Trans Platform Express

I've been working on a song called Xen Rails lately. It started on my trusty old Powerbook, with Logic Express, until it got so big I couldn't get it to mix down any more. I was close to satisfied with the way it sounded at play back time, but when bouncing down to a stereo mix, a glitch developed where I couldn't get all the tracks to bounce together for some reason. Anwyway, after fooling around with it all evening, I finally sent it to my Vista notebook and imported the drums as an MP3 file, and the rest as MIDI to Sonar PE.

Then, I started assigning VST and DXI instruments to the MIDI tracks. On the Mac, I was happy with an Absynth voice on one track, using an organic Cello kind of sound. On Vista, I chose a Stringer string machine voice that really cuts through the mix. I like it better, but now I have to edit that track to get rid of some artifacts (accidentals) that I made while recording it.

There were a few tracks that I couldn't figure out which voice I'd used, even though I have the same synth on both platforms. I couldn't get the same sound, so that leaves me something to work on later. I guess I need to start labeling my tracks with the actual voice name since Logic sort of haphazardly picks that info up from the synths. I guess some of the synths have a more compatible interface with Logic, and that may explain why I couldn't get a mix down.

So far I'm happy working with it on Vista, but I'm further away from feeling finished with it now. The tracks are all in sync, but now I can hear things that I want to change that weren't quite as noticeable on tha Mac. I have a preliminary level mix going on Vista, whereas on the Mac everything was pretty much at the same level going in, only keyboard velocity making the difference in loudness.

I uploaded an excerpt from my mac version to MySpace a few days ago. The whole piece is about 4 minutes long. I'm thinking now about trying to tighten it up a little bit. As it is, it wanders around a bit and doesn't have a very good ending. I think I can fix that now.

Persistence of Vision

I find myself tooled up without any clear direction at this point. In the past, I've been more spontaneous with my musical projects, reluctant to edit myself, basically churning out songs like spent bubble gum. Distance and pride make me want to slow down and proceed with greater care and with more revision than I have previously maintained.

My sound pallete is greater now, and that gives rise to more thought about choices to make, but will it cripple me? When I had two keyboards and a 4-track deck I used to be prolific as hell, but maybe that's the life of a single 20-year-old vs. that of a 45 year old man of greater means and lesser inspiration.

I'm not sure that inspiriation is lacking so much as self-control has evolved. It is the kind of self control that is akin to modesty, or humility that I have, and to some extent it is to be despised. Because without some experimental muscle, my brand of music is nothing. The music I live to create is mine, so there is some sense of pride, and a willingness to edit within some degree of quality. Yet, there can be no experiment without throwing caution to the wind, and blowing the dust off the keys that haven't been touched before, or as often as some others.

Being a manic type though, I know there will come an impulse to create, and that will dictate more than my written words can mettle.

New Workstation

I was reading an interview with Trent Reznor, seemed weird that it was from 1994, in Keyboard magazine. I guess NIN was a bit more musical back then, but his opinions struck me as highly suitable for Keyboard magazine, and also quite a bit leaning towards my own tastes.

He said that he didn't like to mike guitar cabinets, preferring to go directly into an amp simulator. I could see that. Of course his production technique at the time was very sampler intensive. I personally prefer simulated instruments, but would not split hairs as to when the sound becomes a digital recording. He admitted using a minimoog for most if not all of his bass lines, and though I use a virtual minimoog, I can see why.

The Keyboard Magazine mentality came to mind reading Reznor's passion for technology. I can remember in the 80's they thought Thomas Dolby was using the guitar in its proper place by only using them for textures and accompaniment. That is to my liking also. Keyboard used to rave about how "thick" Gary Numan's synth lineup sounded, and that's a no brainer as well.

Ten years later, I read where the guy from The Prodigy used Propellerhead Reason as a sampler on a G4 Powerbook, which was a few years back, but may show a trend from hardware samplers to software based ones. I have thought about trying that, but I may be stuck in the 80's or some kind of facsimile.

