What is Christmas without a SuperNES, a Stylophone, a Wurlitzer and an all girls 60s choir? Nothing, I tell you!
Since I’m breaking a few laws with this one I am not telling who are the singers nanana.
Also it is unclear where the sampling stops and where the true schnauzer-sauce is starting. I’m just telling you can leave out the ladies and still a full track is playing for your little bear-dance. (If I’m ever planning to release this legally I would have to, don’t you just love copyright law?)
This track is sort of a new years resolution. The resolution is: A whole lot more like this to come!

Anyhow, wishing you all a Happy Christmas!

(do with this track as you please. Blog about it, remix it, give it away to your worst enemies, or just do a little nerdy dance to it.)

Winter Wonderland – Schnauzer Radio Orchestra vs ??? – 3:05

download 2.8 mb

Happy New Year!
With this Tune I declare 2009 the year of the Schnauzer. It’s a bit hard describe this one; is it an original or a remix? 90% of what you hear is played in the last month. The rest is from a hard to find German 60s album. For some reason I keep going back to using found material, although it is way more work than recording an original from scratch. Note to self: do an original next week.

Deine Platte – 3:02

Download song

The ever expanding Schnauzer Radio Orchestra is extremely proud to present the next tune before world domination. Roughly forty years after the summer of love you are presented with this.
A production time of 6 months and a few guest appearances over the mail made this song. The longer this was sitting on my hard drive the bigger it got. Around last May I already announced this tune, and 4 weeks later I still wasn’t satisfied with the result. Luckily I was able to find a few fellow musicians who where also feeling groovy. That took this thing into a whole different direction than I expected, but made it infinitely better.  A song is never finished until it is pressed to vinyl so this will go down as the web 2.0 mix.

-edit: all tracks were submitted through the mail

Feeling Groovy – 4:10

download feeling-groovy.mp3 (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA0)

YES! this is also a SchnauzerStudios Production!

photo by Bakou67

They don’t come any more raw than this. I went into the studio completely blanc, pressed record and started playing the piano. No edits, so every timing mistake, false notes and lines I regret are still there. Looking at the final waveform I came up with a title : Loudness Wars.
Headphones required.

Enjoy,

Loudness Wars – 8:29 Download

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

This is a raw mix of the track ‘Boogie Rash’ we did last friday. Phil Martin is responsible for the recording and mixing of this. So, although the composition is mine, I feel a bit reluctant to show off the whole track. I limited this as a one minute fragment. It’s still unclear what is going to happen with this session (45 vinyl limited, or perhaps part of a bigger project), but we all agreed that no matter what, this not the last recording session we did with the philicorda.
Heck I recorded a part with a wah-pedal and that sound instantly gave me goosebumps.
The other tunes we did were even more cheesy, but it’s very hard to pick a fragment. God I love recording with a full band.

Enjoy,

Boogie Rash -fragment- 1:04

The philicorda project is about to begin. A live recording (organ, guitar, bass, drums). This Friday we have a session planned to record the first few tracks. It’s going to be a funky grungy sounding vinyl single (the plan was, if I’m correct, to release it at first as a vinyl 45 exclusively. If it’s good enough it will appear on a Social Beats compilation in the future. I’m actually on my knees on the same adress to get the Schnauzer-CD released, but that’s a whole other story – and that also depends on my personal workflow

Let’s first see if we could get this danceable and raw enough.
What you have here is a raw pre-production of one of the tunes we are going to do (drums, guitar and bass are fake now), but since I put a bit more time in this one, I figured it might be enoyable on its own.
The final version will be posted here in a few weeks.

Enjoy,

Diagnosis Dance – 3:12

Still Carnaval here.

Here’s a ‘polonaise’ I made.This tune has more of a build-down than a build-up, the whole thing collapses halfway, like everyone’s to drunk to dance anyway. I Hope this is annoying enough for you today!

Enjoy,

Prins Noot Mars – remix    2:57

Photo: Flickr CC by Attribution license by Phatbri

A work in progress this week. first of all because my hammond organ is still in restauration, and second I couldn’t be bothered to record a real rhodes because of the fake-hammond organ… There is so much going on at the same time here that I seriously considered to slow my postings down. I gave that a little thought and I came to the conclusion that I’ll always am surfing for corny stuff, so I might as well share it through this blog.
Many of the songs that are in the works now are becoming much complexer and involve a lot more time than the things I did in the past. I still like to make sketch-like music now and again, but I feel the little things are getting in the way of the big and important things.

Basically this is a tune I ordered myself to finish. This has been cooking for quiet some time now, so the minute my organ is in I’m recording the final version.

enjoy,

Smokers Lounge (excerpt) 1:41

Last week I finished another rendition of the Extralife tune.
This was floating in the back of my mind for ages so I basically had to make it to get it out of my system. Again, not really a campy cheesy crappy Schnauzer-tune but an attempt at a techno-tune (with a campy cheesy crappy theme as the source).
Also this thing accelerated the idea Scott Johnson and I had for a while: The Official Extralife CD.  This will be a collaboration between the Extralife Radio team/comic, and the Schnauzer Radio Orchestra.
I’m really curious to find out what happens when a hugely popular podcast, which is available weekly for absolutely no charge starts offering a CD.
Are fans of the show more into mp3’s for their ipods, or are they craving for a shiny disc with cool artwork by some highly respected webcartoonists? Time will tell.
No guts no glory! I have two more releases to finish this next year, but production has started today.

Enjoy,

Extratechno 3:20