Category: Music
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The Core is Getting Soft.12: Goldbaby for Less Silver
Goldbaby is the stage name of a dude named Hugo down in New Zealand who makes fantastic sample libraries of drum machines, sound fx and synthesizers processed through choice outboard analog gear and tape machines. Denziens of online forums like Gearslutz revere him, and his friendly responses in those nether regions suggests he’s a nice…
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Corporate Welfare.9: Markets and Chains
Today I’m posting a link to an article from the blog CivilEats.com by Adrien Schless-Meier called “Why Grocery Store Workers Are Making Less While Big Chains Make More.” It’s a topic on my mind because one of the songs on the record I’m working on is about the economics of supermarkets. The song is called “King Piggly…
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Studio Samsara
I found this on Francis Prève‘s Facebook page. To this I would add step 7, “I am awesome,” and then step 8, “Go back to step 1.” Then it would be an even better representation of what I like to call “Studio samsara.” The Buddha used the term samsara to refer to the endless cycle…
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Busking in the digital age
I’m planning on doing a Kickstarter campaign in July to help with the costs of recording and mixing a new album with Scott Solter this summer. We will be starting by doing a few days in the studio late next week! At any rate, I have a pretty good draft of the rewards, but I’m…
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Snippets of Repeated Takes
I recently finished and highly recommend the book Repeated Takes by Michael Chanan. My main criticism of the book is that it’s large size makes you think it’s gonna have lots of cool illustrations in it. Instead, you get a conventional size text layout with blank margins so big they call to mind the immense foul grounds…
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The Core is Getting Soft.12: Valhalla Freq Echo
“The best things in life are free.” “You get what you pay for.” If cliches are cliches because they’re true, which one of the above applies to free audio plug ins? Well, ca depend. When it comes to the Valhalla Freq Echo delay plug in, the answer is definitively the latter. This gem of…
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The Core is Getting Soft.11: TouchOsc
I’ve always been a latecomer to technology. When I got a fax machine in 1997, someone I worked with said, “Welcome to the ’80’s!” I didn’t get a cell phone until late 2008, and I didn’t get a smartphone until a few months ago. Continuing this trend, I got myself an iPad last week. The…
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The Core is Getting Soft.10: Madrona Labs
There are some soft synths or plug-ins I’ve bought where I could have conceivably sprung for the hardware version instead. But there’s no way I could have ever afforded a Buchla synthesizer – until Madrona labs came out with their Aalto software synthesizer, which is inspired by the designs of Don Buchla, who invented the…
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Top 40 Over 40.16: Holding It Down
One possible answer to the question I posed in my post on Reckoning with REM – How come their early portraits of Southern life never said anything about the history of racist violence and forced labor in their native Georgia, even on their album Fables of the Reconstruction / Reconstruction of the Fables? – is that…