I’m much more excited about Radiohead’s latest challenge to remixify “Reckoning” for a [letter] of reasons:
A) Reckoning’s stems are on i-Tunes all together for .99 total (Nude’s stems were .99 per stem). this makes this activity seem less like a marketing scheme rather than the post-Web 2.0 artistic conversation it was meant to be.
B) This time it’s 4/4, bitch.
C) They are upfront about the tempo: 103.4 BPM. This is cool because it will save me a day. Thanks Radiohead.
The uncool thing about the tempo is that i’m probably going to use something like Garageband and it doesn’t cover tempos rounded to the nearest tenth of a beat per minute.
Anyone want to also send me your Reckoning remix as well?
I’ve just been fooling around and recorded this. This is only 3 sounds in actuality: my voice (recorded about 9 times humming different parts) with effects, and a software sample of a bass drum and a snare drum that I’ve cut up. Thoughts?
After wasting some time on trying to remix Radiohead’s “Nude”, I’ve finally finished this dumb little song. It is a homage to the Coens’ film The Man Who Wasn’t There and also to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
New Song
This song can be described as being inspired by C&C Music Factory, Jethro Tull, and Beck I guess. Only it’s Beck done poorly. Come to think of it, I didn’t really nail any of those three.
So I work doing the copywriting for new products and content management of about 5000 other products at an internet retailer called Sewell Direct. A couple years ago we decided that since our inbound call volume (mostly people needing tech support or customer service) was getting pretty high, we needed some hold music. We’ve been through about 3 sets of hold music, learning what makes good hold music.
I’ve learned that the best hold music is the kind that gets your heart rate down. Anyone calling us up is probably stressed out because maybe Fed Ex didn’t deliver on time, or maybe they just found out the USB to DVI isn’t Mac compatible yet. So the best music to listen to when in this state of mind is something to relax your muscles; like an audio ambien if you will.
Below is the latest version of our hold music. My co-worker Lewis is doing the talking in between the hold songs. I recorded the music part at home just with the usual 4 channel Alesis USB mixer, hooked up to GarageBand, using the same Audio Technica microphones as usual, and also hooking my bass and electric guitar straight into the mixer on occasion. The tracks below are in order of how they play when you are on hold, on like an 8 and a half minute loop. Hopefully no one is ever on hold that long. I think hold time around here averages around 30 seconds or so.
Hopefully these tunes will calm your aggitated nerves, and make you forget all about that ExpressCard to PCMCIA adapter that wasn’t as compliant with your data card as you thought.
Finally Frius, my ode to our largest organ, our skin, is finished. It is meant to be played directly after “Lost and Found”. I haven’t really settled on these two names for these songs, but I guess I need temporary names for them for now.
Frius was done over months and months of time. In order to record it I basically just sampled all of the sounds from my friend’s drum kit using cheap microphones and a cheap mixer/ USB interface into my mac. Although it makes for interesting sounds, its a pain.
The very first beat was made just with GarageBand midi sounds blasted out of Roland desktop monitors into an Audio Technica side-address microphone in 7/4 time. The rest of the song loosely follows 7/4, except in a few places where I needed to break away as to not render 7/4 monotonous.
The staticky sound with all the neat randomized electronic tones at the end of track one and the beginning of track two was a circuit-bent old casio keyboard that I got from DI (kind of like salvation army here in Utah). I think I’m going to post about my first experiences in circuit bending next.
Lately I’ve been mega-influenced by Deerhoof, and so I actually cut Frius from being an 8 minute song into about 4. I admire Deerhoof’s ability to write beautiful and catchy verses without necessarily repeating them very much during the song, unlike most pop.
So here are the first two tracks, meant to be played with “gapless playback” back to back.
