Im not going to start this post by saying “I’m not knocking Social Media but…” because, as we all know everything you say before the “but” is bullshit. So I’m just going to say it: In this post I am knocking Social Media.
Favourite Gear: 12 Step
While working on the forthcoming second part of the Opium Winter EP post, I decided to pause and do a quick entry on what is one of my favourite pieces of equipment.
Minimal
… build things to suit your taste. There’s endless options out there; start with minimal pieces of gear and learn it. Give yourself time. If you start off in an endless search for newer pieces of gear, better pieces of gear, things to add, “this is cool”, you lose the focus you have when you’re working with a minimalistic setup. Once you learn that, and you work very hard to get variety in your work using a limited source of options, that’s when you really refine your skill.
– Kim Rosen – PLAP Interview, July 2019.
Unicorn
It’s quite easy to be super artistic and it’s relatively easy to be really, really pop. There’s this little tiny piece in the middle that meets that very few people ever get to where … it’s a song that speaks to millions and millions of people, not just on the pop side but also on on the artistic side.
It’s actually very difficult to be an artist in the sense that people often confuse self indulgence with artistry. There are a great many people out there who are behaving with immense self indulgence believing that it’s art when in fact it’s something that’s highly forgettable and will only resonate for a short time with people who confuse self indulgence with art … where the people who are capable of expressing themselves through a medium and are legitimately artists are few and far between.
… the people who are able to marry art with commerce in a way where they’re able to touch people, to resonate with them, and make something that’s enduring? That is a unicorn.
– Michael Beinhorn & Warren Huart – PLAP Interview, 2019 .
Opium Winter: Making The First EP, Part 1
Opium Winter released our first EP on April 1. You can grab it on Bandcamp or stream it via the usual suspects (Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, etc). We’re pretty proud of this work and hope everyone out there enjoys it as much as we enjoyed making it.
I’d like to take some time, over a couple of posts, to go over how this EP came to its final form.
Continue reading “Opium Winter: Making The First EP, Part 1”
The Perfect Audio Interface
Searching for a decent audio interface can be intimidating. How many inputs do you need? Outputs? USB? USB-C? Thunderbolt? Firewire? Can it record all tracks at once? Does it need drivers? How much will it cost? What will you be recording?How serious are you? How trustworthy are reviews from music sites? Are said sites honest and impartial or are they thinly veiled shills? What do the “real people” have to say on music discussion sites?
If you’re just starting out, all of this is enough to make you want to just give up. There is, however, a single unit out there which no one seems to talk about at all for some reason. And it’s damn near perfect.