what is going on in your musical life

roxy i regret not buying one of your lps for sale when i saw you -- i really really enjoyed the show!! i'm interested in your songwriting process tbh but this is probably not the place to ask

runes are involved iirc

not really, theyre just involved in how we map out the riff order for later reference
ok runes are involved

Heez, that's a really nice song. I don't say this often, but good guitar solo.

Thanks!! You're the second person today to compliment me on that solo. Feeling confident :)

<iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/86803085" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/86803085";>Burning Cactus/Craigslist Lament</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user13924429";>Andrea Magenheimer</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com";>Vimeo</a>.</p>

Here is a song and video I made. Questions and comments welcome.

Oh goddamn it. fine. https://vimeo.com/86803085

The other day I changed my workstation by doing a simple place-switching of key objects: my computer monitor is now at head level so that I can record standing up, (crucially) free of the goodvibe-killing tendencies of that miserable miserable chair, while my preamp/monitor is now at hip level with the keyboard. This changes everything, no exaggeration - I feel like an idiot for not having thought of it before.

I released a vidya today:

http://www.popmatters.com/post/181255-resistor-narcissist-video-premiere/

I'm playing more gigs than I ever have in any band. We played four shows in April, have three in May and three more in June setup. We have played eight already this year and have eight more booked through August. We played fifteen shows all last year.

Going into the studio to record our debut 7" at the end of the month. Gigging lots at the moment too, including two (small) festivals and support slots with Perfect Pussy and the Julie Ruin. It's going to be a heavy summer.

Excited for you guys. Music making is slow at the moment, but my DJing is going well, playing a little on Brighton, and putting on a party in London which seems to have good momentum.

do you guys get depressed when you finish a song you've been working on for a while

this is ridiculous

like I've been concentrating on this one thing for a few weeks and now that it's done and I'm really happy about it I'm just kind of bummed

Ha, sometimes. What's the cause of depression? That it still doesn't sound how you want it, or that you're letting "your baby" out into the world? Or I guess it sounds more like you're just sad that you don't have it to work on anymore?

maybe it's that there's no gap b/w working really hard on something and it being finished, just like one directly leads to the other

so once it's done it's slightly jarring

hmm, i get some post-partum depression after releasing an album (after the initial excitement dies down anyway). but after finishing a song or album i feel like a weight has been lifted and i can do normal life things again.

Usually (if everything goes right/the thing comes out as I'd hoped) I feel incredibly excited and happy. That feeling doesn't last too long, though; I try to immerse myself in the next project as soon as possible, or else I stew and think it'd be pointless to try to match or top what I just did.

having some interesting situations with vocalists lately...i produced a song for singer A, she ended up going in another direction with her album, but is cool with me putting it on my next record (which is fantastic, because it's some of my best work and this way i know it will actually come out).

then singer B gave me a great vocal for my album, but is kinda blowing up right now and i guess his label wants it to be uncredited. that's also fine in theory but i worry it could get complicated in the future, idk.

we now have vinyl copies of our newest thing on bandcamp if anyone cares http://argentinumastrum666.bandcamp.com/

so if i am to summarize, talking with musicians is (and sometimes is not) a minefield? do other people share this belief?

Ha, totally rong thread.

This Sunday, we will be singing an arrangement done by a Swedish choir of the Sting song "Fragile" as one of our church anthems.

man, Unitarians

haha

anyone know how to get around bandcamp's idiotic upload limit without selling $25 worth of music first?

i am furious

sorry, $20

this is bullshit

absolutely ridiculous

who uses bandcamp anyway

fuck a bandcamp

upload limit?

I mean the 291MB

(per file)

I'm gonna try converting my files to FLAC because they're just a few MB over the limit. I really don't want to have to cut them short.

hey quick Q to ppl who know or may be able to help: I make music w/ a laptop and use monitoring headphones to mix shit because I don't have any other speakers atm. The question is, what do I do when the mix sounds fine/great on monitoring headphones and a complete mess on laptop speakers

yeah totally do the flac thing, i've used that before to get around length restrictions xpost

have you tried making the mix sound better on the laptop speakers then seeing how it comes across in the cans?

xp - listen to it on speakers, even a car stereo, because that is how a lot of listeners are going to hear it

otm

If I have to mix something in a less-than-ideal environment-- and switching between monitoring headphones and laptop speakers is a semi-lame reality, but you can make it work-- I like to keep a couple of "ideal" mixes as control examples, and actively switch between, like, mix to spec. But yeah sarahell otm, use laptop playback as your litmus test. I also like to throw mixes on an iPhone and play it from the speaker to check balances in a hyper-compressed environment (and it mono's the mix too so it doubles as a check for phasing).

I also like to throw mixes on an iPhone and play it from the speaker to check balances in a hyper-compressed environment (and it mono's the mix too so it doubles as a check for phasing).

oh nice!

ty all the advice was super helpful

I ended up taking the entire song apart and starting from scratch and it went from being an agonizing thing to work on to being fun again

I just submitted a remix for Future Islands. Remix is fine, sure. But what was most interesting, for me, was to unpack those stems. They use this dagwood sandwich approach to tracking, there were some eight layers of individually-uninteresting synths layered on top of each other... together they sound delicious. Not the way, instinctively, I would make a track.

yeah i love getting hold of stems and seeing the inner workings of a song. wish i could do it more often. <3 future islands right now, hope something comes of yr remix.

It sounds like NKOTB. We'll see if they like it.

lol hangin tough

that's really interesting re: future islands. generally i'm convinced that when your sounds aren't that great you end up filling up a lot more space and stacking layers a lot more, and things can end up sounding smaller. but if your sounds are amazing, then it's easy to mix and everything can breathe. on the other hand, with synths in particular i have had some luck layering different cheapo vsts where the result sounds much better than any one of the synths would be able to do on its own.

Panipulator is free and relevant to thread: http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/panipulator/

Even though you spent considerable time and effort getting your mix to sound amazing on your monitors, there is still one very important question: What will it sound like playing at a theme park? or at the dentists office? or on your old radio? What if they wired one of the speakers backwards?

As much as we’d like to think that everyone is listening our music in stereo, the truth is that many many people are listening in less than ideal environments. Panipulator lets you hear what your mix will sound like in those environments so you can be sure that your mixes will translate across all systems.

What will your mix sound like summed to mono? Flip a switch to find out. What if someone wires their system so that they can only hear the left channel? Flip a switch to hear what that sounds like. What if they reverse the wiring on one of their speakers? Flip a switch to find out to see how that will affect your song. These are all common scenarios, and the last thing you want to do is find out is that your mom’s voice, that you thought was buried in the mix, pops out when played over the loudspeakers at Nordstrom.

Panipulator will barely make a dent in your CPU usage, so there is no reason that this plugin should not be a default on every single song you mix.