Hey y'all, the band has taken a bit of a break from working in the studio to recharge, but now we’re back in action and finally getting stuff done!
Briefly, here’s what’s going on:
We are finally working on recording Misfits, our next album. The overall theme is “children’s music, but for grownups.”
We’re also working on some game music, as we’ve been approached by three separate teams working on games for Strawberry Jam 10 (hey, that’s another one for the success list)
Also as a reminder, we are totally an actual band with so many people in it and not just fluffy pretending to be a bunch of people through clever production tricks and writing in the third person plural for some reason
Last September I wrote about my VRChat performance setup, based on some new changes I was trying in order to do more to integrate backing tracks into my performances. I quickly ran into some limits with the approach I was taking, and have ended up completely changing how I do things since then, with a setup that is much more reliable, more capable, and higher-quality. It also allows me to use the same audio setup for both mic-boosted and streamed performances.
I was a guest over on Lorenzo’s Music Podcast, where we talked about a bunch of topics including VR-based performances, creative self-expression, and the future of federated music streaming, among other things. Thank you so much to Tom Ray for having me on!
After going through the rigmarole of making nice visualizer videos for Refactor, I noticed that I’d already done that a year ago! In fact I’d done it for a few albums and I’d forgotten about that.
If you follow my YouTube channel you’ve probably been at least somewhat inundated with a bunch of videos on your feed with my music reposts. I’ve finally figured out a process I’m more or less happy with, and am figuring out the best cadence for doing things.
My current plan is to do two releases per week; on Mondays will be what I consider my “real” or “authored” albums, and Thursdays will be what I consider “jam” albums. The categorization of these is a little wishy-washy, but for example, things I’ve done for Novembeat and Strawberry Jam are “jam” albums, while things like Refactor and Songs of Substance are “authored” albums.
Hey y'all! As you might know, I coordinate an annual song-a-day challenge called Novembeat, where in November you try to make something musical every day. Several of my albums have been produced that way, and last year, in lieu of doing the traditional challenge (aside from a handful of low-effort experiments) I mostly used the month as a push to finally finish up Transitions.
I’ve always found Novembeat to be a very helpful thing for feeling unstuck with my own musical pursuits, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get a bit more practice with any aspect of the music creation process.
My suggestion is to only do it to the level for which you feel it’s helpful. Don’t burn yourself out on music trying to produce something if it isn’t flowing; the point is to challenge yourself, not to push yourself to the breaking point. Most years I haven’t actually done something every day, and getting anything done means there’s now more music in the world than there was before, and that can only be a good thing.
Anyway, think of this as an invitation to join in. Or if a weekly-ish cadence is more your speed, check out Song Fight!, which I wrote about recently.
Hello! I think it’s been a while since I’ve talked about what’s going on with the band and what sorts of things are happening. So here’s a casual collection of updates along those lines.
If you’ve poked around this website you probably know that I wrote and use Bandcrash to build the embedded players for the music previews. You might also be aware of it as the tool that I use to publish my albums to my itch.io page as an alternative to Bandcamp. But I also use it as a tool for a bunch of other things in my music — including part of how I publish things to Bandcamp and other storefronts.
I’ve finally gone and set up on-demand CD manufacturing for a bunch of my albums. However, because of how CD sales work on both Bandcamp and Mirlo, I can’t easily offer a discount to folks who have already bought the album digitally, and also the shipping rates I have to charge through those sites are not optimal, especially for international customers or people buying multiple albums at a time.
So, for now I’ve come to a compromise: if you want to buy just the CD of any of my albums, you can do so directly through Kunaki. Note that these versions do not come with downloads, and more importantly, since I’m only charging minimal markup over my own costs, I ask that you only buy the CDs there if you’ve already bought the album digitally (including via one of my discography bundles).
Using that link will give you the best shipping rates (especially if you buy multiple albums at a time or are outside the USA) and is also a lot less hassle for me, so it’s a win-win.
On that note, if you want to buy a CD for an album you don’t own just yet, it’s actually a bit easier and cheaper for everyone if you buy the album digitally and then use my Kunaki store to get the CD. Or, you could buy just the CD and rip it yourself like it’s 2003, and then send me a few bucks some other way to make up the difference.
Anyway, now you have choices for obtaining more collectible forms of my music without it being super expensive.
I now have 9 of my albums available on CD, and I’m working on adding all the others which folks have voted for in the poll.
I definitely want to put Novembeat 2020 on CD but unfortunately that will require some extra process, as it has 29 tracks and Kunaki’s online tool only supports up to 25. There’s a workaround for that but unfortunately it will take some time to figure out how to actually do it suitably.
I’m finally getting around to putting more of my albums on CD, thanks to the on-demand manufacturing capability afforded by Kunaki. You can see which albums of mine are available via this collection, and on each of them you can buy the album via Bandcamp, Mirlo, or direct from Kunaki.
If you buy from Bandcamp or Mirlo the album will also come with the digital download in your choice of formats.
Anyway, inside you can vote on which additional albums I should focus on making available!
But doing so also required, for very annoying reasons, removing it from all other streaming platforms as well, because the distributor I was working with, TooLost, had no option for removing music from just one platform without deleting and re-uploading everything2.
So, when is my music going to get back onto the other streaming platforms? Ehhh.
