Category Archives: Electronic Music: tim p scott

About tim p scott’s productions specifically

What the hell am I doing? Nothing??

July 7, 2012 – 7:36 PM

update 2012/05/11

Well, as the grave draws ever nearer I am stuck in an obsessive-compulsive loop working on a couple of new pieces. Besides Life As Usual, the main thing delaying progress on these works is my attempts to play parts that are way beyond my musical abilities. But the good thing is that I believe I have SOME perspective on my own work. My best technique is to put aside a piece for one or preferably two weeks. When I return to them, I strip out whole chunks of them or even abandon them.

update 2012/02/18
I did buy a beautiful 25 inch LCD monitor from Fry’s Electronics in San Diego. Of course, within a week or two there were 27 inch models for less money. But I guess I can’t chase technology around forever.

I really like this monitor. Now I can see more stuff in my DAWs with less eyestrain.

update 2011/10/22
The good news is that I have a full time job = income again. The bad news for finishing songs is that it’s a full time job. I am not looking the gift horse in the mouth. For one thing I finally was able to afford upsizing my monitor again. As I get older I need larger and larger screens!

I’m in too-many-choice-hell again with Ableton Live. I have been working on a piece for about a year, it has 50 killer riffs and leads in it, and I just can’t seem to prevent myself from adding new or better ones. At least I’ve got it mostly arranged. But I think the years of 1 album per year are not to happen now unless I win the lottery or retire…

update 2011/10/22
Since finishing Pangur Ban I revisited some older tunes. And I’m wrapped around the axle on those as well, partly because I am obsessed with not throwing anything out. I got the bright idea of not working on anything for a week or so, hopefully when I get back to work I will hear pieces with new ears.

The other thing that I do that’s a huge time waster is spending a hour on a snare drum sound, or half a day of a 2 bar rhythm groove. I think it’s pretty obvious at this juncture I would not really be capable of writing anything to deadline…

update 2011/09/12
No one ever accused me of updating this blog too often. Since March 2011 I have actually had a full time job. Really more than that as I am averaging 10 hour days. Not so easy for someone of my advanced years. But it’s nice being able to pay my bills without draining my meager savings. At last I have finished my piece called “Pangur Ban”. For more info and a link to a player for it, see this page. And here’s the background on what Pangur Ban is from Wikipedia..

I’m content enough with it. I gave it its own page since I think it has some interesting production aspects. Briefly, it started with a sample from the OLPC that I thought was interesting. When I slowed it down like 75% it revealed an interesting melody — sort of reminiscent of something you’d hear out of the Buddha Machine. So I arranged, orchestrated, looped and generally mangled it into the new piece. I’ll try to get it loaded on SoundCloud soon with a link to it here. update 2010 11 30Yeah, even though I have time I have urped out nothing new in too long a time. Well, I’m trying to finish this piece:

46-channel Ableton Live set

Well, that and buying some new toys for my studio… update 25 Dec 2010 OK, I finally finished “Haborthelem” (what does that mean? I have no idea but I probably should.)

update 11 jan 2011 The good news is I have more time to work on music. The bad news is that I don’t have any more income for the time being…

update 17 feb 2011 Yesterday I attended a lecture on Pd. This is the Open Source software reminiscent on Opcode’s venerable Max audio programming system. It’s sure come a long way since I last looked at it five years ago or so. At that time it was only partly ready for prime time, but the current version appears much more stable and functional. I’m going to update my comments about it on the “Free or cheap music software” page.

By A. Person | Also posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production | Comments Off on What the hell am I doing? Nothing??

Scary developments

July 27, 2011 – 7:23 PM

update 2012/02/19

Well, that turned out to be a false alarm. I’m back to my version of black metal compositions for the time being.

I still reserve the right to do vocals some time in the future. Maybe I can be the Gordon Lightfoot/Leonard Cohen of my generation (*snerk*)

original post: 2011/07/27

OK, confession time.

Probably giving my age away pretty badly; in my rotation of CDs to listen to during my commute, I pulled up my old Talk Talk collection.

The embarrassing admission is that I actually sing along to them in the car. So what the hell? I thought. I hooked up a mic on an improvised stand (adapted from an old camera tripod I had), hooked it to my ART preamp, and sang along with a bunch of songs on “The Party’s Over” and “It’s My Life.”

So far, I am persisting in my folly but I’m sure reason will return before I make too big a dope out of myself. My plan at the moment is to take one or two tunes and cover them. Basically, I’ll gradually build the track back up using my own tools around my own lead vocal.

This is a lot of fun, even if the tracks never see the light of day. For instance, one track I want to slow down just a few percent which is not much easier with the better elastic audio tools available in most decent DAWs.

Meanwhile I’m also working on a couple other tracks I started as long ago as 10 years which I hope to finish before I get too old to know what I’m doing. Hopefully there will be more frequent progress reports than I’ve been making.

(posted 2011/07/27; updated 2012/02/19)

By A. Person | Also posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production, General announcements | Comments Off on Scary developments

Life is like that…

November 9, 2010 – 6:46 PM

I had really wanted to release another “on-line album” by the end of 2010, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it. I hate to disappoint all the tim p scott fans of the world, but there’s no help for it.
Meanwhile, this gives me a chance to consider the whole concept of an “album” in the 21st Century. It’s been pointed out that the model of mainstream pop music consumption has returned to the “pre-album” days of the 1950s and 1960s, when the unit of music purchase was the 45 RPM record with the “hit” on one side and the “B-side” on the other. Today, people still have their pop music favorites, but they are more interested in the individual song or track than in an album. Part of the problem was (once again) the “industry” where record companies (and even artists, I’m sorry to say) released their hit song on an album where the rest of the tracks were little more than filler. Or released what looked like and album with 5 or 6 remixes of the same one song. In combination with the artificially high price of records (and CDs), consumers got fed up with this and embraced the a la carte world that the internet age brought.
I hope I don’t get kicked out of ASCAP for talking this way, but it was the RIAA and its constituent company members that were primarily responsible for that boondoggle.
Meanwhile, I have a bunch of individual tracks I’ve produced since 2008, and those are mostly available easily for listening. Go to http://wp.me/PnrSR-nY to check them out.
Meanwhile I’m going to have some good new stuff out I promise, but my other work committments are weird and require travel and other strange scheduling stuff…

By A. Person | Also posted in Electronic music: production, Info for musicians | Comments Off on Life is like that…

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
https://ccmw.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/tim_p_scott-0103-eaterrock_192k.mp3%20
(click (triangle) to play)
“Eaterrock” (2010 version)
(6:11) from “Songs in Work”
©2010 tim p scott
https://ccmw.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/tim_p_scott-2103-eaterrock_192k.mp3%20
(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 | Also posted in Electronic Music, Free music, Free music and sounds | Comments Off on Remixing myself…

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: https://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 | Comments Off on Where’s the new music?!

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 | Also posted in Electronic Music, Electronic Music: listening, Electronic music: production | Comments Off on Back to ambient…