audiotthoughts on music

i’m not gonna spoil this with my babbling – just enjoy…

here’s the link to the clip in case it doesn’t show here – had some troubles with this recently…

unbelievable how time flies every now and then. again it’s been quite a while since i posted my last entry. and while i’m in a hurry (again) i just wanted to give you guys a quick update on what’s happening on my end.

as i mentioned during the releasing process of “corner”, my second album is already in the making. but, shame on me, i won’t be able to finish it before may. there’s two reasons for that: one, another recording got in the way and that one has to be finished within the next two weeks, because an important gig depends on it. i’m gonna post some excerpts soon – as a matter of fact, i gotta leave in a few minutes to meet with the guitarplayer and record some of his parts. and second, this new album of mine needs a lot more work than the first one because i’m including a bunch of real instruments and this just takes more time than doing it all within the macbook – you know, setting up the mics, reamping and so forth.

but since “corner” was an inside-the-laptop-only album (apart from the vocals…), i wanted to try kind of a fusion this time – some of my roots are in rock, so i’m gonna need some tubeamps on this one – and a lot of other stuff lying around here somewhere.

then again, the big move is still not really finished! well, i moved alright, but this is germany – so i guess i’ll be spending the rest of my life with bureaucracy-crap. this is ridiculous.

by the way, there’s a live show coming up this saturday. you can read about it right here and if you’re in the area – get there, say hi and have a beer on me. we haven’t played together in ages, so it’s gonna be lots of fun – no guarantee on how it’ll sound though. but maybe the other band will make up for it :-) i haven’t seen them myself yet.

anyway, as soon as i catch my breath, i’ll chat some more.

take care…

wow, those were some ridiculously busy days, but before i talk about it, i’m gonna give you a description of the fifth tune from the album corner…just because i can :-)

this song is called “taking the blame” and it sounds like that as well. the interesting thing about this tune is, it was almost completely improvised. the whole thing took about 30 minutes. i tracked a bassline (again played live with a midi-controller using a nice sample-based sound from the reason factory soundbank), then laid down some drums (same method as above, sounds from the reason drumkits 2.0 refill) and some vibraphone (same again). this took about 15 minutes, all first takes – no cutting, copying, pasting or anything like that. then i exported this mixture as an audiofile, imported it in cubase le4 and recorded the vocals to it. for the vocals i wrote down three lines of lyrics, then pressed record and again improvised something. again, this was only one unedited take, which i imported in reason again to apply some dynamics processing, a bit of reverb and do a mixdown. that’s it.

now, my voice sounds quite damaged and…well….weird on this one. the reason for that is quite simple and shows off the perfectly well-coordinated strategy i applied to the whole album: trial and error! long may it live! i did the vocals for song no. 6 right before this one, so there was just no more voice left to do anything even related to singing. but hey, it’s about embracing the flaws, right? so i left it that way. and i’m really glad i did – now. it took a while to get used to it, though :-)

another funny thing about this song is, i tried to do a song similar to one i heard before and it really went wrong. the song i’m talking about is called “18 with a bullet” (at least i think so) and can be found on the soundtrack to “lock, stock & 2 smoking barrels”. i haven’t heard that song in years, so mine turned out completely different – but anyway, that’s were the inspiration came from…

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hi there.

i know, i know, it’s been a while and it will even be a little longer. there’s happening so much at the moment, i need to sort this all out first before i can write about anything. so i need to ask you (again!) to stay tuned. only so much: there will be dirty little secrets uncovered, one of them involving bagpipes. there will be stories of new horizons and old farts. there will be more music, more pictures, more instruments, more teaching and best of all: more fun.

as soon as i know how to put this all in here :-)

so be warned….

yay, it’s the 1st of april and that means the Musikmesse 2009 is opening its doors today. so i’ll be there from sunup to sundown messing around really bad. i’ll try to take hundreds of pictures and will be twittering a lot but there won’t be any blog entries until at least sunday.

so stay tuned and take care…