Alright another two beats to check, the higher up in the playlist the newer they are. Old Memories was the one I made for yesterdays LouisDen and Cold Fire is the first proper ReWired one I’ve made… Dunno if it’s all that to be honest, but messing with rewire is too much fun :)
Started messing around with ReWire today, man I love it, big up to the Renoise devs for implementing it. Now I can use both of my fav music applications at the same time. Which are, in case someone hasn’t been paying attention, Cubase and Renoise.
Recorded a short vid of my first attempt.. the result of it at least, a quick beat mock-up. I didn’t think about recording until I had had already made the beat and merged all the cuts and whatnot, so it doesn’t look like much… But hey! ReWire!!!!
Yesterday I talked about how you could use AutoHotkey to improve and speedup your computer use in general, but today I thought I’d show how it can be useful for making/playing music. Something more in line with what I usually write about. It’s nothing fancy and quite basic, I re-bound the Channel Mute keys in Renoise, which are Control + 0-9 on the keypad as default. What I did was remove the need to hold down the Control key so I could just hit the numbers on the keypad, 
and I bound several channel mutes together so I could press say 7 on the keypad and mute all hi-hats in one go.
Check the pic for a full view of the script including some notes (or grab it here, just open it in notepad), it’s a very simple AHK script that use the built in command SendInput to send key presses to the active window.
Also you can check the video (HD version on Vimeo as usual) where I try to use my brand new key-bindings, try is the keyword here lol. I didn’t practice any so I’m not exactly tight. The tune is just some lofi, glitchy thing I threw together. This specific script will only work with this songs layout, so you’ll have to make one for each song, unless you use the same layout on all your songs.
Just thought I’d give a heads up about the Worpress 2 Ping.fm plugin I recommended yesterday. It will ping any post that hasn’t been pinged before, so if you edit an old post for instance it will ping that. I found out the hard way yesterday lol, didn’t realize what was going on before I had spammed about 10 links of old posts to the sites I have ping.fm set up with. Not so good, but no real damage was done since I caught it fairly quick.
So a word of caution, disable it if you’re going to edit old non-pinged posts. Or you can of course use one of the other ping.fm plugins that are around on the WordPress repository. I found one that allowed you to specify a little more when it should ping and when it shouldn’t. But I think I’ll stick with the one I got for now, as I now know to disable it if I need to edit any old posts.
Have a good day folks!
I made a drop over at drop.io a week or so ago where I could put up new beats and beats in progress, I only tweeted.. twittered.. err.. twat..? Anyways, I talked about it on twitter and forgot to mention it here. So I thought it was about time I did. I’ve been going through some experimental phase lately, it might not sound like it to some, but I’ve been doing things in ways I’ve never really done before, which means some of them sound a bit different then usual. I also went back to my beat making roots for one, which was kinda fun :) It was a beat for last weeks LouisDen Beat Battle in which you had to assume the personality of another producer. I chose True Master, for those of you who remember him. Really wanna see the video from that LDBB and get a proper listen to what peeps did.
I’ll put up the beat previews and the beats in progress here as well, so you can listen right away without having to switch page. I haven’t decided if I should make a playlist-player or just use the regular one-mp3-per-player. Maybe I should go with the playlist, that way I could put it in any future posts without any hassle. All previews are 128kbps transcoded mp3s, that means low quality. Latest ones are on top. And as I said, most of them are works in progress.
The True Master one is Stars In Their Eyes for those wondering.
OK, where to begin. I’ve already written this once and lost it due to a program crash, but I’ll give it another go. I’ll talk about WordPress plugins, a couple of sites and some programs that I think will save you time and improve your workflow, at least they do for me.
Just to be clear, this is more about all the administrative things you have to do as an artist today and about streamlining your workflow, not about the actual music making process.
Social Networks & Websites
I was looking around for some place that would allow me to update all, or most, of the social networks I’m on, from one place. Since as an artist you don’t really have the luxury of choosing one of them, you have to be on all of them, and keeping it all updated by yourself is more or less a full time job. I wanted to minimize the time I needed to spend updating all those places, and after searching around and testing various services I found ping.fm. It allows you to add networks like facebook, facebook pages (which doesnt seem to be supported in many places yet), twitter, tumblr, myspace and a ton of others, and you can update them all from there, either in one go, or individually.
After I set that up I wanted some way to use it from my desktop so I wouldn’t have to fire up the browser, 
go to the site, login and navigate to the right page every time I wanted to update something. Some more searching ensued and after a while I found MePing, not the prettiest thing around perhaps, but it does what it does very well. Namely import all your networks and custom posting rules from ping.fm and allows you to update, that’s it. Time saved!
OK, then I was thinking, what if I could integrate this site into ping.fm as well, I already had a plugin that updated Twitter every time I made a new post, but what about all the other networks. Once again I went on the hunt and I found WordPress 2 Ping.fm, I’ve been running it a couple of days now and it seems to work flawlessly. It sends an update to ping.fm, which automatically posts it to your configured networks, every time you publish a new post on your blog…
More time saved for important things like actually making music.
OK. I just wrote a long article about improving and speeding up work flow, and then the program crashed….
I guess today is one of those days.
If I can be bothered, I’ll write a new one tomorrow.
As the title says, when you’re thinking about entering a remix competition, read the contest rules. If you don’t there might be some nasty surprises down the road for you. Of course you’ll probably have to sign
some form of contract at some point, so you can always opt-out then, unless stated otherwise. So read through them carefully! And as they’re usually full of legal mumbo-jumbo, you could well read it twice, or more, without feeling bad about yourself.
So why am I talking about this, well I stumbled over a remix competition today that I though could be fun. But after reading through the rules I wouldn’t even poke it with a stick. Too bad. Nothing I can do about that, but at least it annoyed me enough to write this.
Though I’d let y’all know about a couple of issues with the site that I’ve come across.
Firstly it seems that the open source browser Chromium, that is the one that Google Chrome is built on, don’t render the site properly. There’s some css issues, at least on the latest builds. I’m not sure, but it might apply to Chrome as well. Site works fine in Internet Explorer and Firefox though. Just a heads up.
Secondly, the buy buttons in the Soundcloud player should not be there, I can’t remove them for some reason, but if you click them you’ll just get an error. I’ve reported the issue to the Soundcloud staff, so hopefully I’ll get a response shortly.
Edit..
The buy button issue was promptly fixed, so all is good on that front. Chromium still mess up the css tho, but not much I can do about that.
Edit 2..
Been doing some behind the scenes optimizing on the site today (May 31) and yesterday to decrease load times and make everything a bit snappier. I was finally able to after my host did some much needed upgrading, which made everything work proper and the site feel responsive for the first time in ages. I hope it lasts, if it does they might just have saved a customer.
Todays recommendation.. Blame Ones Days Chasing Days.
Alright.. What to say about Blame Ones latest album, besides that it’s good and you shouldn’t sleep on it.
With production by Exile, Black Milk, Kankick, Blu and more, and guest appearances by Sean P, Blu, to name a few, even Exile steps up on the mic, it’s hard to see how it can go wrong… and it doesn’t. I met Blame a couple of years a go, through a mutual friend, and he’s def one of the good guys, so show some love and go cop his album!
I thought I’d put up some preview song(s) off his album but I decided to go with a tune we did a couple of years ago instead. You can preview the entire album on his myspace, so I thought it might be more interesting to share something else.
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