what is going on in your musical life

Control in Brooklyn

http://www.ctrl-mod.com

But are they artisanal synths?

Are they organic?

they're free range.

Sweet thanks!

B and H has stuff iirc but not modulars

Rogue Music in NYC deals with quite a bit vintage analog synths.

I almost bought a microKorg at guitar center...might pull the trigger tomorrow

want to buy mine? v. reasonable.

i'm opening for Colin Stets0n a week from tonight, which is my big solo show this year.

How did this go?

My piece from a few years ago "Locks and Ripples" was accepted to the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium in August.

I was really nervous but I think it went OK. There was some very favourable reaction, which was heartening. I've been feeling more and more like this kind of processed guitar music should be more of a focus for me, like it might be the thing I do that I'm most satisfied with recently. I've got projects already on the go, though: want to finish off the string quartet and record the classical guitar piece and probably write a paper before I could really make it a focus. Just don't feel like I can or should drop those things.

it was really great, thanks. i was reasonably happy with my set and it was pretty special to watch Colin & Sarah in a small space like that.

maybe the most interesting part was watching his (very) lengthy soundcheck. they were using all 16 channels for a sax & violin duo, and i think at least 12 - 14 of those were for him. it was cool to learn the details of his setup, all the contact mics coming out of the horn (and throat), and to see how exacting he was about the EQ for everything.

then i get up there and i'm like "yup, sound is coming out of everything, i'm good "(although admittedly there wasn't much time left for soundcheck, but still).

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/barnsessions/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1449205908429401";>pics here</a>

oops

Would love to see a Colin Stets0n soundcheck!

super interesting, jordan, cool

think my band is turning into surf rock + banging 808, which is ... unexpected

Tfw you had something v short and straightforward but nice enough basically completed in July, spent 2.5 months, when you had unprecedented precious time on your hands, making it more and more complex but never quite getting it right, and then realise that you probably had it right in July.

tfw when you're creating shit, no matter what it is and what's going on

Almost finished doing my first ever remix, OMG. It is... not very like the original song at all. I hope they like it, argh.

ah, but does it sound like you?? always thought that was partly the point of remixes

well, that and to make it bang in the cluuuurb, obv

I think I'm going to put up something on bandcamp for the first time soon. I've been way too eclectic in my activities this year but enough pieces of a certain strain have accumulated that I think they'd make a nice EP/short album.

Something is nagging at me though. Do you guys think of the built-in speaker of the iPhone as the new 'car radio test' when you're mixing/mastering? Because sometimes my wife asks me to play her something I've done from my phone and when I do it just sounds like garbage nonsense to me. Do you guys at all try to mix and master so that your shit sounds okay coming out of a phone as well as great on speakers and headphones? I THINK I could mix so that it'd sound good in that environment, but not without doing real violence to what I want the music to sound like... IDK

ah, but does it sound like you?? always thought that was partly the point of remixes

― Executive Ball Clicker (euphemism) (haitch), Monday, September 26, 2016 7:07 AM (six hours ago)

well, that and to make it bang in the cluuuurb, obv

― Executive Ball Clicker (euphemism) (haitch), Monday, September 26, 2016 7:28 AM (five hours ago)

Ha, yes, it sounds very me, which sadly precludes it from being a club banger. I'm still super shit at beats. My approach was to take micro samples and build an entirely new weird track out of those, rather than lifting melodic phrases and reordering them/making them bang.

Went into the studio for 5h yesterday and did a bunch of takes of my classical guitar piece. I was doing it all myself so I kept running between the recording room and the control room, ha. Might have taken half the time with someone else. A few takes were useless because one track wasn't armed to record, ugh. Should be able to piece something together in a week or two, hopefully. I used a couple of these mics. I hadn't used them before but I feel like they sound pretty good. They do a great job on the sound of me opening and closing the recording room door.

Do you guys at all try to mix and master so that your shit sounds okay coming out of a phone as well as great on speakers and headphones?

I do.

How? Any tricks you've picked up?

i think my best remixes are the ones that are more of a radical re-imagining, but increasingly i try to keep some important element of the original (whether it's a melody or a sound) and leave it relatively untouched, or else it can feel just a bit disrespectful.

