Of Recordings

Everyone loves a mashup:

In other news, I’m on SoundCloud now! Let’s be friends.

For when you have guests.

1. Everyone writes down the name of one artist (in secret).

2. Create a new Pandora station from all the listed artists.

3. No song skips!  (Thumbs up are OK.)

Last year Tom at Music Thing (RIP)¹ had a nice bit for 808 day.  Those are big shoes to fill, but I couldn’t let 9.09.09 pass without a mention.

I tried to think of some quotes about the 909 but drew a blank.  The 808 was as common in hip-hop as in techno, while the 909 is exclusively a house and techno machine.  I enjoy listening to hip-hop, but I don’t really feel connected to hip-hop culture.  But I do feel like techno, and electronic music more generally, is part of me, not just something to consume but something to participate in.  Perhaps that why I am so fond of the 909.

Here’s Daft Punk:

Here’s Jeff Mills:

1. RIP to the blog, not to Tom.  As far as I know.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I recorded a mix.  Maybe two years?  Here’s a new one, full of vim and vigor.

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I hope you like it, cause it likes you.

I promise it will be less than two years before the next one.

Sorta hard to explain, so just check it out.

MS Paint Adventures is one part webcomic, one part crowd-sourced old school adventure game.  You probably should read/play the current story/game from the beginning.

I know I am late to the party, but I was out in the woods when it happened.

Curiously, the best blogging I read on the subject was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates a week before Jackson’s death:

Mike used to be beautiful. My sister Kelly just knew she was marrying him. And he danced so smooth and easy. I hate to think that what gave him that ability, was the same thing that ruined him.

After you start producing music everything sounds different. I rediscovered his music several years ago and was floored by the arrangement, production, songwriting, everything.  I know some of that credit is due to guys like Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien, but remember that MJ wrote a lot of his best songs.

If you write, perform, or produce music, you can learn something from Michael Jackson.

This is my favorite MJ video:

I like the suits.  I like the lean.  I like the hottie with the fan.  I even like the cheesy coin flip.  I love the D-50 bassline.*  The staccato delivery is now a staple of modern R&B-- listen to Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” for example.

Here is a short history of the moonwalk (HT: The Midnight Man):

*OK, I have no idea what kit they used.  It could be a D-50 though.

Did you know that rubber cement is the least useful adhesive known to man?  The only thing going for it is easy removal.  Really, far too easy removal.

So!  I made two improvements to my DIY Live footswitch.

First I pulled out the white springy parts on the surrounding keys so you don’t accidentally hit space when you’re trying to hit B.  (In case you’re not a Live user, space is the default key to stop all audio.)

Second I gave up on gluing the discs to the keys and elected to screw them on instead.  Drilling a hole in something as small as a computer key is a bit tricky, but it’s nothing a pair of vise grips can’t handle.

Now the footswitches don’t slip off all the time.  Truly, this dismal hack is road worthy.

I need a footswitch for Live so I can record and trigger clips while playing with both hands.  So I made one!  I wish I could claim credit for this ingeniously crappy foot controller, but I definitely heard the idea somewhere else earlier.  I can’t remember who or where, so whoever you are, props.

Here’s the basic, stolen idea: take a keyboard.  Rip out most of the keys.  Put something big on the remaining keys so you can mash them with your foot.  Map those keys in Ableton.

Here are my supplies:

• An old keyboard.  The computer kind, not the MIDI kind.  I have tons of these kicking around; you can also find them easily at thrift stores.
• A pack of those rubber discs that go under furniture to keep from scratching your floor.
• Rubber cement.  The latter two cost a combined $7.10 at the hardware store.

First I pulled all the keys off the bottom rows except for Z, V, M, and /.

After looking at the keyboard, then looking at my giant feet, I realized it would be impossible to hit just one of the middle buttons with shoes on.  So I gave up on a four-switch model and decided to go with three: Z, B, and period.

Next I used rubber cement to attach the keys to the rubber feet.  After a false start I found it necessary to use a giant blob of cement on the keys, enough to fill the whole indentation where your finger goes.

After letting it dry, I put the keys back on the keyboard.  I flipped them upside-down so the new footswitches would tilt down toward my feet, making them much easier to reach.

Finally, I plugged the keyboard into a spare USB port and mapped my footswitches to clip slots.  That’s it!  I have a super crappy but functional footswitch.  It cost less than ten bucks and took less than an hour of effort.

5. Korg padKontrol. The bottom left pad occasionally fails to send a note off.  I usually map that pad to the kick drum, which fortunately is not important in electronic music.

4. Faderfox LC2. The channel 4/channel 10/solo button is gummed up.  The other controls just feel so damn nice, making the sticky one even worse in comparison.  It feels like the button might loosen up after pounding on it some more so I am optimistic.

3. M-Audio Keystation Pro. I had to wipe down the keys.  After bangin on low D a few times, it’s no worse for the wear.  One of the knobs is too loose but that predates the coffee.

2. NI Audio Kontrol 1. No noticeable ill effects, although I think this guy was pretty well out of the danger zone.

1. The plank that I put on my keyboard stand to hold my laptop. I just wiped it down and bam, good as new.

So there is only one way to truly silence your studio: put everything with moving parts in a separate room and run a bunch of cables under the door.  Sadly, this is not practical for most of us.  A couple apartments ago, I actually had a setup like this, with my computer sitting in a hallway on the other side of a closed door.  It was blissfully quiet, but quite hazardous to cross the mess of cables when entering the room.  Since then I have not had the luxury of putting my gear in a room where I could close the door.

At any rate, if you don’t have another room to put your computer in, the next best thing is to make it quieter.  You can actually spend a ton of cash making your PC dead silent, but I recently got most of the way there for well under a hundred bucks.  The worst culprits are the things the move the most: the power supply (with its built-in cooling fan) and the CPU cooling fan.  Here’s what I got.

Nexus NX-3000 Real Silent PSU:  Well, “Real Silent” is a straight-up lie.  It’s very quiet, but 19 db(A) is not silent last I checked.  I still recommend it.  Some people might suggest that you need more than 300W from your PSU, but I don’t know if that applies to musical setups.  I run about a million USB-powered devices with no trouble.

Zalman CNPS9500 CPU fan: This is quite a monstrosity; the photos on the web site don’t really show how big it is.  Basically, the main way to make a quieter CPU cooler is to make the fan bigger and slower.  But of course a big slow fan doesn’t cool as well, so you need a bigger heat sink with lots of surface area to compensate.  This fan supports dynamic speed controls; in other words, the fan spins slowly at start and only increases in speed as needed.

In general, End PC Noise has a good selection of quiet computer parts.  I noticed that most web sites about customizing your PC are geared toward people who play video games, but musicians stand to gain just as much.