This is the album I was talking about the other day. I took a bunch of our songs and ran them through Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch (aka Paulstretch), which can play a song back many times slower than it was originally intended. I took my favorites from that project and remastered them accordingly. That's tracks 1-5. Track 6 is a song I made by playing around with some hand-tuned wind chimes that Jaime bought me several years ago. The whole thing is free if you care to add it to your iPod or anything. It makes good background music for doing homework or design work or coding or anything like that. Also, we released it with "no rights reserved" so people can use it in their for-profit productions (movies, videos, games, etc). Anyway, enjoy, and don't forget to relax every once in a while.

Okay, I can finally put all this talk of my band's album to rest, and for that I am sure you are all thankful. For well over a year now, I've been incessantly mentioning "the album" and all the work that's going into it at every different stage. Well, now we've taken it as far as we can. The CD itself (hard copy) is for sale many places online and it can be special-ordered in over 2,500 real (as in "brick-and-mortar") record stores. The .MP3 digital download version can be purchased at iTunes, CD Baby, Amazon MP3, Bandcamp, and pretty much anywhere that legally sells music online. It has also been added to most of the streaming music sites (Napster, Rhapsody) as part of their database.

A lot of these .MP3 vendors set their own prices, and not surprisingly, iTunes is the most expensive at ten dollars. The only places that we had direct input in setting up the sales are Bandcamp and CD Baby, and those are each $6 to download the album. If someone downloads the album, we make about five bucks, but if someone buys a CD for almost twice as much, we make a dollar. That's kind of a shame.

If you just want to listen to the album for free without downloading it, that's fine too. It's still available for free listening at Bandcamp. Additionally, if you would like a physical CD (hard copy) for less than $10, just get in touch with me about making a deal. I have a stock of these in my basement, and my cost was much less than $10.

Typically there are at least a hundred people involved in making a record, and we did everything with just the two of us. We wrote, recorded, and produced all the songs. We commissioned the artwork. We made the website. We ordered and stocked the CDs. We set up every detail of the online sales. Thanks to everyone who helped us along the way: this includes people who bought the first incarnation of the album a couple years back, people who contributed artwork for very little pay, and everyone who has given us encouraging words about our music for the past five years. The money we made from selling the first version of the album (released under the title "innovation avenue" and featuring many different songs/mixes than this one) went entirely towards the making/ordering of these CDs and setting up the online sales. We are now broke, but with feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction. Thanks again, everyone.

ps--Another good way to help us is to leave a review on iTunes!

violince by evan valentine (all instruments by me)

I keep forgetting to mention that earsauce is on this compilation: Independent music for Japan. You make a donation (minimum €1 EUR) in order to download the compilation and all proceeds are donated to Save the Children. There is no overhead with a release like this, so 100% of anything you donate will go to the charity.

Also, on a personal level, I just made this song with my friend Adam. I think we worked well together on this one. To put it in perspective, this was all made in the past two weeks. So, while I'm constantly complaining about how much work Henry is and how I have no free time, I obviously have time enough to do some things that I want. This song is called "Mulholland Funk" and it's pretty middle-of-the road as far as electronic stuff goes. It's easy-going and accessible.

mulholland funk (with adm†) by evan valentine

After a six month absence from the internet airwaves, Fat Man After Dark is returning tonight with a new live format, and he has invited earsauce to be guests on this inaugural show. I'm trying to restrain myself from ending every sentence with an exclamation point because we are excited about this opportunity(!)

HOW TO LISTEN: Just visit fatmanafterdark.com and the show will start playing at 10pm EST. There are no plugins to install and you don't have to sign up for an account or anything. We are scheduled to start between 10:20-10:30pm tonight.

For those of you that don't stay up that late on a school night, there will hopefully be a podcast so you can listen at your leisure.

Okay, it's not much of a "video," but it shows that I have a dedicated fan out there. Pretty cool. At least, I assume he/she is a fan if they made this.

