Been doing a little testing and preset design for the FAW guys for their new synth, Circle.
I have to say it’s been a delight to use. Very intuitive and lovely sounding with some very unique features that make getting oddness out of this synth a breeze.
Came up with this track in a few evenings and it’s 100% Circle. The only other bits are a touch of Reverence (Audio Damage reverb plug in) and the built in Ableton Live compressors and EQs.
Amazing piece of HTML/CSS/jQuery hackery by Cameron Adams that just begs to be played with. It looks like my future will mainly involve creating nostalgic Q-Bert landscapes.
You may have seen it on the interweb news already (Techcrunch, Slashdot, The Register etc) so I’m late to the party, mainly due to the fact I’ve been hard at work restoring our lost servers. I say lost. I mean nicked.
Stolen.
So a note to all you admins out there in charge of sites. Have a think about what your strategy is in case on not just hardware failure, but total loss. Not something you think about too often.
We are mainly back after 4 days of frantic work, but have made some harsh decisions about the very old sites based on some archaic tech that we have just cut free and plan to remake. The only main one missing as of now is Real World Records which we are planning to get online in a new form this week.
Alongside the restore we moved hosts, and switched to a hosted system rather than a co-located server so had to get elbow deep to reconfigure most of the sites to get them working on the new server so this wasn’t just a simple backup restore.
The only missing thing are the video assets. We will be re-encoding and re-uploading those over time to take advantage of the new flash based video player we switched to earlier this year.
As ever having Peter’s name attached gives it legs in the blog world and here is some of the reporting.
Techcrunch | Wall Street Journal | Slashdot | The Register
Always interesting to read the comments (apart from the endless Sledgehammer jokes) and see what people on the outside think our setup is like. Most appear to assume a large enterprise type setup with a team of devs, designers and editors. The reality is much more modest.
It’s not often you get to meet a legend, but working at Real World you get more than your fair share.
Not long ago I was scared half to death by Robert Plant when he excused a sneeze in my office when I thought I was alone and obsorbed with code and today I got to meet (again) one of the kingpin producers in my world, Adrian Sherwood.
Adrian is at Real World Studios mixing a project for Little Axe - one of my favourite Real World artists - and I was there trying to capture some moments on video for the forthcoming EPK but during some downtime we chatted for a moment about music production and he offered up some top tips and my boss, York Tillyer, captured the moment when Sherwood laid down the knowledge.
Minor site update and some sneaky features last night. The main visual change was the addition of some new colourful Aurora Borealis inspired glows peeking out from behind the content panel just to add a bit of colour to my drab winter night, and I’ve sneaked in some minor tweaks here and there to fix it up a bit.
Also I’ve remembered that there is a fully functioning URL based search function that I’ve not got round to creating a form for. Simply stick search/searchterm on the root URL and it’ll work fine and dandy. Try it out here.
Been off work sick over last week and so finally get round to doing a proper version of this mashup (ugh!) I used to do live when I was a DJ.
2 Serge Gainsbourg tracks (Initial BB and Bonnie & Clyde), a Royce Da 5”9 Vocal from a bit of vinyl I bought a few years back, two little audio surprises at the end and a dollop of boom bap.
Annoyed Kylie has nicked the same B&C loop I’ve been using for years but hey ho - Life, as they say, sucks.
Preview it above in the flash player and if you like you can get the 320k DL below.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell
Nice short checklist from Chris Randall at Analog Industries. This one’s my favourite.
“Hey, I think this track needs some percussion.” Sigh. Nobody but percussionists can actually play percussion worth a shit. See #3. If you own a studio, and you want to increase your hourly billing, just leave some maracas and a tambo lying about the control room.
I love this photo. Only drum machine geeks need apply mind as that’s Roger Linn.
Blatantly nicked from Create Digital Music
