Spies Amongst the Stars...

...is the name of the new album (cat# SDC17). You can get it here.

We Seek Connection

The new single is up (Catalog # SDC16):

A Side: We Seek Connection

B Side: Connected

Get it here.

Remixes

A couple of remixes I did for my friend's band, The Volt Per Octaves, are now here. The tracks are Mellologue and Origami.

New SDC Album: Wyrdlings

New for 2009 is the album Wyrdlings (CAT#: SDC15). You can download it for free here.

Dirty Drums

Getting drum sounds can sometimes be a whole day of trial and error. It isn’t always easy to get the sound you have in your head out into your DAW. That is where effects come in. While applying effects to drums has been around for quite a long time, it always fascinates me what a little “color” can do to an otherwise adequate drum sound.

 Take, for instance, this idea I started on Christmas 2008 and finally finished last week. The drum sounds I used were nice but they needed a little extra flavor. Although applying some reverb gave them a little space, the drums were crying out for something more. I remembered that I had bough this great Reason Refill called Filter Research. It took me about an hour of trying various patches but I found the texture that would enhance the drums and add an overall balance to the track. Specifically, the Cutoff and Resonance knobs on this patch proved crucial in generating the tone for the drums. Medium low Cutoff and Medium Resonance settings provided the drums with a slight metallic bite that fit well with the rest of the track.

 Here is the clean version and here is the dirty version.

New EP for the new year

The new ep titled Concrete & Ice is available here.

Lo-Fi Digital

Lo_Fi sounds seem to be happening all around the music industry these days. Circuit bending is one technique that many people seem to have become enamored with. I admit, it is fascinating to see people crack open children’s pianos and other assorted electronic toys and tinker with them to make them do things they were never designed to do. Overall, it never really has interested me to try this and add it to my music however; I have been inspired by some Richard Devine pieces as well as the recently released Steven Jansen album Slope.

I took some of this inspiration and used my old digital voice recorder that I would use when I taped lectures in class. Yes, the device is digital but within that realm, it is what I call lo-fi digital. At the high quality setting, it records at 44.1 kHz and only in mono. The frequency range is between 100 – 12,000 Hz in HQ mode. This means that I still get some fluttering noises in the higher frequencies, which produces some nice artifacts depending on what you are shooting for.

Beginning in January, you will hear the results of my samples produced through this with the release called Concrete & Ice. All I can say is, it is quite different from what I’ve done before but it retains the essence of Small Dot Complex.