Gigs and Gear

Gigs: I'm playing out a hard techno set as phaXis at DFF tomorrow night (Saturday, June 6th) here in Ottawa at the Cock and Lion on Sparks. First time playing that regular club night and its rare that I play techno sets east of Winnipeg, so it should be a thumpin' night to remember!

Gear: Since the local shops here seem to be delayed getting their hands on the Waldorf Largo, and since Moog Audio in Montreal looks like they have stock of the new builds of Future Retro's XS, disturbingly awesome synth, it looks like that the XS and not the Largo will be landing next in the Igloo!

Software Upgrade Day

Kickin' off some new freeform projects, and this calls for software upgrades!

The iZotope Ozone 4 upgrade was the first. Been waiting for that for a bit. Some nice solid improvements to the whole app.

Cubase 5 Upgrade was next. The hard part was finding out where in Canada one has to go for upgrading. Recently Yamaha has taken over the distribution of Steinberg products in Canada, but as anyone can see, the range of Steinberg products available on yamaha.ca is rather thin. Checking into SteinbergCanada.com as directed from a Cubase.net blog post was a bit more informative, however that site wasn't linked from Steinberg's main site - you only get directed to Yamaha's useless site now. Music Marketing is still handling all the Cubase Upgrades while Yamaha has taken over new purchases of Steinberg products; best go to L&M for products, and not through Yamaha's site.

So, now comes the impatient wait until it arrives!

Waldorf Largo

Unofficial sources say Waldorf Largo will ship May 11, 2009 ... never soon enough!

Largo softsynth info

Next VSTi Purchase

The studio's next VSTi purchase will more than likely be Waldorf's new Largo softsynth.

This synth which was announced, of course, at the 2009 NAMM show, seems to contain all the good things about the Blofeld hardward synth that came out last year. I couldn't justify paying $800ish for a DSP based hardware synth, when all I really wanted were the filter drives modes that it contained. So needless to say I'm VERY happy there's a VST version which appears to contain the same filter drive modes which produced some very tasty results when I played around with the Blofeld last year. Hopefully a demo or some samples will be out sometime soon!

Sidechained Compression

Sidechained compression is something I still haven't used as much as I know I should, partially because it can become a routing mess very quickly. It was easier in Logic than Cubase, and the ease of routing is probably still the biggest thing I miss about not working in Logic anymore.

I tried a new trick in Cubase where I'm using only one compressor and using the left channel as the compression trigger and the right channel as the compression content (then expanding the right channel back to stereo before routing to the main mix).

It worked quite well, and allowed me to use VST compressors that don't natively support sidechaining.

Here's the sample: [link]

New phaXis Hard Techno Mix: Sour Gas

I've put a new phaXis hard techno mix up on the Calibrated site in the releases section, called Sour Gas. The mix features a decently wide range of hard techno starting with liberator-ish styles, to Schranz, to some Industrial Strength stuff. Tracks featured includes some of the new Calibrated releases and a range of artists that have been doing some wicked cool stuff over the past year or so, including Concrete DJz, Patrick DSP, Rowland the Bastard, DJ Ogi, and Alex Calver.

N-Joy!

Happy New Year

Happy new year!

Back from vacation in Belize. Very cool country, diverse in both culture, races, and topography. Not to mention having average temperature highs that fluctuate from 26 to 31 degrees throughout the year! Music down there (that I was able to see and hear) ranges from punta rock, raggaton (Latin influenced reggae), world beat/folk, and some good drumming like the Garifuna Drummers group that performed at my friends wedding down there. As much as I love Manitoba, going someplace that isn't -30 (yes, 60 degrees warmer!) for the holidays is certainly a plus.

Now that I'm back, I've finally got the first six Calibrated Records tracks uploaded to the digital stores, so they should be available for download within the next day or so.

Now that that the techno's taken care of, it will be back to freeform for a while.

On the promotion side of things, it looks like Facebook allows public pages designed for businesses and artists which don't require a personal Facebook page to be created, although it limits you to what you can do on the Facebook network. It does allow you to create a network of fans and browse the artists your fans have as well as keep a list of your own favourite artists - which rivals MySpace's functionality. So, I now have a dj phosphor Facebook page. We'll see how long I can go with this before I end up creating a personal Facebook account for myself. The only problem is that it is difficult (or impossible from what I can see) to search for other artists without chaining through fan and favourite links of existing pages - tho I expect that Google will eventually spider into the Facebook pages (hence the blog link here to spur that on). At least the layout is much more attractive than MySpace!