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Psycliq you can wear

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As those who have followed this blog for the past year know, I am very much a fan of print-on-demand services. They’re a fantastic lifeline for independent artists such as myself, since they don’t usually require up-front costs and they take away the need to manage inventory or reach a certain sales throughput to be useful to all involved. Late last year, I switched CD production of Results Not Typical over to CreateSpace who manufactures the CDs to order and makes them available directly through Amazon.com, where many of you like to buy your CDs. The print-on-demand model fits so well that I’m probably going to be going with them for future Psycliq albums as well.

Then a couple days ago, I ran across a site called SpreadShirt. These fine folks do on-demand manufacturing of t-shirts, bags, blankets, and other cloth-like objects. I had used CafePress in the past, and while interesting, I was never very impressed with their quality, since they use inkjet transfers to print everything. SpreadShirt, however, does both direct printing of raster graphics onto the fabric as well as vinyl printing of vector graphics. The latter category is particularly exciting as it results in a quality not unlike that which professionally screen-printed shirts would have.

As of today, I’ve got one direct-printed design available in the shiny new Psycliq SpreadShirt Store, “sound advice”, and you can see the image for it up at the top of this post. I couldn’t decide which font to use for the design, so I decided to just use all of them at once. I really like the results, but I’m even more excited about the upcoming vector-art “finest in electronics”, which you can see the proof image of here as well. One of the coolest things about the vector design is that you can completely customize it, from the color choice to the size and placement of the image. You can even add your own text to the shirt if you like!

As a bonus, you can also buy a shirt with the word “SHIRT” on it in unambiguous capital letters. That way, nobody gets confused.

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The Road Ahead

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It’s the end of the first week in January, and the year 2011 is upon us in full force. Looking back, 2010 was a heck of a year for this little band. For one thing, this website didn’t exist at all this time last year. Heck, I didn’t even own the domain. But just one year later and now we’ve got the main site, a facebook page, a twitter account, a Bandcamp-powered music site, a behind-the-scenes mailing list, an Amazon artist page, an iTunes storefront, and a bunch of other stuff that I’ve probably lost track of. When I look back at it, Psycliq really exploded in 2010, digitally speaking.

Psycliq was very busy musically as well. First, there was the introduction of Mergers & Acquisitions, Inc., a remixes and covers collection that is available for free download right now. And this isn’t a regular album, either. Thanks to the wonders of digital distribution, I’ve been able to update it over time. In fact, if you downloaded it early in the summer, there are two new songs on it that weren’t there before. In the future, there will be more songs that aren’t on there now. I find this prospect awesome. Along the same lines, the special Christmas album Light the Tree for Some Holiday Cheer got updated this year with another new song. It’s my plan to add a new song to this every year so long as I can. It’s also available for free, but only during the holiday season, so you’ll have to wait until December again if you want a copy of it.

And of course, there was the production and release of Results Not Typical, an ambitious 17-track album of jazz, blues, rock, and other stuff. A definite departure from the norm, it was a lot of fun to make, and I’ve gotten back some great comments on it. As with every project so far, I’ve learned much about production and recording that I can’t wait to apply to the next effort.

Speaking of which, what’s in store for Psycliq in 2011? As the members of the Electric Goodies Newsletter already know, I’m already working on new music. I picked up a new synthesizer this summer, and the sonic palette available from it has been inspiring. I also recently got a MIDI controller from a friend, which along with the NanoKontrol I got for Christmas makes software synthesis much more feasible. I’ve been trying out these new tools and getting used to what I can make them do by sketching out new ideas. All said, I’ve got a handful of songs sketched out at different levels of completion that will probably make it into the next album. I’ve even probably got a name and art direction picked out for it, but I’m not ready to reveal those yet. I will say that the Electric Goodies members have access to the three-part “title track”, and that the first person to email me with a correct guess before I announce the title gets a free copy when it comes out.

