After 26 weeks of weekly projects, my creative space has been in pretty active use! For reference, take a look at what it looked like after a similar cleanup in May 2009. This week’s project, then, was to clean it up, organize, and take a few deep breaths in order to be ready for the second half of 2010 and the next sets of projects!

One place that was especially disorganized was my photo supplies. I have a metal crate that I keep small items in – old film cameras, gels for my flashes, spare parts, etc. This crate had gotten pretty out of control:

My philosophy for cleaning is to first empty everything out:

After sorting, throwing away, organizing, and generally cleaning, here’s what the crate looks like now:

Much better! Here’s a photo partway through the process. The studio desk is mostly cleaned off, but there’s still quite a bit of work to do:

Finally, I finished. There’s still a lot to do (old gear to list on eBay or craigslist, things to donate or get rid of, etc) but it’s much better than it was.

You can see the full set of photos on Flickr.

It’s nice to have a clean space to start out the second half of the year in.

This post is set to automatically go live on Friday morning, by which time I will be deep in the woods of Northern Michigan, on a much-anticipated camping expedition. Looking forward to the second half of 2010!

Here’s the overall rig, once it’s assembled:

My main role is as a guitarist, the main focus of this rig is playing guitar. You can see my guitar on the left – it’s an Ibanez Artcore A73 semi-hollowbody. It plugs into a Line6 PodXT Live, which in turn runs to a Fender Blues Junior amp. Both the PodXT and the Fender belong to the church, and stay there & are plugged in at all times, so setup is easy – plug in my guitar, turn things on, and I’m ready to play. A mic stand & wireless Shure mic are also set up full-time, since I sing as much as I can (sometimes I’m too busy strictly playing guitar!).

In addition to playing guitar, however, I’m also starting to slowly bring some electronic elements into the mix. As a solo musician, I typically play strictly instrumental electronic music, and finding an appropriate and musically valid way to integrate that part of my music into what I do at church has been a long, slow process. I feel like I’m finally making some progress, however!

On with the rig! As you can see, there’s a shelf under the amp that’s gaff-taped to a keyboard stand, to form a wide, shallow table.

Here’s a closeup. 2 USB cables and an Apple power cord also stay gaff-taped to the shelf, along with a custom audio cable I made up. It’s a 1/8″ stereo miniplug on one end, and stereo 1/4 plugs on the other end. The 1/8″ stereo end plugs into my MacBook Pro’s audio output, and the other plugs into 2 separate DI boxes that run into our sound system. One of the USB cables runs to the left-side of the shelf, and is used to connect an M-Audio KeyRig keyboard (a small, lightweight 25-key USB keyboard controller). The other USB cable runs into the PodXT Live, so it can be used as an audio input into Ableton Live.

Having all this set up permanently means that setup is extremely fast. I pop the KeyRig out of my bag, plug it into its USB cable, set my laptop on the shelf, plug in 2 USB cables & the audio cable, then connect my power supply to the cord. Done!

The bottom of the rig is a little messy. On the top left, you can see two separate DI boxes, which run my laptop’s signal to two separate channels on the mixing board. You can also see the way the PodXT Live fits into the space of the keyboard stand. This is important because it helps my rig take up a smaller amount of space, and keeps everything together nicely. We don’t have a lot of room on the platform (lots of musicians plus choir) so every inch counts!

Now that I have my 1/8″ to stereo 1/4″ cables, I’m able to split the stereo audio output from my laptop into 2 discrete channels. The left channel strictly carries a click track (metronome), while the right channel carries everything else, which might be loops, programmed drums, electric piano sounds, or whatever I choose to play from my laptop.

Here’s a look at my screen setup in Ableton Live:

As you can see, the rhodes electric piano channel (which is currently selected) is panned hard-right so it shows up separate from the click track. The advantage of this is that the click track can then be sent to the rest of the band’s monitors (via a send on the mixing board) without going to the main sound system, while anything else from the laptop gets sent separately.

