Theoretically I’m spending Sunday afternoon and Sunday night recording Tory Staples on drums for my album.  However in reality we will be escaping the studio for a while for a gig.  The gig is at The Crib Bar 151 Ponsonby Road, Auckland New Zealand, kicks off around 6pm and I’d love to see you there!

This song is very much a half finished WIP.  I lost my voice last week after a cold, and when I tried to sing this on Friday I got only one terrible take done before my voice gave out again.  So I will definitely be redoing the vocals on this!

It has recently come to my attention, that there are people out there who don’t know what WIP stands for.  WIP = Work in Progress.  There you go.  I usually use the term to refer to something that isn’t finished yet, something that is in fact, a work in progress

I am trying out a new WordPress plug-in called Podpress.  Unlike the previous media player I’ve been using (I think it’s called Wimpy) this one should show up in the RSS feed.  I guess I’ll find out soon.

Special thanks again to Michelle Klaessens (The Rock Factory) for a fabulous mastering job, Mark Towl (Stapleton) on drums, and Mike Johns (Revolution Brother) on lead guitar.

The Gear (because recording is always just an excuse to play with fun things!):

The song was entirely recorded and mixed at home in Cubase, with my ancient Tascam US122 USB interface.  I used Adobe Audition for a little wave form editing in the form of noise removal on a funny hiss from the piano (must try solve that some day).

The Drums are recorded from the line out of a Yamaha DTXpress electric drum kit – thanks to Go West Music Henderson for the loan.

The piano is a line out taken from my Yamaha CLP-230 Clavinova via a stereo headphone output

The rhythm guitar is my 1999 Ibanez RG520 (V7 and V8 pickups) played through my Peavey Triple X head and Peavey 5150 cab, which is mic’d up with an Audix OM2 dynamic mic and an Audio Technica AE6100 dynamic mic.

The lead guitar is Mikes Fender Strat played through his bizarre set-up involving an amp that’s rewired to bypass some bit of it and another external unit.  I’ll have to ask him about it sometime because I didn’t pay much attention at the time.

The vocals are me singing though an Audix OM2 straight into the interface, that was turned up to the max to get a bit of distortion going on. (In hindsight this was probably not the best way to do it! )

A huge congratulations to ERIC HOGAN on finishing this big project.  Erik is a talented indie game designer from Auckland NZ and he has developed Derelict in his spare time over the last 9 months.  You can download Derelict for free from his website.

Notes on sound design for Derelict.

I came into this project as it was nearing completion, there were already a lot of sounds in the game from various soundbanks, and already three tracks of music from the other musicians Samuel Gavin, Edward Clombe, and Bill Norris.  I wrote two additional tracks and began working on the sound effects.

One of my favorite effects is the sound the teleport module makes in the game.  The teleport looks like a cylindrical blue forcefield, and monsters are transported onto the ship through them. I created the sound for these by plugging an instrument lead into my recording interface, and moved my thumb about on the hot end creating sounds like electrical hum.  Then I just chucked in a little phaser, a touch of reverb and that was it.

The sounds the monsters make in the game were a lot of fun to do.  I used my Digitech Vocal300 vocal effects processor to pitch shift the signal down and my old reliable Audix OM2 dynamic mic.  Just recorded snarling and lurking and scary breathing all pitched down, again a touch of reverb to replicate the sound of a big deserted spaceship.

The footsteps were the most challenging sound for me.  Because these sounds were recorded at home not in a studio to keep the budget down as this is not a commercial project, keeping out the background noise was a bit of an issue.  Especially when weather is involved.  But if it’s not weather it’s dogs barking, neighbors mowing the lawn, or people driving past.  In the end, I found the best way for me was to use a dynamic mic instead of my condenser, and to manually silence all the sound between the footsteps.  The dynamic mic was a tough choice because I had to get it much closer to my feet for the recording than I had my condenser, so it was tricky to walk realistically in one spot while being careful not to kick the microphone or tread too hard so that vibration traveled up the mic stand into the mic.  All in all, I’m reasonably happy with how the footsteps came out.

Here are the music tracks I wrote for Derelict.

I found this video on a blog I read called open culture. I had heard a lot about these patterns, they are sometimes used in acoustic instrument making, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it. These patterns called Chladni Patterns after Ernst Chladni who apparently invented this technique in the 1700′s.

The study of the visualization of sound is called Cymatics, here is an extract from an interesting article called Cymatics – The Art Of Sound by Katherine M.J. Osbourne.

“Cymatics and Music

Music is not a linear experience, it is four-dimensional. The sound is produce through the vibration of strings in roughly one dimension (the string has thickness). Surfaces and cavities (such as the body of a violin) vibrate in two and three dimensions. All the vibrations propagate in three dimensions through space. The air in a room filled with music is vibrating, and the shape and material of the walls also have resonant frequencies just as the instruments do. Cymatic visualization is used as a tool in acoustics to develop high quality instruments and sound systems. A movie theater outfitted with a THX or Dolby sound system has been optimized for a pleasurable aural experience by analyzing the building materials, placement of speakers, and other considerations.”

