Audio experiment

A couple of audio experiments.. First, I wanted to have a little look into an easy way to add some mp3 clips to the blog posts today, as it'd be nice to occasionally just drop in some bits and bobs that I'm working on. This is a track I made today, which mixes up a few thing from the past week or so.. The weather here has been quite wintery, with a fair bit of snow (by English standards anyway) over the weekend. I was also feeling a bit homesick after getting some nice cards and presents for my birthday last week, but also made to feel really welcome in Germany by a nice series of answer phone messages from pretty much all of my girlfriends relatives. This track is part of my effort to try and turn my music into more of a diary of what's happening for me. See what you think..



The track is a bit work in progress, not mastered properly, etc, but I thought it might be cool to make things a bit more immediate, so you hear lots of bits and pieces as I make them, and not have to wait years in between releases. The only thing that might get in the way is webspace, as I don't have that much at the minute! We'll see how it goes..

Some random other things from today..



I'm up to episode 10 of Gurren Lagann!! Although i was quite into this series from the first episode, episode 8 blew me away today, starting to develop a habit for it now.

I just finished Spider-Man: Web of Shadows DS. Twice. Best Spidey game since Spider-Man 2. Now back to Pic Pic....

First rumours of a PSP2 have started to appear.

GamesRadar had a great feature on non-game gamer gifts for xmas. Reminds me of all the awesome toys I want to waste money on, like this Chun-Li by Revoltech, and this mini Pac-Man arcade unit (sadly not playable!)

Gear

I added a few new sections to the website today, including a bit of info on my current set up. While putting the list together, it reminded me how much free software I use in my set up. Some of my favourite VSTs are free, such as the awesome MDA plug pack, pluggo jnr and FreeAlpha. It's pretty incredible to think of the results you can get out of a music set up that literally costs nothing. I remember how hard it used to be when I was making tracks in Octamed, having to program in some faked delay effects by hand, as I just didn't have any effects plug ins or external fx units. Search on the net now and you'd find hundreds of them, along with countless other synths and effects, which can all be used in free sequencers/trackers.

Which reminds me, I came across another free bundle of plug in effects today..

Blue Cat Audio

Not had a chance to dig into them yet, but it looks like there could be some useful stuff in there, although nothing that sounds weird or revolutionary. If you are looking for something a bit weirder, you could try out Olga. I've only played about with that one a little bit, but it's pretty strange. For starters, the interface is all Russian (i think), making it a little hard to learn. Definitely has a sound of it's own though.

Site work

Just a quick one to say that things might look a bit strange here for a few days as I start changing things around to fit into the new site... The blog doesn't match up with the existing site anymore, but once the new site is uploaded, it'll all make sense again.

One of the things I'm adding is a way to expand posts, so you don't have to scroll through too much to see a quick overview of the blog. I don't post that often, but when I do, it tends to be quite a lot, and it makes the blog look a bit heavy.