EP Progress 8

Songwriting can be so frustrating sometimes. I spent the better part of a week trying to put together 'Vassal', a new song I've been working on. It was sort of an experiment using a part of my software that I haven't used before. 'Blocks'. Using blocks to build songs. More info is here if you're interested.

Anyway, so after a while I decided that I absolutely HATE the song, and it will never see the light of day. Block music is perhaps better suited to repetitive styles. I dunno.

So I've moved onto one of the older songs that I began writing a little while ago. I think I had draft titled it '21st century love song'. It's in the style of underwater rock. Kind of melancholy but also rocks out, old school style. Hopefully it adds a nice contrast, and something new, to the song styles I've already used. Bowie-like.   :)

Oh, and I also started working on my Ergo Alt website. Sneak peak below. The little booklet will be visually interactive, sort of. There's still a lot of work to do on it. I also recently discovered bandcamp which I'll probably use to distribute my music too.

In other news, my friend Amy, who now has a cool blog, is going full speed ahead with her EP. She wants it completed by June. Indie pop is usually pretty simple music so she can probably do it. I think she still wants me to help produce it. Unless she wins lotto and can hire a pro audio engineer. She also picked up a bit of work making the music for an iPhone game which is really cool. She'll be a very busy bee for a few months.

EP Progress 7 and thoughts

I'm working on 3 new songs simultaneously now. Two will make it onto the free EP. Not sure which yet. They'll all very different from each other, just like my first 3 songs. I might end up finishing them all first, then deciding what 5 tracks work. We'll see. So many thoughts....

I was listening to some albums today, High Violet by The National, and King of Limbs by Radiohead. I was really struck by the 'maturity' of the music and lyrics. My music, in contrast, feels a little 'younger'. I was going to write 'juvenile' but that's the wrong word. I really admire maturity in music. It's hard. It requires patience. It requires restraint. Those qualities are particularly hard to induce as a new artist.

Restraint is a particular quality I'm interested in, particularly in the musical 'engineering' aspect. I don't have this ability yet. The ability to engineer a song to make it sound like it's holding back that little bit. Like it could explode at any moment. I've been mastering all my songs with an 8-band parallel compressor and tending to force frequencies through the speakers too much. I'm also having trouble allowing dominance of the vocal range frequencies (200-700 Hz). When I try re-mastering the EP before I release it, I'm gunna try restricting the music to this band, holding back on volume a bit, and allowing transients (~+1kHz) to define sonic space.

Enough jibber-jabber.

Mini tech demonstration

I whipped up this little video, just to demonstrate how my music software works. Hope you find it interesting.

EP Progress 6 - 3rd song done

Hooray. I finished my 3rd song today, and I've uploaded it to Myspace and Jango. I hope you enjoy it.

I'll admit, it feels a bit strange everytime I finish a song. It's like, that feeling you get when you say goodbye to someone. That little voice that tells you 'you need to move on', and so forth. Pretty strange. Or maybe, completely normal.

Anyway, I'm another major step closer to the 5-track EP. Once again, this track was a huge learning curve for me. Next post, I'll try a little desktop video walkthrough of how I put together the new song.

In the mean time, I hope you enjoy 'The Fire in the Heart of Youth'.

Laters.

EP Progress 5 - New song nearly done

Hey Hey! It's getting longer between posts these days coz I've been working non-stop on my latest song, among other things. And I'm happy to announce that I should be able to release it on Jango next week!! YAY! The only other thing to say is that I've changed the title. It was going to be called 'Get up and skate girls!'. But I've ditched that title because those were going to be lyrics in the song, but got ditched coz they sounded crap. That's songwriting for ya!

Anyway, so I'm not 100% sure yet, but I think the new title will be 'The Fire in the Heart of Youth'. But I've yet to let that title sink in...

In other boring news, I took down the Tunecore widget from the side of my blog (it was on the right), coz they only let you play songs that I've distributed on iTunes (which is a bit annoying, blah blah, yeah I'll get over it). Jango does a great job with sound quality, so no probs there.

I've also been working with Amy (see last post) to fix some issues with her home studio, but unfortunately we're only making slow progress there. So her next track will be some time away I suspect.

That's all I have to say right now (SAD!), so here's a photo of me having a beer to cap off this post! Notice that I have that producer 'look' now. Yeah!   :P

producer hair....  producer stubble....  he's probably a producer

Amy's Single - Release

I'm proud to report that Amy's single, 'Too Drunk To Kiss' went on sale today, it's --> available on iTunes <--. And she has a little indie video clip that she did to go with it (taken on an iPhone!). I'm really chuffed to have been able to help her produce this song. It's a great song, well done Amy.

EP Progress 4 and new project

Ha! I've already changed my mind on a bunch of things from last post. Including scrapping the final song, and replacing it with potentially one of two others. I keep hypothesising what the final EP will look like, but to be honest, it's probably still too early to tell.

Anyway, I've come up with two new ideas for songs, so have been working on those, as well as the other two existing new songs. They're sounding pretty cool. I started some vocal work on 'Get up and skate girls'. I wrote 16 lines of rapping, tried it out, then scrapped it. Wrote some new lines, sang those, edited them, and they seem to work. It's an iterative process. At least, that's how I'm developing some parts of this song. Other parts are pretty clear in my head. I need to lay those parts down asap.

I've also been working with a musical friend of mine, Amy, to produce her first song. She has a website. After hearing about my project she got inspired to make an EP of her own, with my help as a producer. She wants to call it 'Spare Parts'. The song I've been producing for her is call 'Too Drunk To Kiss'. Her stuff sounds kinda like Lilly Allen. It's full of sassy humour and attitude. I really like it.

Amy recorded the key song parts at her home, sent them to me over Dropbox, and I pieced them together and added production details. Then we worked together on making it a quality product. The process was awesome, so much fun. I really want to do this for the rest of my life. The song came together in amazing speed, within a week, and it sounds fantastic. I'm really getting the hang of being a producer now.

Amy and I discussed marketing philosophy as well. The need to have the complete package together before release. It would consist of, a product (an EP), a website, at least 1 youtube video, artwork, and marketing material. And lets not forget, cash. Cash to dump on radio station plays, and other things, to help promote the product.

That's enough ranting for today. I was supposed to write something technical. Bah, maybe next time.