myblacksheep.org

Daring and Cowardice

nospam@example.com (Dennis) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:30:42 +0200

Back in october 2007, a message blew through the interwebs: Radiohead had offered their latest album, In Rainbows, for download. You could surf to their site and decide how much you wanted to pay (yes, you could even say "screw you, I don't want to pay anything" and put £0 into the little box) and then get the entire album, unencumbered by any crappy DRM in plain old MP3.

Great, a lot of people thought, but why go through the hassle? I can download all the albums that I want from certain buccaneers and get the same files without the hassle of registration. So they went and did that. Some, of course, used the Radiohead site but the number of downloads from alternative sources kept rising and rising.

Now, there's Coldplay. They're putting a new album out soon (I guess it's called "Viva") and now offer one song ("Violet") for download as well. Great move, Coldplay. But why are you forcing me to put in an e-mail address, zip number and country? Why do you care?

I mean, couldn't you just put a download link there? Now I have to get a throwaway address just to check out whether it's worth all the hassle because I'm most definitely not giving you my data. Especially not if your great Privacy Policy states:

Your personal data, in aggregate, non-personally-identifying form, may be provided to other carefully selected third parties for marketing, advertising or other uses.

Screw you! That's what's wrong with the industry and it seems to be what they're not getting. Downloading music is easy, fast and hassle-free. Yes, it is being made illegal in more and more parts of the world but that's not really stopping anyone from doing it, is it?

So, nice try to both Radiohead and Coldplay but it's just not enough.

Dennis

Making of "Storyboard"

nospam@example.com (Dennis) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:06:47 +0200

Just for the sake of doing something like this, I just recorded a short little screencast about some of the things I've learned while recording "Storyboard" (see below). The audio quality is rather horrible but I was unable to convince iMovie to use my proper microphone so I had to use the crappy built-in one. Anyway, here it goes:

Hope you like it.

Dennis

Storyboard

nospam@example.com (Dennis) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:29:06 +0200

Hey there!
Sorry for leaving this thing alone for so long but I wanted to have something truly presentable before I put something crappy and temporary up here. So, there it is: Storyboard!

Tell me what you think ;o)
Dennis

Recording Music

nospam@example.com (Dennis) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:51:39 +0100

Hi everyone!

Today I'd like to write a little about my history in music recording, how I finally ended up with the almighty Garage Band and why does absolutely everything I need.

Recording music is a difficult field for me. Generally, there are not too many aspects about a recording software that I truly need. Yet, there are one or two requirements that are absolutely essential:

Quickness: When I've got an idea for something I want to record, I need to do it fast. I need to flick a few switches to get my gear powered on anyway and I need something that boots up and is ready to record something quick and dirty in that time. If it takes much longer, I might have forgotten what it was that I originally wanted to record. It's happened before and it's 'orrible.
Sensibility: After recording, I want to be able to roughly edit things, move them around a little until I like them and then produce a quick mixdown of what I have. I want to add new things easily and painlessly, edit or delete them again. If that takes too much work, I can't use that piece of software.
Flexibility: Today, I might do a Rock song, tomorrow a classical soundtrack-like piece. I don't want software to push me into a certain direction so I need to be able to tweak and extend my recording software.

That's it, basically, and although it doesn't really sound like too much, I've made the experience that you can mostly pick two out of the three, sometimes even only one.

I started off on Windows using Magix Music Studio (yeah, I know, I was young, innocent and it was a present) which I kept for quite a while. I only ever used the MIDI part of it, because I couldn't figure out the audio editor part... Anyway, I got a simple Roland MIDI keyboard and played away.

Unfortunately, it wasn't the final say on the subject as a while later I realized that I spent way more time tweaking the MIDI file note by note (because either I didn't play the notes exactly enough or that freaking piece of s...oftware wasn't able to figure out what I intended to play), so it was time to move on.

Fast forward a couple of years to my early band years. I switched to Cakewalk Pro Audio on Windows. It was a lot closer to my needs (which I hadn't even defined at that time) and I recorded a lot of band material with it. I had gotten a 16 Port Firewire mixer which allowed me to record stuff with my notebook instead of my desktop PC - something that I've gotten incredibly used to by now.

Anyway, even Pro Audio didn't really fulfill the first requirement: Quickness. It took too much time to set things up, too much time in which my precious musical idea had already floated out the window.

Which brings us to the present: Garage Band. I bought a Macbook a while ago and with it came Garage Band and... well, I know it's a little cliché to say so but it really changed the way I record music.

Nowadays, I flip open my Macbook, enter my password, click the Garage Band icon, switch my gear on while it launches, connect my Firewire mixer, click two buttons and I'm ready to go in about a minute, busily humming the thing I want to record. And I haven't forgotten what that was ever since.

Now, don't get me wrong, Garage Band has quirks of its own (which I'm going to write about soon) and it's by no means a perfect product but it comes close, pretty close. It's quick, easy to use and extensible like hell. And that, dear Garage Band, is why I like you.

Dennis

The Black Sheep

nospam@example.com (Dennis) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:03:49 +0100

Hey there!
As a first installment on this site, I'd like to present The Black Sheep, my first album-like thingy that's appeared online somewhen in 2007. You can freely redistribute it (as with everything on this site) under the terms of the Creative Commons License you see at the bottom right.
So, here are the songs:

I'll try to write a lot more about the songs and snippets I post around here but for now that'll have to do.

So, that's it for now, folks. Have fun with the songs and please, please do tell me if you like them - yes, even tell me if you don't.

Dennis

My black sheep is alive

nospam@example.com (Dennis) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:08:26 +0100

Things are happening, moving, morphing. It's just one step at a time but the move has started and it won't be easy for anyone to stop it. So, look forward to seeing a lot more around here. I hope you're as excited as I am.
Dennis