My boss at Energy Management Solutions never procrastinates. Anytime I think of an idea he hands me the phone and tells me to do it. I’ve never met anyone quite like that. I like to get things done but I’d say I do my share of fiddling and pondering. Sometimes when you sit down to make a song it’s way too easy to procrastinate. You have a playground of sounds and tools you can play with. Heck it all starts with a loop. A loop! Better stop listening to loops and get to the arrangement.

“Procrastination is making a cup of tea.” – John Kelly

via Laughing Squid

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I just won an eBay auction for a mint Korg KR-55 Rhythm Machine! I got it for $280 and I am pleased. Even though it’s a preset machine it has a good amount of variation, swing and intros/fills. Watch the video above to see how versatile it can be. As far as DAW recording goes each instrument has it’s own volume knob so it’s easy to record each drum on a different channel if so desired. The real reason to like this machine is the sound. It’s pure analog with silver highs and a punchy tight kick. It was used on pretty much on every song on Depeche Mode’s first album Speak N Spell (iTunes link). Expect to hear it on my own future recordings. If one wanted they can mod a KR-55 and add MIDI using an Analogue Solutions kit: www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~concuss/mods/kr55.htm

“The KR55 was, for its time (1979), an advanced preset rhythm drum machine with up to 96 preset rhythm patterns! These patterns cover the whole gamut of presets (Waltz, Samba, Rhumba, Bossa Nova, Tango, Slow Rock, Swing, Rock, etc.). The KR55 also featured a “swing beat” control to add a variation to the groove. Each drum sound’s level can be individually adjusted for each pattern. It can also be externally controlled via footswitch jack for the Start/Stop and Intro/Fill switches.” – vintagesynth.com

Have you bought any new toys off eBay lately?

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BandCamp is a one of the nicer services musicians can use to sell their music. A clean interface, great PayPal integration and stats are all on the table. They have just released an update to the service which allows you to sell physical merchandise along with your digital download. The new best feature is the inventory tracking. Say you have 100 records to sell each time someone buys one the number drops. What has my thinking is all the left over stock I have of old releases. Fifty here, ten there, I can see BandCamp a good place to sell these. You can see a BandCamp page I set up for Arrivers (the first release on my record label released in 1996) here: http://arrivers.bandcamp.com/

“Starting today, you can sell both your physical merchandise and your digital music from Bandcamp, and better yet, you can sell them together. So, for example, you can easily create a vinyl, poster and download package, give your fans the digital files immediately, and then ship out their merchandise.” – blog.bandcamp.com

For more info: bandcamp.com

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Exxon designed Autotune? Apparently so! The bit about Cher lying that she used a TalkBox to hide that fact that she used Autotune is baloney! I own a Digitech Talker and you can get it to sound exactly like what Cher did. Here’s a photo of my Talker: click here. Hey, for once Weird Al seems an appropriate cameo. If you want some meme for $2.99 grab the “I Am T-Pain” AutoTune iPhone: click here

Most of the time I like to leave my vocal mistakes as is. Anyone who follows my music knows that! When I do need some pitch correcting I grab Melodyne. By the way that Direct Note Access thing was released this week.

For more info: antarestech.com

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Read above. I live by that and so should you. The price you accept is the price your worth. This is how you must price your work. Got it? Click the image to download a wallpaper so you remember.

via greyscalegorilla

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I’ve said many times the Roland TR-808 is the king of all drum machines. It has the sharpest deepest kick with the most attack, snares and hats that sound like lighting and a sequencer that makes any beat sound incredible. I love this machine so much I think I subconsciously liked songs because they had an 808 on them (all before I even knew what a Roland TR-808 was!). I love this video above where a bunch of classics with 808 drums were recreated on an Korg Electribe SX. I own everyone one of these songs on 12″.