I still use a G4 Powerbook with Logic Express to do preliminary mixes, and sometimes entire songs. I like the mac because it is already geared up for making music, whereas with Windows you have to do a great deal of poking around in the settings, loading drivers, and other time consuming maintenance. Even so, I use a PC for recording, partly because I already have it set up, and partly because some of my VSTi synths only come in a PC version.

I try whenever possible to purchase soft synths that work on both mac and PC. The GForce Software line does this as does Native Instruments. Some of my dual platform synths are Minimonsta, Oddity, ImpOSCar, Absynth, and Reaktor. I've written quite a bit here about my tastes in software synths and together with Sonic Project's OP-X, those are my primary tools. Sonar came with some others that I use every once in a while, but I think Trent Reznor actually endorses Oddity and ImpOSCar.

It has been said that Gary Numan's early sound was characterized by the Polymoog's "vox humana" voice through two MXR phase shifters, but that would be discounting the minimoog quite a bit. The Pentagon DXi has a phased pad that sounds remarkably authentic, and OP-X does a straight vox humana that sounds lightweight in comparison.

For me, percussion is a weak spot, though with so many loops available and all manner of drum machine simulators, I still want for a better sounding drum kit than I tend to come up with. I should probably build some samples together for my own kit, as that would seem to be in order.

Uncharted Waters

I've started working with some of the widgets in Reaktor by Native Instruments. Absynth, by the same company has a kind of organic quality that reminds me of Reaktor, but there's more to it than that. The weird gizmo beat box things are fun to play with, and inspiring to work with. My next few songs may sound very unlike my previous 30 or so, especially in the beats and percussion tracks. I'm still digging the OP-X and by the way, I have toyed more with Stringer since my last post and I can say that it is one of the best deals in VSTi technology if you like string machines. I'm sure it isn't as nice as GForce Software's "String Machine" but at a fraction of the cost, there is much to be liked. The Logan strings and Arp Omni settings are just great to me. I have to figure out something now to use it in. I worked up one piece but its really just a demo to me. All those sounds remind me of Pink Floyd and all the anthem rock bands that I went to see in the 70's. You can strike quite a mood with a string machine, especially if not overdone. Leave it to me to warn against over doing the strings.

Sonic Projects Stringer

Just a short note about another VSTi synth that I intend to review later, the Sonic Projects Stringer. It emulates 3 different string machines, Arp Omni, Logan, Weslon Symphony, and also does a Solina. I don't know much about these machines, so I'll have to get back with you to write about them in any kind of informed way. At this point, Stringer seems like a poor man's GForce String Machine. However, the sounds are very impressive to me, and once again I was sold by the Pink Floyd demos they did on the Sonic Projects web site. This is a very inexpensive device, and I feel like I should have no trouble finding songs to use it in.

Sonic Projects OP-X

I had been looking for an Oberheim VSTi for some time, given up, and then stumbled across Sonic Projects' wonderful OP-X rendering of the OB-X synthesizer. I was knocked out by their online sounds demos. Being a sucker for anything that sounds like Pink Floyd, I was impressed by the "Wish You Were Here" sounds it could do. The Van Halen "Jump" and Rush "Tom Sawyer" were just too much for me to resist. The OP-X was inexpensive compared to some of its close relatives from other companies, so I decided to give the demo a try.

The "Pro" version gives fine tuning ability for all the individual synth parameters, and when I say "individual synth" I mean every note you play on the OP-X has a separate signal path through an individual 2-oscillator synthesizer. It has 6 of these, and that is where the incredibly rich, "ballsy" sound comes from. I think the regular OP-X model is enough to get most folks going who are just trying to find a good classic analog sounding VSTi to play with, but the "Pro" model is really a fantasy come true. This is a VSTi with meat on the bones.

I have Minimonsta and ImpOSCar to compare it to. I think they compliment each other nicely. Each one has something the others don't. Throw in Oddity and you've got a sound arsenal as good as any 70's or 80's band out there.

