Hello, my name is Looptron.

Meet your new master?

Assuming I ever finish this fucking album I was going to try and use the same folks we mastered the Moeker CD with (they're called Ideal Mastering - very cool bunch) to clean it up, wax it down and make the audio all gorgeous and shiny. Well, it turns out that none other than Ry Cooder (legendary guitar player, producer and major campaigner for getting the elderly back into the workplace) has been having problems getting the sound he wanted on his latest project and discovered something unfeasibly handy by mistake...

From the article:

“It started to sound processed,” he said. “We were losing the feeling of the thing, and this is not music that can withstand this.” Then Mr. Cooder noticed something else: When he burned a copy of the album using Apple’s iTunes software, it sounded fine. He didn’t know why until one of his younger engineers told him that the default settings on iTunes apply a “sound enhancer.” [snip] “We didn’t do anything else to it,” he said.

Would you dare trust iTunes to master your record? Would you?

A Red Cat's Journey, Enhanced by iTunes [NY Times, via Kill Ugly Radio]

"The Smartest Bomb" by Cassette released today.

Cassette's debut single "The Smartest Bomb" is out today. More on that on the other blog.

Or just buy it!

We can rebuild you - smaller, louder, bleepier.

So, not a fat lot of work on the Looptron stuff of late... although I have been doing an awful lot of Moeker and Cassette. To be fair, I can't remember a year that had this much live performance duty in it so early on.

My new baby (a rather luscious reissue of a 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline) has survived it's first two gigs despite not actually being set up for the strings I have on it. Sounds lovely though. My Ibanez is still lovely (and a damned sight more ergonomic) but this thing just has a wonderful bluesy midrange thing going on. Plus you can retune quickly without undoing any clamps or anything.

Last night was the first gig I've done for ages with my old Boss multi-effects unit. Between that and the rehearsals we did it just seems so clunky compared to the laptop-based rig both in terms of physical size (big ol' wheelie bag o'crap vs. laptop bag) and sheer functionality. I also think Guitar Rig actually sounds a lot better too. Mind you, the effects are aging and the software is very new - it's kind of what you'd expect I guess. Looks like I'm gonna have to migrate Moeker over to software emulated geetar sounds.

Looptron-wise, though, I've been constructing some more little bits and pieces of loops and getting off on lots of old school Rhodes type piano sounds that I found. Now the majority of my other band chores are sorted I'm aiming to get functioning demos of this stuff up together. Despite the dark tone of a lot of the lyrics the music is shaping up to be quite happy electronic synth pop. (Note: this could be a side effect of using German built software. I just want Hasslehoff to be proud.) It doesn't look like I'm going to get my month of unemployment as soon as I expected so I'm just going to have to progress the tunes evenings and weekends for now. Nag me to post demos or I'll never finish anything.

Go on.

Insomniac.

Happy new year, happy Friday, happy lunchtime and all that guff. This year's new year resolutions:

1. FINISH THE LOOPTRON ALBUM.
2. Lose 5 kgs of beergut.
3. Go to Japan.

All perfectly achievable.

I made a start on rolling my own looping software, got as far as getting a working audio unit that just does volume stuff and then came across Expert Sleepers Augustus Loop plugin - a really nice tape delay emulator. (Cheap too.) Haven't even begun to get to the depths of what I can do with it, but it hits a lot of my wish list functionality-wise. I'll keep playing with the audio unit I'm writing though. Good learning experience and, who knows, I might even come up with something cool.

I'm not sleeping lately - my brain wont turn off at night. There's lots on to be thinking about, including a Cassette gig on the 10th and a Moeker gig on the 17th... both of which require rehearsal, particularly the Moeker one where we're trying to get new tunes for the gig. In the meantime the day job has got monumentally hectic and, frankly, a bit stressful.

Apart from permanently looking like a zombie this does mean I'm spending some quality time with the laptop at night though, and I've got some really nice ideas coming through. Keep flitting between the concept of doing stuff live or assembling them as recordings to and as a result I'm not actually getting a lot finished but there's a zillion point five little shards of ideas that are slowly coalescing. I think my current ethic should be just to work and work and work on the material in whatever way comes to mind. I'll take stock in a month.