Virtual Thought

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails recently released a Garage Band file of the latest single from the new album “With Teeth”... The file itself comes in at 70 megs and contains the multi-track recordings for The Hand That Feeds.

This is so badass I can barely speak.

Want to transform it into a country song? How ‘bout trance? What about a polka? All do-able. Holy shit. This takes music as open source to a whole new level. What if more artists did this? What if we could play, literally play, with all published musical media like this?

Thanks, Trent!

Amon Tobin is so cool. I just finished reading this interview that he did with Gamespot.

First off, he’s pretty sure his demographic is “computer geeks and nerds.” ( =

Then, there’s this question…

GS: ...The press pack for the soundtrack said most of it was recorded almost entirely with acoustic instruments that you then modified electronically. Did you play all the instruments yourself, or did you-

AT: Actually there’s things that you’ll hear when you listen to the soundtrack which will be very revealing about all that. I’d rather not go into the recording techniques too much, if that’s OK?

GS: No, no, that’s fine. I won’t ask a magician for his secrets.

AT: That’s cool, cheers.

Sweet. All class, that guy.

I’m considering re-working a song that I put to rest a while ago… the mix never made me happy, and after some cool criticism from ASHRUG, the Austin Studio/Home Recording User’s Group last night I want to stick my hands back in the mixing/mastering pie. Badly!

I’m remixing Tidal, an old track I did on Buzz. Here are my thoughts so far:

• Anyone out there know how to make lyrics sung through a vocoder more understandable? One idea I had was that the vocoder seems to have totally lost the sibilants… so I could mix those back into the track from the un-vocodered vocal track after some liberal high-pass filtering… they should also be EQ’ed properly (doesn’t everything?) so they stand out a little more…


• “What this needs is more cowbell!” Seriously, I’m going to mix-down that high, popping, cow-bellish sound… not sure why I tried so hard to bring that to the forefront before.


• The bass needs to be opened up. The hihats, after all this mixing, will probably need to be brought down again. The snare could probably be punchier.


• Needs more texturizing stuff… whooshes, beeps, etc. The things I never quite think about whilst putting down what I think of as “notes”.


• Change the drum track?

Oh, yeah. That song is Copyrighted to me. You wouldn’t want it in it’s current form anyway. ( =

The Dandy Warhols’ recent album, “Welcome to the Monkey House” is an incredible piece of work. The production is fantastic, the music itself is catchty and poppy. Really, just fantastic. I’ve owned it for a long time, but I wanted to go public.

Especially after that Evanescence post. Yeesh.

Evanescence is one of my formerly guilty pleasures. See, I don’t believe in guilty pleasures anymore—I’ve conciously given them up. So, yeah, I like music like Nine Inch Nails, Chemical Brothers, Enya, DJ Shadow, Tori Amos, BT and Ferry Corsten… but, also, thrown in there are acts like Dream Theater and, as I mentioned before, Evanescence.

I like the music a lot… I’m given to writing music that sounds like a soundtrack myself, so I appreciate it in wildly successful mainstream music (Fallen has gone to 5x platinum). That said, though, the lyrics read like junior high goth poetry. It’s a little embarassing. “Tourniquet”, a song about killing oneself and worrying about whether that disqualifies you for God’s grace or not, is probably the best, most mature song on the album. I can also barely listen to “Hello” because the emotional context is so raw (it is written about Amy Lee’s sister who died when Lee was six). The rest of the songs, though, are kinda silly fun. It’s no wonder, since Amy Lee has questionable taste in inspiration. But enough teasing—like I said, I love this album. I just don’t take it too seriously.

But what does that mean exactly? I don’t take them seriously? They’re expressing themselves honestly, and if I like the music and her voice then what’s there not to take seriously? As much as I enjoy snobbery, I’m trying to move away from that in my music taste.

And yes, I consider them a Christian band. And, no, that doesn’t disqualify them from my playlist… it’s too bad that there are some people that can only listen to so-called “Christian rock”, which one person on a message board proclaimed as ”...music that doesn’t just entertain, but contains an evangelical message bringing others to Christ…” All I can say is that I fear for the world in which everything must be shoved into some false dichotomy of black and white or right and wrong.

And, Ms. Lee, if you’re reading this, feminism doesn’t mean that you hate men. Sheesh!