I bet some of you were wondering, “He’s almost done with the song, what’s up?”

Well, things kind of got out of hand with the news writing and I was writing lots of stuff even though there was not much work left to do on the song. So today, since homework has been strangely absent all week more or less due to varying reasons, I finally sat down and finished the tune. It’s up on the ridiculously popular eMule content database right now and I’m currently uploading it on to MegaUpload for other users who don’t use eMule to get a direct link. I’ll edit the post once that’s done. I’m currently having problems on the uploading end of things for some reason right now.

Edit: MegaUpload link. Uploaded!

Strangely enough, the song is appropriately named “Kinda Distracted” which suits since I was distracted a number of times trying to complete the thing.

It’s a bit of a chillout tune. It features some well known sound, but you know me, messing with things, I have been modifying tonnes of stuff. I noticed that when you make the kick peak, there’s a certain kind of interesting sound added to the kick (hard to explain in words). So when I started contemplating how else can I modify the sound. While I was doing that, I stumbled across this one way to make the kick sound different while playing with a synth. So I chopped the synth down just for the kicks and it sounded interesting and different - just the way I like it.

There was also a sound I’ve always wanted to tinker with and it has the added bonus of being strictly playing with chord-like sound (something I don’t often incorporate in to songs) so I was able to actually take that knowledge of what different chords sound like and tinker around with that to get something interesting. If you know house, you know who I’m “kinda” parodying.

There’s also different standard DJ effects that DJs play around with. Since I haven’t put much on the master other than compressors tweaked so I have room to play around with in terms of DB of various frequencies, I managed to finally add something that would add some real control on how the song sounded and it was, granted, recycling the Free Filter, but using a different setting so it filters out lower frequencies. The result is the sweep you hear about two thirds the way through the song.

I was also trying to focus on mastering towards the end of the production and I know that the spectralgraph is ideally like a hill (lows really loud while highs nice and soft) and when I started thinking about that, I immediately knew that the highs and mids were a little on the loud side. I turned both down a little manually by figuring out what was the offending instrument and tweaking the velocity of the notes in one case and turning down channel volumes in other cases. I couldn’t touch mixer volumes because there was so much automation that was going on, it would cancel out a lot of my work and make things, well, redundent.

This is also the song that was another attempt at making a nice chillout tune and I like it better than Valley of Dreams. Meant to be a bit of a background tune, but at the same time, make the atmosphere a little lighter.

I’m not real sure I want to make another attempt at a tune like this though. There’s times where it seems to be getting futile during the production process, so I’ll probably stick to more energetic tunes like Phantoms of London. A lot more people seem to like that anyway. I have a few concepts “sketched” out in different project files, so I’ll probably work one of them.

…which apparently breaks the world record for most gold medals won by a host country. I’m currently high on euphoria (the emotion) over this because it was such a close game, so, that’s all for now. WOOOOWW!!!!

In my reporting (which covered mostly ACTA since it was a hot and fast paced topic), I made two speculations: that ACTA negotiations were starting to show signs of things going south with deeply devided negotiations and that pro-copyright people are also supportive of ACTA transparency.

how does two for two sound?

This is one of those rare moments where I feel confident in predicting things (which ended up being almost always accurate by some form of miracle) and its even rarer that these predictions revolve around good news - which, in this case, was the fact. One things for sure, taking a risk and speculating a little and finding out later you hit the nail on the head, the feeling never gets old.

I just finished writing the previous entry and noticed that this blog started on February 2006. Apparently, the four year birthday of this blog was about 20 days ago. Nifty! Happy B-Day blog!

Well, spent yesterday laying down a bit of a gauntlet in the news front, so today, I spent some time working on some new tunage. The goal I kind of set for myself is to get a new song released by the end of the week or something close to it.

Unfortunately, since it’s been so long since I last worked on actually trying to compelete a song instead of doing a production version of a sketch, it’s really taken a lot out of me trying to perfect it. Still, I managed to get a completed version with a good chunk of the tweaking done. A bunch of it was editting the melody for variety, adding some extra percs for variety and a tonne of automation for… erm… variety.

So now I’m doing what I’ve done last time I produced music, I’m giving myself the rest of the day off from music production and then going to go at it tomorrow to see if there’s anything I can pick up that I missed from before. Sometimes it’s small things I wouldn’t have thought of right towards the end of the last session, other times it’s adding in something killer that helps the music pop. It really depends on what I can catch that I can modify in the song.

