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!!!!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, so what’s this 2 Weeks 3 Hours all about?
I’ll tell you. It’s about creativity, it’s about about getting things done, it’s about emotion, consistency, abstract paintings and time & space. It’s about trying to do something creative, interesting and worth wile. Here’s two points about what all that really means…
How:
I will have 3 hours every day for 2 weeks to make a new song, it can be a remix, an instrumental, hip-hop, jungle, everything goes. On top of that I’ll make a picture for it, photo/collage/painting/whatever. After the tune and pic is done I’ll post it here for everyone to hear and see.. no censure, I’ll put it up even if I don’t like it.
After all is done I will go through the lot and fix any things I really feel needs fixing. Once I’m happy with the tunes and pics after that I’ll make a cover, put em all together, and hopefully they’ll all fit together as a whole, that’s the idea anyways. We’ll know in a couple of weeks.
Why:
Personally I’ve been slacking off a bit lately, so one reason for doing this is to jump-start myself back on track. Another one is to see if I can actually make something coherent and consistent with limited resources and time, call me a masochist lol. I wanna see if I can pull it off, without making any complete duds.
And why add pictures on top of that?
Well.. I’ve done photo jobs off and on, graphic design on occasion, painted a lot, and I hardly do any of that any more.. I miss it. So I thought this was as good a project as any to get my ass on those things as well. Plus I don’t think that you have to be an EAM musician collaborating with either a modern ballet company or a quasi-performance artist to bridge the gap between art-forms. I’m not saying I’ll make fine-art here, or everyday things for that matter, what will come out will come out.
See you on the other side.
I’ve also been thinking about writing up a “real” About magOwl piece, without the usual nonsense that goes into those. Because more often then not they don’t say shit about who this or that person really is, same with mine (both on here and on other places).
Is it really so terrible to get a little personal, even if some of it might look a bit weird to some people? I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t. I can of course be wrong.. It’s been known to happen. But I mean we’re all people (most of us anyway), and we all got our quirks and eccentricities, we usually just hide em from other people, some even go to great lengths to do so. Why?
Anyways.. I’ll have to think about what to write, not just jot down whatever. So.. *puts meat-helmet back on*
I’m trying to update sowl.org a little, changing the theme (and in the process learning some css/php) and making it cleaner all over. It’s a work in progress tho, so I’ll fix things as I go along, removing some things and adding others. I’ll also start posting more, so instead of waiting for something “important” to post I’ll just throw up things as they come along, important or not.
I’m also gonna switch host, once this year expires (June I think), to a better one.. site is soooo slow sometimes, feels like being on dial-up once again and I don’t have the patience for it. And I’m probably gonna register a couple more domains as well, so site might go through another transformation later on, I might keep it as is tho and fire up another one all together, we’ll see what the future brings!
