Sometimes I can be very doubtful about …everything!
To find purpose in music, life the universe and everything all I need to do is just play a good record.
This one did it for me today! This one made me dance in my underwear… don’t picture that…

Tommy James and the shondells – Money!

Album tip for the day is…

4 Thumbs Up on this record. The fellow in the middle wanted to be cool and show the peace-sign, so we’ll just forget about him. Here we have four band members dressed sharp showing their thumbs saying: buy this record, you really can’t go wrong with this one.

found via link

This haunted me today. Perhaps this gets better if you sing along loud. Press play at your own risk.

One Hour Challenge Nr.2

The first ‘one hour challenge’ took me 3 minutes so I guess I had some spare time on this one. The basic rule is to enter the studio empty minded, and come up with some form of a tune within one hour. And after a very heavy gig Saturday night I was very blanc mind you.
I’m very fond of micro-electro tunes, soundscapes and other eletronica, so my expectancy was that the end result would be something in that direction.

From here is a pretty detailed time-schedule of what happened (mom; you can skip this and just press play).

18.00 pressed start on my computer and while firing up Ableton-Live I glanced over a tiny casio keyboard lying besides my monitor(picture above). I pressed some keys, and that very bass line became the framework for the whole tune.
18.10 recorded a basic 4 bar drumloop
18.15 made basic framework for the first chorus
18.20 played entire melody-line (2nd take)
18.30 realized it would be cool to use the casio’s drums as well
18.32 recorded crappy drumloop
18.40 Changed microphone for the Ukelele
18.45 microphone is warmed up but the hour mark is approaching.!
18.55 recorded Ukelele suffering from a cramps in my hands due to difficult chords
18.57 recorded bass
19.00 recorded piano first take.

Break time!
So now I have one minute of full audio in Ableton. everything starts at 00:00 and finishes after 1:00
19.30 start editing the audio basically repeating the whole thing and chop the most out of it the first round.
20.00 applied a little eq to bass, drums, and piano
20.15 compression and eq on the ukelele
20.20 I cheated! Added one crash-cymbal shot at the beginning of the second round. FAIL!
20.30 a little compression, eq and limiting on the master bus and rendered the wave-file.

So the first hour was used to come up with some tune and record it.
The second hour is less interesting because in that time frame I just mixed and mastered the tune.

I wanted to do a lot more (record some extra rhythm parts and some additional instruments but the hour mark was very strict. Those were the rules and this is the tune. The most dissapointing thing about this is that I didn’t come up with a proper title for this.

Enjoy,

One Hour – 2:26

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Yo Gabba Gabba must be the coolest kids-program out there. Here rock-band Cornelius totally rock out on 1-2-3-4-5-6.
I’m awake now!

This cracked me up hard yesterday. It was taken from a 1965 TV-special called ‘The music of Lennon & McCartney” Alan haves is having a hard time playbacking his own lowrey organ solo of Hard Days Night. And to be fair: it is hard to do, but not impossible. I’m saving up for a crazy keyboard moves extravaganza! and this is definitely going to be in it.

Klaus Harmony, and yes, those tiny letters spell out : ‘the mozart of porn’ .

His website is found here (don’t worry it’s safe for work).

Now my problem is I want to believe this. It looks so corny and genuine that it has to be real. It’s not. Klaus Harmony is a fictional character made up by Matthew Strachan, an English composer mainly working in the TV-industry. (who wants to be a millionaire’s soundtrack is from his hand). I think Matthew just needed an excuse to pump out the most corny tunes he could think of. The first three volumes of Klaus’ work are ready.

Rachmaninov had some big hands…
The solution for playing his pieces is given here.