So when is it coming out? I have no idea at this point. I’d definitely be working on it throughout the year wherever I can, but life has a way of getting in the way. For instance, I’m finishing my master’s degree this coming semester, which is going to be more work and insanity than I’ve ever dealt with at once. This is especially true since I’m not quite a rich rockstar yet and still have a full-time day job. This means that Psycliq will probably get a little quiet for the next few months, but it doesn’t mean that I’ve disappeared. For even with all this, I love to make music and couldn’t imagine not doing it. And digital distribution makes it easy to just put out things without there being a traditional “album” to put it on. And I’ll almost certainly have something up in Mergers & Acquisitions, and I’ll of course be doing another Christmas song at the end of the year.

All of this to say that there’s a lot in store for Psycliq in 2011 and beyond. Thanks to all of you for

Production, Uncategorized

I Have Kontrol

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Update: For those wandering in looking how to use a nanoKontrol with ProTools 8, I’ve since updated to a nanoKontrol2 and ProTools 9, and the two work seamlessly out of the box with each other.  On the chance that you’re still shopping around for stuff, I highly recommend going with the nanoKontrol2. Original post below...

I hope that everyone had and/or is having a wonderful holiday season! Have you downloaded Light The Tree yet? It’s only going to be up for another week, and it’s completely free! My holiday has been filled with a lot of driving around to family events, but now I think we’re finally settled into the house for a bit.

Exhausting, yes, but lots of fun, with a brand new year that’s almost begun. And what did I find under the tree this year? Why, nothing short of a new piece of gear! OK, this rhyming has to stop. (Anybody got a mop?) Seriously.

What you’re looking at in the product shot (courtesy of a fine review from SKRATCHWORX) is a Korg NanoKontrol. This lovely (and tiny) piece of hardware is really just a USB MIDI controller with a bunch of sliders and knobs and buttons on it. Nothing fancy on its own, but when you pair it with the right software you’ve got a pretty powerful setup on your hands. The obvious use case for me is for a mixing board, controlling track volumes and plugin controls in ProTools. With nine independent sliders, each with a knob and pair of buttons, you’ve got some really nice physical control over the mixing process. Since ProTools is notoriously picky about non-Avid-owned hardware, it sadly didn’t work out of the box. However, there is hope! You see, with its included editor software, this little guy can spit out pretty much whatever MIDI control codes you want it to, thereby pretending to be basically any kind of control surface out there. I used a great little tutorial to wire it up into ProTools, and I was very quickly in business. The first eight sliders map to the volume control on the first eight channels, and the last slider maps to the volume control of the last master fader. In other words, it does exactly what you’d expect it to do. In fact, I was a bit amazed at how smoothly everything worked. I will likely be tweaking the control mappings going forward, but this is a fantastic starting point, and I’d like to thank the folks at Trikome for their setup.

One of the main reasons for loving it so much has got to be the hardware transport controls. The ability to start, stop, rewind, and record from dedicated buttons cannot be beat. This way, I don’t have to fumble over to my computer keyboard to mash the right arcane button combination just to get things to start and stop when I want them to.

Mind you, the NanoKontrol doesn’t do any recording or mixing on its own — it is nothing more than a simple MIDI device. But like all good tools, it’s in exactly the form factor it needs to be in to make it useful. I’m going to need to rearrange my desk a bit to accommodate it, but I really needed to rework the studio space anyway. Maybe that’s something we can look forward to in the new year.

Music

Epic Epicness

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I wanted to give you all a taste of what the folks on the Electric Goodies Newsletter get from time to time, so I’ve put up the EPIC REMIX of “every morning orange and blue” off of halt:

Clocking in at over 28 minutes long, this is an ethereal soundscape unlike any other.Well, maybe it’s a little like sigur ros. This song was created quite simply by using an audio stretching program on the original mix of “every morning”. I played around with it on a few of my tracks and really liked the results on this one. I actually liked the audio-wash effect on this so much that I’m going to be using this on a song called “The Chaos” that’s due to be on the next Psycliq album. Members of the newsletter have already gotten several clips of that track, too, so there’s some further incentive to join up. This also marks the first native Psycliq remix to be put onto Mergers & Acquisitions, but I think it still loosely fits the definition of the collection.

