The new single from Jerin and myself is now available at Bandcamp for your listening and downloading pleasure!

Tell It To Me Straight by Kin to Stars at Bandcamp.

Super-happy to get this one out the door as it seems to be a crowd favorite at shows. Jerin wrote the chorus and first verse years ago, and brought it to one of our songwriting sessions last spring where she and I worked up the rest of the tune. The guitar and drum arrangements were done by me, using the DM6Kit and Garageband’s built-in amp modeling mojo.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell y’all that sharing a song via a tweet, a “like”, a “plus” or what-have-you is every bit as valuable as buying it these days. So please know that we appreciate your support no matter how you choose to express it. Which is a polite way of saying: you can haz piano pop? Yes, you can haz, and please haz it along to your piano pop-loving friends, too.

Adam Yauch and Paul’s Boutique: How dumb court decisions have made it nearly impossible for artists to sample the way the Beastie Boys did – Slate Magazine.

Results from our Audio Poll: Neil Young and High-Definition Sound. Nearly half of the people surveyed for this article could not tell the difference between an uncompressed WAV file and a compressed iTunes AAC file.

Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » You’ve Got To Be There For The Accident. Participation is mandatory. The next time some musician is bitching at you about how the internet and piracy is destroying everything, check their website (if they have one) and see how many gigs they’re playing, the date of their last release, the number of fans in their fanclub.

HBO Has Only Itself To Blame For Record ‘Game Of Thrones’ Piracy – Forbes. And this more or less outlines why I’m agreement with The Oatmeal (NSFW) and not Andy Ihnatko. It’s bad enough when a popular show like GoT isn’t available, but we don’t just watch anymore. We tweet, we blog, we share, we make funny Team Lanister! t-shirts and head-on-a-stake cake pops and we can’t participate because there’s only one way to legally experience the show. Scarcity ain’t like it used to be.

There in the bottom of the empty planter was a hornet nest the size of a tennis ball. Lucky for me, the wayward hornet seemed to be the only tenant. It had found the drain hole at the bottom of the planter and decided to set up shop. As I went inside to get the wasp spray, I decided I was glad to find the nest now – otherwise we’d have hornets flying around our yard all summer and no clue where they came from.

I gave the paper nest a good soaking, and when no other hornets came out I tipped the planter into yard waste can. The nest rolled in and broke apart, revealing a honeycomb-like core. And nestled into the cells of the comb, in a tight little ring, were about eight totally gross hornet larvae.

My reaction was somewhere between ewww and cooool and as I leaned in for a closer look I realized that the way they were arranged reminded me of nothing so much as chambered bullets in a revolver. Which makes total sense because everyone knows hornets are nature’s small arms fire.

When the head hornet came back I squirted her too so she couldn’t shoot me with more hornets.

(Not my dog.)

Turning off comments seems to be a thing and while I can respect the reasons some people have for doing so, I’ve never felt the action was very welcoming. I’m sure there are people out there with haters to deal with, and I suppose that the presence of haters indicates you’re doing something interesting. If you’ve earned a sizeable readership you’ve earned the right to moderate the incoming praise and/or scorn.

There’s just something off-putting about coming across an insightful blog that has commenting disabled, dispiriting when it includes a multi-point post outlining all the reasons they’ve turned off comments, and maybe a little graceless when the post goes on to state that people who wish to comment should start a blog of their own. A lot of this is done in the name of “raising the level of discourse” or whatever, with analogies involving living rooms and what should and should not be said in them.

If blogs are the living rooms of the web, there’s a contingent out there still covering their furniture in plastic wrap and asking us not to use the good cloth napkins. There is also spam, and haters. So — pull up the drawbridge and we’ll converse from our towers via Trackback smoke signals? Is Trackback still a thing?

Anyway, see you all on Facebook!

While my friends continue to gravitate toward vintage API consoles, 2″ analog reels and bespoke condenser microphones, I seem to be hellbent on recording with the cheapest gear possible. I probably won’t rest until technology allows me pristine 24-bit audio clarity from shouting into tin cans strung with waxed twine.

Case in point: a few weeks back I bought a Korg nanoKONTROL2 which is a “slimline” control surface for mixing audio on computers.

A bit of explanation: most audio recording software has on-screen controls that mimic the buttons, knobs and sliders you’d see on a real mixing board in a real studio. It looks cool but it’s a challenge to use these controls with a mouse or touchpad, especially if you just want to bump up a slider just a teensy weensy little bit. So smart hardware people came up with “control surfaces” — a device with real buttons/knobs/sliders to control the fake ones on the screen.

Control surfaces can be very fancy and expensive but with the explosion of cheap n’ easy home recording and laptop/tablet DJing it was inevitable that there’d be some cheaper options. The nanoKONTROL2 seems to be built specifically for those people in mind. It’s USB powered so you just plug it in like you would a mouse. If you’re using Garageband or Logic you can download a driver from the Korg website and go to town.

Here are some thoughts after using it for a few weeks:

It does exactly what it advertises. You get eight channels, each with volume slider, panning knob and buttons for mute, solo and arm (for recording). They work seamlessly with Garageband. The play/stop/record shuttle control is way nicer to use than awkwardly stabbing the space bar, and less noisy, too — I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to edit out the clack of a keypress at the end of a take. The marker controls aren’t particularly useful unless you’re working with video. Buttons are backlit when active.

