Yes, come on lets play :-)

As usual, my output continues unabated- I have a tasty early mix of a new peice I'm cooking up- it's based on an old piece- Just Because You Say It from The Madman Chronicles but with a whole new bed track, lovingly crafted with my new favorite toy- LMMS.

So have a listen to Just Because 2008...

Well, never one to stop once I get started, I've been continuing with the tweaking here- Dark Cheese now hasa popup player, the other albums will follow- takes a while to set up when there are 23 tracks per album- yikes! Also, I'm going to register my albums with various online databases and such- yeah, fun, we-ha! Online releasing joy, but once I get a workflow, I'll start helping other audio artists to do the same.

One of the tasks I accomplished was setting up Google Analytics so I can see a lot more detail about who's looking at the site here- shout out to whoever it is in Outremont (or at least their ISP is there) that's been enjoying my output :-)

And hey folks- remember to leave some comments, I love feedback and the comments seem to be working for sure now...

Of course, this major push here has got me figuring out a ton of stuff, so I've got a whole new layer of skills to offer my clients!

Until next time, stay in the groove!

Okay, I just did a major update to my site, particularly the releases page- you can know listen to the tracks individual on the site or there are now folders with the entire albums in mp3 format- yes, I've bowed to the inevitable and released it all in mp3- there's still ogg versions kicking around of a bunch of stuff, but for now the albums are available in mp3... Also in the media folders are larger versions of the covers, and m3u playlists as well :-)

The other thing is that the comments are enabled on the album info pages, so leave your thoughts, opinions or ideas on what you listen to...

Enjoy!

Now  I need some sleep :-/

All right, what busy month it's been! Just managed to get the "backend" of this site updated, my client sites tend to get priority. From your side, you won't notice much difference, but it lets me do more, so you might see some new things happen here soon :-)

Today we managed to sort out the domain issues for the PAU site, so it's now available through both http://www.pauart.com and http://www.pauart.ca.

Over the last few days I've also reinstalled my operating system on my laptop- last month I did something very foolish, after walking home with my laptop in -30 C weather, I started it without letting it warm up and immediately the hardrive started acting a little funny, leading up to the S.M.A.R.T. system informing that a hard drive failure was imminent and that I should backup all my data :-/ I immediately picked up a nifty SATA/IDE to USB connector to do just that- a very useful purchase that has also enabled me to access a couple old hard drives I didn't think I would ever access again! And over time my hard drive started acting worse and worse locking up on a more and more regular basis, now I have a new one, on which I have just rebuilt my sysytem.

The install of Kubuntu 7.10 went totally smoothly- about 30 minutes from starting the boot to the live cd to having a functional system, including installing the restricted formats/drivers- after the cd finished it's thing and I shutdown, I made sure to plug in my ethernet cable because the wireless card in my laptop has a Broadcom chipset, so the proprietary firmware needs to be downloaded and installed before it will work. It was a breeze to set up though, once I had restarted, the restricted driver manager popped up automatically and asked if wanted it to enable the necessary repositories to download and install the drivers (as side note, the software update manager also popped up at the same time, but I canceled it until after I had the restricted drivers installed), this also included the ATI drivers for my graphics adapter- I just had to say yes and off it went, when I restarted the computer, everything was working :-)

Since then though, I've been doing all the tweaking and installing to make it just the way I want it- I do a lot with my machine and I'm very picky about how it all fits together :-D

Last week I was the projectionist at the library for the local Traveling World Community Film Festival, crazy fun time with a lot of movies... One of my favorites was Red Without Blue, but there where plenty more that touched, stirred and informed!

I'm also excitedly preparing for a performance i n the upcoming Emergency #16: Festival of New Dance and Performance in April, my proposal for a solo perfomance was accepted last month :-) The festival is sponsored by the Peterborough New Dance. I'm looking forward to finally premiering being in front of an audience- pretty much anyone who knows me knows that I like to dance, so I'm finally stepping up :-)

Anyhoo, that's a lot of typing, so I'll leave it there for now, maybe it will be soonernext time so I won't have to type so much...

The comments should work now -fingers crossed- so leave one...

