New Track: Loose Junction
Dec 30, 2010 tracks
Surprise! 
This was supposed to be a quick test mix in order to check with the people sampled that they were okay with it, but consensus seems to be both that it sounded like a good mix and that the song felt “done” to people, so I’ve decided to toss it out for all of you to hopefully enjoy!
Loose Junction: (download)
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This track features treated vocal samples of Lesley Kinzel and Marianne Kirby from their Two Whole Cakes Fatcast (a podcast about body politics which I’ve been known to quite enjoy) as well as one other spoken-word source that I pulled from the Creative Commons search engine many months ago and which appears to have disappeared from the web in the interim. I’ll try to amend this post when I re-find it.
In addition, I believe it’s the first thing that I’ve written where all the instruments other than the percussion (and the samples noted above) were made on the modular synthesizer. That was a bit of a trial, but something I really wanted to try to do. I’m still not sure that it’s an efficient way to work in terms of workflow, but it does lead to some interesting textures that I don’t normally get out of my software-based tools.
This brings our track count for 2010 up to three, which makes this, well, not the best year ever for providing you all with new music to listen to, but hopefully you enjoyed what did come out and next year will be richer in music for all of us.
In the meantime, have a wonderful new year and as always, let me know what you think!
Equipment Fail Theatre
Dec 28, 2010 dotcom, Gear, iPad
So I got an iRig for Christmas! This allows me to answer all the questions everybody had about using oScope on the iPad with the iRig to plot DotCom waves. And the answer is… it doesn’t work.
I know that I’d said that it would. A lot of other people seemed to report that it did also, and I went by that. But I’m not certain that the fault lies with the iRig.
Why? Well, because my Plantronics DSP v4 adapter + Camera Kit + headphone adapter solution doesn’t seem to work anymore either.
(On the other hand, the iRig + Amplitube seems to work. The signal from the DotCom seems pretty hot for it, so there’s a lot of distortion if I don’t turn it way down and lots of noise if I do (and then amp it back up in the iPad), but the result isn’t all bad. I wish the free version included more pedals.)
After fighting with it frustratedly for quite a while, I decided to just go chat on Skype for a while and relax, and my home-made shock mount (depicted in the site banner) self-destructed, and proved to be one of those situations where it kept *almost* being fixable and then all the elastics would leap off at once.
It was frustrating to say the least. (I’ll need to go to Michael’s for new craft loops soon.)
Looking back on 2010, the biggest and most obvious thing is that I only posted two tracks this year. So that’s going to be the big thing for the new year — to get back into the swing of actually writing, rather than just tinkering. The dotcom has been a lovely beast, but it’s also proven to not be conducive to getting music made, and I need to find a way to tame it and get it in line, or I need to figure out when it’s useful and look elsewhere for everything else.