Monday Night Dance Party
- Posted By:
- Matt
- Posted On:
- April 6th, 2009
- Posted In:
- Blog, Music
- Comments:
- 5 Responses, Join The Conversation.
I’m on vacation this week but Alison still has to go to work so I felt bad and figured nothing would cheer her up more than a dance party. Of course you can’t have a dance party without dance music so I made some. It’s short and annoying, just the way dance music should be, enjoy.
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Condo Countdown
We have an official occupancy date for our new condo, below is a countdown to that date….
Free GarageBand Drum Loops
- Posted By:
- Matt
- Posted On:
- January 24th, 2009
- Posted In:
- Blog, Drumming
- Comments:
- 3 Responses, Join The Conversation.
There’s nothing I love more than laying down a solid groove on the drums. With the recent popularity of mash ups it seems that everyone is looking for nice clean drum beats to sample so I made some. These free GarageBand drum loops are made using electronic drums in my apartment and they are free so go ahead and use them. If you get rich using them I might call you begging for a cut but if you ask me to drum for you when you tour we might call it even.
I hope you like them and I want to make them better so please leave feedback and I’ll keep at it.
Download the loops here: MM-Loops-24jan2009 (809)
Listen to them below:
88bpm – 1 Verse – Rock
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140bpm – 1 Verse – Urban
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108bpm – 2 Verses 2 Choruses – Urban
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How To Use The Loops
- Download and unzip the file above.
- Copy the files to User(your user folder with the house icon)/Library/Audio/Apple Loops/User Loops/SingleFiles
- Open GarageBand and look for the loops in the loop viewer.
- Make music.
Best Blog I’ve Seen All Day: Random As Rhyme
A good friend of mine recently launched a new blog and it’s excellent. Here’s how he describes it:
Random as Rhyme. Strange name for a blog. But this is a strange blog. I write about my interests and interesting things I find on the grand old internet. Things normally talked about: Cars, BMX, Cartoons, Movies, 80s Nostalgia, Hot topics, Wordless Wednesdays, Things I always wanted….
Why I like it:
- Posts about cartoons you forgot existed.
- Complaints I agree with.
- Awesome design.
- He’s a Front End Developer…
Check it out if you’re bored and subscribe to his RSS feed if you like it (it’s at the bottom). There’s lots of good, original content posted on an almost daily basis.
Sick Ship – Songwriting – December 22 2008
- Posted By:
- Matt
- Posted On:
- December 23rd, 2008
- Posted In:
- Blog, Drumming, Music
- Comments:
- Comments Off
We posted two new demos on the Sick Ship website; check them out.
Anticipation – The Way I Hear Music
You’ve had that song stuck in your head all day; you can’t wait to get home and listen to it as loud as you can; you need to hear it, you can’t breathe until you hear it. You finally get home; you kick off your shoes and lock the door. You press play and time stands still in the split second before the music kicks in.
You hear the opening notes of the song that you’ve been dying to hear all day but the intro is just the beginning, you’re dying to hear the first verse. The first verse hits and all you can think about is the giant release that is the chorus. The chorus hits and you sing along at the top of your lungs, nothing feels better. Now you can’t wait to hear the second verse because it’s the one with the lyrics that are the exact lyrics you’d write if you wrote songs, they’re perfect and they sum up every emotion you’ve experienced that day, that week, that month, that year. You need to hear the bridge with that perfectly timed guitar riff or that breathtaking bass line; the part where everything drops out except the drums and group vocals, the part all of your friends would sing along to in the car on the way to the show on Friday night.
Now you focus on the drums; the split seconds between the bass drum and snare drum; the bass on 1 and 3 and the snare on 2 and 4. Everything is perfectly in time but the snare drum is one tiny nano second behind the beat; not enough to hear but enough to feel and it feels good. It’s as though you can feel the anticipation the drummer felt and the power behind the beat; you can feel every emotion released when that drum was hit. The song is dripping with groove and it feels more right than anything you’ve ever felt before.
Music is tension and the anticipation of the release. There’s tension and release within the song structure, within each note played and within each drum beat that makes you move. There’s also tension and release in the anticipation of hearing your favourite song, discovering new music and seeing a band perform live. Music touches everyone in different ways and I find it very hard to write about the way it makes me feel; this is my attempt. How do you hear music?
Why Vinyl?
- Posted By:
- Matt
- Posted On:
- December 14th, 2008
- Posted In:
- Blog, Music
- Comments:
- 7 Responses, Join The Conversation.