I’m really looking forward to getting a chance to use this rig over the next weeks and months. The ability to drop in programmed elements, live electronics, and use a click track to lock in tempo will be a dynamic new element to our church’s worship music.

Floridan Rework by billvanloo

Well, there’s just a little process. Here’s a quick video I shot of my studio session the other day, when I added the melodic and chord elements.

18/52: Floridan Rework from chromedecay on Vimeo.

This week’s project was getting things organized for company 7’s upcoming releases and Web presence. The group’s new site is:

http://www.company7music.com/

company 7 is made up of Hans Anderson, Rebecca Anderson, Gabriel Craft, Rebekah Craft, and Bill Van Loo. Our current plans are to finish up an EP for release on chromedecay later this year, and begin planning our live performances. I’m proud to be part of such a talented group of musicians.

A little backstory about the members of company 7. Hans and Rebecca Anderson are a husband-wife duo also known as Double Helix. They have recorded for labels like Transmat Japan, Rush Hour and Delsin, producing house music tinged with jazz, dub, and gospel influences. Gabriel and Rebekah Craft are another husband-wife pair. Gabriel is an extremely talented drummer, having played with groups like Cloud 9 and others. Rebekah is a singer-songwriter, taking her talents to the acoustic guitar and poetic lyrics.

We first played together during the fall of 2004, during a burst of creative output. Family life and other commitments obliged us to put this group on hold, however, until fall of 2009, when we began working on new material again. Photos from one such session are found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chromedecay/sets/72157622286457436/

This week, we made the decision to finish up our current set of material for release as an EP, as well as getting our Web presence up and running. The results are the new company 7 website, as well as some more behind-the-scenes work like putting together chord charts, track info sheets, and so on, to allow us to more easily work on finishing our material.

I’m very excited to bring you our music in the near future.

One benefit of being a teacher is that I have my summers off, and I spent some time this past summer with my Minidisc recorder, binaural microphones, and other recording gear, capturing sounds in my house and garage.

One of the sets of sounds I recorded was using my bicycle as a percussion instrument, along with some other random sounds from the garage (like dropping and hitting a plastic pop bottle, and so on). I recorded about 30-45 minutes worth of raw sounds, and then recorded them into the computer as several long, continuous audio files.

At that point (late last summer), that’s where I put the project down temporarily. The work I did this week was to start isolating individual hits and loops in order to turn them into usable sounds. Because I’d recorded the long segments off the MiniDisc into Logic, I started there. Also, I much prefer cutting/editing sound files in Logic compared to Live – Logic’s much more of a traditional audio editor, and I find it works great for that kind of work.

Much selecting, trimming, and saving of individual files was done.

You can see some of the list of files here:

After I had saved out many, many individual hits and loops, I started loading things up into Ableton Live, my preferred composition tool. Live is the ultimate destination for this material, as I intend to eventually make these sets of sounds & loops available (though that’s a project for another week!).

Here’s a couple views of what it looks like when brought into Live:

If you go to the full-size version of those photos, you can see that most of these sounds ended up in Live’s Drum Racks, which is a great tool for this kind of thing.

I then spent some time writing a demo track that would give these sounds a chance to shine.

Here’s the final product:

14/52: chromedecay: field – demo 1 by billvanloo

All the sounds you hear in the demo track were produced from the field recordings I did, with the exception of the bassline.

Each of these sets was recorded in late 2009. Bill Van Loo’s set was recorded at the Dreamland Theater in Ypsilanti, MI, and Joshua Schnable’s was recorded at FFMUP in Princeton, NY.

This release is available for purchase via iTunes, Amazon and other digital distribution sites. Check the release page for more details.

Joshua’s live set was recorded on October 12, 2009. It is a collection of new work; a tribute to the Berlin dub techno movement of the mid-1990s.

My live set was essentially a live performance of the Ypsilanti by Night record, with lots of live tweaks and additions, along with a rare performance of my track “FM Study”. You can view video from the first song of my live set below:

Bill Van Loo performs “Ypsilanti by Night” live at the Dreamland Theater from chromedecay on Vimeo.

