After my previous review of elasticStage, a customer service representative reached out to me and told me that they’d improved their cutting process to reduce the surface noise, and asked if I’d be interested in receiving (at no charge) a recut of the two records. I agreed to this, and the replacement records arrived today.
On both of my albums, I am extremely pleased to report that the audio quality has improved in every possible way! The surface noise is essentially gone, and everything sounds perfectly clean. Some of the subtler sounds that had been lost behind the surface noise before are now super apparent, too.
The difference is much more profound on Transitions than on Refactor, but both albums have definitely improved as a result of their process change.
The actual manufacturing and delivery time was also greatly reduced from the last time, which tells me that they’ve probably cleared a backlog in their manufacturing.
Furality is an annual virtual furry conference that takes place entirely in VRChat. I have a dealer’s den booth this year, booth 816 (second level of the 2D Art + Miscellaneous) section, and I’m super excited!
Last night Furality opened up a dealer’s den preview so that we could check that our booths are set up correctly, and as a treat we got to see a decent chunk of the world and the overall style of the show, and I gotta say, it’s incredible. The Furality team have knocked it out of the park this year, and have really outdone themselves. From what I’ve seen this isn’t just going to be an incredible con, it’s going to be an amazing VRChat experience, and I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of it.
If you’re at all in VRChat (even if you aren’t at all interested in furry stuff), or heck, even if you’ve been thinking of trying VRChat out, I highly recommend coming to Furality Somna so that you can experience the joy. Also, you don’t need a VR setup to use VRChat! it just helps with the immersion (although just a warning, if you play it on desktop or cellphone you’ll probably end up really wanting to get a headset anyway).
Also, I plan on doing various impromptu shows at various places throughout the con, and if you see me wandering around, feel free to come up and say “hi!”
Back in April I learned about elasticStage, an on-demand vinyl production company that makes it easy for musicians to get their music on vinyl without any up-front costs. I ended up setting up Transitions and Refactor for manufacturing, and ordered some test copies.
My lead time at the time was around 6 weeks, and I was told the records would ship on May 14. They ended up shipping a couple days later than expected, but I still ended up receiving them today, which isn’t too much further after the original estimate.
Anyway, here’s my review of how the product turned out.
UPDATE: elasticStage have responded to my review by sending me updated copies. Definitely check out what’s new!
Bandcamp Friday is a thing that Bandcamp started in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, primarily to help out performing musicians who no longer had access to live performance venues due to the COVID lockdowns. It was a very nice gesture on their part, to help offset some of the suck of the world affecting musicians by waiving their cut of the purchase price.
As someone who wasn’t a performing musician at the time, I still benefitted from it, as it gave me an occasional tiny boost to my (already tiny) music income.
But at this point it’s an entrenched tradition and it’s actually causing more harm than good. It might be time for it to end, or at least be reconsidered.
Hey y'all! It is Bandcamp Friday once again. Today is the best day to support musicians on Bandcamp (including myself) as Bandcamp waives their cut of the sale price of all music for this day only.
Bandcamp have recently made some default pricing changes and based on their reasoning I have opted to change my own pricing strategy (as hinted at previously). Previously I had a kind of complicated and largely vibes-based approach to pricing, but it was doing me no favors. From now on, all of my albums will be $1/track up to $9, and individual songs will be $1.50/track, with occasional exceptions for certain considerations.
Anyway, for this Bandcamp Friday, you can get 25% off anything in my catalog (including my full discography, which is also always discounted) with the discount code “MAYDAY25.”
Also, as usual, here’s some of the stuff I’ll be buying this month:
Then in June, I have a whole bunch of stuff going on:
Furality is taking place from June 5-8, and I have a booth in the dealer’s den, where I plan on having some small impromptu performances; you might also find me out and about throughout the rest of the convention, in which case, feel free to come by and say “hi!”
