I talked a little about the production in an earlier post, but I have included some further details after the jump.

This is one of my shortest tracks, and that was a deliberate departure for me — in the past I feel like I’ve often stretched things out to get to a certain length, and let them get a bit too repetitive in the process, so I deliberately avoided that here. In hindsight, there’s a lot going on in there, so perhaps it could’ve done with being a bit longer, but it definitely shouldn’t be boring at the very least!

In terms of sounds, the pads and bass are from the Blofeld, but everything else is software — Calf Monosynth for the sixteenth-note bleeps in the background, Linuxsampler for the Rhodes, and Hydrogen for the drums. The Rhodes is the excellent jRhodes3 soundfont, which I converted to SFZ format using sfZed, and the kick and snare come from the Microhammer Gnomehammer collection of wintry sounds.

The vocal sounds were a bit of fun. I recorded myself singing a note in to my mic, chopped out a small section that had a nice, stable pitch, and then time-stretched that to produce a longer vocal sound that sounds a little strange and ethereal. Each of the little vocal flourishes was created from that by pitch-shifting it to create the different pitches, and then performing a bunch of micro-edits for the glitchy, stuttery bits.

Effects-wise, I’ve already discussed Loomer Cumulus — it’s responsible for the messed-up drum break in the middle, and a few drum hits in the latter half of the track. I’ve also used the Decimator plugin a bit: the Cumulus drums, vocal sounds, and sixteenth-note bleeps all have automated Decimator plugins. The warbly, lo-fi delay on the Rhodes is courtesy of my Behringer VM1 analog delay pedal.

You really should check out the game, but if you just want to check out my music, here it is: I’m feeling lazy, so I’m including this as an embedded player from my Bandcamp page instead of uploading it again and using my usual HTML5 player.

Given Bandcamp’s generous definition of “a download” — streaming playback within the browser is still unlimited and free, and album downloads count as just a single download — 200 a month will cover a fair bit of activity. I’ve yet to reach 200 downloads in total so far, so 200 a month will probably always be enough for me.

Once again, Bandcamp proves that it’s a class act. Rock on!

The writing was on the wall earlier this year when Bandcamp started taking a 15% cut on sales in order to cover its costs. I think that’s perfectly reasonable, but the question remained: how would Bandcamp cover its costs on free downloads, where there’s no revenue to split? It answered that question today by announcing an end to unlimited free downloads.

In typical Bandcamp style, it’s a perfectly reasonable arrangement. New accounts get an allowance of 200 free downloads (existing accounts get 500), and more can be bought in blocks that work out to between 1.5 and 3 cents per download. If you’re also selling music, each $500 in sales gets you an extra 1000 free downloads, so commercial artists can still run free download promos at minimal (or zero) cost.

Some bands had used Bandcamp to provide hundreds of thousands of free downloads at zero cost, and this plan will put a stop to that. However, it’ll likely put a stop to my use of Bandcamp too, at least in the long term. My 500 free downloads will last me quite a while, and for a band with no tech skills, even 3c per download is a great deal for what you get, compared to trying to cobble something together yourself, but I already run my own hosted server, so it just makes sense for me to make this site the official home of my music.

Hopefully it’s clear that I’m not down on Bandcamp — it’s a fantastic service, and it’s helped an ever-growing list of artists to gain commercial success outside of the mainstream music industry. If I ever have a change of heart (or career) and decide to start selling music and flogging merch, Bandcamp is almost certainly where I’ll do it. It’s just no longer the ideal service for hosting free music that it once was.