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?

08-08-09

Old Stuff That’s Actually Quite Awesome

So today I was looking for an old piece of music amongst my many unorganised folders of music sessions everywhere. This is when I found quite a dated piece – a song that I wrote when I was mainly just writing instrumentals because I still wasn’t confident enough in my singing. Now the thing is I remember exactly why I gave up on this song – it was random, not complete, all over the place and just didn’t make any sense. However, since I wrote that song my music has in fact being pushed towards matching that exact style (That’s right, I make music that’s not complete, random, all over the place and that doesn’t make sense hehe). I listened through the song today and just couldn’t believe my ears, why did I ever ditch this song?

Its true that its a good idea to leave things and come back to them, hell even leaving a blog post and coming back to it the next day makes you see heaps of errors in your writing. Most of all my songs that I’ve left and come back to have made me face palm when I listen to them again. Except this song. So today I built on it, went crazy, and it was terrific (I bet you tomorrow I wake up, listen to it and think – oh god, why did I blog about this? this is song is horrid).

And you know what? I’m actually going to put it on the album. Yep. There’s been songs that I’ve worked on for about 8 times the amount as this one, but hey, I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

Oh, and to be a jerk, I’m not going to attach the whole song, in fact just attach an excerpt. The song title will be named “Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous Land”. This is dedicated to my soft toy giraffe friend Flint, who has unfortunately been adopted by me, and has been the only witness to all my rather frustrating, enjoyable and downright crazy bedroom studio sessions. Sometimes I feel that Flint would miss his friends back at the soft toy store. So Flint, this song if for you!

Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous World

07-27-09

Villains

I’ve added the song ‘Villains’ to the website. Its a few months old now, but the writing process and the lyrics for it took little time in comparison to some of my other songs. The main riff uses guitar and bass, and if you notice the riff continues throughout the whole song, with other elements just getting layered over the top.

The chorus ‘They are growing into villains again’ was inspiration from this kid who was playing music through his mobile way too loud on the train (it was awful music as well). Everyone on the train really wanted to punch him and in the end it was a nice old lady who told him to turn it down. The kid looked so pissed off that he had to turn his music down, was quite funny actually.