Welcome (back) to Crow Caw Music Works

December 13, 2008 – 7:06 AM

last modified 5 June 2010

Welcome.

This is the place for all things related to and about the musical productions and writings of tim p scott, producer of electronic post-rock instrumental compositions before there was post-rock.

If this is your first visit, glad you’re here. You can go to the page “Listen” for samples of tim p scott’s music, “Who?” for some biographical material, “What?” for general information about this site, and “Where?” for contact information. “How” discusses various aspects of what used to be called “DTMP” (Desktop Media Production).

If you’re returning, welcome back. We’ll try to keep current information about both tps musical projects and the state of this site in the posts below.

Finally; while we try to be realistic and flexible about copyright law (who wants to spend all their money on lawyers and lawsuits? [besides certain churches?]), we sincerely hope you’ll at least have the grace to give credit to tim p scott and/or Crow Caw Music Works if you use anything from this site. You know it is really copyrighted, after all, and the music is actually registered with the US Register of Copyrights. So please try to do the Right Thing, as they say in the Islands:

“It No Kill You”.

By A. Person | Posted in Blog housekeeping, General announcements | Comments Off

Crow Caw gets BFD 2.1

July 21, 2010 – 10:38 AM

I have used old versions of fxpansion’s BFD drum plugin product for a couple of years. Having played drums in a previous life,  nothing I programmed ever quite did it for me. BFD is one of those plugins that basically is a sample playback engine with 10s of gigabytes of drum hit and drum loop and groove recordings.

My first demo version came in a copy of Computer Music magazine. It was a special version of BFD 1.5 but still had an amazing amount of functionality and a ton of grooves. I always wanted to buy the full version, both to support fxpansion and of course to get <<more>>. So finally in July of 2010 I burned a candle to the gods of debt and ordered it.

It took a while to install. Depending on how impatient you are, the available space on your hard drive, or just how many velocity layers you want, the installer gives you three installation options: small, medium and large. Having just plumped for a 500GB drive I went ahead and installed the large version which takes up about 55GB.

One of the interesting features in BFD 2.1 is “load on demand”. This allows you to quickly create a part with only a few basic layers and articulations loaded, and then when you are editing the track or rendering it, the entire kit is loaded.

The only complaint I have at the moment is that the GUI is awful hard to see and read due to the tiny font and dark color choices. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the GUI can be customized, and a post on the FXpansion support forum indicates the company is not excited about creating that possibiity. But with the use of the Magnifier accessory and a little experience, so far I’m a happy camper.

last modified 2010 august

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production | Comments Off

Remixing myself…

June 6, 2010 – 10:45 AM

For some reason I’ve been resurrecting ancient song data files and seeing if I can still recreate them. I started with the data from Jack of Shadows, which was essentially based on MIDI files run through the Roland SC-88 and the Emu Proformance+. The sequencer used was “Metro” which was Macintosh only.
For this track (“Eaterrock”) I re-recorded the MIDI from a Roland SC-880, using it as well for the piano part. The main change is a layer on the bass organ part of a bass patch designed on an RGC Triangle II synth. This is mixed fairly low and essentially just to give a little attack to the bass part.
All the parts were soloed and then recorded as audio in Sonar 8.5.3 and mixed in the box. The other big change is instead of using the Alesis Quadraverb (which provided the reverb in the original) I used my current favorite reverb plug in, the Cakewalk Perfect Space device. (Which is basically a convolution reverb.) A company named Bricasti provided a whole bunch of free impulse responses which work fine in that device.

Below are players of the original version and the newly recorded version.

“Eaterrock” (original)
(6:09) from “Jack of Shadows”
©1995 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)
“Eaterrock” (2010 version)
(6:11) from “Songs in Work”
©2010 tim p scott

(click (triangle) to play)

Hmm.. on laptop speakers or earbuds, you probably won’t hear a lot of difference, especially if you listen to it in a less than perfect environment. For a limited time, then, I’m going to give links to the underlying audio tracks (192Kbps MP3s) for you to download if you like. (Depending on your browser, you should be able to just right click on the following links.)

Original Eaterrock version 2010 remixed version

Last updated 20100606

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic Music: tim p scott, Free music, Free music and sounds | Comments Off

Some notes on software guitar processors

June 5, 2010 – 6:45 AM

I’m not much of a guitar player, and the guitar I have is of equal quality. So, can using VST guitar plugins make the proverbial silk purse out of a sow’s ear? Yes and no.

Here are some notes about a few demo and freeware versions I’ve used. Your mileage will certainly vary, but at the least it may be something for you to consider.

