NatchDan.com

Ahoy there, mateys.

If you look to your right, you’ll see that there is a new page under “Music”: A page one which I have collected my favourite songs that I wrote during February Album Writing Month 2008.

Now, if FAWM is the sprint, I’m now taking part in the marathon - Fifty Songs In Ninety Days, which is being generously hosted by FAWM this year. My artist page can be found here - wish me luck!

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Beck has confessed that most of the lyrics on Odelay are complete gibberish - scratch vocals that he never replaced.

Kind of makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I found this link on the wonderful FAWM forums - join us!

Work continues on polishing Evolution, hopefully to be finished soon - however, I wouldn’t expect it to be before March. That’s because FAWM is almost upon us once again! Yes, fourteen songs in twenty-eight days - but wait. This is a leap year! No problem, they say. Do us fourteen and a half.

Genius!

Sadly, some bad news on the internet music front is that Pandora, the internet music recommendation service, has been forced to block UK IPs from the site - meaning that it is now a purely US site and is in danger of going under even there. To help fill the hole Pandora leaves, I humbly recommend SeeqPod - It crawls search engines and streams you the results. Perfect if you have a song you HAVE TO LISTEN TO RIGHT NOW.

I just thought I’d let you guys know a couple of things that I use to make my music, and the places that I get them from.

(Spiritual Awakening, FAWM 2007)

All of the orchestral sounds on this are part of the Squidfont Orchestral soundfont, available here. Also available on that site are some soundfonts from the nigh-legendary Nando Florestan.

Catherine, TBA 2007

(Audio Not Yet Available)

On this track I use the free Mellotron VST called TapeWorm from the frankly wonderful TweakBench. He has a wide range of VST instruments and effects all for free, and a kicking Nintendo naming scheme for some of them.

While this may not seem like a very exhaustive list, these are two very powerful tools and two very useful websites with far more to offer than I’m sure I use them for. Check them out!

Ahoy there. Just to let you know how things are coming along with the new album, there are three songs complete, two written but not completely recorded, and one in the works with Mr Tim Wille - and only ONE of those is an instrumental. Featured on one of the finished tracks and one of the mostly-finished tracks is The Rumored End (MySpace link) (FAWM link). I’m also hoping to get Isaac Quatorze on at least one track - I contributed to one of his FAWM tracks this year. Another collaborator I’m hoping to work with is a very busy man indeed, so I won’t link him just yet in case it doesn’t come to fruition.

The moral, kids? Do FAWM next year. You’ll drop into the most useful and talented music community you could possibly hope to.

Here, have a teaser.

Hallo. It’s been a while.

February Album Writing Month was a challenge that, last year, gave me two songs to use for WERX. This year it’s given me the bones of an entire concept album which, fingers crossed, will be ready by the end of April. Go check out the site and listen to the incredible amount of talent over there.

Secondly, there’s new stuff on the site! Namely, the addition of a Flash player to the album pages so you can listen to tracks without having to download those hefty zip files.

To show off the new player, and also to air a track that’ll probably never be heard otherwise, take a listen to the first track of an album I gave up work on because My Chemical Romance came out with The Black Parade and the idea was too similar. This is called The Theme Of Dr. T, and it can also be found on the new “Randoms” page for musical orphans on the right hand side there.