Here’s a few ways into 808 land: AcidLab Miami (German recreation) $1399, GoldBaby The Tape808 (samples) $24, D16 Nepheton (virtual plug-in recreation) 139 EUR

“Recreations, again by ear, of some classic early 80s beats that were originally made on a Roland TR-808 drummachine. This became the signature sound for freestyle music and later for house. Mantronix – 808 Beats, Shannon – Let the Music Play, Freeez – IOU, Man Parrish – Hip Hop Bebop, GLOBE & Whiz Kid -. Play that Beat Mr. DJ, Nineteen – Paul Hardcastle (iTunes link), C.O.D. – In the Bottle, Marvin Gaye – Sexual Healing” – Harlem Nights Music

For more info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_TR-808

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Today I have am asking you guys for a bit of help. Normally a Google search is all I need to find out anything I need to know but I’m a little stumped on this one. I joined Facebook before they had “Fan Pages”. So like with MySpace when people who liked my music wanted to friend me I gladly obliged. I did set up a Facebook Group but I could not simultaneously update my profile and the Group so it was useless really. Today I have a lot of Facebook friends.

Here is the problem I am having: I get a lot of emails “to the members of” pertaining to an upcoming techno event. I never joined to be a member of any of these groups/events. Some of the emails are from actual friends (like Reade Truth). I don’t want to unfriend him. I only want to stop receiving those types of event notifications from him. Some of the emails are from people I friended who I didn’t know (thinking they were fans). I could unfriend them but if they are genuinely interested in following my updates I don’t want to be rude. Lastly, I get “to the members of” event notifications from people who are not my friends at all.

I’ve gone into My Account -> Notifications and unclicked everything I can imagine would be causing the issue. I set up some Gmail rules so Facebook notifications skip my inbox and go into a Facbook folder but I still have to weed through 15+ “to the members of” emails per day. So what’s really going on here? Any help would be appreciated!

By the way you can find me on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/oliverchesler

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I’d like an installation like this permanently in my living room. Created in Berlin by Joerg Piringer he calls this work [untitled] and describes it as “an interactive sound poetry installation”. Be sure to check out Joerge’s other interesting installations too. I like the one’s that spit out random Twitter feeds.

“the visitors speak, shout and cry into a microphone to evoke a dynamic world of letters and vocal sounds. image and sound are created immediately by speaking and vocalizing into a microphone and modifying the voice through signal processing while the software is analyzing the sound to create animated abstract visual text-compositions.” – jörg piringer

For more info: joerg.piringer.net

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Here’s a great video from the Sasquatch Music Festival 2009 (watch until the end for the good stuff). James over at Synthtopia titled this video, “If You’re Doing A Live Show, Make Sure You Invite This Guy.”. I agree 100%. This reminds me of the movie Defending Your Life. The basic moral of the movie is that you only live once so stop worrying what other people think of you. I’m such a tightly wound person I think of think of this stuff a lot. I’m always trying to remember that most people are just concerned with their own lives, no one really cares what the hell you are doing so enjoy your time without shame.

“Yuppie Daniel Miller is killed in a car accident and goes to Judgment City, a waiting room for the afterlife. During the day, he must prove in a courtroom-style process that he successfully overcame his fears (a hard task, given the pitiful life we are shown)” – Defending Your Life, IMDB.com

via Synthtopia

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SoundCloud iPhone App from Oliver Chesler on Vimeo.

SoundCloud has become the best place for musicians to store and share music online. The Berliners have continutally upgraded their site’s services listening to it’s customers. Beyond the new features the site is managing to scale well and it looks very pretty. Here are some of the new tools in the latest release “Taylor”.

SoundCloud already had the best embeddable audio player with a great waveform display and comments along it’s timeline. Now there are two new player widgets called “Artwork” and “Mini player”. Here they are:

Artwork Player (Roll/click your mouse over for effect):

Mini Player (Click Play to expose mini waveform):

Sharing is much better now too as they follow Flickr a bit here allowing users to grab a Secret Link to send out. Stats is greatly improved (where there even Stats before?). Just take a look at these Stats from the past seven days:

Here we go with a big one: an official SoundCloud iPhone app! Take a look Ma no flash (Video above).

Finally there is a new pricing structure that could make more sense for the unemployed and skeptical. For more info: click here

Follow me on SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/thingstocome

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