See also: chromedecay behind the scenes: bill van loo live performance rig, part 1 and part 2, where the gear and methods used to perform my part of this recording are discussed in great detail.

I often start working on a project idea for 52 things a number of weeks before it’s completed and ready to show here on the site. This week’s project is an example of that type of pre-planning.

I’d been thinking about putting together a sampler CD that would contain new music from chromedecay artists for 2010. It’s important to me that chromedecay releases be unique in some way. The obvious trend has been toward digital-only releases, so I felt the unique quality for this CD sampler would be to emphasize the visual and handmade aspects of it.

I got an email from Snapfish at the beginning of the year, advertising 50 prints for 50 cents (plus shipping costs). I started thinking about what I could do with 50 prints, and realized they’d make great cover art for a small CD-R release.

I then started going through my iPhoto library, looking for photos that would make good covers. I settled on using these 5 photos, with 10 copies of each, for a total of 50 prints:

The prints were 4×6 inches, so I uploaded versions that had a 2″ strip of black to one side in order to produce a final image that was 4×4 inches square. After they arrived, I spent 15 minutes or so cutting off the black strip to produce a final 4×4 square image:

After a bit of work, I had all 5 sets of cover photos cut down to size:

I then set the cover photos aside, waiting for the right time to complete the assembly of the covers. This week, I spent some time in Photoshop creating the overall cover layout, including placement for the cover photo.

I also used the time between the first of the year and now to solicit new material from some of the chromedecay artists. I got great material from both Joshua Schnable and Rob Theakston, longtime contributors to the label. The final tracklist ended up being this:

1. Cultivating – Rob Theakston
2. 1970 Sumeria – Joshua Schnable
3. 11-14-2009 – Bill Van Loo
4. 5/52 (Rhodes & Reaktor) – Bill Van Loo
5. 1970 Sumeria (Bill Van Loo’s JPL remix) – Joshua Schnable
6. Vostok Station – Joshua Schnable
7. Overextended – Rob Theakston
8. The End of It – Bill Van Loo
9. Dust Bred – Bill Van Loo

After finishing the layout for the CD sleeve, it was time to print, cut, fold, and glue. Here’s a short video describing that process:

9/52: chromedecay 2010 label sampler CD behind-the-scenes from chromedecay on Vimeo.

You can see more photos of the whole process below:

9/52: 2010 chromedecay sampler photos on Flickr

I’m very pleased to announce that these are now available. As mentioned above, it’s $3 plus shipping, or free with the purchase of any full-length release while supplies last.

This record came together at the beginning of December 2009, when my longtime friend and musical collaborator Rob Theakson sent me the following text message:

That was on a Monday night, giving me 6 days to produce 21 minutes of music. Now, if this had been anybody but Rob, I would probably have laughed at the idea, and given it no further thought. However, Rob is one of my best friends (as previously mentioned) and he has a way of convincing me that crazy ideas are actually good ones.

I found myself staying late at my church on Tuesday of that week and recording a bunch of guitar improvisations after band practice ended. I had a very loose idea of what it should sound like, along with a rough conceptural framework to hang it on.

The title of the record, “The Ghost of an Idea”, is taken from the prologue of Charles Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol”; the four track titles are abbreviated forms of chapter titles. As I started thinking about the story and how it’s structured, I was inspired by the complex and emotional memories in it, as well as the idea of the Holy Ghost inhabiting and inspiring artistic works of diverse forms.

That gave me just enough to go on. I took a guitar piece I’d previously recorded for Rob but which had never been released, and that became “The First”. The other 3 pieces were based on these guitar improvisations, which were edited and layered in Logic Audio (much like “6 strings for a winter’s day“, my earlier ambient guitar work).