Overall, considering it’s sort of another attempt at a chilled song, it’s going over pretty well.

I also had the chance to start messing around with more hardstyle sounds and stumbled on some promising sounds I’ve never heard before in a hardstyle tune that I liked when I managed to process them. So, with a new filter, there’s definitely some promise there.

I tend to try and figure out what works in different genre’s and see what elements can be transposed into the genre I’m working in and the more sound I can get from other genre’s, the bigger the pallet and room for creativity I have. So far, it’s definitely workign out nicely.

That’s it for now.

Just put together another article which I haven’t really done in a while. It’s a rather comprehensive article on how the IIPA’s demands of Canada being put on a priority watchlist is groundless. Something nice and comprehensive being pushed out the door like that felt great. Something with nice solid research (which took a while for one section considering the acronyms provided by Canoe made things really difficult at times - i.e. SMEI apparently stands for Sony Music Entertainment (whatever the I stands for, though my guess is International) Thankfully, Amazon helped bail me out of things like that so I could get the best possible information on quick notice.

It just felt great not only putting in such solid work, but also flipping some propaganda on its back shell so effectively. It’s one thing to shoot it down with the odd fact here and there and using opinion, but using so much research to back yourself up is quite another, so it isn’t exactly as easy as you might think.

Another slam dunk for the Cube and it feels great!

The milestones are a bit more spaced out these days because the nice round numbers are so much larger. So there’s reason to be happy about the music download release today because it’s currently beginning it’s final assault on the 300,000 download mark. Right now, there’s only 20,000 downloads left to go befor it gets there.

The only downfall is that it won’t make any overtakes even after it clears 300K, but when you’re in the top ten, overtakes are far fewer and far between (a couple are over a million and the top release is over the 30 million mark)

It’s regretable that my output is so miniscule right now, but in another two months, I’ll be able to really start laying down some new tracks (Summer holidays FTW!) It’s always an exciting time when something new gets posted, that’s for sure. I mean, all of you seem to be enthusiastic about the music even up to now (it really is appreciated you know) There’s no real way I can thank you enough even if I produce a hundred more tracks for you.

As for actual progress, I was able to squeeze in some time here and there to just tinker around with a few idea’s. There’s several concept tracks laid out. They vary from fully formed, ready for mixing to a one pattern melody in an untuned 3x Osc. That’s really the kind of thing you gotta do. It’s the equivelent to a painter sketching ideas down on a pad of paper whenever an idea pops into their head. Every so often, I get one of those ideas that I think might be cool and quickly put it in a simple melody form. I detune and revamp if I have time (rare when “off season” like this) I currently have probably 40 or so of these just flying around loose in the FL projects folder. I imaginatively name them “Trance 4″, “Drum N Bass 15″… numbered in order of when I came up with it.

I think I said before that I usually start thinking of names towards the end of the production process. It’s whatever name that just fits. Sometimes I have an idea fully formed in my head, but a lot of my better works end up being something that I completely did up without a clue of what I’m doing in the grand scheme of things. I like to call it “producing by feel” and “Startin’ Fresh” was one of those tracks - one of my best tracks to date as a matter of fact. A second method I use is “producing by inadvertent melody”. That’s where I listen to an existing production and only listen to certain aspects of the song to get a completely different idea out of it. The song wasn’t intended to produce something like that, but it comes to me anyway. One of my older works, “Dark Garden”, was one of those tracks. A third way of producing is producing by emotion and “Phantoms of London” was one of those tracks. I don’t use this method because it requires a sustained emotion for most of the process (often at least two days) and my mind is so all over the place constantly solving different kinds of problems or just consuming more knowledge, it’s next to impossible - PoL was an exception. The fourth method I use is production by concept. This is the one I use the most mainly because my mind works very well with it. The results are mixed as sometimes it’s really good (Space Rays) and other times it disappoints me (Valley of Dreams). While a mixed bag, I wouldn’t be producing much music without this kind of technique.

