http://thevorstandcircus.com Melbourne Beauty - creating an album while working 9 to 5 Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:40:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A couple of weeks ago I played my wife the sketches and material I've generated for the album so far.  She was really happy with it because she said I'd "gone back to that lush, sexy, electronic sound" that I'd started with.  Seeing as she seems to like it so ... http://thevorstandcircus.com/?p=14 Standing in front of a keyboard for an hour a day and wailing like a loon over stuff I’m making up on the spot is exactly as hard as it sounds.  The hard bit comes now.  I’ve now got about 80 bits of random riffage and singing recorded, ranging in ... http://thevorstandcircus.com/?p=13 Vocoders, for those of you not familiar, were first invented as an encryption device.  Basically, they take two audio sources and use the amplitude of one to control signal to control the amplitude of the other.  What that means in practical terms is the robot vocal sound you hear on ... http://thevorstandcircus.com/?p=12 I started playing around with arpeggiators while I was generating material for this album.  An arpeggiator is a handy function on a synthesizer, or in my case, a plug-in on a MIDI track in my computer software, that takes the output from the key or keys you’re holding down on ... http://thevorstandcircus.com/?p=11 OK, so it’s been three months since my last post.  But I have a very good excuse.  Just 6 days after that post, my wife and I bought our first home, an apartment, at an auction.  We then had a 30 day settlement, and then moved.  Then it was Christmas.  ... http://thevorstandcircus.com/?p=10 I learnt a lot about streamlining the creative process between creating my first album, which took 18 months, and making the first Vorstand Circus album, which took 6 months.  For “Sworn In…..”, I decided what the album was about thematically, decided on the instrumentation, decided roughly how long it would ... http://thevorstandcircus.com/?p=8 I’ve got a 9-to-5 job in a large company, which I got 6 months after returning from three years in Switzerland.  I had the privilege of working full-time on my music in Switzerland.  I released two albums, one under my own name and one as The Vorstand Circus. I’m now ... http://thevorstandcircus.com/?p=6