The cover image is a photo of a house in Ypsilanti that I took last summer:

Once I delivered the final mixes to Rob, he quickly pressed up 50 copies of the record as a 3″ CD, which is one format that his boutique label releases music on. A number of copies made their way to me, and I sold the majority to recipients of my email list in the following week or so. I have a few left to sell at shows, but that’s it, so I realized it made sense to also offer this digitally.

After looking into my options, I found that RouteNote seemed to make the most sense for this release. Its major difference from other digital distribution companies like CDBaby (who I use for most of my digital distribution, especially for releases that are also available as physical CDs) is that RouteNote doesn’t charge a fee upfront, but instead takes a slightly larger percentage of each MP3 sold. For a release with such a small number of tracks, it would take quite a bit of sales to recoup even the $55 setup fee that CDBaby charges, so it seemed to make sense.

I’m very please that this is now available; RouteNote has distributed it to the Amazon MP3 Store and eMusic. It will be available via iTunes very soon.

You can also check out the growing selection of other releases on chromedecay, both by me and others.

Here’s Joshua’s original “1970 Sumeria”, on SoundCloud:

1970 sumeria by jschnable

I got the stems downloaded and started work on my remix, using a very minimal setup – just the laptop running Ableton Live 7, my M-Audio Trigger Finger, and my headphones. This allowed me to start work in my wife’s art studio-slash-home office while she was doing other things.

Here’s a screenshot of Ableton Live partway through work on the remix:

I finished the remix in the actual chromedecay studio today, and now it’s available for you to listen to via SoundCloud:

1970 Sumeria (Bill Van Loo’s ambient JPL remix) by billvanloo

A few years ago, I replaced my trusty titanium PowerBook with a shiny new Intel MacBook. That brought lots of increased power, but as I mentioned in the post at the time, it meant losing some things I really liked as a result of moving from the PowerPC-based PowerBook to the Intel-based MacBook. My favorite Rhodes electric piano sound came from Logic’s EVP73 plugin, which didn’t run on Intel Macs. One of my other favorite sound sources was Reaktor Session, which I loved for its Vierring ensemble, among others.

This week’s project, then, was getting an old 500MHz iBook set up to restore that lost functionality! I realized that I could install my old Logic Audio 6 on the iBook and set up EVP73 and Reaktor Session running inside it as AudioUnits plugins. I only get a couple instruments at a time, but that’s perfect – I’m still running Live 7 and Logic 7 on my MacBook Pro, and the audio from the iBook just gets routed straight into that.

Getting Logic installed and set up was a breeze – this is one place where having dongle-based copy protection makes this much easier than a networked challenge/response or authorization. I just plugged in my old Logic dongle, installed the program off CD, and I was up and running. Getting Reaktor Session going was a little more work – it uses a network-based authorization scheme, and I had to email Native Instruments support to get it authorized (to their credit, they turned it around in a day or two and it was quite simple after that).

What I now have is an instrument station that consists of the iBook running Logic 6 with EVP73, Reaktor Session, and any other native Logic instruments I care to load up. It’s got a little 2-in/2-out MIDI interface connected over USB (thanks again, Kent!), which lets me connect my 76-key controller keyboard, as well as MIDI clock sync from the MacBook Pro rig. I can sit down at the keyboard, pull up a great Rhodes sound on the EVP73, and just play. That’s what I was really missing – the chance to just play, without having to worry about routing, plugins, compatibility, and so on.

Here’s a quick jam I recorded last night. The electric piano sound comes from EVP73, the synth sounds are from Reaktor Session’s Vierring ensemble, and the drums are being programmed in Live with a Drum Rack I built.

download this audio track: 5/52: rhodes + reaktor session jam

A few detail photos:

Finally, if you’re interested, here’s a setup shot, showing how I took the self-portrait that’s at the top of this post:

The camera for the shot (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18) is on a microphone boom stand, angled down using a Manfrotto mini ball head. The main light for the portrait is a Vivitar 283 with a 1/2 CTO gel (shown at the right of the photo), also on a microphone boom stand.

Also, you can see that the far end of the studio there is a bit of a mess. That’s another kind of project, though…