OP-X comes with hundreds of preset banks, and one of my favorites is of course the "famous" bank. It has all the aforementioned sounds plus "99 Luft Balloons," and some Jarre stuff, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, you name it. OP-X makes an excellent Jupiter emulator and even has that characteristic Roland filter sound available. There are a lot of Roland patches that make me very happy here. It does some decent MiniMoog patches too, but not to surpass Minimonsta in my opinion. I still like Minimonsta for that Moog sound, but OP-X is extremely versatile, especially in Unison mode where it is monophonic but phat as phuck.

My only complaint about OP-X is that sometimes, if you slip and accidentally bump an adjacent key, the sound stops and you have a very noticeable silence. This only happens in unison mode, and may be something that I am doing wrong (besides bad playing.) Other than that, it is very solid, amazingly not too CPU heavy, and just sounds like a dream. The side-by-side comparisons on the website between OP-X and a real OB-X are really amazing.

Here's yet another VSTi for the arsenal, complementing well with other analog simulators for a niche that was once reserved only for that of musical royalty.

Little Bits is available now at amazon.com. The distribution process happens in waves as each retailer picks up the new release. Amazon has very good prices and offers MP3 music without copy protection. Something I didn't know at first is that amazon is set up to load songs into your iTunes player, if that is your preferred method.

I'm very proud of this release as it is very homogeneous in being all new and all synthetic. This material was born of simulators and CPU intensive synthesizers. I really get off by this kind of material. It seems like each release I have with tunecore, the more I want to dig in and build something new. My first two releases this year featured lots of older material, some simply remastered, others reworked completely, but basically older stuff that I had never released to a commercial market. This latest one is all new with the exception of the epilogue, Velvet Elvis, 9 songs that exist entirely in the digital domain, composed and edited entirely on a notebook computer.

This is probably my last album for 2008, though I just get more and more wound up to try something new with the tools that I've been using. I have been in talks with David Gilmore, of A Presence Called Fred, to do a guitar based album, but that would probably span into next year at my best estimate. David and I go back to at least two bands we've been in together, and he is an undiscovered master of the guitar as far as I am concerned. We did a cover of Black Sabbath's Iron Man That was pretty faithful except for the reggae drum patterns, and some of David's original pieces have been innovative and fresh to me. So there is hope for us on that front. Of course, I shall be writing synthesizer pieces for as long as I am able, so next year, hopefully we will have some more new material to share with you. It seems the spark of musical ideas has ignited here in Cedartown, and will not burn out for a while.

Little Bits Released

The new album is called Little Bits and may be the best so far. These are some synthetic songs, no doubt. Alpha is a song with a synthesized vocal part and all the instruments were simulated by the computer. A few of the tracks on this album have loop based drums, or have real vocals, but this album was produced almost entirely in the digital domain. I'm very proud of it. Some of the tracks are available for a short time on MySpace.com/oersted. There is a link on this blog's side bar. Within the next 8 weeks or so, it will be available as MP3 on iTunes, Amazon.com, Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, and other online stores. I hope my fans enjoy this one. I've been listening to it in the car, and in my iPod for the past few days, and I love it.

What Have You Been Up To?

I am often accused of sounding like a chatterbot, usually when someone doesn't understand my remarks, but perhaps more often than that. I would say that I am 99% robotized. That is to say, my inner soul gyroscope of humanity is less than 1%. It doesn't take much. A little goes a long way. But if I sound like a robot, maybe I am.

The inevitable question of "what have you been up to today" is usually hard to answer. Unless I've been keeping score, I might not even know this one. How do I summarize nothing? Should I just say "nothing" or "not much?" One tires of that quickly. If I spend my morning thinking about a problem, or writing something down that I made up, then a solid response would have to summarize those thoughts and sometimes I'm just not willing to go there. I mean no disrespect, but if I'm going to be accused of being a robot for saying it, then maybe it isn't worth saying.

