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.
Hey, it’s a new year! I’m going to try to keep these posts going for a while, I think. As always, these are just highlights; if you want to see my full listening history you can check out my last.fm profile.
I feel like doing these approximately once a week is a pretty nice cadence. So I think I’ll start scheduling these to go up every, say, Saturday. Yes, that sounds good.
Here’s some musical-listening highlights since the last one:
Black Box of Jazz: This is an amazing compilation of some of the best music that jazz has had to offer. I happened upon this collection when I was visiting Hong Kong back in 2000, and it’s an essential for anyone who has any interest in the genre.
The Great Concert of Charles Mingus: Speaking of jazz, this one is also particularly amazing, although it probably helps to be familiar with a bunch of jazz already to fully appreciate some of the musical humor in it. Mingus is one of the jazz greats.
Pivot by Amoeba (one of the many projects of Robert Rich): I’m not sure how to describe this as anything other than “experimental rock.” There’s some great grooves in this accompanying some great noises. I’m not sure how I ended up with this in my collection (way back in 2019 if my file timestamps are to be believed) but I’m glad I did.
Duo de Bois: Six Sonatas for Flute and Violin: It’s a shame Magnatune has ceased operations because they had some really excellent classical music on offer. This is an excellent recording of a great classical work. I can only seem to find it for sale on Apple Music these days but it’s licensed CC by-nc-sa so it should be possible to obtain freely. If only there were a way.
Heartbreak on Vinyl by Blake Lewis: The sophmore album of my favorite American Idol finalist, with some pretty nice lush electropop/dance vibes on this one
Hey y'all, I’m trying to figure out when I should schedule my next VRChat concert for. If you’d be so kind, please head over to this poll and click on the times which work well for you. (Remember to set your timezone as well!)
As an independent musician who is also a (former-ish) software engineer who is keenly all-too-aware of technology and the development of the web, I would personally love to see a much better ecosystem of independent music distribution and discovery that isn’t reliant on any one company or platform, or even a handful of them.
When discussing some of the alternate paths that people can take, it’s important to know what’s out there and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
So hey, I’ve been working on improving the tag browser in the releases section, and have it to a point where the browser itself is, I think, really good? All that’s left to do is to tag all of the songs. I have, uh, a lot of tagging left to do. I built some tools to make it a bit easier, at least, but it’s still going to take me quite some time.
Anyway, while tagging music, I’ve been spending some quality time just listening to other peoples' music. Here’s a few things that I’ve enjoyed recently.
Earlier today I was in a conversation with Jeremy about what it means to be successful.
The gist of the conversation is that pretty much everyone, especially those working in music, always have such a relative, subjective idea of what it means to be “successful,” and the overarching constant seems to be that even people who are making a sustainable living at music, and who have a respectful following, and so on, still don’t see themselves as successful.
I think at this point it’s pretty clear that I am not successful as a musician; my releases do not pay for themselves, much less generating any considerable amount of income, it’s been a struggle to get even 150 subscribers on my YouTube channel, and even getting anyone to listen to my music to begin with is a struggle.
So, here are some ideas of what I think it would mean to be successful as a musician. This isn’t all-inclusive, nor does every criterion have to be met.
Hello my lovelies! December 6 is the last Bandcamp Friday of the year. On this day, Bandcamp waives their share of the sale price, leaving musicians with a bit more money from their hard work.
I of course have my latest album, Transitions, and quite a few other albums available, including with a deep discount if you opt to buy my entire discography all at once.
There are also a lot of other artists that I think you should consider supporting!
Hey there! I have a shiny new website, as you can probably see right here.
It’s still a bit of a work in progress. There’s a lot of meta-information I still need to add, and the music section will eventually get a nice tag browser to make it easier to filter through my, uh, 25 years of releases to find what you’re looking for, but adding in the data that’s necessary for that to happen will take some time.