I find it very fascinating to be able to ‘see sound’. Even zooming in and seeing the wave-form representation in recording software is of endless entertainment to me. It amazes me the way something can be both so simple and so complex at the same time.

What do you think about visual representations of sound?

What is New Zealand Music Month?

According to the NZ history website …

New Zealand Music Month began in 2001. Each May, New Zealand music is showcased on radio and television and in live performances.

New Zealand Music Month aims to boost the visibility and success of New Zealand music. It was developed to support the New Zealand music industry by creating a commercially successful platform for local performers. In 2000 airtime for New Zealand music on commercial radio stations made up around 10% of programming. By 2005 this figure had increased to nearly 23%. The amount of New Zealand music sold increased from 5.45% of the total market in 2000 to over 10% by 2004.

Us NZers are lucky to have a whole month in celebration of NZ music! It’s not just about going out and buying a CD by a NZ musician though… Get out and go to gigs, learn an instrument, start a band or get your mates over for a jam. Tell your friends about your favorite NZ bands. Support, celebrate and enjoy NZ music.

My 5 favorite New Zealand bands/artists this May are…

1. Matt Thomas – I heard Matt’s song “Come back round” late one night on a drive home and just couldn’t get it out of my head for the rest of the trip. Love it

2. Battle Circus These guys are cool. I always seem to have their song “Send in the Clones” floating about in my MP3 player. I love the way they muck about with odd time signatures.

3. Plum Green I heard about Plum Green through a friend of mine, the production/recording on some of the songs is a little rough but the songs themselves are beautiful. My fav is “Below the Water”.

4. Infinite Flying Kick I love to see IFK play live! They’re fantastic My fav IFK song is “Sad Robot”.

5. Crash Test for Favorite Things I don’t believe I’ve been to one of their gigs yet, but I somehow ended up on their mailing list and after spending half a year deleting their spam I finally gave in and checked out there website – and there’s some really great music on it

There are heaps of great NZ bands, but I’ve just listed 5 for today so as not to overwhelm readers with a spectacular Spaghetti of links. I will list another 5 next week.

I’ve done a bit of reading around the dub dub dub after googling “Why is music important” and something I was surprised at was the number of articles on why music is important for brain development in children. Thinking back, this is probably what got my parents into forcing me to take piano lessons from an early age. (What they didn’t count on was me getting a dose of rock n roll and throwing out eight years of classical piano lessons to play the electric guitar, not to mention dying my hair pink and dropping out of school…). Anyway, to the point, humans are fantabulous pattern recognising creatures. It’s what helped us to find food back when we were monkey people, it’s what causes us to be superstitious, and it’s what makes us like music. It’s all about repetition, and recognising repetition as part of a pattern. Learning to recognise patterns when you’re young (eg music lessons…) will no doubt help you to recognise patterns in other areas like Maths. Maths is just full of patterns and repetition. As is science – all that cause and effect (not to mention all the maths involved in science). I’m not certain music will help you get a good mark in English though. I still think the English language is daft. I before E, except after C, except for sometimes when it’s just not. Oh the daftness! Thank god for spell-check Wait, I take that back. The language does follow patterns, sentence structures, and then there’s poetry which is basically all about lyrics right? It’s just the spelling which is daft. And having words that are spelt the same and sound different like “wind” and “wind”

Wikianswers says “Music is important to the economy“. So there you go, I read it on the net so it must be true Actually, I’m sure it is true. But, music is not important to ME because it’s important to the economy. And it’s all about me, so I’ll just say nothing about that subject. Wikianswers also says “Music is not important; it is simply inevitable. It is as inevitable as language, mathematics and art. We are wired (and driven) to organize the elements of our experience into things of balance and beauty.” I like that answer a lot. It’s neat and to the point. Unlike my rambling uncertain essay of an answer

I also came across an article written by a guy called Martin Willet who has some very strong opinions on why music is not as important as those evil musicians make out…

“Young people are like sheep. If they constantly get the message that music is the most important thing in their life they begin to internalize it. Hitler would be proud of his protégés, they have proved his point that if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough people will believe it. Not only believe it but be willing to kill for it. The big lie is that music really matters and life without music is unthinkable.”

I personally think, he’s a bit extreme.

I don’t know why music is important to me personally, but it really is. I’d call myself crazy if I started saying “I was born to play music” or anything like that (seriously, I know I suck). But I have chosen the path of the starving musician that will almost definitely lead to me spending the rest of my life working in music instrument retail while moonlighting as a guitar tech. But, I’d still much rather do that than anything else with my life