I thought I’d shake things up a bit here and migrate the site over to Jekyll rather than use Wordpress – possibly permanently, but let’s see how we go. There’s been a lot to absorb in learning how Jekyll works, including some new web dev paradigms for me, such as the Ruby infrastructure, CLI site building and whatnot, but it’s been an interesting week trying to figure this all out.
Read on…Indie game dev wizards Pixeljam have just released 'Pixeljams Volume 2', featuring an exclusive Ochre track, 'Jump Vector'. The compilation also includes tracks from business funk maestro Datassette and fellow Toytronic alumnus and Pj honcho Miles Tillmann, among others. There's a particularly cool video for Datassette's track 'A Doomed Vessel' also included, created by Rory Scott. Safe to say five bucks gets stretched pretty far here.
Just fifteen pounds sterling for 400+ tracks of electronica. God knows how many hours of new music is on this, but it'll keep you going until Christmas. All proceeds go to Macmillan Cancer Support.
Tickets here! You can also buy tickets from participating venues.
Read on…Up until recently I used Quicktime to switch audio tracks for the odd music and showreel video, but since it will no longer be updated for Windows, and can possibly lead to your PC getting the clap, I figured I'd better find an alternative option. Enter ffmpeg. It's a very powerful, free command line tool that I'd previously only worked with in tandem with some sort of GUI or partner app, and had never really tried to work with it on its own due to its bewildering plethora of options. But after a little trial and error I've settled on the following commands to replace audio streams in video files, (re)encoding where necessary, and avoiding video transcoding if possible in order to retain video image quality.
Read on…The third instalment of the popular 'Touched' series of mammoth charity compilations will be released later this month, on the 29th July 2016. It'll no doubt be another huge collection of tracks spanning various genres (but, like the previous two, it will probably centre heavily on the more electronic side of things). Once again, I'm pleased to be involved, and have contributed the track 'Anaphora'. Here's a little preview vid:
Check out this beautiful cover of 'Paper Unicorn' by Digitonal, arranged for clarinet and piano. Fantastic work.
After recently receiving an excellent remix of Paper Unicorn by Marc Melia, I thought I'd make stems for the rest of the EP publicly available.
Some of the parts I use are typically bathed in convolution or delay effects, in which case I've also included some dry versions for added flexibility. Most have an intro bar of silence, except Glassmaker, which starts instead with a single beat of silence (as I'd prepared that a while ago on a separate occasion). Should all be 24-bit wavs. Let me know if I've messed anything up.
01 Paper Unicorn (98bpm)
02 Ark of Comfort (115bpm)
03 Hivernal (122.6bpm)
04 Infinite Bookends (81bpm)
05 Glassmaker (127bpm)
Have at it!
I'd put stems from earlier tracks online, but thanks to the general impermanence and incompatibilities of music software, plus my relaxed attitude to track freezing, many tracks fail to load or play correctly. Lesson learned: freeze and archive! Should be easier from this point onwards, now I'm over the 64-bit hump.
I've just redesigned the site for my mastering service, Melograf Mastering, to make it much more accessible on mobile devices. It's a lightweight html5 site, replacing the previous WordPress and Flash-based incarnation that had nonetheless served me well for the past six years (crazy to think it's six years old already!). I've retained the dark, cyan-heavy style though---if it works, why change it?
Hopefully everything renders just fine, with nippy page loads and responsive resizing for different browsing devices, but if you notice anything afoot, embarrassing typos and the like, please give me a shout. It feels odd to do without WordPress, but it admittedly made less sense on a blog-less site, and was used primarily for the feedback comments and the contact form. Now that it's been established for a while and I have more credits under my belt, the loss of a feedback page is hopefully minimal. It's been almost fun refreshing my basic web dev knowledge, reading up on html5, css3, media queries and the like. For a dilettante like me, these more recent developments certainly seem to have made designing a simple site much more straightforward and browser-compatible. Lo, progress!
Here's a new track I've been working on while trying to get to grips with Ableton Live as a production tool, rather than performance tool. Being so used to Cubase, it's been quite a workflow departure for me (though largely a positive one, I'm happy to say). What Live lacks in comprehensive MIDI and automation editing, it gains in immediacy and ease of audio editing (which has always been a weakness for Cubase, betraying its roots as a MIDI sequencer). Plus some Max for Live tweaks help patch the holes in core functionality, and also help make setting up some MIDI control panels for my hardware synths a breeze (especially handy, as much of my hardware requires loads of menu diving, and is pretty laborious to program).