tracks, they almost always just charge the per-track price instead of $9.99. Sometimes it can be a lot cheaper, such as when I downloaded the remastered version of Bitches Brew for $7 instead of $20!
  4. Selection. Early on Amazon’s selection was paltry, but I’ve been finding more and more obscure ’70s stuff lately, such as what I sought out tonight: the first two Greenslade albums. Well, OK, I just looked on iTunes and they have them both now too, for the same price… but at the lower bit rate.

The new CDs are here! The new CDs are here!!!

OK, I hope it’s not as pathetic as Navin Johnson, but UPS just delivered my new order of CDs from Kunaki. I ordered five more copies of ÷0, three more copies of Unnatural Disasters, plus twelve copies of my latest, Mellotronic: Far Out Sounds! (And Other Space-Age Hyperbole).

I have to say, Mellotronic turned out pretty well. I’m really proud of the design on this one.

Granted, this is probably four, two, and eleven copies, respectively, more than I’ll ever actually need but, you know, positive thinking. (And right now there are more commas in that sentence than potential buyers of my music. No, Scott… think positive[ly].)

The upshot is that now you have an additional option for purchasing these albums (since I know you want to! [positive])… you can order the CDs from Kunaki, download them (some of them, anyway), or you can buy them directly from me, if you happen to be within a several-foot radius of where I currently am.

Sweet.

A Grotesque Over-Indulgence in Flatulent Analog Synthesizer Wankery

When it comes to vintage (pre-digital) keyboards, there are a few legends: the Hammond organ, the Rhodes electric piano, the Mellotron, and of course, the Minimoog.

I don’t own any of those actual instruments, of course (although an old friend of mine has over the years possessed a large number of them, and used them on some recordings we did back in college), but I have been extremely impressed with the generic replications of these timeless (OK, hopelessly dated, but eternally retro-cool) trademark sounds that Apple has provided with GarageBand. (OK, there’s no Mellotron in GarageBand, but as I’ve learned and demonstrated, a dead-accurate add-on is available.)

Most of the recordings I’ve made since I started using GarageBand (in early 2007) have been brimming with these sounds, most notably the electric piano, and only slightly less notably the organ. Although I’ve been obsessing over the Mellotron lately, my favorite keyboard sound to employ for solo parts is the “Analog Mono” synth, which is fairly similar in tone and timbre to the venerable Minimoog.

I’m currently at work on a “top secret” collaborative music project. (OK, I don’t know for sure how “top secret” it is, but since I’m not in charge of it, I’m keeping mum until I’m told it’s OK to blab.) So far I haven’t nailed what I’m looking for for that project, but along the way I did produce this… interesting track. Recorded entirely today (July 29, 2008, which of course is yesterday now), it’s a fairly static, spacey/electronic jam, 7 1/2 minutes long, with some nice big reverb-y drums and of course an interminable, excessively excessive (yes, that’s possible, and if you doubt it, just give this track a listen) quasi-Minimoog solo. Probably not most people’s cup of tea, but I actually find it kind of cool to have on as background noise.

This track is unlikely to ever be released, at least in anything near its current form, so I provide it here as a curiosity. It was mainly an experiment: an effort to try out various “distressed” electronic sounds, to play around with recording a drum track straight through (instead of perfecting a few 4-measure loops), and of course, going totally batshit crazy with the synth solo, in a number of ways: experimenting with the octave and pitch transposition buttons on my 2-octave portable MIDI keyboard controller, trying out some adjustments to the synth tone, and finally (after about 15 years of improvising solos) dabbling in the realm of scale substitution. Music theory FTW! (I was going to say “Yay, music theory!” but I already used “yay” in a post within the past few hours and I just can’t bring myself to do it again. Plus, this was an opportunity to once again demonstrate my 1337 skillz.)

Now that I’ve proven why this blog is called “Blather,” here’s the freakin’ song.

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/analogwankery.mp3]

Mellotronic is now available on INDISTR! Sort of…

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of my new EP, the one I’ve been talking about for the past several blog posts… Mellotronic: Far Out Sounds! (And Other Space-Age Hyperbole). Yay! (Ugh, is that really, really how it’s spelled now? Really?)

But… well… Houston, we have a problem. (Sorry, had to say it, what with the “Lunar Landing” track and all.) I noticed when I was uploading my tracks that, for some reason, the title track always showed up with a running time of 0:00, instead of the correct time of 4:44. The other songs show up fine, but no matter how many times I tried uploading “Mellotronic,” it always came up as 0:00. But when I played the sample in the account area, it worked fine, so I figured, we’re good to go.

Not so fast. I just went onto the actual page where visitors see and purchase the album, clicked the button to listen to the clip and… what the hell??? It’s not my song, but the Three’s Company theme song. Three’s Company!!!

Hmm… well, OK, are there any brave souls out there willing to shell out a buck and see what you get when you actually buy the song? (I guess I should just contact their tech support, but this is getting kind of fun… I’m curious what’ll happen next.)