Welcome (back) to Crow Caw Music Works

December 13, 2008 – 7:06 AM

last modified 12 jun 09

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, welcome. 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.

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.

As of summer 2009 this site might not get updated as frequently as it has been, due to work in progress on several new projects. However be assured that new stuff will keep getting uploaded and old stuff updated as time permits. Thank you for your understanding.

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 General announcements | 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

Brainstorm!

May 19, 2009 – 7:48 AM

I haven’t implemented them yet (except in my mind), but I’m going to add some “customer only” pages under the various release pages. You’ll be able to access them by entering a password; possibly something that only a CD purchaser will be able to tell from the packaging.

At first, they’ll probably just have the MP3/OGG/WMA versions of the songs for download, but in the future I hope to include other easter eggs. Check back now and then and I’ll make an announcement in a post in this section.

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

Warning

March 1, 2009 – 12:40 PM

I’ve written about this band before. Basically it’s one of the primary influences on me and my music. Even though they only released 2 lps (that I know of) in the 1980s, I still hardly ever get tired of listening to them.
I was just making up some MP3s for my portable player, and listened to “White Camels” off the second LP (”Electric Eyes”) again, and was struck with how excellent the simple guitar lead was they used for the out…it starts at about 3:56 and goes to the end about 5:18.
I’m going to go out on a limb here again and put up the file in a player, even though it’s a frank copyright infringement. I’m justifying it by the fact the record is nearly 25 years old and most people have never heard of it. So I don’t feel I’m taking royalty money out of anyone’s bank account.

White Camels
(5:18) from “Electric Eyes”
©1982 Warning

(click > to play)

(A note about the “Possibly related posts”: WordPress seems to generate these automatically. I would personally rather they weren’t there, since it isn’t real clear that the site doesn’t put them there, and I can’t control which ones show up. So if offensive, irrelevant or ridiculous links are posted down there, apologies in advance.)

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

Back to ambient…

February 23, 2009 – 3:55 PM
Silencio draft#5 (about 22:00)
Appr. 22:00 long
©2009 tim p scott

(click (>) to play)

Going through old ideas I I decided to put back my Eno/Budd/Lustmord hat and the result is a new ambient/soundscape piece. It still needs some tweaking but in any case we’ll put up a player with the current draft on it for your amusement (warning; the draft is 20:00 long)

OK, on 19 Mar–after listening to this a couple times, I’ve figured out that it needs a new revision. The last half of it is closer to what I want, but the first part has to change. So check it out now and then next week I hope to have version #4 up to listen to on this page.

It’s also recommended that you listen to it in a very quiet environment since it’s extremely subtle.

(Note: if you see a list of “automatically generated links” below, that’s something that wordpress is doing that I don’t really approve of. I don’t know how it generates the links or what the rationale is for it. In any case, I’ll probably figure out some way to turn them off using CSS if they get really annoying.)

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic Music: listening, Electronic Music: tim p scott, Electronic music: production | Comments Off

A new and excellent site for musicians: bandcamp.com

February 15, 2009 – 1:24 PM

Update stardate 6 Jun 2009: I’m liking this site more and more. If nothing else, their FAQ is the most fun to read of any site. They obviously understand “Web gruettiquette” and “independent music” well.

The little player tool doesn’t look so hot. I went back to their site to see if they had improved it any..doesn’t look like it yet.

Original post: I found a site called “bandcamp” through some forums I read.  This is a new site for independent bands and musicians to put their tracks and albums, sort of like amiestreet and many others (some of which I describe on other pages of this site.) It looks very flashy and professional; obviously whoever is behind it has some $$ for programmers. At the moment it’s free in order to try to get musicians to put some content on it (otherwise…what good is it?)

I’m also getting sucked in by their nerdy+cool attitude in their newsletter and

I’ve signed up and stuck one song from “The Circle of Art” up just as a tryout. It will of course take some time and effort to set up a band page on yet another site, but it does look well thought out and feature rich.

One nice little feature is that they offer a player shortcode that lets you easily embed tracks back into a wordpress.com page! Isn’t that a nice feature? Thus:

This was the original shortcode:

Now they recommend I use this one:

which sort of looks the same to me.

(I can’t show the code that generates that player in wordpress.com, the “sourcode” tag doesn’t work for it either.)

Anyway–bandcamp is not a social networking music site where you can message the artists, rate their works, etc. (as far as I know so far) but more or less just a showcase at present.)

The other thing it doesn’t have at the moment is a “browse” or “search genre” feature. All the artists appear to be on the same level without a way to filter for certain genres, popularity, etc. Maybe these things will be implemented or maybe I’m missing them. More Will Be Revealed, Doubtless. But if you have your own promotion mechanism and just need a place to park your product, this looks like a good place to do it.

(Eventually this page will probably end up on “51-Places to put your music” but I just wanted to get this note written quickly.)

