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.
Man, have I ever managed a coup in the artists I’ve got collaborating with me. This new album’s going to be something special, guys.
First off, shout-out to Brian. Hi, Brian!
As you may have noticed, I’ve managed to uncover awful things about the music business with startling frequency recently. Well, there’s more. Steve Albini, legendary studiohand behind such acts as Pixies, has this to say about your friends who have just joined a label: This is how fucked they are.
Work is continuing apace on album #3, probably my most together and professional sounding yet. My aim is to have some kind of collaboration on every track. Anyone up for that? It’ll be a freebie, as per, and hopefully it’ll be appearing here in the next couple of months.
It’s Friday night, folks, which means tonight is my show on BKWR. Don’t miss it! See the page for details.
There was a technical error (Read: I screwed up) this week, so there’s no archive of the 13/04/07 show. You can, however, enjoy last week’s show for a week longer because of this! You lucky people.
Two things I want to pimp out to you today: Firstly, The Turtles discuss record labels. Secondly, every Thursday night DS Fanboy has a game night, for all wi-fi enabled Nintendo DS games. Join us!
Ahoy there, listeners.
Work on the concept album I mentioned has slowed due to a variety of factors - a lot of it needs to be re-recorded, and some of it I’m just plain not happy with - and so work has begun on my third album proper. A likely addition to this album will be my first SongFight entry. SongFight is a musician’s challenge where you are given a title and you have to write a song to fit that title. This week’s title - Ten Lies - just grabbed me so much I had to jump in.
Also on the internet of note this week is this interview with Dick Dale, who you may not know by name, but he’s the guitarist who played the version of Misirlou on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and can play like you can breathe. He has some interesting views on the music industry that he imparts for free in the video.
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.
The big news around here lately is that my second album, How To Fall, has just been released for free download from this very site. It can be obtained right over here as a zip file.
I have been enlightened to the benefits of placing all of my music available for free under a Creative Commons “some rights reserved” license, and to celebrate this I would like to encourage remixes and covers or alternate takes of any song from WERX (found here) or How To Fall. The one condition is that they must too be available for free! Record them, upload them somewhere and leave the link as a comment.
I am a rocker. I rock out.
Creative Commons License