One Bit At A Time

I'm still working on my next album, Little Bits. I've got seven candidate songs finished, though a couple of them probably won't make the final cut. I've been coasting for the most part doing songs that are easy to put out, but are not the kind of cutting edge stuff that I was doing in the mid 80's. That's not all bad, but I'd hate to think that my best work was done on a 4-track cassette deck. I have some great tools right now, but inspiration has been hard to come by.

Let's face it. Inference Patterns was mostly a reworking of songs that I wrote 20 years ago. But I learned how to use these new tools while making that album, so I'm happy to have landed here today with all this knowledge. I need to spend more time on this current material and resist the urge to just knock out MP3's without giving them a good working over first and good mastering later.

I have settled on a two station approach that is working nicely so far. I use my mac to start the song and do computerized vocals if needed. Then I copy a mix down to a windows vista computer where I can add all kinds of virtual synths, or record real synths and vocals in the studio. I have produced a couple of songs for the new album like this and it has worked out very well so far.

I've uploaded a couple of the new songs to the Beta 3 Lounge radio station. Listener response has been very good and I'm encouraged now to try some things I haven't done in a while. My sound is getting better and has a more thick heavy synth style than I was capable of for a long time. I used to get this sort of sound using lots of analog synths along with chorus and phase shifter pedals. I can now do everything inside the computer without any of that old equipment, and the sound is a little more flexible though consistently where I want it to be.

That's what I'm doing, one bit at a time.

Somnolence

or the lack thereof . . .

I once had a doctor tell me that in times of war, men sometimes go without sleep for 3 days. I found little solace in that as I am an insomniac. Last night I stayed up while editing a report that I'd been procrastinating for some time. Sometimes there is a certain inertia or potential that must build up before the dam breaks and all the pent up energy is released.

I do that with music, but I'm either completely off or completely on. There is no scenario where I sit and write a little bit one day, and then add some more later, incrementally finishing a song. Most lyrics come in a matter of minutes to me (maybe that explains something) whereas I don't always get music with them. I tend to get musical ideas and then get some inspiration for the lyrics, though sometimes I flip through my notebooks looking for some unused words to wrap around a melody.

As a synthesizer player, I spend a fair amount of time doodling on a keyboard and fiddling with the sounds. I think that is what really attracts me to the synthesizer, is that aspect of actually crafting the sound pallet for a song. Sometimes I use presets, or some combination, but even with presets, there is a process of sorting through them, listening for the right sound for a particular part of a song. I'm sure guitarists go through something like that, but guitar is so dense in harmonics that you can always tell it's a guitar (well, most of the time.) Sure, there are guitarists like Adrian Belew or Robert Frip, and I'm not sure if I'm even spelling their names right.

I think my cat just farted. I hope that's what it is. Gotta go!

Strange Charm

I added some Gary Numan covers to the Beta 3 Lounge lineup today, from largely unknown bands, Harmonic Comotion and 5. There was an album of Numan covers a few years back called Random. It was okay. These other bands warranted my attention for being just bizarre enough to make me feel something when I listen to these well worn songs from days past.

A Presence Called Fred covered Metal live, and though a little rough around the edges, I thought it was worth a listen by the sheer nerve these guys had, playing in an auditorium of around 1,000 seats, to an audience of rock fans.

I keep getting emails from bands that don't fit the mood I'm going for with Beta 3 Lounge. Heavy Metal shock rock doesn't cut it for me, though I get an mp3 in the mail every couple of days from that kind of band. Actually, I received only one or two cold call type emails that seemed interesting enough to play. Unfortunately for them, I only play music from my library.

My listeners expect something better, whether I convey that to them or not is unclear, but I expect it myself, and that is enough to let me know what fits the play list and what doesn't. If it isn't good enough for me to listen to, it isn't good enough for Beta 3.

It's been a couple of months since Inference Patterns was released, and now that The Visitor has gotten some exposure, I've been able to relax a bit and listen to them after some absence.

