Spent a good deal of yesterday’s evening working on another piece for my future live set. Several amusing ideas came in the process.
Analog sounding. Why they still continue to argue about the digital vs analog sound. Where the hell can you still hear it in the original analog form? Almost everything that is recorded these days is distributed on a digital media, which is bits and bytes in its essence. Having that, it all comes down to creating the “correct” analog-sounding sequence of bytes to reproduce that unique sound that you still want to hear on your iPod. Am I right or am I right? What about vinyl records? What about them? I love vinyl and have the collection of my own. Nothing can beat a great grind and especially in techno domain, but… from a producer standpoint, hey, you still need to get the sounds to someone who cuts the plates. Do you use magnetic tapes for that?
Several days ago I was totally bedazzled by Wesen’s openness and the willingness to share information when he laid down all tiniest details of his techno music construction workflow to the readers of his blog. He posted a carefully crafted PDF file with textual information accompanied by the set of loops, samples and sysex data ready for immediate action. You can take it all, play with it, feel it the way he felt and get all inspiration you can.
Two weeks ago my dad has finished another project for me — Monome clone. I wanted it to be different from what’s offered by the respected authors in some ways, and it is obviously cheaper to build it than purchasing the read-made piece from them (of course if you have all necessary tools to carve nice rubber buttons, case, face plates etc).
Here are the amazing “Techno Is Not A Joke” series on YouTube from The Pod: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
I share their views to some extent. Techno is a universal music that you can use to express yourself, make people dance or make them think about the past / present / future, or do other magic with minds and souls.
Links were found at Music Thing.
Finally, it’s here in my hands. I’m very excited about it as it took 2 days to come to Kiev from Germany and long 2 weeks to travel a fraction of that distance to my city. The negative side is that customs took another $360 (given that the box cost $999) to give it to me, and UPS got $10 to perform a radiology test that never happened (just a rubber stamp on a paper). That’s the sad part about this country I’m going to leave with a special pleasure very soon. Everyone is robbing everyone else on the legal terms here and it’s fine. No one cares. Even those being robbed.
Anyway, it’s here and it’s what matters after all. Thank you Ableton for a great product!
Here’s a little nice video from their office in Germany:
Finally, the Ableton Live 7.0.3 is officially installed and running on my laptop. No, the package hasn’t come yet if you wonder, but they were generous enough to send the download link (for the app only of course) and a bunch of the serials along with the order confirmation to get me started immediately upon charging my credit card. So, I spent 10 minutes downloading all the latest while they packed the boxed version for me.
The Ukraine is famous for its unreliable postal services (well, as many other distant corners of the world), however, I believe UPS or FedEx (still not sure are we in the EU or outside it) will do its best to save some silver hair to me. Hopefully there will be no problems with customs and everything. Even 5%-10% tax would be a LOT given the price I paid.
You may wonder, why am I drawing so much attention to the fact of the purchase? It’s easy to understand if you are in a music geek circles, and almost impossible otherwise. Long story short, (a) it’s the best music production workbench with all sines and saws world ever seen, (b) the fact that you purchased any software product in this country (and bordering Russia) is kind of … extraordinary and deserves attention by itself, and finally, (c) it let’s me immerse deeper into the creative part without a stupid thought “do I deserve to use this, or am I a smelly thief”.
Happy.
Many of you know me as a music geek. That would be a correct assessment of my attitude to everything composing / hardware / software related. I like experimentation, layering sounds, playing with tune structure and working on tiniest sonic details that are so subtle that affect the listener only on the subconscious level, like ghost notes and other miniature stuff.
Today is a BIG DAY for the crimusic.info — our local Crimean Modern Music Portal. That would be two Birthday celebrations:
It’s pointless to mention that the show is going to be spectacular. Crowds of clubbers, creative folks and fellow composers — everyone is going to be there. Amazing! I’m in anticipation of long talks on hardware, MIDI, 8-bit madness and recent electronic world music trends. Hey, it’s going to be magical.
The place is almost 100 kms away from where we live, but nevertheless we are going to join our friends on the long 2-hour drive and have a great night.
Hope to see you all there!
Yesterday it was a huge day for the local Crimean (Ukraine; is where I live) club community and youth. It is the day when the global Crimean club radio was brought up on the air.
Happy Birthday to “Aesthetics” Radio!
First of all, I’m writing this when the most recent firmware version is 1.22. It is important as you may guess from version to version things change, and in case of TC, not necessarily to good.