New Song: “Snow Break” (92bpm)
On this very snowy Santa Fe morning and with one week left until the 2008 Winter Solstice, I’m pleased to release this new song for free under a creative commons license. Snow Break is a 92bpm ‘breaks’ piece based around a sampled string melody from a 1960’s Mellotron tape loop. (The Mellotron was the original pre-digital sampler, a massive and fiddly organ that triggered the playback of tape loops instead of tone wheels…)
It’s been years since I’ve played around in the 90-bpm breaks range. Having that extra time/space between the beats makes it possible to play with wicked bass sounds and long cymbals - things that are hard to squeeze into my usual 140-175bpm range. This is also the first song I’ve mastered using Logic’s built-in multiband compressor and adaptive limiter (instead of an off-the-shelf mastering tool like Yamaha’s finalizer or T-racks.) I think the Logic plugins preserved a lot of the crispness and space that would have been muddied up by the other harder-edged mastering tools. What you hear below is the final (13th) mix of this song.
Listen:
Redesign for The Greenlining Institute
greenlining.org
I’m very pleased to announce the redesign and redeployment of greenlining.org.
Associate Director Orson Aguilar at Greenlining hired me to make a brand new website, following a look and feel sketched out by their designer. They needed a customized content management system that would make it easy for them to update their news, videos, publications, and policy initiatives. Everything needed to be database-driven, from the home page to the staff list to the news area.
Highlights
- Videos are automatically embedded and synchronized with content uploaded to YouTube™
- Images and all other content on the website can be edited using a web browser. No need to photoshop images to scale or crop them, no need to create PDF previews. It’s all done on the fly.
- PDFs, videos, and news articles are all tagged with the policy initiatives they relate to, so the policy pages stay fresh and up-to date whenever new content is added.
- Seamless integration with PHPList for the ability to send email newsletters to 1000’s of subscribers.
About the Client
The Greenlining Institute’s mission is to empower communities of color and other disadvantaged groups through multi-ethnic economic and leadership development, civil rights and anti-redlining activities. They’ve made financial institutions like the Bank of America and Wells Fargo commit to investing over $900 billion (over 10 years) to help the communities they serve.
Funky Nasty Techno Mix
Recorded live from on top of Roe Mesa at a party in Northern New Mexico this past weekend. Funky techno / electro, featuring songs with dirty(ish) vocal samples. Starts off with 128 BPM techno, ends up with 140 BPM full-on breaks. (The set then continued into big drum ‘n’ bass and went all over the place… but these 50 minutes are the best part.)
Click below to listen:
New Donations System for Upaya.org
The Challenge: The Upaya Institute relies on donations to support a variety of projects, and using PayPal for donations has turned out to be expensive and difficult to track. Upaya needs to be able quickly manage and prioritize a list of funds, and make it easier for donors to make contributions.
The Solution: We decided to replace Upaya’s PayPal donation button with a dynamic funds editor that deposits donations straight into a bank account. Donors can specify what funds they want to support, and Upaya’s accountant can easily see what donations have been made each day. Try it out on upaya.org.
This is a 3.5 minute tour of the public side of this system (for making donations) and the administrative side (for managing donation campaigns and retrieving results.)
Serious Song (Drum ‘n’ Bass)
Wow this song was a long time in the making. 12+ months? Not sure if it’s done yet — this mix feels a little thick and awkward at times — but it’s done enough to let me move on to some other tracks in the near term.
174 BPM d’n'b, growly nasty bassline, occasional explosive speaker-ripping kicks, and an acid synth line that snuck in from my techno personality.
The “This song is a serious song, isn’t it?” sample is from this very silly record.
Listen here:
Flickr Photo Updates (Finally!)
I hadn’t touched my Flickr account in a very long time. I think I’m still bummed out that Yahoo! bought Flickr. But there were a few fun photos I wanted to share, including this one:
“Ocean: 1 Tank: 0″
Found on a beach in Culebra, Puerto Rico. The US military used Culebra island for practice-bombing from 1901 through to 1975. Leah and I had some great snorkeling adventures there, though it was a bit strange to explore this underwater world where you were as likely to encounter a manta ray as you were a bomb casing…
Ottmar’s “Scent of Light”
Long-time client and friend Ottmar Liebert just released a beautiful new album of guitar music. It hits stores next week, but the music can be previewed and downloaded as of today from the ListeningLounge — a custom-built mp3 store I set up for him a couple of years ago.
Each of these ten instrumentals draws a picture, and each picture tells a story. It’s music as a smell that triggers unexpected memories. India, 1978… Granada, 1992… each track has a strong atmosphere of time and place, like the journal of an itinerant poet or painter.
White noise compositions for sleeping
I made these sounds and this web page after a rather frustrating time searching the Internet for free MP3s of ambient white-noise stuff — things to help my baby boy sleep.
I was amazed when I found no high quality long playing mp3s free of charge.
Click here to start snoozing:
White Noise Sleepy Sounds >
Dance Dance Revolution
Does anyone have a Xbox 360 I can borrow?
A while back I was hired to compose two songs for Konami’s DDR UltraMix 4, and they sent me some free copies of the game… but I don’t have a console to play on (or stomp on or whatever it’s called when you do the blinky-light DDR thing.)
They bought all-out rights to the songs I made so I can’t post the DDR editions here. However one of the songs was a remix of an older drum ‘n’ bass tune I wrote called “Indian Summer” which I can reproduce in full here:
Benbient (Ambient)
Composed for Benjamin Becker, born Feb 12, 2008. 102 bpm. Ambient groove deep ethno dub. Usually I make music on a Macintosh running Logic Audio and a sizable amount of outboard gear… but this one was composed entirely on a Palm Pilot T|X using Bhaji’s Loops between the hours of 3am and 5am while lying around in bed waiting for Ben to wake up to the dawn.
Listen here:
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