And don’t forget, download Light The Tree for Some Holiday Cheer for free today! It will only be available through the holiday season, then it goes in the vault for another year.

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Happy Holidays

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For the past few years, I’ve had a bit of a Christmas tradition: I put together a special Christmas song and release it for free on the net. It’s that time of year, so once again, Light the Tree for Some Holiday Cheer is now available for immediate download!

I try to add a new song to this each year, and for 2010 I’ve recorded a mellow electronic arrangement of “In The Bleak Midwinter”. Sure the song is vastly inaccurate from a historical perspective, but it’s still a great song in my book. My arrangement here is based off of the one by Kevin Max on the fantastic various-artists Christmas album named Noel, which I like much more than the classical arrangement of the song.

And did I mention that it’s free? Think of it as a little Christmas present. And speaking of Christmas presents, don’t forget that you can do all kinds of great holiday shopping right here. Really, I think it’s a safe bet that Psycliq music will be this year’s Snuggie, so get yours now!

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We Are in the Amazon Now

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I’m very happy to say that Results Not Typical is finally available from Amazon.com as a physical CD! I didn’t think this was going to happen after CDBaby’s snafu with it. But in the end, this has been a good thing as it’s made me re-evaluate how I handle CD building and distribution entirely.

One of the biggest problems in being a smalltime independent artist is the upfront cost of the production of physical media. This is especially a pain to me because I really like physical media, and I really want to make it available to people who also like it. For both The Mathemagician’s Riddle and halt, I did absolutely everything from my home. I burned the CDs, printed the labels using lightscribe, printed the insert cards, packaged them all up into cases, and sent them off to CDBaby for sale. For Results Not Typical, I tried something a bit different: instead of printing my own cards, I got a small batch printed by a poster/cd printing place. I still printed the CDs on my own and packaged it all up by myself, but I was overall pretty happy with the quality.

CDBaby, it turns out, wasn’t quite so happy. They claimed that their distributor wouldn’t distribute a CDr, which was odd to me since my first two albums were also CDrs and went through fine, but who’s counting. Upon further pushing and digging with the aid of a very cool and friendly customer service rep from them, I found out that if I bought duplicated CDrs from CDBaby’s parent company, they’d be happy to sell them. Handy, that. 🙂

After moping and despairing for a bit, I set out to find a real solution to the problem and came across CreateSpace. These guys are a little print-on-demand service that has the added benefit of being owned by Amazon.com directly, so anything that you produce through them is made available through that storefront without further hassle. I also tried another print-on-demand service, which had decent results as well, but I liked the interface, packaging options, and integration with Amazon available through CreateSpace a bit better.

Roll this all up to say that as of right now, you can buy all three Psycliq albums almost anywhere you’d want to. And you know, it’s never too early to start your Christmas shopping…

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New Results

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image

Just got an express package in the mail: a new printing of Results Not Typical. This one comes from createspace. Same music, bit different packaging, and these are print on demand and should be available through Amazon. I think I’ll be using these guys for the forseeable future.

Production

Incoming Christmas Music

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I know, I know — it’s still much too early to be thinking about the Christmas season for most people. But the truth is, if I don’t get to recording a Christmas song early, it just won’t happen before the holidays are upon us. Thus, I’ve been fighting with ProTools and Renoise today to begin tracking this year’s song, “In The Bleak Midwinter”. I’ve even got the sheet music printed out on my desk in front of me, both as a reference for when I’m recording and to remind me to finish the blasted thing. I’ve got a basic arrangement mapped out, with basic chords and drum beats, but I still have a very long way to go here. I’m hoping to be able to throw some time at it over the weekend.

Unfortunately, as implied above, my studio software has been giving me headaches over this, not wanting to sync up and throwing all kinds of cranky errors at me. I’m trying to update and patch everything that I can find, but so far I’ve only been able to get it to run in fits and starts. Funny how all of this starts happening just after the new version of Pro Tools is announced. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that there’s got to be some kind of out-of-warranty timer going on here, plotting against me.

