Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Our fellow Wikiloops musician kimbo has set up a countdown timer for the next Wikiloops members’ meeting in August – seems that everyone who has attended one of these just can’t wait until the next one. And at least for me, that’s entirely true. So click the image below to go to kimbo’s realtime countdown page:
As I also wrote on the ‘loops, I wasn’t entirely happy with my previous upload and remix of Erwan’s sweet little music box theme – so I decided to spend a bit more time with it. So here it is again, with a different take on my bass:
Musicians on this one:
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening.
Yesterday I uploaded two tracks to Wikiloops. The first one was something which wasn’t really finished, in fact it was just me noodling around with my bass playing over a track of – my bass. Nothing special, just what came to mind. But someone asked, so I decided to upload it:
And the second one was an add over three tracks from Erwan on musical box, keys (with some artificial voice), and cello:
Then this morning about half past 11am, I was just answering a nice email I had gotten a bit earlier, our internet went out. And it stayed off for most of the day, all in all for some 9 hours or so.
So not much activity in that direction today, just sent a short thank you answer email, and also said thanks to 8 thumbs on my first and 9 on my second tracks so far, and that was mostly it.
And as always, thanks for reading, and for listening.
I loved Don’s track even with him alone, but together with our relatively new member “ajax” and her sax it became irresistible – so I added a bit of a low end to it:
List of musicians, until now:
As always, thanks for listening. And thanks to my friends at the ‘loops for all the fun 🙂
Edit: Oh, and look Ma – we’re on the radio!
See also on the right, we have several channels on the ‘loops, one of which always plays the newest stuff…
To all those who celebrate it, we wish a Merry Christmas 2019.
I don’t have any new music (yet), just a few photos:
This is an in-camera black & white photo (also simulating an orange filter) of Tuna from early Sunday morning. She doesn’t eat much since then, so at the moment we’re a bit concerned about her.
We’ve also got a nice Christmas and season’s greetings card from Shi – and I had nothing similar to send as a reply (I’m really not that good in the graphic arts as she is), so I took a photo of an old Welsh song which I’ve played with the orchestra this season. Also uploaded it to Wikiloops to greet all other musicians as well:
This is more a New Year’s than a Christmas song, and you can read more about it or hear it if you wish. I took this and the following photo using Mitchie’s nice little 20mm f/1.7 Panasonic Lumix G lens.
The next photo is of Tuna again, close up and with Mitchie’s lens wide open at f/1.7, so just one eye is sharp – and everything else more or less blurry. I also used a black & white conversion in software this time, and simulated an Ilford HP5+ film in RawTherapee. Midtoned as usual, which means the whites are white, the blacks are black, but those middle tones are more brownish than grey:
Two different light colours in this one, natural daylight from outside, and artificial light in our living room. And I liked that high contrast effect from the film simulation in this case.
Edit: here’s another photo from today. In this one I simulated a colour film, Fuji Astia – and also cropped it into a 3:2 format like from the time we were still using film:
Hope that our cat is better soon.
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing. Nice holidays to you all.
I had an old track of Oliv, Shi, and Wade in my watchlist in Wikiloops since quite a while. And I was busy doing other things, but yesterday and today I could play around with that track a bit. And after trying a few very different things I decided that once more it was best to keep it simple, and to let my bass just support these wonderful musicians a bit. So here is the result:
The list of musicians (so far, it was downloaded already):
So thanks to my friends and fellow musicians in the ‘loops, and thanks to you for listening.
Uploaded a short bass-only track to the ‘loops:
The same is available without the clicks as a HD track. Harmonies are on Wikiloops (click the track id to go there). As always, thanks for listening.
I was reading the latest c’t magazine and also just watched an hour long video talk they had about the finest article in it. The topic: once a year they publish suggestions of ideal machines to build for yourself, with low power consumption, which are quiet, run smoothly, give you the best bang for the buck, and so on.
I find these very useful, and all of my self-built PCs – some of which are distributed to the wider family by now – were always at least based upon their suggestions.
While discussing PCs with my brother (his doesn’t start anymore at the moment, after years of service (it also was a very good one)) and after reading that latest article with a remark that multitrack music productions would love to have many CPU cores I decided to check my own one. So I’ve made a short video about it:
The music I’ve used for that demonstration & check was my latest collab with Arno from Wikiloops. Merci Arno for your wonderful track!
And yes, for what I’m doing, an old 4th generation Intel Core i5 is more than enough as you can see. So a nice actual 9th generation one is the one I’d take for any new build, these integrated graphics are more important to me than any assumed or measurable advantage of AMD chips…
Thanks for watching, and for reading – as always.
There was that lovely folk song from Wikiloops member “Arnosolo” which I downloaded a while ago. And first I worked on noise reduction of the track a bit, made a video about that, and messaged Arno. He allowed me to show that video (and contributed another and maybe even better one) – but before I did that I sat down and played on his track a bit, and uploaded that to the ‘loops. So here’s his lovely song, with me noodling (improvising) on it:
Oh, and the videos and the forum article about adaptive noise reduction are here, in case you’re interested.
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening. And if you’re a musician yourself, then please consider joining us at Wikiloops – it’s free, and it’s fun! 🙂
One of the tracks/jams in Wikiloops on which I played last year was included in another album today, this time one of a drummer again:
Mixed tape by Bothen, on Wikiloops
I had uploaded my bass to the track at about the same time as Bothen did with his drums, so I offered to mix them together – and that gave an interesting 3/4 from me, with a 4/4 played over it by him (Arno’s template had this polyrhythm feeling anyway).
I also made a video of this track in my DAW, together with the settings for my bass, so in case you’re interested, it’s here:
My own version got some remixes by others as well, so here’s the version from my own album:
As always, thanks for reading, viewing, and/or listening 🙂 And thanks again to Bothen for including me on your wonderful album – I feel very honoured! 🙂