It doesn’t do much else. You can’t really assign the controls to anything else, so don’t expect to use the nanoKONTROL2 for recording automation or tweaking effects parameters. Updated: in the comments, Anders points out that he’s successfully mapped the nanoKONTROL2 to things other than channel controls, so the deleted section maybe only applies to Garageband. Some pricier controllers can reset their knobs and dials to match your current project settings and commit settings to memory. You don’t get that here, obviously. I’ve found the nanoKONTROL2 is best for when you want to get a mix going quickly from scratch. Once you’ve set some automation curves for volume or panning though, you can forget using this controller, as it has no effect on those.

It’s small and light. If you’re the type to record and mix on the go, like for podcasts or basic live recording, the nanoKONTROL2 is great. You can easily throw it in your pack with your laptop. It’s probably ideal for Ableton Live users and DJs too. Take it on your next airplane jaunt and work on your electronica suite.

Build quality is meh. What did you expect for under $100? The buttons are hard rubbery plastic; the pan knobs are pretty smooth and tight; the channel controls are also smooth but the plastic sliders are a bit loose on a few, kind of like loose teeth. I feel like I got a “good” one and suspect that the quality might vary from item to item. It comes in white or black, and honestly it’s not all that hot to look at. Overall the nanoKONTROL2 feels toyish, like it might end up unused in a junk drawer someday next to the 3rd gen iPod.

This is awesome. I LOVE the future. Cheapness aside, it’s really great to be able to plug in the nanoKONTROL2 and get to mixing, being able to better “feel” where each instrument sits in the mix and control those levels more precisely than with a mouse. And did I mention it was under $100?

Overall, not too shabby for something I literally bought off a hanging rack like a pair of fancy socks. In the next version I’d like to see a cluster of, I don’t know, maybe four generic knobs that were assignable to nearly anything, so you could tweak things like compression levels and envelope points with the same level of accuracy. As it is, you’ll probably end up abandoning the nanoKONTROL2 once your keeper takes are recorded and basic levels are set.

And also: there’s gotta be a market for just-as-simple but less ugly versions of these things. I can totally see this thing with all the same functionality but with the brushed aluminum deliciousness of a Macbook Air, with high-quality knobs and sliders.

“What do your parents think?!”

It’s been about two years since I quit my job as a lawyer to be an indie rapper, and I still get that question more than any other.

Seth’s Blog: Don’t expect applause.

If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work–the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.

Amanda Palmer, Kickstarter, and Everything – Whatever. SF writer John Scalzi, who I tiptoed past at ECCC once because I was too chicken to say hello, has a great analysis of Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign.

Does “Mastered for iTunes” matter to music?. Short answer: OF COURSE IT DOES. I’d wager more people own earbuds than home stereo equipment. Interesting tidbit about how Rick Rubin influenced the sound quality of iTunes files.

Spam-erican Apparel « DIS Magazine. A look at the dark, weird side of print-on-demand. I’ve used Zazzle lots of times for short-run shirts and mugs and the quality is better than most. That said, yeah, there’s no real cost to creating anything on Zazzle so people are free to create a zillion shirts in the hope they’ll appeal to a few customers.

Then you flip it over for the BIG REVEAL:

It’s perfect. Perfect!

PERFECTION I SAY.

And not a moment too soon, as I often carry random picks in my old wallet which shake loose into my jeans pockets. Here’s the guitar pick harvest from the day from the latest load of laundry:

My wife is the best. I’m sure yours is nice but mine is THE BEST.

May 1992. I graduated from the University of Akron with a degree in English that took me five years to complete. I wish I could say that I spent most of that time partying and engaging in illicit activities, but the truth is I was just an undiciplined so-so student with no idea what I wanted to do with my life upon graduation.

I remember graduation day. A gorgeous early summer morning in northeast Ohio. Walking around the campus as it slowly emptied of students. Filled with more than a little dread. I had no job lined up, certainly nothing that would lead to a career. My first job out of college was a porter at a nearby Holiday Inn. After five years in school I’d spend that summer running clean linen and pillowcases to the housekeeping staff and extra toothpaste and bathrobes to guests.

Sometimes I wonder where I’d be now if I’d taken a different path. Like a year off to just work, or a few years in the military, or Peace Corps, or whatever. I don’t regret my college experience, but there’s plenty of evidence that I was just going through the motions.

Who could have seen then that the things that led me to my career now, my life now, would be the things that most consumed me when I was fourteen? All those lovely summer days spent indoors pouring over issues of COMPUTE! and typing BASIC programs into an Atari 800. More summer days spent indoors learning every note of David Gilmour’s guitar solos on The Final Cut. Who would I be now if I weren’t such an indoor kid?

But I didn’t study computers or music in college. For the people who are still making up their minds, college years are over and done before you figure out what to do with yourself.

A new Kin to Stars single. We recorded the base tracks way back in January, before the ice storm, but we’re just now closing in on the final mixdown. I’m still very much enjoying working with Garageband and its constraints. I haven’t found it lacking anything I could make do without anyway.

This track will also be the first to have a drum part that I played, not programmed. By “drums” I actually mean the DM6Kit I wrote about last year. It took an evening to come up with the part, another evening to rehearse and record. The final take that made it into the recording was the best take of at least ten or twelve with a few glitches fixed by hand. I was pretty tired at the end of that day. Still, it’s way more fun to do drum parts that way.

I’m excited for this track to be finished so we can get it into your ears. Until then, if you haven’t heard the first two Kin to Stars tracks we’ve released, you can find them here on Bandcamp.