I didn’t grow up listening to music on vinyl records; I had a few kids albums when I was really young but by the time I was old enough to buy my own music cassette tapes were the mainstream. My Dad had lots of records and listened to them on a regular basis, loud, with headphones on. When CDs became the mainstream and all of my Dad’s favourite albums were purchased on CD the cassette player was removed from the home stereo system, a CD player was added, the record player stayed, and my Dad still listened to records turned up loud with headphones on. Now CDs are basically dead; new music is consumed in the form of MP3s whether obtained legally or not. I have a huge collection of CDs that I never touch, they mean nothing to me, I have no connection to the physical CD, the music was ripped from the CD to my computer long ago and I haven’t interacted with the CD in years. Listening to music has become passive, there’s no physical interaction anymore.
I recently received a record player as a gift from Alison and I instantly fell in love with vinyl. Music has become interactive again! I carefully remove the record from it’s sleeve, you can’t throw it around, it’s not indestructible; I put the record on the player, make sure the size and speed are set properly; I clean the record, lift the needle cover and lower the needle. It’s a ritual, it takes time, I’m doing something more than listening, I’m involved and how good the record sounds depends on me. Half way through the album I have to get up and flip it, clean it and play it, like stoking a fire. The packaging is bigger than a CD or cassette, the pictures are bigger, the liner notes and lyrics are easier to read. I feel like I’ve bought something real, something permanent.
I think a lot more thought was put into the entire structure of the album when vinyl was the mainstream. There’s no skip button so skipping a track is a real chore; you have to get up, stop the record, lift the needle, turn on a light, find the tiny line that separates tracks and try to place the needle in the exact right spot. Bands made albums that you’d want to listen to all the way through, no one wanted a bad track right in the middle of an album side so the bad tracks were left off. If you just liked one song you could buy a single and the single usually came with a bonus song on the other side. Music was better because it had to be.
The trend now is to offer free MP3 downloads of an album when you buy it on vinyl, it’s perfect; you get the vinyl for home listening and the MP3 for you iPod, the best of both worlds; the interaction and ritual of vinyl with the portability and convenience of an MP3. I wouldn’t be surprised if bands just stopped producing CDs in the future.
I’m hooked on vinyl; the ritual, the interaction, the permanence and the sound quality; it’s all too perfect and it’s how music should be enjoyed.
I Went Snowboarding On November 22nd!
- Posted By:
- Matt
- Posted On:
- November 24th, 2008
- Posted In:
- Blog, Snowboarding
- Comments:
- One Response, Join The Conversation.
Just over a week ago it was really warm here in Toronto and I was starting to think we’d have to wait until January to get any local snowboarding done. Last winter we thought we were super lucky when Horseshoe Resort in Barrie had 2 runs open on November 24th so we thought we were dreaming when Horseshoe and Mount St Louis opened on November 21st this year. Since I hate Horseshoe Resort and love Mount St Louis Moonstone we decided to go to Mount St Louis on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008.
The entire hill was covered in snow and they had 6 runs open, it wasn’t like any early opening I have ever seen, the conditions were as good as they are in the middle of the season and the lift lines were super short. At one point we had a group of 10 riding/skiing, it was a good time.
That’s it, we beat last year by 2 days and it feels good…
Sick Ship – Songwriting – November 20 2008
- Posted By:
- Matt
- Posted On:
- November 20th, 2008
- Posted In:
- Blog, Drumming, Music
- Comments:
- Comments Off
Steve and I got together again and reworked a song we had written and recorded years ago. This time we used the same Micro POG octave pedal as last time but we ran the higher octave through a Little Big Muff and into it’s own channel in the mixer. The dry bass signal went through the Fulltone Bass Drive and the Sans Amp into another channel in the mixer. The high bass and low bass were panned to different sides and it was awesome and super heavy.
This song uses some weird time signatures and a lot of poly rhythms, it took me forever to figure it out, I’m an idiot.
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Sick Ship – Songwriting – November 11 2008
- Posted By:
- Matt
- Posted On:
- November 11th, 2008
- Posted In:
- Blog, Drumming, Music
- Comments:
- Comments Off
It’s been almost three and a half months and we have another song. This time it’s just me and Steve (drums and bass) but it sounds full thanks to the Fulltone Bass drive and the Micro POG. We really like this song, it’s a slow jam….
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