I probably should have spent more time mastering Inference Patterns, though the overall feeling I get from it is pretty much what I was shooting for. Considering the investment in time and treasure, these two albums have been a great success.

I'm still in production, though at a slower pace than the last two efforts. My next item will be called Little Bits. Bits of it are playing on my radio station now, so that I can guage how an audience reacts to them.

Check out my recordings at Amazon:

Happy birthday to Clay Broome. He is a musician and friend of mine from around my neck of the woods. I forget if he is older or younger than me, but we are around the same age.

I have a birthday coming up in a couple of months. I'm starting to not want to count them, so I hope I've not done Clay any harm by mentioning his annual thing.

Good music just doesn't really age. It might conjure up some memory of a time past, but I don't get tired of some music. Some classical music, some rock, some post-punk electronic whatever. I just don't get tired of some things. Beta 3 Lounge is an internet radio station that plays space age rock, and some electronic stuff. It seems to be gathering momentum, with people marking it in their station presets. I try to pick music that ages well, and it is an eclectic selection of music, much like a college radio station. Check it out if you need some mood music or if you like streaming audio. It's one of those things that just gets better with age.

Different Spheres

Up on the mezzanine level, Charlie and Emmy wait for me, but I'm still down here in the studio, working on things. The institute changed ISP's last week, and that has been keeping me down here on a fatter pipe than we currently have upstairs.

Do we dare borrow ideas from others? Sure, we do it all the time. But in my opinion it was in extreme bad taste that Ray Kurzweil patented Dr. Richard S. Wallaces AIML (ALICE) software in 2003. The patent claims to bring some improvements, but they are nothing that hackers haven't done on their own to the free software for years.

My opinion of Kurzweil is pretty low right now. What a truly bankrupt individual it takes to try and profit on a good man's ideas, let alone try to profit from something that was free and remains free, and is in the pubilc interest to remain free. Shame on you Ray!

Studio Setup

Somehow I wound up with two Digital Audio Workstations setup. I had been careful only to purchase virtual synths that I could use on both mac and PC. At one point I thought I'd do everything on the mac from now on, but in the Studio, there are a few bigger hardware items that just don't fit the mobile scheme that I had.

Several things fell into place in the studio. I downgraded my computer from Vista to XP Professional. I'm really glad I did that. Now several things that didn't quite work in Vista are working properly in XP, like rewire in cakewalk. I could never get cakewalk to open Reason running on Vista, but now that is a possible way to develop songs first in Reason, and then just open them up in a Sonar sequence. Remote Desktop Connection works now using the mac as a client now that I'm using XP again. That helps me in several other ways, in my programming work.

I bought a Korg microKontrol MIDI controller, thinking of it as a portable mini-keys kind of conrol surface. The damn thing weighs a ton, made of thick brushed aluminum. I love it, and have been using it upstairs in the den while I watch TV, noodling around with ideas using the mac notebook as a virtual synth.

The core of my virtual synths are now Minimonsta, the minimoog on steroids, impOScar, Oddity (arp odyssey emulator), Pro-53 Prophet Five emulator, and Absynth 4. These all work on both PC and Mac, so that if I create a new voice or write something that uses them, I can transport that from one DAW to the other.

In the Studio, I've got the Moog Prodigy, Roland Juno 60, Yamaha DX-21, Casio CZ-1000, Korg Polysix, and a full scale M-Audio keystation 49e. I find that the mini-keys on the microKontrol are fine for dreaming up songs, but the full scale keyboard makes for better craftsmanship in playing them to ultimately record. Not always, but in general, my hands have learned their way around a full size keyboard without me thinking about it. I tried using virtual keys where you type on the "typewriter" computer keyboard, but that is really dodgy. It takes forever to practice even the simplest melodies to try and play them that way.

