Sowl Productions

Tapes: We Like Em

Site Update

I just Installed the Super Cache plugin for Wordpress, last time I did it caused some weirdness on the site, so I’m just giving a heads up. I have tried it out and checked everything I could think of (which usually amounts to, not everything), so if there’s something fishy going on just let me know and I’ll either uninstall it or try to fix whatever it is that’s causing the problems. Last time around it was mainly the tunes in the download section that didn’t work for some reason, and I think I’ve fixed that.. but you never know.

Hope y’all had a good weekend.. till next time!

Projects, Ideas And New Music

I got a couple of instrumental projects in the making, not going to give away too much detail, but one of them revolves around making a 5-6 track EP through the evolution of one tune, and I’ll leave it at that.. enigmatic enough? Maybe not. I think they can turn out to be pretty interesting though, if they do I might consider pitching them to some labels.

I’m also going to try finish up another remix installment because some people have been asking me about it, and as I didn’t think my 2 Weeks 3 Hours project held up properly, it’s about time. I was also thinking about putting together a compilation of old beats spanning 1997 –2001, or around those years anyway. As I recently resurrected my old darling the Ensoniq EPS 16+ and converted all the old Atari arrangements to PC, all I could find at least. So I’ll check through them, pick out some decent ones and remix/re-master them. I’m not going to change the over all arrangements, at least nothing big, I just want to apply some compressors and proper EQ’s and so on, since I didn’t have any of that stuff back then.

Other then that I got an EP coming up with Atari Blitzkrieg (as mentioned before) and some other tunes which hopefully will come out during the fall, not going to jinx anything by spilling the beans, with my track record when it comes to failed releases, it wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do. I also made a remix of St-Liqour-Ish tune Moneysack, good looking out by my man Bluevibe who hooked me up. I don’t really know what’s going to happen with it as I had to leave for vacation right after I submitted it and I have yet to get in touch with them about it. So we will see.

And… as I got into division 1 of this years LouisDen League, I’ll need to step my game up since I’ll be going up against some truly talented cats over the months to come. Will be fun though, I need the challenge.

So that’s more or less it when it comes to the music bit, but I’ve also been thinking about some other things involving painting and photography.

I’m still in the planning process of figuring out a nice/interesting theme for a photo project, not really sure where I want to take it, or what I want to do with it at this point, but I’ll figure it out eventually. My old Nikon needs the workout, only been taking crappy pictures with a crappy digital camera lately and that’s not cutting it.

As for the painting business I have no idea of where to start, it’s been too long since I picked up the brush, but I’m sure that once I get some canvas up and get started it’ll fall into place. My painting process is fairly abstract, as are the paintings, I never really go in with a plan, I just let whatever it is that wants to come out flow, and as it progresses I’ll see where it’s going. Would be fun to have another exhibition, but it would require me to paint a lot of new ones because I only got maybe two or three old paintings left. So a long term project, or maybe a joint project with an old friend of mine could be the way to go, we’ve talked about it at least. That could be really interesting as we did some wild collaborative paintings back in the day. Maybe go for some big ass canvases and not just the regular meter, meter and a half ones.

Mucking about with ReWire

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!!!!

Word of Caution

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!

Improving Your Workflow

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.

Read more »

Fail

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.

Quick Update

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.

2 Weeks 3 Hours: Epilogue

Ok, so how did I do? Did I manage to meet my criteria and expectations. Did I fall short? Any duds, heat or was it plain blah. These are just my own personal thoughts on the project, and as such, not exactly objective.

The Rules:

Did I do a track a day for two weeks? No I didn’t. I had a couple of days off during the process, for a couple of different reasons, so in that regard I guess I failed. But I think the fact that I got it done in the end, even if it took a couple of extra days, is what’s important.
And I only used three hours to make each tune.. really. I know there’s now way I can prove that, so, you know… you’ll just have to take my word for it.

The Pictures:

Well I have to say I fell off a bit with the pictures. My idea was to actually go out and take some spanking new photos, which I clearly didn’t. I think maybe it all got to be a bit too much, I mean your brain’s kinda mushy after cramming out a tune in three hours, and to re-invigorate your artistic self after that, go out and take at least one good picture, get back in and fix it all up… So I took the easy way out.

Quick rant…
I know it’s all about taking pictures of everything and publishing every photo on the net somewhere now-days, say flickr for instance. But I’ve never ever understood that practice, and for the record I never ever will. What is the point of putting up every damn photo you take of something? As a photographer you take say 10-20 rolls of film (to use a non digital analogy) on a shoot, and from all of those pictures you might choose 1 to 5 pictures that you actually want to show other people. Seriously.. no one is interested in looking at 700+ pictures of the same thing. If you can’t pick out the ones you think are good from a set, please don’t upload anything, we have enough visual pollution. EOD.

The Songs:

The quality of the songs, which is a highly subjective matter, is pretty decent in my opinion. Sure there are a couple that aren’t all that and can’t be ranked among my better work, but they are still ok and not complete duds. I really don’t feel there are any total failures regarding the beats. The ones I feel the least has to be Whirlwind and The Return, mainly because they are way too simple, they feel like an intro that never really kicks off. There are more that could benefit from some expanding, but I think the majority work as is.
Favs have to be World, Pineapple and Full Circle with Poppa Laser, Glitch Train and maybe My Heart (which sort of grew on me) or King Me, close seconds. And I gotta say I love the drums and bass on Good Tymz.

Conclusion:

If it’s an accurate picture of my emotional state over these two weeks, I really couldn’t say. The tunes surely varies in style, tempo and execution, but I think I need more distance to draw any conclusions about it. Give me a year or so, then I can look back with a little more clarity and objectivity.
It did however get my beatmaking tempo increased, I’ve been steady at it ever since I finished this up. Even if it did backfire slightly the week just after, but I kinda expected that.

So in conclusion, I think I managed to pull it off fairly well, a couple of bumps and some things that didn’t work out as planned, but overall I’ll give myself a pass. What do y’all think?

Send me a PM if you wanna peep the Remixes.

About Page

Finally got round to update the About Page that I talked about in a previous post. I split it up into three parts, about the site, about me as a musician & last a more personal, abstract one about me as man. It’s not entirely finished, but finished enough. I’ll keep adding to it when I have the time.

Just a quick update.