Also remember that many of these are continually being worked on and improved, so the versions I’m writing about are probably already obsolete as you read this.

Studio Devil BVC (www.studiodevil.com)

+ VST

+ Free version  for eval! (BVC variant)

+ Cheap

Pretty nasty distortion tool which can border on shrill. A little of this goes a long way.

ReValver (www.alienconnections.com)

Free versions of this commercial product can be found that have a subset of its entire feature set. This is the ultimate tweaker tool. You have a tool box full of preamp and amp models and processors you can wire together into a virtual rack, sort of like the Reason model. In each device you can actually get in and edit it as though you were actually modifying the device’s electronics. Very powerful and capable of great sounds.

♥ Dirthead 0.80

My favorite single processor. May require a little EQ to tame the “honkiness” you can get from a cheap guitar.

++ FREE!

+ Three levels of distortion

+ “Cabinet” switch is useful and adds good sound

+ Simple to use, stable, extremely light CPU footprint

Voxengo Tube Amp

Voxengo BoogeX

After tinkering with these a lot, it became clear that they often had one or two great characteristics, but alone didn’t do the trick. This is where Ableton’s Rack paradigm comes in handy. It’s simple to create a Rack which is a layer of several of these tools. I have Racks that parallel three or four of them, usually Dirthead, Studio Devil and Boogex. Another channel with a Live Utility device allows you to add some clean signal.

Then you can map Macro controls to easily tweak the amount of contribution to the entire sound from each device.

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic music: production, Info for musicians | Comments Off

Google AdWords and the New Marketing

May 15, 2010 – 3:46 PM

I don’t know. There’s a big part of retro me that really resents the New Marketing. This is where you scramble, lie, cheat, and do whatever’s necessary to drive traffic to your site and sell stuff. Yes, we want to sell tracks and CDs. But I just hate the concept that New Marketing is the way to do it.

I got a voucher recently for a $100 credit for Google AdWords. Just as an experiment, I decided to go ahead and set up an account and see what would happen.

Amazingly, it worked. Even with the clumsy choice of trigger names, it actually did drive traffic to this site.

Results of AdWords campaign

Here’s the number of visitors to this site over the period the AdWords campaign was running.

It didn’t really result in any sales that I can tell, but there’s probably other reasons for that.

last updated 2010 may

By A. Person | Posted in Info for musicians | Comments Off

Snapshots from around the studio

April 8, 2010 – 4:02 PM

Crow Caw Music Works International Headquarters

Gimme that comfy country vibe!

My camera just gave up the ghost. It had been working perfectly for a long time. I can still view and download photos, just can’t take any more. Oh well!

Guitar department

Guitar department


There’s a wealth of interesting detail here (depending on your personal understanding of the word “interesting”…) Notice the high quality $20 First Act guitar amplifier you can just see the top of under the desk. I’ve since relocated it a little bit and covered it and its mic with a heavy blanket. This seems to give me better guitar sounds…possibly because I can run it louder.

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production, General announcements | Comments Off

Welcome to the Crow Caw Music Works International Operations Center

February 22, 2010 – 3:15 PM
Studio front door

Is this nondescript enough?

This rather forbidding looking entrance is the front door to the CCMW IOC.The loading docks and executive towers are on the other side of the building.

Another view of the front door

As mentioned elsewhere in this site, the hardware components are inexorably being taken over by software. The main production is handled by a big computer named Colossus with lots of software editors, synths, DAWs and processors on it. A few years ago Colossus would have been state of the art (it’s based on an Intel quad-core Q6600 CPU) but now it’s “venerable.” However, it still has the juice to do what it needs to.

This is what the main production desk looked like from the rear. It’s been cleaned up and improved since this photo. The rack mounted Intel box is visible at the lower left. The light gray box in the middle is the retired Macintosh G3. It’s still there since once in a while we need to resurrect old project files that run in Metro or Opcode Vision that are Mac only.

From mid-2009.

Last edited 20100605

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production | Comments Off

New tracks: “Whispers of Doom” and “Robot Monster 3″ – technical details.

February 18, 2010 – 7:55 PM

Updated 2010 02 22

I’ve just finished “mastering” two new tracks that have been in the laboratory for a few weeks.

“Whispers of Doom: is pretty much like everything else I’ve been doing lately.

“Robot Monster 3″ is more fun as it uses extensive dialog samples from the 1953 grade-Z science fiction movie “Robot Monster” – see page 43 in the “Listen” section: http://crow-caw.com/40-listen/43-some-newer-tracks/

These were produced once again in Ableton Live (currently v8.1.1.) They make extensive use of the fantastic sounding Zebra2 synth — you can hear it in the bass parts and some of the leads, The venerable soft synths Triangle II and Crystal were also used, along with a weird patch from Arturia’s Analog Factory.