My choir will be performing with Rainbow City on June 6 (which I may or may not be a part of, depending on how badly this conflicts with Furality)
Bandcamp recently rolled out bulk editing for albums, but unfortunately it only lets you bulk-edit album prices, rather than the prices of individual tracks within an album. Fortunately, it isn’t too difficult to do this with a little Javascript.
For each album that you want to change the prices on:
Open up your album’s editor
Open up your browser’s Javascript console (usually using ctrl-alt-I on a PC, or cmd-alt-I on a Mac)
Paste in this bit of code (assuming you want to set the price to 1.50 per track in your local currency; change the '1.50' to whatever value you want it to be otherwise) and press Enter:
I recently learned about elasticStage, an on-demand vinyl LP manufacturing company. I’ve always wanted to get some of my albums on vinyl, especially Transitions and Refactor, two albums which are very near and dear to my heart.
As such, I’ve set up an elasticStage page where you can order my stuff on vinyl! I’ll probably add more albums as they come.
I’m still waiting for my test copies to arrive (and they likely won’t arrive for a little while) so if you order a copy right now it’s at your own risk, but all of the reviews I’ve seen of the service are incredibly positive. On Refactor in particular I’ve scheduled it as a preorder to be released on June 14, which is both the 10th anniversary of the original release of the album and also my birthday.
I’ll definitely be reviewing the test copies when they arrive, and if you want to take a chance on something unproven, right now is the time to order, as the actual manufacturing lead time is currently around 6 weeks.
Today is Transgender Day of Visibility, and as a transgender musician who has been releasing music online since the 1990s (and writing music since the 1980s), it’s super important to me that members of my community get seen today. The complex feelings around being transgender have always been a big part of my music, even before I had the words to express it.
Today, March 7, 2025, is Bandcamp Friday! That means that for the next 23.5 hours as of the time of this posting, Bandcamp waives their cut of the purchase price. So if you have any music you want to buy on Bandcamp, today is the best day to do it.
To that end, I have a new album out, which you might be interested in if you’re seeing this post.
Other than that, there’s what I’ll be buying today:
For folks who follow this site directly on bluesky you might have noticed that the view there has… problems. I’m mostly posting this to see if some of those problems have been resolved.
Unfortunately, as things stand, bluesky is really just not a great substitute for a proper feed reader, so I’d suggest getting one of those instead rather than trying to have a single social feed be your one view to the universe.
Convolution reverbs are pretty neat. Basically you take a recording of a space’s acoustics and then the reverb characteristics of that space can then be applied to any audio signal. I usually use convolution reverbs for most of my music, since it’s a lot easier for me to use someone’s recorded impulse response of, say, the Ulm chapel than to fly to Germany to record there in person.
You can also use recordings of things other than acoustic spaces for interesting effects; Logic’s Space Designer comes with a whole bunch of impulse responses that are used for various effects, including drum transformers, ghost rhythms, and other such things. A lot of my more sound designy stuff makes heavy use of this.
But what if you use whole songs as an impulse response?
Gosh, I almost forgot to post this, but that’s because I haven’t actually listened to much music this week. Dunno why. But here’s some things I heard:
The We ♥ Katamari soundtrack; specifically I have an old gamerip that unfortunately has the full per-level runtime tracks which get kind of old after a while, but it was surprisingly fun to listen to while driving for some errands
I didn’t listen to much music this week, but here’s some stuff I enjoyed:
Benny Benassi - Electroman: I bought this because “Good Girl” was on Lumines Electric Symphony for the PS Vita, pretty much the only game that I spent any significant amount of time playing on that doomed system. The album as a whole seems like it’s a lighthearted parody/homage of all of the dance music styles that were popular in 2011. Or at least I found a lot of humor in it.
The Rainbow Disconnection by Sad Kermit: I absolutely cannot believe that this album is allowed to continue to exist. I could have sworn it was DMCAed at one point. Also back when I got it, it was a free download from the artist’s website, I think. There’s more tracks that have been added since my acquisition.
