Ochre

Hi folks. I’ve recently started work on a film soundtrack for Dolls, and currently have three pieces written to date, posted below. Feels nice to take off my Ochre hat from time to time, writing music tailored to the requirements of a specific project.

Dolls by Ochre

I’ll be posting more news as and when it trickles through, but if you’d like to actively stay in the loop with Dolls, we have a Facebook group to join, as well as a dedicated film blog for your bookmarks. If you’re on Twitter, you can also follow the Dolls team on there, too.

Meanwhile, I’m feverishly trying to complete my uni work over the summer, as well as sorting out the next Ochre project.

And it needs you! Yes, I know you may have already done this (and I do apologise for the inconvenience), but it’d be awfully nice of you to click on it again.

Following my traditional of sporadic and occasionally regrettable social media suicides, I had removed my Facebook profile after inadvertently hosing the Ochre page (I thought it would be ‘hibernating’ along with my personal profile, but I guess not!). Now while I’m not missing MySpace, Facebook was a much handier means of getting snippets of news updates out there, and although Twitter has become increasingly useful for this, there’s no denying Facebook’s convenience and popularity.

I think it’d probably be a good idea for me to install some admin other than myself though, just in case I get trigger happy while aiming at my feet again.

Oh, and I am working on some new music by the way too, if I may self-consciously steer this post towards something a little more newsworthy. More details to come soon (demo track deleted from post).

Here’s a quick review of 5 online services and tools I’ve made use of and felt most helpful to me as an independent online musician, during the past year or so:

1. WordPress

As if you hadn’t already noticed, my site’s based on the excellent open source blog/CMS platform, WordPress, which continues to impress me with every update. It runs on PHP with a MySQL database, which allows me, as a non-programmer, to get a fairly complex site up and running without having to know much about the actual programming-side of things. Yet, it’s flexible enough that if you want to change the look of your site, you can do so without much more than a rudimentary knowledge of CSS—simply tweak your theme however you see fit, blissfully ignorant of the more complex inner workings going on behind the curtain. Even if you can’t be fussed editing your own theme, there are plenty of ready-made themes available to download and activate, from within the WP admin area itself.

Another great aspect to WordPress is its extensibility—there exists a veritable plethora of handy plugins written by charitable geeks, provided for free, affording your site some very handy bolt-on features. As with the themes, you can browse and install plugins from within the admin area—no tedious download/install needed.
(more…)

If you haven’t seen/heard my remix of Jay Bharadia, you can listen to/download it from SoundCloud, as well as the other remixes from Lone, Airliner ’67 and Implosion Quintet.

I’m actually on SoundCloud, and although currently mainly using it as a means of receiving mastering files, I’ll be uploading demos and sketches now and then, so if you’d like to ‘follow’ me to be notified of track uploads, please visit my page. SoundCloud is a very nifty service, totally optimised for listening and commenting to music—you can comment on particular sections of tracks using the natty timeline while listening. As far as I know there are also the obligatory widgets for posting/sharing tunes too.

The server can occasionally strain under the weight of users, as it’s getting rather popular, but it seems pretty responsive these days, ironing out its initial teething problems.

Meanwhile, back at Ochre HQ, the new album is back from mastering, coutesy of panicStudios. Sounding warm and punchy after being fed through some ridiculously expensive analogue gear, waiting patiently for a release schedule to slot into. I’ll be able to spill some more beans once I’ve got a definite plan to unveil.

Midsummer Nice Dream CDs and vinyl continue to shift nicely, but there are still a few copies left if you fancy one. If you’d rather have a download version, it’s slowly making its way through the usual download stores like iTunes and Napster etc. At the moment it’s currently selling for a ridiculously cheap $1.69 at Amie Street (for 320kbps mp3, no less), though given the dynamic pricing used there it’ll probably creep up slowly as people grab it. Also on Bandcamp for a flat $6, in just about every digital format available ever.

I think that’s the current news round-up sorted.