We've had some flirtation with management recently, this has opened up some avenues that are interesting for NK, however it's not stopping us plow forward with our album. The 2nd round of vocal recording is next weekend. Sarah is stopping over so we are gonna cram as much in as possible. This should see us with around seven complete songs with just the mixing and final arrangements to tweak.
So this weekend I had some time to work on a remix for one of "the managements" artists. This artist has some pedigree and also chart success, hopefully the fruits of my labour will make it on to their forthcoming single.
The original track was 115bpm, my version is 125bpm and uses the sound set for one of our new songs. This has given it the NK branded feel. The track has been completely reworked with only the vocals surviving. The vocals were treated with Logics' in built time stretch engine so I could get them working at the new bpm without altering the pitch. I remember the first hardware Sampler I had that could do that the Akai S1100, I think it could only manage around 32 seconds though and you ended up with something quite robotic sounding. The Akai samplers also had a really cool feature that would allow you to shorten a sample loop on the fly. I used that effect loads back in my first band. I also showed Bon from Nitzer Ebb that feature and low and behold it ended up on a remix they did of their track called "Captivate" :-)
Think I'm gonna buy myself a Little Fatty, the Moog analogue stage synth. Normally for live, the parts I play come from soft synths triggered within Logic but the new stuff is pretty complicated and I'm noticing a small amount of latency. Plus I'm always on the edge when it comes to using Logic live. I might have to render parts to audio stems for the next gigs and disable all of the AU soft synths.
OK so it's Sunday evening and one of my favorite non sci-fi flms is on, Crash.
Matt
Sunday, 9 March 2008
Friday, 7 March 2008
GIRLS ALLOWED
Just making my daily visit to our blog and it occurred to me - where are all the girls?? I'm definitely a woman's woman (though must stress that I do NOT wear sensible shoes) and it would be nice to hear from any ladies that are into what we're doing, or any thoughts / comments really. No offence fellas ;-)
Other than that, I'm looking forward to a quiet, relaxing weekend of writing. Got a fair bit to crack on with. I'll write soon with my progress.
toodleloo x
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Wednesday, 5 March 2008
INTERNET KILLED THE VIDEO STAR
We spoke about doing a video last year and I have been giving serious thought to doing one again. I know my way around FinaCut Pro but AfterEffects would require a steep learning curve. Therefore doing anything creative with graphics mixed with live footage is gonna take me ages. I hate the thought of not being able to do something but throwing myself into something at this stage will be a distraction from the music.
So if you know anyone that is cheap and good with AfterEffects let us know.
So if you know anyone that is cheap and good with AfterEffects let us know.
Y/N
Bring it on! Can't wait to hear the progress of The Y/N song. I really like this track and enjoyed writing the initial lyrics and melody to go with it, which I felt should be quite robotic and dark. It will be good to develop it further.
I was intrigued to see this poster ad for Art Sheffield 08, which seemed freakily related to our idea for Y/N. Do you think artists all key into the same idea at the same time and the idea manifests in its different forms?
I'm sure Matt and I discussed this ages ago, thinking that it was wierd that we'd have an idea for, say a video or a song and then the next minute we would see it on MTV and be miffed that someone else had got there first. Maybe we should get new jobs as those people that forsee trends.......
anyhoo - better go and cook my tea (veggie spag bol) x
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
FEEDS Y/N... YES
Are now working on the main site. My hosting company doesn't allow Crossdomain XML feeds and runs PHP in safe mode. I guess this is understandable. So I moved the site to another server, http://www.northernkind.net the co.uk domain now re-directs to the .net address.
Thanks to the people who emailed suggestions :-)
YES / NO was cracked tonight. This was an idea written back in October 2007 and was the first presented to Sarah for the new album. It's remained pretty similar to the idea I supplied however I have had to change the bassline and bass sound a little. It's actually got the feel of HLs' "The Lebanon" about it. One of the great new plug-ins in Logic 8 is the Delay Designer. The bassline now has some creative delay added to it and it really works well. I'm usually not one for adding effects to bass sounds as they then tend to dominate the bottom end of a track, I've solved that by filtering the low end frequencies out on the delayed parts. This is definitely a beat driven track. I think Sarah will need to write more parts for it though as it's a bit sparse and doesn't follow a proper song structure yet.
Matt
Thanks to the people who emailed suggestions :-)
YES / NO was cracked tonight. This was an idea written back in October 2007 and was the first presented to Sarah for the new album. It's remained pretty similar to the idea I supplied however I have had to change the bassline and bass sound a little. It's actually got the feel of HLs' "The Lebanon" about it. One of the great new plug-ins in Logic 8 is the Delay Designer. The bassline now has some creative delay added to it and it really works well. I'm usually not one for adding effects to bass sounds as they then tend to dominate the bottom end of a track, I've solved that by filtering the low end frequencies out on the delayed parts. This is definitely a beat driven track. I think Sarah will need to write more parts for it though as it's a bit sparse and doesn't follow a proper song structure yet.
Matt
Sunday, 2 March 2008
COLD, EARS AND MORE ON WILDER
Unfortunately I have come down with a cold, I'm not really one to take time off or wimp out but it has effected my sinuses and also my hearing. I'm always listening to music particularly on headphones so I'm conscious of the damage excessive use can do.
