songtradr, bandcamp, faircamp, etc
hi.
this blog makes me feel like an absent friend who just pops up at your front door unannounced every few months, like “hey whats good, tryna kick it?”.
there are projects in the work, i promise. an acoustic album recorded entirely to a 7” reel to reel, no digital processing, of the songs that are to comprise the album that never got finished that maybe will one day get finished. later today i’ll setup a peertube account and i’ll upload a phone-video of the reel to reel in action. speaking of fediverse products such as peertube…
as you’ve probably already heard, songtradr purchased bandcamp from epic about 2 weeks ago. like many others, i was worried about how a publishing company would honor the legacy of a platform that provided digital music free of drm to music consumers. but before we even got that far, the new owners decided to lock out the entire bandcamp team from their systems. and 2 days ago, news broke that they fired the entirety of bandcamp united union leadership as well as a huge proportion of their staff:
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-bargaining-union-layoffs-songtradr-18432047.php
some might wait around to see how a company that deals with hundred of thousands of dollars worth of sales daily is going to function with a 3 person customer service team, but as a matter of class solidarity, i’m out. that’s a personal decision for me, one that i, specifically, am in a position to afford.
anyways, back to the fediverse… there has been a product by the name of “faircamp” for a little while now. the team behind radiofreefedi.net has decided to provide hosting for rff artists. so without further ado…
you can now find symphonie no. 4 here: https://faircamp.radiofreefedi.net/benjamindaass/
as well as the embedded player to the right (and above, fuck squarespace’s web editor).
where you can stream and download for free, or leave a donation if you so please.
you can also listen to rff in browser or via a variety apps: https://radiofreefedi.net/
there are a few different groups that i am aware of trying to create a full-fledged bandcamp replacement, but for now faircamp seems like a great solution as long as you have the technical know-how and time to self-host or if you are fortunate enough to find someone willing to host.
huge thanks to control freak (whose work can be found here: https://faircamp.radiofreefedi.net/control/) for setting me up with hosting.
thank you for reading. new sounds coming soon.
belated release announcement
you can tell i’m a real professional by the way i market myself. about 3 weeks ago, symphonie no. 4 for electric guitar was released as the first completed thing since i have christened this studio of sorts. it starts with an electric guitar rendition of chopin’s prelude no. 4 in e minor, except i transcribed it to e flat minor.
you can listen via embedded player to the right side over there. the handsome devil in the cover art is homeboy. he’s been an assistant engineer here at cows for the last 15 months. although he mostly just adds little easter eggs to the recordings.
i don’t ramble too much about making my music because i feel like, well who really cares. but for what’s worth, the whole thing started more as a production experiment. i’ve wanted for some time to record a basic guitar harmony, something one might play “cowboy style” but record it across many guitars playing a note a each. so its very very basic 6 voice harmony. and i think the effect is very cool although takes a lot of work to produce it correctly.
as you layer the guitars you start to really really hear the frequencies that are augmented on your instrument(s), the room, and/or the details of your production chain. i would like to think that i did a decent job addressing all that in the mix stage, but there are certainly some upper mid frequencies that are a bit pitch-y.
the other issue to address is phase. because of course there’s always phase. this could theoretically be addressed in production/post-production but i decided it was much easier to record all the guitars and then address it in the mix (by processing half the guitars tracks through phase adjuster boxes). this was incredibly effective. if anyone is interested, let me know and i’ll upload before and after phase-adjusted recordings of the harmony guitars.
as for the composition itself… since this started as a production experiment, i didn’t create the most interesting harmony for a seven minute composition. and once i decided to commit myself to making this something “finished” i had already recorded all those harmony guitars and would be damned if i was going to start from scratch (i do not like cutting and pasting parts in the box. i think its a bad practice and you can hear the edits in the recording). so i had to write my melodies to the song structure i unfortunately committed myself to. which was fine at first. i’m very much happy with the first and second movements (the first 4 minutes and 40 seconds of the piece). the third and forth movements took a lot of effort to write. it was a balance between making it part of the same thing but not just repeating movements. in the end, i’m pretty happy with how the third movement turned out, but wish i at least produced the last movement a little better. although i love the sound of many fuzzed out guitars layered on top of each other, i made it impossible to get the snare drum to cut through.
oh well, you live and you learn.
thank you for following.
here’s to future sounds.
updates including SP3AK
the studio is a bedroom, the closest thing i have to a bedroom is my studio.
its sort of beautiful. a mess of cables and boxes with switches and knobs full of potential sounds.
the problem is when things in my life go haywire, it manifests in the studio. and when things in the studio go wrong, it feels like my whole life is crashing down around me as i watch the news and smoke with cigarettes and am otherwise paralyzed to try to stop it.
months and months and months ago… i mastered a few tracks for a friend who is working under the title “SP3AK”. those works can be found and supported here:
since then, the crashing has begun. i’ve had a serious of seemingly-neurological problems with my left arm and hand. things that seem to be cubital tunnel and then a shoulder impingement or something (i don’t have health insurance and don’t generally trust medical professionals anyways). so its been difficult to play guitar, but slowly getting less and less impossible.
then the cows computer died. and with it went the album that i’ve been working on for years as well as the musings.
anyways, things are starting to get rolling again. there should be a instrumental release by b.d.a. in the coming months, and eventually i will start to re-record the album although it may just get released as a serious of singles as its already been too long. the musings are dead. they were improvisations that i don’t care to work out.
currently listening to Mitski’s Laurel Hell and Neil Young’s Harvest. both are highly recommended.
spring reverb
nothing like some spring reverb. picked up an anasounds le truand. that’s french for make everything sound awesome. that got used on the triton (set to a wurlitzer sound). ran the drums through my good old 202, and the guitar through the space echo. this track has some serious space. serious musing.
the cd that’s lost among the chaos that is my desk is michael g. ronstadt’s ‘shaken earth volume 4’. you can find a lot of his music here : https://www.michaelronstadt.com/shop.html (but not that album for some reason…?)
anyways, here’s the musing in dorian. it is meant to be the third track in the collection. the soundcloud playlist has been updated to reflect that.
a musing is…
mus·ing /ˈmyo͞oziNG/
noun a period of reflection or thought.
in other words, me bullshitting around on a guitar over the same three or four bars of piano accompaniment repeating endlessly. you could call them guitar sonatas. i usually have one specific musical element that i’m concerned with exploring (a particular scale, time signature, whatever) and after i write and record a piano part that repeats for a few minutes, i just explore on the guitar until i have enough phrases that i like and arrange them in some semblance of a progression that might keep someone interested. oh, and then i put reverb on everything. reverb sounds like musing (as a present participle).
the newest one took a little bit of extra effort. it was hard to use the flat second without adding this psuedo-”oriental” sound that i find super tasteless. but in the end i think i’m pretty happy with it.