NatchDan.com

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.

Hello, folks. How’ve you been?

It struck me the other day, whilst viewing the excellent Jonathan Coulton’s website, that I can’t possibly hope to keep or build a fanbase if I leave my precious site here dormant. So, sorry about that.

There are a few pieces of news that I should share with you all. Firstly, the Music For A Film EP is no longer for sale - it was a nice experiment, but I think I need to stick to free music for now. A free download will be coming shortly, so if you didn’t get a copy then not to fret.

Second, everything I do in future will be put out under the name The Approximation, the main reason being that if I actually do get a band together sometime then we’ll be already set.

Last, but not least, remember that album I was working on many moons ago? It is about to become The Approximation’s first release. The tracklisting is as follows:

01. March
02. The Walls
03. Rocking
04. SPC
05. 11
06. Ten Lies
07. Do You Know?
08. Five
09. Lay Back
10. Wanted
11. Time

Awesome. Now, if you would like to be a fan of The Approximation on the dreaded Facebook, click here. If you would like to hear a little something I’ve been up to for fun, click here.

PS: If you’d like to see some footage of me in action, click here.

I’ll tell you what it is - It’s a brand new NatchDan album! Yessir! Created as part of the AAD project, Triad was written and recorded from midnight to 10am July 16 2007. And it’s a corker, if I do say so myself. Go listen!

Folks, I want to sit you down and have a talk. I am selling a CD. This does not mean that I have abandoned you, oh no! I will still be providing plenty of free music for you all. This CD is not album #3 - it is an EP. You can see a button to buy it over there on the left, or, if you want more information on the disc, you can go to its page.

On this disc, you will find uncompressed versions of four songs you know (including a slight remix/remaster of Rid Of You) and three new songs you don’t, including that nine-minute thing I was referring to in the last post, not featuring The Rumored End.

Papa needs a new pair of shoes.

Also coming up, a set at the Musician in Leicester where I will be giving Rid Of You and Charlotte their live acoustic debuts. I will let you all know how it goes.

Also also, I have set up a YouTube channel. This means a few acoustic videos from me as well as music videos put together by anyone who wishes to. Want to have a shot? Make a video and give me the YouTube link! Available so far: Rid Of You, Acoustic.

I also want to thank everyone out there who listens to me for your support. It really means a lot to me.

So I received a spam comment today for “lawyer Phoenix”.

…

Yeah, you all know what I’m thinking.

A piece of music that I’ve impressed myself with coming up, folks. It won’t be on the album for a couple of reasons (One being it’s almost ten minutes long), so as soon as I get the extra guitar part from The Rumored End it’ll be on the blog.

Exciting!

So. Farewell then, Pandora. Due to new internet radio licensing restrictions, the best recommendation station out there has had to end its service to anyone outside the US, even Canadians. This equates to a kind of ridiculous greediness on the part of the licensers, who have made it difficult for Pandora since the day it was opened. For the same reason you will note the BKWR page missing from my site now. I can’t afford licenses like that. Most people can’t.

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.

I have just started a weekly web radio show on Blue Kaffee Web Radio. You can listen live here at 10:30pm GMT Fridays, or you may have noticed the new BKWR page on the right hand side there - this contains a flash player and download link, as well as a tracklist. This is updated shortly after the broadcast every week.

This week’s theme: Electricity! Rock on.

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.