My goal is to have it all wrapped up by December, at which point I’ll put the Christmas album back up on the music site for download. Members of the Electric Goodies Newsletter will be getting sneak peeks and will be the first to know when the album is available again, so if you want to be in on the latest word, that’s the place to be.

Music

Track Notes Vol. 1.4

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This is the final edition of track notes for Results Not Typical. Enjoy!

Incognito Shuffle

Spies are sneaky creatures. If you don’t see them, the feeling is not mutual. If you do see them, it’s already too late for you.

This started as a backing track to a face-matching game. We ended up not doing much of anything with the game, so this little ditty gathered dust for a few years before I decided to take it apart and rework it into this song. I really like the avante-guard feel here, like something out of a speakeasy, and the walking bassline really makes me want to buy a real upright bass. I’m not sure my wife would appreciate us keeping one in the house though, so we’ll have to pass on that for now. That said, on this album I actually did do a lot more with bass than I had previously, mostly because I couldn’t really rely on the synthesizers for the basslines and keep the aesthetic that I wanted to for this album, and I really love that pushing-the-microphone-past-its-limits sound.

They Came In Waves

The odds seem insurmountable. The hordes crest the hills on all sides, a seemingly endless onslaught of feral ferocity aimed directly at your head. As soon as one falls his kin rise on the opposite side. The question is not when but if this night will end.

This track was recorded entirely with the Korg Wavedrum and no other instrumentation. Consequently, it was also played live, and you should be able to tell just how terrible a drummer I really am. Mind you, this is even after gratuitous post-processing and many takes on each part. I think it’s because of all that that this song is actually my least favorite on the album, though it’s still interesting to me. I like the relentless sonic onslaught that the pounding layers of drums make, and the tribal adrenaline rush that it’s meant to feel like. In the end, I chalk it up to experimentation and call it a day.

Eyes In The Forest

A pair of small lights gleam at you from the dense wood. They seem inviting, whimsical, almost playful. When you’re close enough to see the truth, you no longer have a chance.

This started out as a simple guitar progression that I liked, played on my nylon string acoustic and recorded in one take and named, simply, “forest”. When I pulled out the sketch to start building it into something more, I ended up actually using the original guitar piece verbatim (with a touch of compression and reverb thrown in to draw out the tone). After laying down a simple synth melody over the top of it, I had it mostly where I wanted it — but it was very, very short and something felt missing. That’s when I dropped the synth down a few octaves and drew out the low growling noise to contrast with the peaceful, idyllic sounds of the beginning. Also, if you get a chance, listen to this with a good set of stereo headphones.

Closure

After many years of wondering and doubting, resolution finally comes. It may not have answered all of your questions to your satisfaction, but there is finally an ending to this tale.

The final song on the album, this one feels like a sigh of relief to me. I particularly like how it falls down through some lingering tension and strange harmonics before it finally comes to rest on that major seven chord. It really is a story of life, having spent years worrying about a past event you can’t change, wondering what might have been, only to finally let it go.

 

And there you have it — a collection of my inner thoughts for each song on Results Not Typical. I’m sure I’ll find something else to fill these pages here. In the mean time, I’m trying to find a way around the Amazon problem. I’ll probably have more news for the site in a week or two on that, but for now I’ll just say that I’m looking into a few things.

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We’re Not In The Amazon

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Turns out that due to an oversight on my part and a bad policy on CDBaby’s distributors part, Results Not Typical will not be finding its way to Amazon.com’s stores in physical CD format. This is due to it being technically a CDR, which is apparently forbidden by CDBaby’s distributor. This surprises me, as Results was printed exactly the same way as both Mathemagician and Halt, and those went through the whole system without a hitch. People even bought them, from Amazon, had them shipped in the little Amazon box, and everything! And nothing fell over the whole time, if you’ll believe that.

This honestly makes me disappointed and sad, as I was hoping to make my music available to as wide an audience as possible. This is not to be, for the system has conspired against us.

Everything is and will remain available digitally for those of you who don’t care for owning a platter of plastic. For those of you that do want the pile of atoms, you can order the discs directly from CDBaby via the “Store” link at the top of our site here.