Note added 20090526: It looks like they’re implementing a way to buy tracks at “U choose the price” value.

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

The replaygain computations

February 1, 2009 – 2:39 PM

Winamp can calculate the “ReplayGain” value for an album, or individual tracks.

What is ReplayGain? This will be explained in more detail on the LOUDNESS WARS page but in short, it’s an objective measure for how relatively loud a whole album is. For instance, if an album has a ReplayGain value of -5 dB, that means you would have to turn it down by 5 dB so it would sound as loud as one with a value of 0 dB.

The original idea of that was that you wouldn’t get blasted if you had a mix CD or playlist of a lot of different recordings from different sources. In practice it doesn’t seem to be that important since most people listen to the same sort of music, and most commercial music is already produced to sound as loud as possible anyhow.

In any case, using WinAmp to calculate these values for all the tim p scott albums:

Title Value (dB) Approx. range (dB)min .. max
Jack of Shadows -1.50 +2.2 .. -3.4
The Circle of Art -1.35 +1.3 .. -4.3
radio i -1.00 +0.2 .. -3.3
glossolalia -3.00 -6.0 .. +2.2
MMIV -1.75 -2.6 .. -1.0
Canciones… -3.60 -6.0 .. -1.3
The Secrets of Metals -2.47 -4.3 .. -1.9

 In other words, the Canciones… LP is the loudest and radio i is the quietest.

Some comparisons to commerical records:

Digweed’s Global Underground GU014 album gives –7.45 dB  (!) That’s not surprising considering it’s a club record.

Metallica’s Death Magnetic (the Guitar Hero 3 version, not the standard released version) gives -2.72 dB. There are lots of discussion of this album all over, especially in terms of its terribly poor mastering for commercial release. The sad thing is that it’s great music (at least in my opinion). It wouldn’t matter so much if it were Creed or Nickelback or something.

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Loudness wars | Comments Off

Firefox/Safari/Chrome users: sorry!

February 1, 2009 – 8:46 AM

The cool thing about wordpress.com is that you can purchase an option to customize the CSS for your site. This is great and allows you to do amazing things to the site appearance.

Of course, the problem is that every browser (Internet Explorer[IE], Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.) has its own idea of how to interpret certain interesting CSS code. On top of that this is a moving target since all browsers are continually releasing patches and updates. For instance at this moment IE is at version 8, Firefox is at 3.0.9 (I think) and Chrome is at about 2.0.172.something)

We have been trying to write the CSS so that the site looks at least reasonable for all the browsers; but unfortunately this means they don’t look great in any particular one. This will take more study–maybe there’s another way around it. But for now it will have to do

Since for better or worse 60 to 80% of people use Internet Explorer, if there are conflicts the CSS was written to look best in that browser. Mainly version 7.

So, our apologies in advance if you’re using another browser and things look “off”. They should at least work even if not well…

(last edited 20090605)

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

What a treat…

January 26, 2009 – 12:27 PM

Now that I have this site running, I can make changes on it more often.

For instance, I have been working on a track for a while (it doesn’t have a real name yet, perhaps it will be called “The Elucidatory Apparatus Lav-Merz-Nokh”). It’s in a good enough state that I’m willing to put a version of it up for listening; see the “40-Listen” page to hear it. At least for now..

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

As far as I can tell..

January 15, 2009 – 2:04 PM

…at least the site looks OK in IE and Firefox. Can’t say it’s the most beautiful thing on the web, but at least I can’t complain about it…

I continue to be humbled by the awesome strangeness of CSS….

I rankle a little working within constraints…some people find it challenging. I do a little but more often I think of some cool thing I want to do and find it frustrating. But I have to keep in mind: economy = limitations. I still prefer being able to update this site incrementally over the control of every pixel I had using the previous system.
It’s just amazing what you can do with CSS with a little creativity. You just have to realize that at a point you’re going to hit a wall where you have a certain piece of HTML to work with, and you ain’t gonna be able to change it. That’s just the way wordpress.com works. I’m not ready now (and maybe I never will be) to go to the Next Step…

By A. Person | Posted in General announcements | Comments Off

wordpress.com and email

January 15, 2009 – 8:22 AM

I was worried I painted myself into a corner there for a minute, but wordpress.com was better than I thought.

I didn’t read WordPress.com FAQs carefully enough to realize that they didn’t support email (even though they clearly state it in their support faq).

Fortunately, they implemented some sort of deal with Google Apps to hook Gmail with WordPress, so now tims [ at ] crow-caw [ dot ] com which used to work years ago is now up and listening again! [ as of Jan 15, 2009 ] . Hopefully this will be a good solution for a long time.

There’s also a new account “info [ at ] crow-caw [ dot ] com” which I’ll try to encourage as the main Crow Caw account…

By A. Person | Posted in General announcements | Comments Off