I've been remixing my tunes, getting ready to make some CDs for "demo" purposes.
I've been using John Parker's excellent production on our Scratch Ambulance disc, as well as the two tunes of mine that sounded decent through the PA system at Galapagos last month as my "baseline" and adjusting tracks to that baseline.
I'm not using much equalization but mainly eliminating "muddy frequencies" by moving too-closely pitched sounds to different pan-locations. Also getting basses and kick drums on their own tracks and leveling them separately.
I eliminated about 100 tunes from what I've posted online so that's about 120 I could potentially use. I have done one disc with 20 songs I'm fairly satisfied with, but I'm thinking a multi-disc set is where this is going, just so I have a hard(er) copy record of a fairly productive couple of years.
November 2007
Add Tape Hiss to Your Sound
Just received an email for an audio plugin that "simulates analog tape" for digital recording and producing.
VirSyn is the Germany-based software company that makes it.
Here are a few of its features:
VTAPE Saturator
- Realistic tape emulation
- Tape saturation / compression
- Tape hiss
- Wow & Flutter
- Equalizer
- Aliasing free distortion
25 years after CDs were introduced to the market as a "noise free" sound system, there is a sizeable industry devoted to adding high quality realistic noise to digital sound. There's a moral in here somewhere.
Get Those Breasts Out of the Lobby--They're Offending Women
Diana Kingsley, Blue Ribbon, 2005, 42" x 40", lambda print
The artwork above, by Diana Kingsley, was recently removed from a curated show in a building at 55 5th Avenue in NYC (at 13th Street). The property is owned by arts patron Francis Greenburger, founder of Art Omi, an artist's colony in upstate New York. Greenburger employs a full time curator, Elisabeth Akkerman, to install art in buildings he owns around the city and country. And not just install--the above work appeared in a two person exhibition called "Blue Ribbon," which is the name of Kingsley's piece--clearly her work was an important element in the show. The other artist, Kate Gilmore, shows with Smith-Stewart gallery; Kingsley is a Bellwether alum who has been showing at Leo Castelli.
Why was the work removed? Besides housing the headquarters of Greenburger's company, Time Equities, Inc., the building on 5th has a medical office where women come to get mammograms. According to Kingsley, the curator told her that a complaint had been made because someone felt it was inappropriate to see full breasts on display--in a sweater!--in a place where women were possibly getting bad news about cancer.
That's it. That's all it takes, and the artwork is gone. This wryly humorous and rather gorgeous image, with an awkwardly placed brooch mirroring a cheesy floral award in a play of irrational, cantilevered symmetry, will not be seen. And an arts patron does nothing to stop the suppression.
This is pure speculation, but I wonder if it was actually men who were disturbed by the image and the traumatized cancer screeners just a politically correct excuse to get rid of it. Corporate lobbies are dull unsexed places and this decorum is ironclad.
"Force Fed"
"Force Fed" [mp3 removed]
Aggressive, male club type thing with dirty guitar effects, 808 and very digital acid-synth
Update: added a few more "licks" to the third guitar appearance and took out about 10 secs of synth near the end.