Buttering the musical muffin..

Album review – Enter Calico (Clear Notice Recordings)

Posted on August 9th, 2010.
Category:  tunes, video     
0 comments

I don’t usually do album reviews here, but I’m going to make an exception. Enter Calico, by new net label Clear Notice Recordings is a great compilation of unsigned electronica artists. That maybe nothing new in itself, but the label’s inception has been interesting and I’ve watched it unfold online for the last few months.

Clear Notice came about almost entirely through Twitter. Kieron James, the man behind Clear Notice, organized the whole release online. Not only are the artists discovered through Twitter, but the album mastering and artwork were done by Twitter contacts and, just for added value, Keiron organized a video for each song on the album (through Twitter again!). Check this stunning example for Tricil’s track “The Emancipation” by Burning Head.

The music itself is all important of course and it is a great album. There are some exceptional tunes here. David McSherry’s “U?+”, alka’s “sOMn ambulance”, tricil’s “The Emancipation”, rktic’s “nordic walking” and Tapage’s “Wounds” were all highlights for me and could easily be mistaken for songs by artists such as Chemical Brothers, Plaid, Orbital or Aphex Twin.

So if you want to support music and artists at grass roots, grab a copy of Enter Calico. It’s £7.99 from Bandcamp and should be available on iTunes within a few days. I recommend.

Circuit bent Realistic reverb

Posted on November 26th, 2009.
Category:  gear, video     
2 comments

Months ago, my good friend Oli from Groove Criminals sent me this rather charming circuit bent Realistic Reverb unit. I completely forgot to post it here, and it serves as a good tester for embedding youtube clips into the blog, which I’m amazed I haven’t done before. Read more…

DCAM Synth Squad

Posted on July 29th, 2009.
Category:  plugins, video     
6 comments

OK, let’s get this out of the way right up front. I work for FXpansion so you can take this entire blog post with as big a pinch of salt as you feel is necessary… Read more…

Sony Vegas and VMware Fusion

Posted on June 10th, 2009.
Category:  video     
0 comments

As my hunt for a good screencasting solution continues, I’ve become painfully aware that to edit video on a Mac you basically HAVE to buy Final Cut, in some form or other. Now I’ve always been Sony Vegas man. Vegas is perfect for editing together multiple sources that are different resolutions, a video screen capture from here, a jpg from there, a video imported from your mobile phone. Read more…

Screencasting on a Mac

Posted on June 3rd, 2009.
Category:  video     
3 comments

I recently moved to a Mac as my main studio computer. One of the things I have to do regularly is screencasting (I do all of the tutorial videos for FXpansion). My needs are fairly simple: Read more…