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production | Comments Off

NWEAMO festival in San Diego – Oct 2009

October 3, 2009 – 8:06 AM

Experimental Music Concert at San Diego State University

College students going tribal

College students going tribal

Joshua Fried intensely focusing on some strange thing

Joshua Fried intensely focusing on some strange thing

Joshua Fried grabbing more input from his FM boombox

Joshua Fried grabbing more input from his FM boombox

Tristan Shone's DUb Brutaliser waiting to be inflicted on the audience

Tristan Shone's Dub Brutaliser waiting to be inflicted on the audience

IMG_1703

NWEAMO is a cool organization now in its 11th year (as I understand it). Its mission is to maintain the connection between classical music and avant garde and popular. It makes sense the way they explain it. They support performances in Europe, the US and elsewhere as far as I know.

Anyway, last night was the first of two of these concerts they stage yearly in the US. Fortunately they are held at SDSU which is not far from my house.

The program was very excellent and fascinating and the only complaint I have was that it was too short! It lasted a bit under 90 minutes. In any case it was well worth it. Hopefully I’ll be able to add a bit more tonight.

There doesn’t seem to be anything recent on youtube, but do a search for NWEAMO and you can see videos from last year of previous performances in NYC and San Diego.

NWEAMO concert night; view east over the SDSU pedestrian bridge

NWEAMO concert night; view east over the SDSU pedestrian bridge

Update 4 October: I’ll go ahead and upload the snapshots I took last night. Amazing and intriguing work and a lot different than Friday’s performances.

I just wish I had some video and audio to contribute. As it was, it appears that I wasn’t really supposed to even take pictures, although I had the flash off and was careful to mute the camera.

Tristan Shone's Dub Machinery

Tristan Shone's Dub Machinery

Joshua Fried's shoes, steering wheel and electronics

Joshua Fried's shoes, steering wheel and electronics

Boogieing down to Joshua's mashup

Boogieing down to Joshua's mashup

IMG_1713

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music | Comments Off

Moving into the new century…

July 19, 2009 – 8:50 AM

Well, not quite. As usual, I’m the last person in the world to adopt something new. In this case, I’ve finally bought a laptop.

I’ve been wanting to get a portable computer for some time. I’ve been waiting for a decent laptop under $400, but nothing was really suitable. There are Atom powered “netbooks” but I want to be able to at least run Live and Reason on it.

I saw a Turion-based system advertised at my local Fry’s store for $299. It was almost suitable, but the deal killer was the Vista Home installation. As you may know this is the version of Vista that can’t be upgraded to Windows 7 when I comes out. So I “splurged” for an Acer 5520 which is powered by a AMD Turion X2. It was another $100 but so far I think I’m glad I spent the extra money.

Then yesterday I spent another $100 on a security cable, wireless router and carry bag. It’s all good fun and now I’m another $500 in debt but happy…

Update on the laptop

Well, that turned out to be a bust. The Acer laptop was flaky beyond belief. I followed all the instructions, made sure the anti-virus and updates were all there, but after many hours of work the thing still didn’t work reliably.

I took it back to Frys which efficiently refunded my money. I ended up buying a Toshiba model which I have so far put many hours on without a single problem.

last modified 2010 sept

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music | Comments Off

Where’s the new music?!

May 26, 2009 – 2:45 PM

(June 26)

Well, it’s not really “NEW” but I’ve uploaded a nice copy of my Buddha Machine 2.0 remix (info on this page: http://crow-caw.com/40-listen/44-buddha-20-remix/) OK, I can announce that I have at least uploaded something new! It’s a fairly long (7:23) piece from the loops from the second version of the infamous Buddha Machine, generously provided (under a Creative Commons license) by FM3. I put the track on bandcamp for anyone’s delectation.

(May 26)

As someone once put it to me: “Life is a lot of clutter.” There are so many things you have to do that keep you from making music. And as you get older there are more and more of them. Simplify dammit!

Anyway, I also have to confess I’m tinkering too much. I have a Novation SL keyboard/control surface I really haven’t optimized for use. It’s proving worth the time for me to delve into it and the “Automap” feature.

Anyway, my new strategy is to go ahead and chunk out some partially finished tracks. Maybe at some point I’ll set up some comment strategy to see if it’s even worth pursuing a particular musical idea…

Well, stay tuned and I’ll try to update. Before that I need to fix up the CSS for this site anyway. I’m sort of getting tired of the color scheme, but I’m afraid if I change one thing I’ll have to change everything…

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music: tim p scott | Comments Off