My band is fifteen Saturday afternoons into recording our new CD. We have decided to put it all out so we are going for a 18-19 song 70+ minute CD. That's a whole lot of work for a weekend warrior band. Going for the full monte since we couldn't get it done this year, so we figure put it all out and then play any rock dive bar or biker shindig that will have us in the Louisville metro area or the tri-state every weekend for the next couple years.

"How? Any tricks you've picked up?"

If you are actually going to press it onto vinyl or pay to get CDs done, hire a mastering engineer. You can't fake 50 grand in a equipment and/or a real mastering room no matter what the advert says on the application.

If you are going to have it mastered by a pro, don't put ANY (that means none) compression and/or limiters on the master channel of your DAW and leave some head room for a guy that has 50 grand worth of good equipment to actually use it.

If you are not going to use any pro mastering, just do what you want kinda. The biggest thing I have picked up from home recording for years, if it sounds like crud when you cut it, no amount of plug ins or digital trickery will really make it all that good.

If your monitors don't carry the bass correct that it translates when you burn a disc or put it on other formats, you are in for a struggle. When I get close to finalizing a mix, I personally listen to it at different volumes in multiple places and listen for what isn't there when the volume is low or what sounds boomy when it's loud. At this point you to me, you should be really only raising lowering things 1 db/notch on a mixer at a time either way.

Pro mastering is some voodoo, you might be able to get the volume, but people that do that for a living have higher magik than you. Maybe I'm a bit jaded, but as much as I like home recording, I hear and find the limitations of it and I think some of the hoodoo that you really don't need a big studio or whatever kinda crud - you can't fake a tuned room, you can't fake real reverb, you can't fake 2 inch tape and you can't fake a 50000 mixing console for the most part when it's done right. People doing all soft synths can kinda disregard all that (kinda), but more I record I hear and find the limitations of what I got when I compare to the real deal.

just joined a band (drummer) after being out of the music game for five years (newborn child), i'm a little bit excited because after lurking around the craigslist musicians board forever I finally found a pretty dang good singer/songwriter

which in my experience is easily the biggest hurdle if you're fixing on making original music anyway, anyone can play guitar but finding someone that has written a good song, recently, is just about impossible

I was looking at craigslist ads the other day (small area, not a lot going on) and saw someone who wanted to play "Sunn O))), Boris, Khanate, or Lysol-era Melvins". Which, you know, I could get into.

Problem in general is I'm not really good at anything and haven't ever done more than fuck around with other people off and on, mostly off. In this specific case though the ad states he's a freshman at one of the nearby universities and I'm a 42 year old with a job and a kid and a regular bedtime and all that.

So what?

well, this Sunn 0))) fan could be 19 yrs old, I can't off hand think of another scenario when one might go hang out with someone 20+ years younger apropos of an e-mail, of course that needn't be but realistically that's kind of awkward right? I'm only 31 but if I had walked into a rehearsal space full of teenagers a couple weeks ago I would have been mortified

and also tremendously embarrassed. other than the age thing though, no reason to be shy about being "not really good", if you've ever fucked around with anyone else, off or on, you are well, well ahead of the pack.

even I can remember a musicians classifieds section in the newspaper! sometimes I think music is just about as popular as ever, but making it is not exactly en vogue in 2016

I have been in bands that included suburban dads and youngsters; it generally works out fine.

My mother founded a chamber orchestra whose specific mission is to put older amateur musicians (generally retired) with young people who are still learning. It's all good. Just get out and play. Music is universal.

sheesh did you have a different username before?

also i recently heard of a pleasing success story about craigslist in my city (a band i really like came together thanks to a cl ad). meeting people irl and talking with strangers is fine (and gets easier) but it helps if you already know you have musical ideas in common (and it also reduces the awkwardness of struggling to convey to people who you are, what you want to do, what stuff you're into in the 2 minutes most people give a conversation with someone they don't know well)

my musical life is pretty good right now! playing a show at a DIY venue on Saturday with the synth-pop band I play with (the woman whose project it is calls it disco grunge, it's super fun to be the person who brings out the gnarly) and we recorded some stuff a few weeks ago. jamming with another friend like a mini-CAN (she's Irmin) and trying to get someone to let my other band (with ilxor n/a) play a show. it's not the easiest thing in the world but i'm working it while my students take their midterms. working on an EP with long-distance recording project too, and sometimes playing for fun with another drummer friend who has 2 kits in his practice space.

