Sample instrument developers Audiomodern have just released a new product called Paths, for which I contributed a variety of stem loops. Paths features 30 unique seamless loops of cinematic electronica/downtempo and ambient music, each loop broken down into six 24-bit/48kHz instrument stems for maximum flexibility.
They’ve wrapped 1GB of loops in a custom Kontakt-based instrument module for managing, mixing and arranging the stems, as well as applying a suite of integrated effects, with everything synced to the host tempo. All loops are also available in ACID, Apple Loops, WAV and REX formats, so they can easily be tailored to your platform of choice and edited/processed further.
Luckily, Paths appears to qualify for their seasonal sale too, so you can use the coupon AMHOLIDAY16 to get 25% off at the checkout.
There’s a wealth of material in there for you to adapt and remix, hopefully inspiring plenty of new music. Here’s a quick preview:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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).
