Music
Flight of the Conchords
2008-02-25
Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie make up Fight of the Conchords, a kind of parody folk group from New Zealand. Click the image above to see them sing Business Time live on stage. "It's Wednesday, and Wednesday night is the night we make luuurve... Conditions are perfect; there's nothing on TV". They are clearly having a ton of fun.
I prefer their live performances over the music videos. Be sure to watch The Humans Are Dead, Jenny, Albi The Racist Dragon, Bowie Song, Something for the Ladies, Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, and Issues.
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Music For The Holiday Season
2007-12-24
Each holiday season I get time to play with Garageband and add slightly to my musical skills. This year's creation is called Faraway Home (2m 30s, 192kbps AAC):
[You should be able to see a Quicktime controller above and play it straight from the blog. If you don't, see the iCompositions link at the bottom of this entry.]
It is loop-free and made of nine tracks: two lead, two bass, two percussion, two rhythm, and one atmospheric. To hear it well you need some good bass to reproduce the very low notes. I'm using Garageband 3 on Tiger, a 24" iMac and a 49-key M-Audio keyboard.
This time around I set out to create all my instruments, and find a way of getting some emotion into the piece. This is tricky because my musical skills are limited and I don't have a lot of experience with synths. Along the way I discovered how useful the track echo can be.
I started out experimenting with track echo and had two instruments derived from a synth pad, one in each ear:
The track echo takes into consideration the beat of the music, so it can be used to create extra notes, especially with tremolo and auto-panning. That experimentation led to a version that made the left ear lead the right ear by a very short time interval, letting the echo do most of the work.
I needed an atmosphere, so toned down the pinging sound of the other two tracks and created a background from another synth pad instrument. That had some very nice resonances in it.
Then I modified a synth texture to create a "thump" note and used them in pairs for a heartbeat. That went into one ear and a drum from the rock kit in the other ear. At this point some sort of a start to the piece came together:
To add some bass and melody I modified a bass guitar to make a muted twangy sound and used the track echo to create extra notes for me.
I needed more bass than that for more of a punch, so I used a different bass combined with a bass amplifier and some heavy filtering to get really deep pure notes. The lower of the two is actually two notes an octave apart:
Now I'm getting somewhere musical. But there is no lead and no emotion. After a lot of experimentation I got the sound I wanted: a twangy guitar sound from a synth. The lead is a modified synth lead that responded very well to the pitch blend wheel on my keyboard. The final trick was to add reverb to just that track.
I created two tracks separately, expecting to make one from parts of the two, but once I played them both together, realized that I could have a duet. Finally I created an end, worked on the beginning some more, adjusted the levels and panning, and tweaked everything.
I'm not sure how it stands up on its own. It would be good as part of a movie, an atmospheric background to a car journey in the rain or something like that. I will put it up on iCompositions with my other music.
[You should be able to see a Quicktime controller above and play it straight from the blog. If you don't, see the iCompositions link at the bottom of this entry.]
It is loop-free and made of nine tracks: two lead, two bass, two percussion, two rhythm, and one atmospheric. To hear it well you need some good bass to reproduce the very low notes. I'm using Garageband 3 on Tiger, a 24" iMac and a 49-key M-Audio keyboard.
This time around I set out to create all my instruments, and find a way of getting some emotion into the piece. This is tricky because my musical skills are limited and I don't have a lot of experience with synths. Along the way I discovered how useful the track echo can be.
I started out experimenting with track echo and had two instruments derived from a synth pad, one in each ear:
The track echo takes into consideration the beat of the music, so it can be used to create extra notes, especially with tremolo and auto-panning. That experimentation led to a version that made the left ear lead the right ear by a very short time interval, letting the echo do most of the work.
I needed an atmosphere, so toned down the pinging sound of the other two tracks and created a background from another synth pad instrument. That had some very nice resonances in it.
Then I modified a synth texture to create a "thump" note and used them in pairs for a heartbeat. That went into one ear and a drum from the rock kit in the other ear. At this point some sort of a start to the piece came together:
To add some bass and melody I modified a bass guitar to make a muted twangy sound and used the track echo to create extra notes for me.
