benjarvis.org » Podcasts

The Grand Wazir.

Ben — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:50:41 +0000

Earlier this week I finished wiring up my bedroom studio and I’m now able to record from my external hardware. After I was done, I realized my first mistake. All of my external gear is routed into a Behringer mixer and the mixer outputs to the line-in on my PC and the mains on the studio monitors. I can play my gear over the speakers with or without the PC on. This is great for live setups and practice, but there is one catch. Since each piece of gear is patched in to one mixer, they all feed in to the same stereo input. If I want to record a piece of gear, I have to record each one separately. If I don’t, then all of the gear ends up on one audio track in Ableton and I can’t apply effects to the individual instruments. I could run Y-cables from each of the synths to the various ports on the back (configuring them all for stereo input), but the ports have pretty lousy A/D converters. The ideal solution is an audio interface like one of the ones M-Audio makes and give each synth its one digital channel. Then I do all the mixing in Ableton, and screw the external mixer. Oh well. I’ll get one eventually.

In the meantime, I’ve been learning to mix samples, softsynths, and external gear together. It’s working. I got the recording latency down to playable levels and I can even do live monitoring without any noticeable latency. The end result is a little sketch I call “The Grand Wazir”. It’s a down-tempo droning affair that started with a patch I made on the CZ-101 (the first sound you hear). Enjoy!

The Grand Wazir.flac (Lossless)
The Grand Wazir.oga (OGG Vorbis)

“Style 2 Sell”, My 1997 Hip Hop Hit.

Ben — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:29:53 +0000

Today I went to the thrift shop to find a tape deck so I could start digitizing my shoe box full of demo tapes. I lucked out and found a pristine Technics deck and it sounds great. I have roughly 30-40 tapes with various musical pieces. Well they were attempts at music. At any rate, they all need to be digitized, remastered and archived. I plan on releasing the best (or worst) of it here as I go through the pile.

The first song was a no brainer. In 1997, I was spending a lot of time slacking around with my buddy Josh, making music with whatever device we could get our hands on. I had bought a Roland MC-303 and we decided to try our hand at making a hip hop song. We didn’t have proper recording equipment, so we patched the mono output of the MC-303 into the left mic input on a tape deck I had and a mic in to the right input. This totally separated the vocals from the music. When it played back it was like listening to one of the first stereo albums with wacky extreme stereo effects, before they calmed down and put the vocals in the middle. It was fun but always kind of disappointing. The other problem was that we used a shitty mic without a pop filter so the vocals were really muddy. Most of the words were unintelligible.

Now, 13 years later, I’ve digitized the two tracks, cleaned them up (the best I could), mixed it to center and equalized it. It’s no Phil Specter Wall-of-Sound classic, but it sounds a lot better than it did and I’m happy to release it. Since I have the music and vocals separated, I think there might be a 2010 remix in the future.

Please understand that we’re not rappers. This was just for fun. Two dumb slackers playing around. I produced the beat and melody, Josh wrote and rapped the first half, I wrote and rapped the second half.

Style 2 Sell.flac (Lossless)
Style 2 Sell.oga (OGG Vorbis)

1080p (No I Didn’t Buy a TV).

Ben — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:23:05 +0000

My co-worker and I were talking about making music. I found out that he’s an MC and from what I can tell a pretty good one. I told him about my electronic music production past and he said he was interested in some beats. So I sent him some of my stuff. He sent me a track that was in progress. It was a really slow grooved commercial hip hop song. So I whipped up this little test track from the inspiration. It’s really just a test, but I figured I’d share. If you make anything out of it or rhyme over it, post a link in the comments.

The First Podcast Test.

Ben — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:40:56 +0000

I put together a tiny audio file using a shitty mic I dug up out of the closet. It’s not anything you really need to hear. I just needed a file to test the podPress plugin. Hopefully this works.

You should be able to just add the RSS feed to your iTunes or other suitable podcatcher. Let me know if it works for you.

THIS FEED IS NOT IN THE iTUNES STORE! YOU WILL HAVE TO MANUALLY ADD IT. I WILL GET AROUND TO ADDING IT TO iTUNES AS SOON AS I DECIDE ON THE SPECIFICS OF WHAT I WILL BE PODCASTING!

Free-to-Air Satellite.

Ben — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 14:43:00 +0000

I’ve been listening to the podcast of Off the Hook (I’m actually really getting in to podcasts) put out by 2600. They were discussing a television system that I’ve never heard of. It’s called free-to-air satellite and sounds pretty wicked. Basically, you hook up a medium sized (less than a meter) satellite dish to a decoder that scans for free-to-air channels. These are domestic and international satellite channels that can be viewed for free. You could watch camel racing from Dubai, sushi eating contests in Tokyo, or even a Latvian pop concert. And get this, the whole set-up is less than $300!

I’d love to be able to pick up European channels or South-East Asian channels.

I’ll definitely be looking in to this. :)