Saturday, April 19, 2008

Soundclick Value, Oddity Bugs


Soundclick.com is a great place to purchase mp3 files if you like paypal and can find something you like there. It is an artist's community, so there is a wide variety of styles and quality. Most of the time, you can listen to something before you buy it, and many times the author generously gives away pieces, though that also varies.

The drawback, and probably an impediment to selling your songs on soundclick is that you can only sell to members. The process is that you create an account and put some money into the account and then you go about actually purchasing things.

Okay, Gforce Oddity, I have found some bugs in the VST synth. If you use more than one instance of oddity on a song on Sonar, some of the characteristics of the voices you choose get changed. I worked with one song recently for quite a while with no problems, and then suddenly the envelope changed on my 2nd instance of oddity. I tried rebooting. I tried deleting the synth and re-installing it, changing the voice and changing it back. After it went south, I couldn't get it to come back. The serendipity was that I was much more satisfied with the impOSCar voice that I used instead.

Monday, April 14, 2008

MySpace for Flux Oersted


A long time ago, during the Black Monolith phase of my music doings, I had a myspace page and for some reason, decided it was too much hassle at the time, and deleted it. There are still some of those Black Monolith songs being hosted on other sites like garageband.com and iLike. Most of those songs came over from cassette tapes in the great magnetic flux of 1994. Back then, I had a wooden box full of tapes that I kept all the cassette masters of me repertoires in. I had contingency plans if the house caught on fire, to rescue that box. Now my music is digital and dispersed all over the place. I do however keep DVD-R backups in a safety deposit box at my bank.

But I digress. MySpace pages seem to be a requirement for bands these days. Of course, I'm not a band, but rather a project, still, it seemed like making another go at it would be worth while. Whereas before it seemed like the only people on MySpace were teenagers and sexual predators, nowadays it is more like business on the net.

My new page is at www.myspace.com/oersted. It seems like most of the traffic is from other bands. I remember Dave Thomas from Pere Ubu singing "everybody's in a band" and sometimes it seems like everybody has some kind of band going on.

But this brings me to one of the key ingredients of the web music business: "How to be found." There are millions of listeners, and millions of bands, maybe more music than potential viewers. So how do you connect to them without any sort of traditional ad campaign or promotion?

One way that tunecore.com suggests for doing this in iTunes is to create iMix playlists that contain a few of your songs and a bunch of really popular ones. Then, when somebody finds the play list containing their favorite artist, your music is riding piggy back with it and is potentially heard and tried out. That sounds nutty if you're used to the old days when people listened to the radio, but fewer and fewer people leave home without an ipod or some such device these days for playing "their" tunes. So musicians are left to try and insert themselves into the music search loop somehow.

This brings me back to MySpace. I don't know how anybody actually finds your band page unless they are a musician who systematically goes through all the other band pages doing friend requests. Once "friended" the musician places a thank you message in the target band's page and that serves as an advertisement and a link back to their own band page. Now if all the visitors to your music are other musicians then you'd better have some really good music if you hope to sell them anything of your own. All the other electronic musicians can pretty much duplicate most of what they are going to hear as they make their rounds through all the other band pages, posting advertisement comments.

Every bit counts though. The more search efforts you can seed, the better. There's always a chance that somebody will like what they hear enough to pay for it. Somebody has to pay for it the first time before it can wind up on a bittorrent search.

Another question arises. Would you rather be heard or would you rather hold out and be purchased? On soundclick.com/fluxoersted I have my entire current catalog of music available for sale, by the single, in albums, but also for free to be streamed. I endorse the play before you pay philosophy. Most big name artists don't feel this way. They have lo-fi 30 second sound bytes available. Some even put partial songs on their MySpace page. To me, the "try some, buy some" plan is more equitable when you're like me, unknown, and with nothing to lose. But there again, all the participants on soundclick.com are other bands. Of course, that may just be my perception. There may be more listeners than it seems like and I'm just not getting them.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Inference Patterns is available at a web store near you


Flux Oersted - Inference Patterns
The distribution channels have just about all started carrying Inference Patterns. iTunes was online early with a "partial album" for some reason, although they are carrying all 10 tracks that I have listed for the album. Of course, the songs are all available separately.

Amazon.com is the lowest price I've seen so far, where you can get the all 10 songs for about 6 dollars. Rhapsody and Napster also carry it. And I think there are a couple of others but I forget what they were.

I've made a couple of press releases patterned on the information at Robitron.com There is a special edition audio CD version online at CafePress.com containing a few bonus tracks for those wanting an actual CD to hold onto.

Friday, April 04, 2008

I returned to the studio today after a week-long stay at my mom's house while recovering from hip replacement surgery. I had a good rest at my mom's house, but couldn't wait to get back to the studio.

I'm in the middle of my "alien influence" album. Most of it will be instrumentals, and started out as more melodic, but since I've been out of the hospital, I keep going industrial on everything. I hear machines talking to machines and telling people what to do. I want to put some meat into this, as the first few songs are more like temporal transposed songs from the middle ages played by VST synths. I've got to put some impOSCar and Oddity lines in there. This isn't one for the pocket orchestra.

A friend of mine, Neil Fellowes, told me about a nice little VST synth called Pokegy. I had to hunt one down because the original website is vaporized. Anyway, it is a nice emulation of a Moog Prodigy, which I've ranted about here lately, and though I have a real hardware version of one, I prefer not to have to power it up and plug it in if I don't have to. The Pokegy sounds pretty true to the real thing and even has a few mods like an FM modulator. It has polyphony, so there's something you can't do with the real deal.

I used it in a short atmospheric piece to start with, and am pleased with it so far. I fooled myself into thinking that it wouldn't work with Sonar, but it turned out that I had inadvertently turned off the option that creates the audio playback track for new instruments and didn't realize it. Geeze, these pain killers are crippling my brain!

Back to pokegy, it sounds more like a Moog Prodigy than Minimonsta for my tastes. It has that dual oscillator feel to it. There are times when that is what I want, and it cuts through the mix when needed. I'm finding that Minimonsta is good for the very rich textured synth-type sounds that can't quite be accomplished with impOSCar. ImpOSCar is pretty amazing, and has some very lush sounding textures of it's own, but even though they are both VST synths, Minimonsta just has that very analog feel to it, while impOSCar sounds like a Casio CZ-1000 with analog filters. I don't mean to sell the impOSCar short, but the way it generates sounds is different from anything I've ever used before.

I love them all.