Truck

I will be playing at Truck this year - check the site for details.

Are you an American and do you like sports?

Yep, it's another sponsored post. What jewels of commerce will the internet throw at us this time, I wonder?

If you're after Yankee Stadium Tickets, Fenway Park Tickets or Wrigley Field Tickets, then why not go and have a look at A Cheap Seat? I'm guessing they're a Ticketmaster competitor: things certainly look that way.

Beyond that link, several exciting images loop around, including one which might possibly be Shakira. This was definitely my favourite: the football players hugging really did nothing for me.

There's also a strident-looking green lady who's probably from Wicked or something like that. I've never seen Wicked and don't plan to at any time in the near future: I'm incredibly distrustful of modern musicals.

Anyway, yes, go there for your tickets and such. If you're American. Win.

That's the end once more - off we go back into the blogosphere.

ShopWiki

This is a sponsored post, as if you couldn't guess.

I've not really found a good online price aggregator, so I was actually mildly intrigued to hear about ShopWiki.com, which crawls sites using a Google-esque algorithm rather than simply re-posting a load of sponsored links.

They're harping on about getting good deals on Wii's, video games in general, game bundles and Wii accessories.

It currently seems US-centric - I would like to see a UK version for obvious reasons. However the interface is pretty good and maybe they're going places. We'll see if it stands up to the likes of Froogle, which never really took off for me.

That's the end of this gubbins. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled nervoustestpilot.co.uk.

For Sale: 1 Yamaha RM1x

Yep, it's on Ebay.

I'll be quite sad to see this go as I used it to do my very first gigs at The Cellar, Truck and elsewhere. It's a good bit of kit and it does have a few quite weird sounds in it I haven't heard anywhere else. Take a look at the auction if you fancy it!

Visiting the Village

I've been working on a podcast over at Mode 7 Games entitled Visiting the Village. It's a gaming podcast primarily, and there are lots of those around, but we're going for something a bit different: more of a US-sports talk-show style punchy discussion format with informed opinions and no "LOOK AT THIS AWESOME SCREENSHOT" nonsense. Anyway, Visiting the Village, for all your gaming podcast needs - check out Episode 2 which is out now.

Some Awesome Public Domain Audio Resources

So, as per my previous post, I was on the hunt for some genuinely copyright-free sampling material.

Through Electronic Musician, I came across the Prelinger Archive, a brilliant trove of old adverts, public service announcements and so on, all properly Creative Commons and guilt-free.

Also LibriVox, which is essentially CC amateur readings of books and poems.

A massive collection of foley / instrument samples / speech /everything you can imagine can be found here at the One Laptop Per Child project.

These should keep me going for a while!

"What software do you use?"

It's the ultimate noob question.

I've seen two cultures where newbies come onto forums and ask questions: programming and music production. In both, it appears, if you want a question answered, you have to do the following:

1. Demonstrate that you've already learned how to do obvious things

If what you want to do is something other people will think is trivial, like "how do I make a sound with this VST" or "how to I load this VST in Sequencer X" (people still ask stuff like this), then you won't get an answer.

2. Demonstrate that you've put significant effort into solving the problem

If you haven't tried on your own then why should anyone else try for you? Some people don't know what VST to use. If they said, "I tried V-station and I didn't like the editing, or I tried Sylenth but it's a bit too complicated for me because I'm a beginner", then they probably deserve consideration.

3. Demonstrate that you're not a prick

If someone is a nice person, and asks politely, they should get a polite answer. There's obvious ways to do this on forums.

Now, back to "what software do you use?" I read an interview with Tiesto in CM recently: it was probably the worst music tech interview I've ever read. That's absolutely no disrespect to the guy who wrote it - we all know how these things work. He was obviously struggling to get anything.

Everyone's keen on bashing Tiesto: I've never had a reason to until now. He was such a complete dick in that interview: he absolutely refused to discuss any techincal details of anything. When asked about synths he gave the usual, "Oh it doesn't matter what synth you use..." stock answer.