The term "remix" has come to mean a lot of things in the past 20 years. As opposed to a cover song, a remix is usually a new version of a song that one creates with electronic production techniques. A remix will oftentimes contain some samples and chord progressions from the original song, though some remixes bear no resemblance to the original version.

Another concept within the world of remixes is MicroRemixing. Although this has been around for over ten years, it has started to become popular in the past several years. MicroRemixing involves taking sounds (small snippets) from a particular source and combining them in new ways to create a new, different song that bears no resemblance to the original. These are typically released for free on the internet to avoid legal troubles. The most famous MicroRemix was The Grey Album by Danger Mouse, which gained notoriety about five years ago. This album combined elements of The White Album and The Black Album. Another MicroRemix artist who is becoming more well-known is Pogo, who rearranges popular Disney feature films into new songs. His productions have a video element which he considers crucial. Most of his productions are available as free downloads (making even a small sum of money from these videos would instantly put him in a world of legal trouble). He typically introduces his own drum sounds and sometimes synthesizes his own bass parts on top of the songs. His newest offering, Wishery, has accumulated over 1.3 million views just six days after its release. The source material for this song is the Disney classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

I wanted to see what the Micro Remix thing was all about. For my source material, I used the film score to the 1999 Oscar winner American Beauty. Depending how familiar you are with this movie, you may recognize the sounds that I used, but you will not recognize the song itself. This is no masterpiece, as it took only three hours to make on November 4. The process was easier than I thought; I lost a little respect for the art of MicroRemixing and consequently lost interest in putting the finishing touches on this song. I was fully prepared to introduce my own drums or bass parts, but my version uses only samples from the movie, with no external sounds or effects added (not even reverb/echo).

Here is what happened when I combined eight songs from the American Beauty film score into a new song of my own. This song is available as a free download--just click the down arrow on the right side of the player. Enjoy.

I just recorded and uploaded this. It's a song that my cousin Michael Valentine wrote and sent to me a few months back. Sometimes it's more personal to have an extremely unpolished recording, and that's how I wanted this one to work. I made sure that I had not rehearsed the song in a few days, and I used the classical guitar, which hadn't been tuned in nearly a week. So yeah, it's a bit rough around the edges. I also resolved to use the first take no matter what went wrong. Fortunately nothing major happened, heh.

i can't walk away from my heart (written by michael valentine) by evanvale

Song info pasted from site...

song still needs:

re-record vocals at beginning (with real lyrics)
bass
strings
[maybe] another simple beat to go over the top

Okay, I think I am finally done working on it for now. That is to say, until the next time Steve comes over here. I added a fake chorus of my own voice at the end and made endless mixing adjustments. Making music this way can be maddening. You spend the first day making loops and getting all the components to meld smoothly, and then you spend three more days making minute adjustments to seemingly insignificant settings on all your sounds and effects.

This song is just a few loops

1 short ukulele loop
1 short piano loop (to match)
5 piano samples (low piano)
1 drum loop
2 voice loops (for refrain during last half of song)

It really is that simple. Even the high piano stuff is the same piano loop played at a higher octave. All of it was recorded by me except for the drum loop. So the song wasn't very hard to construct, but most of the ambiance is created by stringing effects together and splitting the sounds up into multiple channels that can each be processed differently. This results in me looping portions of the song in headphones for hours on end while I pace around the basement floor (the paint is worn off by my computer), occasionally making changes to various settings. I always have to make sure I do not over-listen to a song during this process, lest I lose all interest in the song and it falls by the wayside.

I realize that some of the chorus at the end sounds fake. It sounds like some alien altos are singing with me. That is intentional.

Stephen was awake for 8 hours yesterday. Yup, "awake." That means I did this:

sandwich in the sky (unfinished2) by evanvale

Not finished, of course (nothing ever is), but starting to sound nice. I would recommend skipping halfway through (by clicking the middle of the song after you hit play) to hear the real build. The first half is naked. I'm going to wait for Steve to help me with lyrics and such.

I guess I've caught the music bug once again. I love when this happens.