Yes, I've managed to craft out some more of this oddness in sound I've been conjuring and co-conjuring out of the nothing...

First, collaboratively-

My "first" cover (I did a version of Land of the Silverbirch, a traditional folk song, so it was more of a rendition than a cover ;-)) is, of course, of a song by a friend- Tammy Lin Foreman of Original Plastic (www.originalplastic.com)- you can have a listen to the original song - Overwhelmed - over on Zed. I used a sample from the original version in creating the bedtrack for my cover- gave it a good dollop of dark cheese- and then jammed out on it vocally :-)

You can check out the parts in individual tracks here.

And grab the finished track here.

I've been working with an odd fellow named Murno Gladst- we are working online, he sends me a file (or files to be assembled) and I do some layers on it as a bed track- so far, he's sent me some base tracks and I've made some tracks to go with them and sent them back, I await a response...

At this point, I do have this as a current snapshot of this piece, you can have a peek at the source tracks here.

An interesting thing developed out of this work with Murno's piece though- the process I followed was this- while playing the bedtrack he sent I would jam out for the length of the piece, mute what I had just recorded and then do another track, repeat. The first couple tracks I did were vocal, then I started using a software synth- the ZynAddSubFX, which I played with the keyboard on my laptop. I chose to use only 4 keys on my keyboard- rv57- these actually correspond with 3 notes- F (the r and v are both F, just one octave apart), F# and A#- this way I could comfortably lay semi-conscious and twitch while the bedtrack assaulted my senses.

After completing this volley of the exercise, I muted out the bedtrack and listened to the rest of the tracks together- each of which was recorded without listening to the others- while recording I only listened to the bedtrack. What resulted can be found here.

And onto the solo stuff-

This first one is an experiment in using the ZynAddSubFX synth with LMMS the first release of this song, 2bMoody, is on Dancing Circles- check out the new version and the old version- and have a peek at (or a play with) the source tracks for it.

And these last 3 are done with varying combinations of LMMS and ZynAddSubFX:

Spikey Matter (source tracks)

This is the Eye (source tracks)

Zyntheticvox (source tracks)

Okay, it's been a long time since I added anything here, and this is going to be pretty short, just to say that I will be adding more soon and to let you all know I have added a new page to the site: My Three Wishes and I've been putting together a new sub-site for Full Metal Booty: fmb.webmadman.net

More later...

Well, really just one tweak- I've pulled the ads of off my gallery- lots of impressions but no clicks- as I sort of suspected, like myself, the people that come through my site just ignore advertising, can't blame them. I'll leave the ones here for a little while- but I suspect their days are numbered as well... 

Well, having talked to a few people that I've been reconnecting with thanks to Facebook, I realize there's a lot of folks poking around on here, so I better get some updating done- I know I get a lot of traffic by my server logs, but so much of that comes from all over the world (most notably, and this makes me scratch my head and think, "what are they lookin at?", is North Korea- go figure), that it didn't light much of a fire under my butt, but now I know that it's people I actually know =:-0

So, the updates have begun :-)

If you pop over to my "Digital Services" page, I've added more of the sites I've been working on- there's still more, but there's a few there to nibble on now.

Also, I finally got around to putting up more of my Tarot Designs, again, there's more, but I need to track down the bits and pieces, it's been close to a years worth, so they are scattered across hard drives of 2 different machines :-/

Hope you all enjoy these "new" goodies from yours truly, WEBmadman :-D

Oh yeah, and you will notice the "Ads by Google" thing- not expecting much, but like I said I get a lot of traffic, and, hey, you never know ;-)

I've done a little cleaning up here and there while I've been at it- great groovy fun, hopefully I won't wait so long next time and avoid some of the frustration these things entail... 

Well, as I was prepping everything for the last upload, I knew I had the "lyrics" around here somewhere, and, no surprises, it is in the E-Say Archive: Flailing Ourselves with Fresh Cut Puppet Strings. And don't you know it there's a whole bunch more words there :-) So I laid in a couple more layers. The new mix politicsyncobation210507 has it's vox tracks added to the project folder.Keep on keeping on :-D