Rick Smith from Underworld did this in an interview I read years ago - it really frustrated me at the time because I love Underworld! Now, I know it doesn't matter what synth you use...ooops.

Anyway, there will be a load of idiots in the world who "want to sound like Tiesto" and want to know what synths he has. The "it doesn't matter what synth you use" answer is there to deflect the low level idiots who have never even used a synth: it's an encouragement to make some damn music first and then worry about all that stuff afterwards.

But, what happens when you have made some music? Recommendations are useful.

I'll tell you something: I, and a lot of other producers, quite like knowing what synths people are favouring. It's just information to build in when we consider a new purchase. For example, I was looking into Sylenth quite heavily, then I happened across an Airbase tutorial where he mentioned that he's really into it. Sylenth really suits his sound: it's good for sounds in that direction as well as lots of other things.

Similarly, I bought Quantum Leap RA after I interviewed Inon Zur and he mentioned it; ditto Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra with Richard Jacques. Other things, I've researched and bought on my own.

So, if you're a producer and you get interviewed, what should you do?

As Airbase continually shows, there's absolutely no need to hide all your "secrets" - all of the popular things are already caned to death by everyone under the sun; you're not protecting anything. However, while it's your right to keep some things private, that doesn't give you any justification to deflect all your readers as idiots. Not everyone who reads music tech magazines is a noob: especially CM, which has improved wholesale over the last few years to the point where a lot of the content is extremely valid for professionals.

The next time someone polite, who is making an honest effort to learn, asks you what synths you use, why don't you tell them?

Sampling

I was watching Videodrome last night for the first time and kept noticing some very dark, potentially breakdown-worthy samples throughout.

A younger me would have just ripped the audio straight away...an older me waited until this morning and found out that the DVD had already been sent away in its little Lovefilm packet...but anyway...

I'm basically scared of using samples from movies now because I don't want there to be any barrier to my tracks getting a release. I don't want to cause any problems for a label so I just leave everything nicely legal.

Lawsuits over samples only happen to extremely popular tunes, but what if (for example) one of my tracks got licensed to a compilation? Anyway, the point is not that I'm likely to have a Top 10 EUROHIT at any point in the next five years, but that sampling is seen as an impediment to a legal release by a lot of labels.

I tended to use speech samples really prominently in my older stuff because I basically knew it was for a small audience and nobody would ever bat an eyelid. Loads of musicians do the same.

Obviously, you are using someone else's work and not paying them for it - a friend made the point to me a few years ago that a great deal of effort has to be put in to get movie sound to a finished state, and simply grabbing a cool-sounding vocal snippet from the soundtrack is essentially piggybacking on a load of people.

But fundamentally, it makes me sad. It sucks the fun out of production: the era where you could just grab anything is gone and that's definitely, categorically a bad thing for electronic music.

I actually don't know if I should just bash on regardless, get to the stage where labels are willing to shoulder the burden or negotiate for rights on my behalf, or if I have to leave this side of my production behind.

The Orb

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTy4-OjscAQ

I can't embed this video because, while Universal want to make some content free, they don't want it to be free free. It's Toxygene by the Orb: the Jean-Michelle Jarre-sampling techno-dub masterpiece.

I was reminded of this earlier when talking about 90's dance stuff and remembered their ridiculous Top of the Pops performance. The only reference I can find to that is here - YouTube doesn't seem to have it (someone correct this!)

My nostalgia is generally confined to hyper-specific personal incidents, but I do have some 90's nostalgia - ridiculous dance music could cross over into the mainstream and cause a huge stir. Deadmau5 is probably the only good example of this in recent years: basically hardcore dance that has "it" in a pop way. The Orb were different because they were riding a huge cultural wave: they tripped off the edge of rave culture and landed in art-dance. I love the sounds in that track, the "offensive" Jarre-sampling, the faux-disturbing video, the "trippy" freeform nature of it and the driving, driving dubby bassline. It really caught my ear when I first heard it, and I continue to respect The Orb and all their excesses.