I needed more bass than that for more of a punch, so I used a different bass combined with a bass amplifier and some heavy filtering to get really deep pure notes. The lower of the two is actually two notes an octave apart:
Now I'm getting somewhere musical. But there is no lead and no emotion. After a lot of experimentation I got the sound I wanted: a twangy guitar sound from a synth. The lead is a modified synth lead that responded very well to the pitch blend wheel on my keyboard. The final trick was to add reverb to just that track.
I created two tracks separately, expecting to make one from parts of the two, but once I played them both together, realized that I could have a duet. Finally I created an end, worked on the beginning some more, adjusted the levels and panning, and tweaked everything.
I'm not sure how it stands up on its own. It would be good as part of a movie, an atmospheric background to a car journey in the rain or something like that. I will put it up on iCompositions with my other music.
Music From Air
2007-12-12
Air, a French band, makes some really great music to work to. Above is a live video: Talisman. I prefer the album versions because they are so much more polished. Be sure to hear La Femme D'Argent (album version set to the video of a sonogram or live), Biological, Another Day, and Alone in Kyoto. Lots more on You Tube.
Thomas Dolby Is Getting A Lifeboat
2007-12-04
Thomas Dolby (yes, that Thomas Dolby) is having a lifeboat delivered:
You can read all about it on his blog. And I thought it was submarines he was missing.I’m going to sleep on it, but I think I’ve found my lifeboat. She’s on blocks on a farm in Berkshire, about as far from the sea as she could get, and still be on the British mainland. She’s somewhat neglected—in fact the owners are planning to burn her unless I buy her this week—but she has enormous potential. A lovely mahogany interior, and a wheelhouse to die for. I’m not going to tell you any more about her until I make up my mind, but let me just say this: she is a boat born out of necessity, and if I decide she’s the one for me, I will abandon myself to a whole new romance with a wonderful ship, the open sea, and my imagination a blank sheet of manuscript to fill with the soundtrack!
The Making Of Dark Side Of The Moon
2007-10-21
Fifty minutes about the making of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon can be found on Google Video: Part 1 and Part 2.
I had seen bits and pieces of this before, but not all of it in one place. It goes through the whole album track by track, talking to the people who made it, describing and showing how it was done. There was no mixing automation in 1973, so mixing an album was, as they say in the documentary, a performance in itself. Many people were needed to manually move every slider and change every effect at exactly the right time.
Pink Floyd On The BBC In 1968
2007-07-17
This six-minute piece from a long-running BBC science show called Tomorrow's World tries to predict the future of special effects for rock concerts. Of course this is 1968, so pretty much everything to do with rock concerts had still to be invented. Pink Floyd went on to be the band to beat when it came to live shows.
Wish You'd Been There -- The History Of Pink Floyd
2007-04-16
Originally broadcast by the BBC in 2002, this excellent two-part radio series about Pink Floyd features the band members, people who worked with them and knew them, and of course their music. It's about three hours in total, presented in Real Audio format in four parts (the last two are in the wrong order) so you'll either need the Real player, or VLC to listen to it.
Dave Gilmour hasn't done too badly out of the whole thing either, as a tour of his floating studio on the Thames shows in an episode of the BBC's Three Men In A Boat (Google Video, 5 mins). That link also has many other Pink Floyd clips.
Scott's Challenge
2006-12-26
On his blog Scott Stevenson has challenged Mac and Cocoa bloggers to post a recording of themselves playing a guitar or other instrument. Since I don't really play anything, I have to cheat and use Garageband. Here is an orchestral thing I created that includes strings, a grand piano, and a sax: download MP3 or AAC approx 2MB, 2:20.
It does what it was intended to do: create a mood and not be too repetitive. Real musicians could do much better.
It does what it was intended to do: create a mood and not be too repetitive. Real musicians could do much better.
Music
2006-07-29
I've tried my hand at composing some things musical over the last few years. You can hear my five attempts at music at iCompositions. I have a 49 key USB keyboard and Garageband. My favorite (and most complicated piece) is called From Behind The World. I hope you like flutes. I am unskilled musically, so it is very difficult for me to improve things beyond a certain point. I certainly find mixing very hard.
It's interesting what Garageband has done. It's reinvigorated many, many people who have dabbled in music but never had the barrier to entry lowered far enough for them. If there is one word that sums up Apple's business philosophy, it is Passion. Find something that people care about passionately and sell them things that feed that passion. Music. Composing. Running. Coding. Photography. Movies. Writing. Teaching. Remove barriers and noise. Let me focus.
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