Last year I took a week off to mix our album, at that point my studio was in the spare room, I tried as much as possible to create a temporary mixing environment with spare duvets covering walls and pillows as bass traps in each corner of the room. As your ears start to become fatigued you instinctively turn the volume up, it's crucial to take breaks when working like that. Since then I have noticed some slight tinnitus in my left ear. Although tinnitus isn't actually caused by excessive noise it's used to describe ringing in the ear. Tinnitus is actually caused by infection, although studies show that prolonged use of headphones encourages the growth of bacteria in the ear, so indirectly they do effect it. HA HA you even get medical advice on this blog!
So I haven't done any music this weekend to save my ears, what I have done is add a really cool feature to our main website. A few people said "how come you don't update your site that often" so I said check out this blog it's updated most days. I decided to write an import script in Flash to load external XML from this actual blog feed. I tested it locally and it worked fine but then I realised Flash wouldn't pull a cross domain XML feed. Having trawled the web for help I finally stumbled on a PHP feature that would do this, only to realise that my hosting accounts PHP config didn't support this :-( I have it working on my works test server so I know it works, I'm just hoping that my NK hosting company can help.
Back to Alan WIlders letter. Apart from the sound quality issues he also went on to attack the record labels. Mute have always been a label I admired, manly because of its roster of great music but also it's general ethos and humble beginnings. I think Daniel Miller is of the industries true heros, Mute was probably the largest indie label before its takeover by EMI. One of the other labels I really admired was Factory. I'm surprised that Mute haven't had the attention of fIlms, documentaries and books like Factory has, then again I suppose Daniel Miller is a fairly tame character compared to that of the late great Tony Wilson. One of the main reasons for my love of Factory (apart from New Order / Joy Division) was their approach with the design and packaging of their products. Our first album was manufactured on a fairly small budget, therefore we were limited to what we could do with the CD packaging, the next album however will be much more special and hopefully something that people will treasure.
I think my biggest gripe with Alan's letter was his overriding grumpiness with the state of things. He's in a pretty good position having made no doubt a stack of money being part of Depeche Mode. If he is so disillusioned with the industry why doesn't he go it alone. I enjoy all the aspects of being part of NK, as I have talked about before in this blog we do everything ourselves and really try to push the creative aspects of the music, imagery & design whilst having a full time job. I/We do it for the love of doing it, not for the money.
Who needs a record label?
Last year I took a week off to mix our album, at that point my studio was in the spare room, I tried as much as possible to create a temporary mixing environment with spare duvets covering walls and pillows as bass traps in each corner of the room. As your ears start to become fatigued you instinctively turn the volume up, it's crucial to take breaks when working like that. Since then I have noticed some slight tinnitus in my left ear. Although tinnitus isn't actually caused by excessive noise it's used to describe ringing in the ear. Tinnitus is actually caused by infection, although studies show that prolonged use of headphones encourages the growth of bacteria in the ear, so indirectly they do effect it. HA HA you even get medical advice on this blog!
So I haven't done any music this weekend to save my ears, what I have done is add a really cool feature to our main website. A few people said "how come you don't update your site that often" so I said check out this blog it's updated most days. I decided to write an import script in Flash to load external XML from this actual blog feed. I tested it locally and it worked fine but then I realised Flash wouldn't pull a cross domain XML feed. Having trawled the web for help I finally stumbled on a PHP feature that would do this, only to realise that my hosting accounts PHP config didn't support this :-( I have it working on my works test server so I know it works, I'm just hoping that my NK hosting company can help.
Back to Alan WIlders letter. Apart from the sound quality issues he also went on to attack the record labels. Mute have always been a label I admired, manly because of its roster of great music but also it's general ethos and humble beginnings. I think Daniel Miller is of the industries true heros, Mute was probably the largest indie label before its takeover by EMI. One of the other labels I really admired was Factory. I'm surprised that Mute haven't had the attention of fIlms, documentaries and books like Factory has, then again I suppose Daniel Miller is a fairly tame character compared to that of the late great Tony Wilson. One of the main reasons for my love of Factory (apart from New Order / Joy Division) was their approach with the design and packaging of their products. Our first album was manufactured on a fairly small budget, therefore we were limited to what we could do with the CD packaging, the next album however will be much more special and hopefully something that people will treasure.
I think my biggest gripe with Alan's letter was his overriding grumpiness with the state of things. He's in a pretty good position having made no doubt a stack of money being part of Depeche Mode. If he is so disillusioned with the industry why doesn't he go it alone. I enjoy all the aspects of being part of NK, as I have talked about before in this blog we do everything ourselves and really try to push the creative aspects of the music, imagery & design whilst having a full time job. I/We do it for the love of doing it, not for the money.
Who needs a record label?
Re album name -
Cheers Gary!
It's interesting that you should suggest that as an album name, as a very close friend of mine has just suggested 'Where to from Here?'.
Great minds think alike ;-)
bye for now x
It's interesting that you should suggest that as an album name, as a very close friend of mine has just suggested 'Where to from Here?'.
Great minds think alike ;-)
bye for now x
p.s
It seems my whizzy new blog method is flawed, as I need a password to reply to comments. Help!
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