11-27-09

Giraffe Incognito – The Pursuit Continues

It’s finally here!

So, what do you do now? How do you get your hands on one of these?

Well I only printed 50 Digipak Copies, so if you want to grab one – please send me an email.

However, you can also download the album. I’m offering it under the pay-what-you-want- scheme.

You can download it for free, or pay $1000. I won’t lie to you – a $1000 dollars would be nice, but that’s not my aim. I put alot of effort into making this cd so I want YOU to listen to it. I don’t care if you don’t want to pay for it – in fact I actually encourage you not to.

10-04-09

My Whole Album In Just Two Minutes And Twenty-Three Seconds

Hey guys, sorry for the lack of attention made to the blog. But I’m almost there. I should be looking at getting the tracks mastered this week, I had Paul from Indie Masters check out all my mixes, and after some general feedback, I was suprised I had little polishing to do on my songs.

October is my goal, and even though it’s already hit the fabled month – I still have until November to finish it yeah?

But, because I know you guys are waiting (the whole 4 of you who check my blog!), I’ve decided to give you a nice little treat for being so patient.

It’s my whole album, every song, in just under 2 minutes and 23 seconds! I will note, that the full album is 53 minutes. So if you think about it, you’re listening to some sort of percentage…

09-21-09

Cupcakes and Mixing

I wish I was mixing in something like this:

However I am not.

So for the last few weeks, I’ve been really getting into making my songs sound as best as I possibly can. This has been quite a timely process, as I’ve been real anal and am aiming to make all my songs stand alone.

I’ve had a go at EQing all my songs. This is something that engineers take 20 years to learn. So when I dived into the deep end I’ll be honest I didn’t really know what I was doing. I hit a few forums and got some advice.

Basically, EQing is making sure that there aren’t too many instruments in your mix clashing. E.g. you want to make sure the bass drum and the bass guitar sit really well together, like in a pocket. You also want to make sure that the frequencies that the lead guitar are using aren’t clashing with the vocal track.

Doesn’t really make sense does it? Well put it this way… You have made heaps of cupcakes, but you want them to sit together nicely. So you don’t just throw them all willy nilly into the box. Otherwise when people see the box they’ll be like “OMG, there are like cupcakes on top of one another and icing is like going everywhere”.

However, if you were to place the cupcakes nice and tidily into the box, you can open the box and people can see all the cupcakes in all their glory, and know exactly what each cupcake represents and how good it will taste.

If my music was a tray of cupcakes, I’d like it to taste pretty damn good. Get it?

08-28-09

Progress – It’s keeps getting deeper!

First things first, how awesome is this picture! It was by a guy named Jan Oliehoek, and he’s done some really cool photo manipulation work – you can check out some more of his works here

Haven’t posted for a while. But hey – been busy getting this nasty little cd completed so you can hopefully get your dirty mits on it by the end of … september (realistically).

I’ve been awaiting feedback from several reliable sources and am now going to give my music to the mastering dudes for some more feedback, so that’s all starting to looking promising.

I’ve also started work on my album art, this is one of the main reasons I wanted to make a cd in the first place! So it’s been really fun playing around with ideas.

I don’t want to give anything away but here are some teasers – it will most likely be black and white, be a font lovers paradise and there will be hidden giraffes for you to find!

As for the title of the album – I haven’t chosen it yet – and no it will not be ‘the prototype’ (that’s what I wrote on the draft cd I gave to people!).

Have a good weekend.

08-18-09

A Collection Of My Favourite Album Covers

I’ve been checking out heaps of blog posts showing great examples of album art. Most notably these articles on Smashing Magazine; 35 Album Covers, 100 Obscure & Remarkable Album Covers, and these articles from Abduzeedo; Part One, Part Two.

Those posts mentioned above really show a great collection of album art. It’s a shame how this art has died away since music has mainly been assessed online. I love going through people’s ‘vinyl’ collection and staring at the album art printed onto a nice big sleeve. Some people say album art is dead, but I still make the album art show up on my computer when I listen to tunes. I even know people who will impulse buy albums just because they like the cover, without even listening to the music! So I still think it’s important to get good album art for your cd. If your album art is average, people will think your music is average and will most likely put your cd back in the rack and move on.

I decided to go through my collection and pick out my favourite album art, just to get some inspiration before I start on my own. Although the collections of album art on smashing magazine and abduzeedo have already done excellent posts on this, it was good to go through my own collection and pick out the album covers that I never seem to get sick of.

The list is in no particular order, in fact I went through my music collection, picked them out then randomized the list!

Read more…

08-13-09

Wordle based on lyrics of my songs

Since wordle seems to be the flavour of the week, I decided to make one based on lyrics from the songs I sing in that should feature on my next cd. The songs being Villains, Mr. Gangster Man, Tomorrow’s Past, Dreaming Again, Black Crow and Blue Scarf.

Pretty interesting to see my most popular words are don’t, even, just, like, please and growing. That’s along with the song titles of course!

08-12-09

Turn Your Last.fm Into A Wordle

So what is Wordle?

Well it’s a cool site developed by Jonathan Feinberg that makes nice images based on text that you input. The way it makes the images is based on how frequent the word is.

So I thought, it’d be cool if it can generate a ‘Wordle’ based on your last.fm, for example artists with more plays would be bigger in the resulting ‘Wordle’ image. But that would involve copying your favourite artists’ name several times and can be a waste of time, so I’ve made it easier for you. Simply enter your last.fm username, choose what charts you want and then click go.

Note: Results will open in a new window, you then must copy the text and paste it into the ‘Wordle create’ textbox.

Warning: Last.fm users with high playcounts on their artists (for example 2000+ on some artists!) may take alot longer to load the results. Be patient!

New: You can now select top track charts!

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Enter your last.fm username:

Please select what chart you want (default is overall charts): Overall Charts Rolling 6 Month Charts Rolling 3 Month Charts Weekly Top Artists Top Tracks 6 Month Top Tracks 3 Month Top Tracks

I’m not the world’s best coder. So if anyone wants to help me make this work better, shoot me up an email!

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Here are some examples of last.fm + wordle:

araci

Damo_The_Bo

willbo27