Thoughts during the breaks
I had this beautiful track from Tom & Devin on my watchlist since quite a while. And today I could finally add a little something to it:
List of musicians, so far:
Thanks to my friends over at Wikiloops for their wonderful music. And thanks to you for listening. Join us to add something.
Richard fixed the issue with the embedding of the Wikiloops player last night, and he tested it with my post “Blues Knows No Colour” on this blog. Cool; many thanks man!
So now I can try and show/play you the last remix I’ve got plus one that I had made for some friends (with mixing only, no bass needed in that one). So here they are:
Yup; works. And here’s the one I (re-) mixed:
Works as well. Thanks for listening, and if you’re a musician, then join and play with us on Wikiloops!
Last night, Zuleikha uploaded her newest composition “Last Peace” to Wikiloops. I had helped her a bit with getting the Addictive Keys Studio Grand into Ardour, so she mentioned me as well on her lovely track. And over the night, she got 11 thumb ups, 5 downloads and 1 remix already as you can see here or on her track:
I also like her new avatar there which she drew herself:
And as you can see, she also received a first remix already, which were some jazzy drums & guitar played by João (nickname jjdf) from Portugal. Obrigado!
As always, thanks for reading.
Over at Wikiloops, the album of today was again one by my friend, Monsieur OliVBee from Paris, France. And in his ‘Deep Dark Blue‘, he features another great singer which is AnneCozean from the American west coast:
I listened to this today at work when I needed to blend out discussions and/or telephone calls from colleagues, and again I was blown away by the quality, the taste, and the musicality of all involved musicians. And by Anne’s voice of course. Another outstanding album from Oliv and friends.
And I will definitely listen to his other albums which are yet unknown to me, like ‘MOF on the loops‘ (featuring marmotte), or ‘Instrumentals‘.
This is world-class music, and if you don’t know and/or didn’t hear anything about Wikiloops yet, just listen to one of these to get an idea of what it’s all about. Heartily recommended, and another instant fav and download from me.
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening.
At Wikiloops, we have that concept of a ‘watchlist’, and mine got filled quite a lot recently. Each time I sit at work and listen to something where I think I could add something, I add it to this watchlist – so mine currently has over 100 gems inside:
At home, I’ll download all of these when I have the time, and start ‘working’ on them in my DAW (=’Digital Audio Workstation’). Convert MP3s to WAVs with Audacity first, then load them into Ardour. Set the tempo, check with a metronome, eventually make a clicktrack and/or a count-in. See if I can enhance the given audio, and it helps if you have single HD tracks because a drum kit or a guitar might need other treatments than a voice.
Often I also add markers where the chords change or to separate parts of the song so during recording I can see the structure.
And finally I’ll grab my bass and play.
And all of this is great fun. I’m learning so many different things. And I’m so glad that I found Wikiloops…
It’s now almost exactly 15 months since I found and joined Wikiloops, this ‘Über-cool‘ platform for jamming with other musicians from all around the globe. It’s even fun to only listen, and to discover new original music each and every day there – we have different “radios” (streams) to cover almost every taste you might have at the moment. So even for ‘consumers’ this is nice, and it’s heaven for musicians. I’m so glad that I’ve found it.
And if you don’t only listen and/or practise to the looping tracks but remix and upload some stuff yourself, you’ll receive a little appreciation from others in form of nice and helpful comments, and “thumb ups” like in other social media platforms.
And today, I received thumb up number 1000 from fblack (from Spain) on my latest contribution to the track “Story…“. Thumb number 999 was from Ms Shi from England, number 1001 from Pexe from Brasil. So my statistics (which you can see on my profile) looked like this an hour ago:
So thanks go out to my friends on that platform for being nice and commenting and giving feedback in form of these thumb ups. As Chuck Mangione would state it: Feels So Good…
Thanks again my friends, and to those whom I haven’t met in real life yet: I hope that day comes soon 🙂
Thanks to everyone who reads this, for your interest 🙂
Played on a nice song from RobM, mpointon, jamlady, and ROBJOL (all Wikiloops usernames) yesterday, and since we’re not done with embedding the new Wikiloops player into WordPress, please consider listening to the song “Story…” at its source. This will also show you the list of musicians who participated so far, and some comments from other Wikiloopers.
Thanks for reading, and for listening.
I’ve got a really cool remix on my first bass noodling upload on Wikiloops – josepssv took it and turned it into something else.
Just tried, but I think I still cannot embed a Wikiloops track into WordPress, so please go to the official remix to listen to it if you want to.
Thanks.
Edit, from Sunday afternoon: … and I’ve got a remix on that last remix. Listen to it here if you like to.
And again, thanks fro reading, and for listening.
I’m late to the party, I know, and that’s because I’m still relatively new in Wikiloops. But when I listened to a track on an album there lately and started to congratulate all participating musicians for their work, one of them – my friend Monsieur OliVBee from Paris, France, told me that he had the same track on an album of his, and pointed me to it.
And wow, what a discovery that was! First, he has Shi on all of his tracks of that album. Second, he has bass players who are really good – and so are all other musicians as well. I knew some of his tracks because I had used his template(s) (and Shi’s remixes) as well for my own albums, but still, OliVBee’s “Raspberry Charm” album is sooo good. I even like its cover:
So when I asked Oliv about the cover picture, he said that Shi took the photo – and I’m wowed again. Creative with a camera as well…
Some instant favs are tracks with Dick (Richard) on double bass, or with Haddock on his fretless. But listen to all of them, and then consider to download and pay for this to support us a bit. I paid for that download myself, and it’s so totally worth it in my opinion.
Your taste might differ of course, but there are lots of albums on the ‘loops – so browse the collection and see if there’s something you like. I just happen to love this one. Published on Christmas 2015 by OliVBee.
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening.
I’ve been to London some time ago. The first time I was fifteen (so not much older than Zuleikha is today) with my school class, which was really cool. Then I was traveling through it by train, and later just driving through some tunnel under the river Thames. Now Zuleikha and Mitchie want to see it, and what we saw on the TV already were the following videos – just linking to them here again so they can be found again.
First, there are “100 Things To Do” by some cute Koreans (of course you can’t do that all, but it’s still fun to look at if you don’t know the city or haven’t been there since a while):
And since those girls were in the area but didn’t mention it, here’s another video about Camden Market (Shi sang about that so nicely in her “Must dash” song):
Of course we have some own plans already – Mitchie wants to visit the Malaysian Embassy because of her passport, I’d love to see the Bike Shed (which also has a cool restaurant), and Zuleikha has lots more on her agenda – a city map alone brings out lots of ideas already…
Oh, and we’ll go by car. And ferry. And within London, we’ll take the tube. No plane, no train, and no tunnel, just the old-fashioned way of traveling. And I’m very much looking forward to that as well.
I’ll report from there once we are back – but first there will be other things to come…
As always, thanks for reading (and watching).