woo, tangent » open source musicians

some quick podcasty updates

lsd — Wed, 26 May 2010 04:04:28 +0000

Three podcast releases, all involving me in some way, that I feel compelled to draw attention to:

A new Partners in Lag — in this ep, we talk about Red Dead Redemption, all things Halo, Steam on the Mac, and the potential future for Linux gaming
Episode 39 of the Open Source Musician Podcast — another community call-in show, where a bunch of us chat about a whole heap of things
Episode 41 is out, too — this one features all of the entries for the Tunestorm02 challenge. Even though they were all recorded with household item sounds, in line with the theme of the challenge, there’s huge variety in the results, so it’s well worth checking out.

tunestorm 01

lsd — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:32:52 +0000

The guys over at the Open Source Musician Podcast recently ran a little challenge, called “Tunestorm01″, which called for people to record a track built upon a bass part playing a descending major scale — here’s my entry. Some people did some very clever musical work around that bassline in their entries, but I took the cheat’s way out and went abstract.

mp3 | vorbis | 1 minute 54 seconds

more podcasting

lsd — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:02:21 +0000

Episode 28 of the Open Source Musicians Podcast is up, and as I mentioned yesterday, I’m once again on it! Skype garbled me a bit, but overall it turned out surprisingly well quality-wise, and it was great fun to record. I’ll have to be a bit more careful if I podcast again, though — at one point I got up for a few seconds, and while I thought to mute my mic on my mixer before I did, I must’ve dropped my headphones on my synth keyboard, which was still patched in, so everyone got a few seconds of synth sound action.

coming up milhouse

lsd — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:36:23 +0000

Feels like time for another bullet-point update!

We got a house! Well, provisionally anyway — we sign the lease on Saturday. It’s a cute little renovated two-bedroom place in Footscray, so it’s got a bit of that same old house charm that our Surrey Hills place had. Living west-side is going to be quite a change, but it’s a quiet spot, and it’s not far from Kensington or Yarraville, which both seem like awesome places to hang out. The timing is great too — we get the keys on January 5th, so we have plenty of time to give notice here and start packing and cleaning.
Royal Crown Revue tonight! Last week, Kat spotted that they were touring, so we grabbed some tickets. It was going to be a pain heading off to two house inspections this afternoon, then heading home and having to head back in to the city for the gig, but now that we’ve been approved we don’t have to worry about those inspections now.
I have a new coffee machine! I had been using a plunger at home since my old machine died a couple of months back, so I’m very glad to have a new one. It’s a Rancilio Silvia, and I got a new grinder (the matching Rancilio Rocky) as well. Perhaps now wasn’t the best time to buy new toys, but I got a great deal on it, and I sure as hell need my coffee right now!
I ended up on the Open Source Musicians podcast again on the weekend; one of the usual hosts couldn’t make it, so the other host, and a few of us that were online at the time, jumped in to a Skype conference call and talked crap for a bit instead. That episode isn’t online yet, but I’ll link to it when it is.

dabbling in podcasting, and studio upgrades

lsd — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:03:48 +0000

Given that I record my music entirely under Linux, I was very happy to hear of the Open Source Musician Podcast; so much so that I’ve already contributed my own segment to the show. In the recently-released episode 26, I discuss the equipment (hardware and software) I use to record my music, as well as the workflow involved.

In other news, I got an awesome new studio toy on the weekend — I replaced my Singstar mic with a Rode NT1-A condenser mic. While I’ve only had a brief chance to play with it, it sounds very clean and clear, so it’s a revelation compared to the hissy, muddy mess that I got with my old mic. It also came with a shock-mount and pop shield, so it looks très professional in my mic stand: