slowburn

New Moog filter plugin from UAD. It sounds great, particularly the distortion stage which mimics the Moogerfooger input stage, and has 2-pole and 4-pole lowpass, bandpass and highpass filters. It’s very DSP hungry though, it uses up a lot of the UAD cards processor power and the UAD-1 doesn’t handle plugins like that very well. Still, it sounds great, has LFOs and some nice stereo-izing features, and won’t hum and tune in local radio like the hardware Moogerfooger filter pedal that I had to return.

I will probably get this, and may use it for last minute tweaks on a song or two as I finish up slowburn. I hope they do more effect plugins, I still use the Roland plugins on every single song I mix.

And a new compressor plugin from Audio Damage called Rough Rider. It’s not modelled after any particular piece of real hardware (as far as I know), it has all the usual compressor parameters but is fairly straightforward. I’ve mostly tried mangling drum loops with it, and it does that well. It doesn’t give you numeric values for the various knobs, you’ve got to just play it by ear, which is cool. It seems to have some distortion/limiter stage in there, everything comes out limited to 0dB with some nice added harmonics (the “rough” part of the name, presumably), which is nice.

Oh, and it’s completely free, so there’s no excuse not to grab it.

I’ve been having a hard time getting myself into the studio to finish up slowburn, so I did a quick remix of Radiohead’s “Reckoner”, my current favorite song from their latest album “In Rainbows”. Give it a listen, and vote for it by clicking on the “+” if you like it. If you want to remix it yourself it’s only 99 cents for the six unmixed tracks in the iTunes store.

Saturday night, Bryan Campbell came over and took some pictures of random gear in the studio to use as a basis for the album artwork. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he does with it, I’ll put up some pictures when he’s had a chance to work on them.

Having successfully gotten myself back in the studio to work on that remix, I’m going to try to finish up the album this week. I have a list of very specific things to work on, and I’m hoping it will go quickly once I get into a groove. Here’s hoping I’ll have the final mix for you soon.

Congratulations to Vida and Dallas, on the newest addition to the Kashuba family, Maddox!

I caught yet another head cold this week, and have been too congested to work on anything. I’ve been listening to the latest mix off and on, and have a good idea what I need to do to finish it up, I just need to be able to do it with a clear head. Hopefully I’ll be able to start up again very soon. I’m not sure what’s up with my sinuses, but it’s been a particularly bad year.

I’ve been listening to the latest and greatest full album mix while playing some videogames. I’ve heard these songs way too many times, so I need something to distract me enough to listen to the music and get the big picture, rather than obsessing about the individual bits and pieces. Of course, I also just like playing videogames.

The more frantic game I have been playing is “Super Stardust HD”, which is a souped-up version of Asteroids that constantly throws a bunch of stuff at you and keeps you in a perpetual state of panic as you try to blow everything up without running into anything. This game definitely takes my mind off the minutiae of the mix, as well as inspireing me to curse loudly and creatively at the TV. The music actually goes along with it surprisingly well even though it’s comparatively very mellow. It’s kind of like playing Grand Theft Auto with the ambient station on, I guess.

The other game is “Endless Ocean” which is a super chilled out diving game. You swim around petting fish, dolphins, penguins, whales and various other creatures. The game is mostly about exploring the ocean, with a few optional goals you don’t really have to do, and absolutely zero violence or killing. The music goes great with this game too, and the audio output of the Wii goes through the TV rather than the stereo, so I get to listen to the music on yet another set of speakers/headphones.

I did find out that “Endless Ocean” does not like mp3s encoded at 256kbps. When I tried to use that file it sounded like I was underwater with weird bubbly distortions to the sound. At first I thought that was actually an intentional feature, since it is a diving game, but it wasn’t. Encoding the mix at mere “good” quality 128kbps fixed everything.

This past week I worked on five of the songs, and I’m very happy with the latest mix. I fixed up “hummin” to the point where I don’t think I’ll need to add beats, fixed a few sounds in “puppy” that were bugging me when I listened on headphones, and chopped out some extraneous parts on “lemon”, “rollover” and “lurp” to tighten them up and simplify them. Everything is sounding really good, and I’m hoping to finish everything up this week by focusing on adding some fun and cool little bits. The one remaining problem is the last track, which I’m still not 100% happy with, but I’m making progress there too. Again, almost there!

Saw Beck again, this time at the Independent on Sunday night. This was a much smaller show than at the Outside Lands Festival and it was fantastic. The highlight was when everyone in the band put down their instruments and grabbed handheld grooveboxes for “Hell Yes”, as shown in the picture, with Beck using a DJ fake-vinyl scratching program on an iPhone while he rapped through a headset mic. Dan the Automator of Gorillaz and Dr. Octagon production fame opened with a DJ set. Fun night!

Edit: SF Chronicle article about the show.

I basically didn’t work on slowburn at all this week, other than listening to it every day and writing down the remaining things I want to work on. I am contemplating adding beats to the first and last songs, as they currently are the two parts that aren’t working for me. Part of me says I should spend more time getting them to work as they are, but a louder part is telling me to finish this project up by whatever means necessary, and a simple unavoidable truth of electronic music is that adding a beat makes almost anything sound better. One option if I did add beats to them would be to also release a free beatless version of the entire album, which could be cool…

Instead of doing real work, I played around with the Tenori-On and started plotting out a post-slowburn strategy for releasing some more new music. I started by organizing all the little music fragments I’d written since I got the Tenori-On four months ago, and found to my pleasant surprise that I had about one hundred and thirty different little musical bits saved on there. That’s a lot of song ideas! The device is a bit over-priced, and has a number of technical shortcomings, but it is clearly a great match for me as far as inspiring me to write new music. Anyway, I sorted through them all, picked out the best bits, and chose around thirty to work on further and hopefully develop into two to three minute little songs.

My tentative plan is to release digitally through iTunes a series of EPs with 4-5 of these little Tenori-On songs each, as a little side project while we figure out where submodern will go next. Dallas and I have talked about focusing on our Cryptic Funk record label, and trying to move in to the digital age by doing smaller and more frequent releases instead of waiting to have enough songs to fill up a CD. This project would help us dip our toes into that and figure out the technical process of releasing things purely digitally. Our eventual goal is to help other people release their music through the label and in doing so promote the sort of melodic electronic music we like. For now though, being able to release my own songs more quickly and easily would be cool.

Anyway… the bottom line is I spent the week screwing around with the Tenori-On instead of finishing up the album!

So, enough fun stuff, time to buckle down and finish this project. First priority is finding some way to be happy with the first and last songs. Second priority is to work more on some of the builds, and add a little effects weirdness to sections of the percussion, as well as finalize the drum bus processing. Last priority is to add any little touches necessary to make things a little more interesting and cover up any remaining things that are bugging me. Here we go, hopefully…