Saturday, August 1, 2009

Day 212: Monkeys, Peanuts, Noob and Brodinski

It's Saturday night so what better way to enjoy it than some monkeys dancing to Noob and Brodinski's techy influenced belter 'Peanut Club'.

Nuff said!

10/365

p&&l

bang!

Friday, July 31, 2009

Day 211: I want to be a DJ when I grow up...

I have an interesting video for you today, something I discovered on twitter. Legendary genre melting DJ Diplo recorded this when he were just a lad. An aspiring DJ playing at School discos.

No of course he commands serious bank, and only plays the illest gigs (probably). Anyway, the message most certainly is... stick with it. All the pros were amateurs once.

Oh, and just in case, weirdly (yet pleasantly) this goes all NSFW toward the end.

Enjoy:

10/365

p&&l

bang!

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Day 210: Make me Dance Remix Competition entry

I guess all in, these last few weeks I have started to steadily pick my game up a bit. A large part of this game 'up-picking' has been taken up by doing this remix.

I found out about this remix competition via twitter, and thought it was a good opportunity to improve my production skills some more, whilst, you never know, maybe getting some exposure.

Now I still think I have a long road in front of me on the production front, but this is by far my best work to date for sure. I had fun making it, and am fairly pleased with the outcome. If nothing else I can definitely see a linear advancement in the quality of my tracks. So yeah, go me!

Anyways, here you have it in all it's glory, just have to wait and see how I get on now...

10/365

p&&l

bang!

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Day 209: Bang the DJ on your Radio

Ok, way back on Day 5 I made a skeleton scoring system to help me monitor progress. That's what that '2/365/ means at the bottom of every post in case you were wondering.

Basically it's '2 out of 365'. A full 365 would indicated reaching my goal to a very satisfactory level. As I have blogged about a few times in the not to distant past, I actually seem to be chickening out a bit. I don't know the exact causes, but i suspect some deep routed self doubt, that and not being in the familiar confines of my home city (and therefore knowing more peeps).

Anyway... playing out isn't the only way to make progress/score points (thankfully). Press coverage, write ups, getting tracks out, and radio play all count. As well as any other relevant, but not anticipated happening (like if I get accepted for the redbull academy for example).

So, you'll notice that the number isn't 2 anymore, it's 'shot' up to 10. Wow, how can this be? Well one of my tunes got played on an Internet Radio show. Ok, so this isn't gonna have Ibiza Rocks banging on my door, but importantly it was unsolicited. They found the tune, I had no contact with them previously. So it's not like I cajoled them into it etc. They found it, liked it, and played it (twice in fact, tho am only scoring it as once!).

The DJ was DJ Breakz, from Break Pirates radio, and the tune was 'Pre Party'. Unfortunately I didn't anticipate this eventuality, so there is no official scoring for it. However the nearest thing is 'Tune featured on blog'. This has a score of 8. I think this makes a tune played by a DJ on radio or otherwise about the same. As, after all it's unsolicited approval of a track. So, for this reason I am giving it the same weight.

For prosperity, I have a recording of it going out 'on the air' too, so you can enjoy it as much as I did!








Sweet huh? I nearly dropped my sandwich when I heard that. So thanks to DJ Breakz, and the Break Pirates for clearing a very long dry spell!

10/365

p&&l

bang!

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Day 208: Shameless

Right so if you know me at all... then this will be like the 30th time you heard about this today, sorry.

I'm shamelessly asking for your help. I entered my awesome summer mix into a competition, and I need to get 100 votes to qualify for the finals.

All you need to do is click the following link, then look about a 3rd down the page on the right there is a pink button with the word 'UP' on it. Click that, and jobs a goodun!

Click here to cast your vote!

Anytime you want me to vote for you for something just let me know, what goes around comes around etc!

2/365

p&&l

bang!

Monday, July 27, 2009

Day 207: How to be endlessly creative.

Nothing worse than setting some time aside to finally work on that masterpiece only to stare blankly at your DAW without a clue.

Drag a few on beat kick drums into the drum rack, create a one finger stab... listen to it go round a few bars... yeah, it's not happening is it.

Sometimes it just don't flow like you want it to. Though don't fret all is not lost. While there is no such think as creative magic dust (tho the Rolling Stones might tell you other-wise) there are some things you can do to start the ball rolling.

Synthgear came up with 170 of them:

1. Stop thinking of drums as KICK/SNARE/HIHAT
2. Use more 16th notes!
3. The relationship between percussive sounds and rhythmic noises can be a melodic relationship
4. Turn it into a melody
5. Turn it into percussion
6. Turn it into a pad
7. Think about a bongo player sitting in the street
8. Select a new random tempo
9. What Would Joe Zawinul do?
10. Make a cliché

11. Put in something off-key
12. Get reckless
13. Less logic
14. List your standard process from start to finish, now reverse it
15. If you dismiss an idea, stop and ask yourself why
16. Skip your first impulse and use the second one
17. Do something that isn’t 4/4 now
18. How can you make this fall apart
19. Play it backwards – the part, don’t reverse audio.
20. Pretend your mom is sitting next to you

Check the rest on the original post, but some real good ideas in there, anything to start looking at things from a different angle...


2/365

p&&l

bang!

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Day 206: More great Ableton Tips

Kiwi Ableton legend Tom Cosm has made another one of his great Ableton tutorial videos.

What I like about Tom's videos is that you learn so much from them, not just about the intended subject matter, but also some great general tips for production and using Ableton. This is due to Tom's obvious complete control of the software, watching him use it is a pleasure.

I learnt some great tips for manipulating and copy automation that I had been wondering about for ages, I also had some revelations about using Analog too that I hadn't thought about before. All of this from a video about creating drum loops!

Top class stuff.


2/365

p&&l

bang!