audiotthoughts on music

ok, i’m opening a new category for the album “corner” i made as part of the rpm-challenge 09. there will be detailed descriptions of all the songs as well as technical info on how i did this etc., so make sure you check this section out for fresh content.

i’m gonna start tomorrow with an overview of the album, what i planned to do, how i failed with that and what came out in the end…

once again here’s the link to listen and download it or you can check out the freakingly cool player thingy in the entry below…

have fun

a huge step for me and a small one for the world – you decide about the direction…

i uploaded five songs of the album “corner” to my soundcloud page for your listening………..ahum…….pleasures. you can check them out in the player below (which hopefully works…) or at the link above and you can also download them for free – in original quality and filesize (!)

i’ll post detailed descriptions of each song as well as the whole project here, starting tomorrow, so be sure to check back on how i did this and why (for god’s sake!). and one more thing: if you happen to be a student of mine – i forbid you to ever listen to this! i was young and needed the money!

let’s see if this interactive-integrated-soundcloud-player-thingy-works…

ok, now that the rpm album is finished and thousands of meters above the ocean, i finally have the time to take care of this site. i just upgraded to the newest wordpress version, which didn’t work last week when i tried it a few times already. now it’s up to date and i’ll spend the next hour or so looking for a new theme and a bunch of plugins that will take care of this blog in the future. i think the site loads faster already because of the upgrade but it’s still not as fast as it was a while back – maybe some theme- or plugin-problem. i’ll get right on it…..

so if you experience some weird things going on with this site in the next few days you’ll know what it’s about :-)

for some reason they look less blurry in the printout but anyway, here’s the artwork for my rpm-challenge album which i called “corner” by the way.

the cover:

the back:

and the inside:

the pictures are NOT altered or manipulated in any way, they are exacly as they came out of the camera – except for the writings of course :-), pretty cool huh? don’t ask me how i did this, i’m not a photographer. i just took the camera and shot what i thought might look good. there were 18 pictures, 3 of them were completely black and i picked these 3 out of the other 15, added the words and that’s it.

hi y’all.

first of all: it’s done!!! the rpm-album that is, i finished it this morning after overcoming some technical difficulties in the last few days. now i only have to print out a cover and put it in a package – that’s it. and although the album has more flaws than i can even begin to mention, i really love it, yay! it’s weekend so it will ship away on monday but according to the mail-company’s website it should arrive in time. as soon as the rpm guys have it on their site i’ll make it available as well and i’ll write about each song in this blog so you can see what i’ve been through with this :-)

now some (not really) bad news: the problems with this site get bigger and more. i really need to change something because it hardly works anymore and i apologise for any inconvenience on your end. now, with the album finished, i’ll have more time to fix this – so stay tuned…

yours truly

hi there.

for two days now i’m having troubles with my internet connection, maybe because of the snow. so hopefully you can read this as i’m typing it into some tiny handheld device thing.

just a quick update on what’s going on: the rpm-album is almost done, i’ll send it off this week – hoping it will arrive in time for i have no idea how long shipping takes to the us of a. once it’s on its way i’ll announce it here so you can all be my witnesses that it was finished long before the deadline. at this moment i don’t know what the cover will look like but there will be a cover, no booklet though. i’m figuring out a way to make the album downloadable on this site. i’d like to offer a pay-what-you-want-solution but i don’t know how to do this. any suggestions? (no idea if this link embedding works)

and i’m looking around for a new site-design, the old theme seems to be kind of obsolete, i’m experiencing problems on a quite regular basis…

that’s it for now, have a cool sunday evening…

…when you got tesla coils :-) i found this hilarious and awesome at the same time. there are no speakers involved – none at all and these suckers are over 110 dB loud!

by the way this is another addition to the mario-theme-played-in-weird-ways-series. enjoy…

p.s. it seems there is a slight problem with the site regarding movies in some browsers. if you’re not able to see the video embedded, here’s the link: cool tesla coil video

all this computerwork is kind of freaking me out. working on the ovotex, the ‘normal’ teaching stuff, the rpm-album, the website etc. wow! and the more i sit behind the screen the less i’m really playing. nah, that’s not complaining – i’m way more productive right now than i was ever before, i’m just beginning to drift away from really playing music. so i joined a network to find musicians in my area. i wonder if there’s someone willing to just jam. this might sound weird and maybe it’s a german problem (at least it seems typical…) but it’s kind of hard to find jammers here. they all want to make setlists and do gigs and demos and whatever else. don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have musicians who take music seriously and if you’re in a band it’s good to have a goal – but, hey, let’s not forget why we started making music in the first place: fun! tadaaa!

and one more thing, jamming is not just some stupid habit of killing time. it’s the no.1 thing to become tight as a band. there’s no better way of getting to know the guys you play with. so jamming is fun AND learning at the same time and that makes it really cool in my book!

woohoo, this rpm-album eats up a lot of my ‘free time’, so sorry if i’m not writing as much as usual. it will be over in a week, guaranteed. i got half of the album finished and next monday it’s off to shippingland. and i was asked to teach jazz-vocals in a music school which got me thinking all day. there’s time to decide for me if i want to do it and for them if they want me to do it – it’s all a bit vague (is that even a word in english?) at the moment. they have someone for pop-vocals but would like someone for jazz. what i was thinking about is how to divide this. i never kept those apart – in my book all the styles belong together somehow and a good musician should know about them all. so i was wondering how to do this without shooting too much deers in the pop-teachers woods – ha! i’m speaking in pictures, how cool is that? the master of lame analogies has found a new discipline and made it his own :-) ok, you can stop kneeling before the screen now….

i knew this thinking outside the box and fighting the sort-it-into-different-styles-thing would get me into trouble one day. damn you world !!!

and while i’m at it, here’s some soundclips of another really groovy bunch of guys. i found this on Keith Carlock’s website, they’re from an album called Oz Live by Oz Noy.

there you go…

damn this groove

steroids

go and buy that album. i know i will!