overall, pretty good!

also Puffin otm about age -- using it as an excuse for not playing just means you don't get to have fun/express yourself via music because you're limiting your options

i finally found a reliable practice space - it's a reservable uchicago room with a set of drums, so i don't have to move anything around. wish i could muffle the drums and toms because they're boooooomy as fuck and rapidly played notes on them get lost in the wash, but i can't complain too much.

my band forces at work has been together for like 4 years and we're finally putting out a 4-song EP, haha. sometime very soon! i think it turned out ok. as usual, kind of hard to tell when something is "finished."

I played with Damo last night!!! And it seemed to go down quite well, I think, though you rarely get people who hated your set come up and tell you so the people who do come up after the gig are a self-selecting sample of positive view-havers.

MORE INFO PLEASE!!

what kind of stuff did you play, what did he do, who else was playing? did you rehearse? was he friendly? i have a lot of questions

Yay Emily! LL otm! Did you chat with him?

whooaaaaa nice!

Most of the people who were playing were from Brighton/London and knew each other, but we also had Eda from Boredoms/Drum Eyes. The backing line-up was made up of violin - cello - guitar - synths - drums - toy instruments - percussion. He was really friendly but I was v starstruck and sick with nerves so kind of couldn't talk that much. We did have a few proper chats over cigarette breaks. Four of us had rehearsed together to get a feel for how we played but all eight of us only did maybe a ten-minute soundcheck? Damo gave a reasonable amount of input into what feel he was going for that night and gave us all a pre-game pep talk, and we had a kind of "pull the name out of the hat" thing to choose the order we'd all come onstage, which was pretty funny.

Yeah for me the age difference is weird; I'm a professor at a different university and even my juniors and seniors seem like little kids to me now. Plus, you know, crippling self-doubt, fear of the unknown, low self opinion, etc.

have been feeling pretty uninspired lately and it's putting me in one of those moods where i want to sell all my guitar gear and buy some obscure synthesizer or ancient instrument and focus on mastering something that no one else plays. it would be really nice to play something very compact and self-contained instead of having to deal with amps and cables and whatnot.

^I love the idea of selecting a really limited set of tools and making a group of tracks. Like one Casio keyboard and a couple of pedals, or one folder of samples and a couple specific plugins.

^^^ That's what's really generating a lot of work from me right now. I am limiting myself only to what I can do in the Nanostudio DAW app (which does not do straightforward audio tracks; any audio from a mic or from other apps has to be chopped into modest size chunks for use on the pads in its drum sampler, everything else has to come from the onboard synth). Have just about amassed enough stuff in this mode for a short album which hopefully will have some sort of a unified feel due to the limitations of means.

(LL one of the tracks has a stompin' 2-bar loop of your drumming from one of our collabos!)

ha, what? that's awesome! i wanna hear it!!

Yeah for me the age difference is weird; I'm a professor at a different university and even my juniors and seniors seem like little kids to me now. Plus, you know, crippling self-doubt, fear of the unknown, low self opinion, etc.
I'm a professor too! They do seem like kids. I don't necessarily want to play with kids either. The rest of that self-image stuff is within your control though, and speaking for myself, there's not enough time left in my life to give over one more second to any of those three things, or the etc. I'm in a phase of radical self-worth i guess.

there's not enough time left in my life to give over one more second to any of those three things

otm, even less left in mine!

I've been in a duo for 3+ years with a bandmate that's 14 years younger than me. I've played with people that much older than me too. Age is less "important" than complementary aesthetics, approaches to playing, and expectations. Enjoying their company is also important if you want a regular thing.

My best ever co-guitarist was when I was 22 and he was pushing 40, I had never been in a band and he had been in all kinds of them (I saw him for the first time in 20 yrs this spring and felt all mushy when he told me he also considered me his best foil ever)