Most importantly, I try and keep a sense of adventure. A lot of artists out there find one good idea and it becomes a hit. Great job! They then try and milk the idea to death by producing with the exact same style and feel. Eventually, fans get bored and move on. I’ve been working really hard to avoid something like that - and I think a lot of other unsigned artists do the same. The key is not being afraid to try something different, even if a method has proven successful in the past.

Anyway, I hope you find this post as interesting as it was random.

I had been experiencing the usual withdrawel symptoms of not writing and for the first time this semester, I felt like I had the opportunity to write something. The piece I wrote was a bit of a gamble, but I ran with it. Who knows, this could be the third accurate prediction I’ve ever made or it could be the first big prediction I’ve ever made that is going to fall flat. As with my previous predictions, it’s not something I just pull out of thin air, but rather something that takes long study and a round of all the plausiblities and measuring the odds of what’s going to happen (not an easy task to say the least).

My prediction is essentially that ACTA is going to lose teeth simply because of all the different opinions going around within ACTA and where it should go among other things. I think that a vision of complete chaos and filibustering would really explain why all the secrecy is going on because that would wreck some images amongst pro-copyright maximalist camps. I can expect some disagreement within the details as that’s just a normal part of online commenting, but I feel that the overall point of view is actually sound at this point that there is reason to doubt the extremes ACTA was originally intended to go. The question really is, how flat is this thing going to go?

I will readily admit that I was among the first to sound the alarms about ACTA, but naturally, it was because it was a huge threat to what we know today at that time. As things went along with various events happening throughout the process, I can admit that there are reasons to doubt that ACTA would live up completely to copyright extremists expectations. Of course, until this point, that was very hard to see.

I’ve been really busy with school as of late. In fact, I’ve had hardlyh any time to do much outside of school.

Still, I got a rare opportunity that couldn’t happen at a more odd part of the year - I learned a tonne about DJing in front of a live audience. This was the second time I’ve ever had that opportunity and, shockingly, all this was school related.

There’s plenty of good lessons I learned including how to properly beatmatch music (which, for a while, I never had the chance to try and fix, let alone sit down and figure it out). I can say it makes a heck of a lot of difference DJing with fully beatmatched music even though it takes several hours of pre-show prep to pull off.

I also learned what it’s like to DJ with an actual MIDI controller. Yes, it’s 100 times better than DJing with a mouse despite what kind of problems that can occur in the process. I’m hoping to hang out with this other DJ that’s been teaching me all this fancy stuff more as time goes on. While I’m more in to producing, he’s more in to live shows, so I think we can do a bit of trading off of stuff here and there.

I couldn’t pass up on an opportunity like this since live shows are going to be a big part of my career as a producer if/when things keep going the way they are going.

Oh yeah, the audience response was pretty much entirely positive of the performance even though I had minimal practice with the MIDI controller. A lot of it was “I’ve never heard of this music before, but I love it!” and some of it was, “I didn’t think I’d like that kind of music.” In essense, similar reaction to my first live show and my old radio show. No one believes me when I say electronica has good music until I get them listen to it. I remember some of the priceless reactions being, “OK, what’s the song called again?” over the years which, when it comes from someone who was telling me 5 minutes earlier that all forms of “techno” (their term, not mine) is crap, is bordering on hilarious in a positive way. Maybe chalk it up to too many years of listening to top 40?

I’m also already looking forward to Summer as time goes on because that’s when I can actually get back in to writing a lot again. It’s just that writing will always be there waiting for me to come back, but school is either a “you are committed” or a “your not going to get very far” kind of thing that lasts only a certain period of time. School will eventually be over, but journalism can last a whole lifetime.

Anyway, just letting everyone know I’m still hanging about, just more infrequently than usual is all.

For some reason (well, it only happens once a year for such a release) I forgot to set some of my files to “release” to help with initial distribution. It happens every year where the queue lines just jump up in size for everything I’ve been sharing.

I’ve set the 2009 RAR file to release to help some users move up in the lines. Several other older files should be better distributed anyway.

The good news is that a few users probably have the file by now to help speed up distribution. Still, I know the ED2K/KAD network enough to know that issues such as “three complete users and no upload, 50 users and three parts missing” happen, so I’ll keep the file on release for a while long after the first few completions.

So, just a notice to let everyone know I’m trying.

PS: I’ve had the odd crash here and there, so if I inexplicably go offline on a rare occasion for an hour or so, that’s probably why.