On the mac notebook station I've got Logic Express 7, which matches everything on there, so I have no intention of updating until I retire this notebook and get something newer. That may be a while, I don't know. I like to use my stuff forever until they literally fall to pieces. My Polysix is nearly in that state after the battery spilled acid on the circuit board and wiped out the patch storage. The Juno 6 doesn't have a battery thankfully. (of course it has no memory either)

The PC in the studio has Cakewalk Sonar and an M-Audio Fast Track USB ASIO audio interface. It is an entry level interface, but is plenty sufficient for my needs at the moment. I've got all the same virtual synths on there as the mac, plus a few others. Mainly though, it is a faster machine with a bigger hard drive so is more suitable for the heavy lifting.

I had some problems getting the ASIO drivers to work, but finally sorted that out. The Mac is so much easier to deal with in that respect. Some day I may go to an all mac studio, but for now, I need to work with the gear I've got, and am quite satisfied with it all for my current needs.

Logic Express 7 and older macs

I'm still using my G4 Powerbook that has traveled with me all over the world, gone to school with me, been used almost constantly since 2003. Last year I bought a new Vista notebook with faster dual core processor and well, ... just never could make myself like it. I guess once you try Mac you never go back, or something like that.

But what to do with all my virtual synths and my ever present musical thoughts? I'm glad now that when I bought Minimonsta, Absynth, and other goodies, I made sure that I could download versions for both PC and Mac. I think the last straw was trying to get ASIO drivers for the PC with Vista. I'd fire up Sonar and try to record something but couldn't hear it. Vista really dogs out a computer, even with a fast processor and tons of RAM, it was like working in quicksand.

So my Powerbook is like 5 years old, titanium 1 Ghz, 1GB Ram. I love it. The paradox with Apple is that as soon as you buy a computer from them, a month later they're selling something twice as fast for the same price. On the other hand though, they stay backwards compatible for a long time. I'm going to keep Tiger and Logic Express 7 on here, because it seems that if you upgrade to anything UB, things become more resource intensive. I happen to be content with the features I have, so all is copacetic.

Using virtual au synths with Logic is great, and the main reason it works on an older computer is the "freeze" function. There's actually a little blue ice crystal looking button. You click it and the track is processed into an audio track, using your synth and its settings and its MIDI sequence to fix the track as audio, thus freeing up your CPU load. Then, it lies dormant until you want to unfreeze it. You have to unfreeze it if you want to change notes or other MIDI information, or change the voice of your synth. Other than that, after it is frozen, you just treat it like an audio track.

In an experiment, I found that I could sustain Minimonsta, impOSCar, 2 Oddity parts, and an Absynth line before the G4 started to max out. My typical recording style usually has a vocal track, maybe an audio track from my real life Moog Prodigy, or Juno 6, and then 4 or 5 virtual synth lines. It varies with each song, but that is a typical lineup for what I am likely to come up with.

Another nice thing about Logic Express (besides its price) was the ability to drag drum loops onto the arrangment view, so it works something like Garageband in that the loops adjust to tempo and the song's key.

If you use Reason, Logic Express can host it along with your song. I'm not sure how that would work out with the G4 processor doing all that at once. I'd probably work out something basic in Reason, export that to an audio track, and then embellish it in LE.

LE has some pretty nice virtual synths that come with it, a sampler, and can also use GarageBand instruments. It may not have all the features of Logic Pro, but was a great value for what it cost. On an old mac like my titanium PowerBook, it is just what I want for my needs.

Lastly, you can get even faster powerbooks on eBay for around $250-$400 on a regular basis right now. If you are looking for a way to get started with a mac, get one of these macs and look for LE 7 or 8. If you buy GForce, NI, Korg, and other soft synths, you may have access to Universal Binary software as well as programs for the PC, so you wont be locked in if you decide later to upgrade to an Intel mac, or a PC. The old macs may have screen issues, dead batteries, and may be dinged up a bit with a few scratches, so be prepared to get a machine that has been very loved by heavy use. But if you can get one that has a GB or more of RAM, you're getting a whole computer for basically the cost of upgrading the memory on one.

Robby.

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.

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.

Inference Patterns is available at a web store near you

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.