I’ve finished The Bee LP! and you can download it for free right now. So what are you waiting for? Go get it!

I’ve just started working on a new track for the Bee LP entitled “Drones.” Appropriately enough, it is (mostly) in an ambient style, with droning synthesizers.

A rough version is posted now on the album page for your interim enjoyment.

My latest full-length album project is going to be entitled simply Room 34 but, honoring some of my favorite bands that have released self-titled (or untitled) albums, such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and Weezer (and probably others I’m just not thinking of at this second), it has an unofficial title, based on the cover: The Bee LP.

For the first time since I began recording music in 1990, I’ll be putting out a release with cover art not designed by me. The cover art was drawn by my five-year-old son, Fletcher. It also serves as inspiration for the music on the album… or at least for the titles of the songs, each of which will be bee-themed.

Learn more at the album’s official page!

OK, first off let me say that I have finally arrived at an age where I can honestly and without shame say that, no sir, I just don’t really like A Prairie Home Companion that much. And that’s a tough statement to make as a born-and-bred die-hard self-styled intellectual liberal Minnesota DFLer. (That’s Minnesota’s slightly-more-liberal-and-even-more-union-friendly flavor of the Democratic party.) And I think the thing I dislike most about the program, more than Garrison Keillor’s meticulously cultivated faux-folksiness is the nauseating preponderance of jazz violin in the featured music. I hate jazz violin. (And I love the fact that it has yet to earn its own Wikipedia entry.)

Well, I’ve been working on some new music. In the spirit of the title of a track from the latest Joe Satriani album, I’m currently calling it “Dun Dun Tsh.” And right now I am really enjoying it because it’s drowning out the jazz violin that’s currently playing at the Caribou Coffee where I’m sitting as I write this. I’m not really sure how I’d classify this music, but it’s definitely inspired by the “electronic breakbeat jazz” work of Revolution Void.

Once I have a finished version I plan to release this as part of a new series of free downloads distributed under Creative Commons licensing.

For now, here’s a rough mix for you to enjoy. I said enjoy!

OK, I hope it’s not as pathetic as Navin Johnson, but UPS just delivered my new order of CDs from Kunaki. I ordered five more copies of ÷0, three more copies of Unnatural Disasters, plus twelve copies of my latest, Mellotronic: Far Out Sounds! (And Other Space-Age Hyperbole).

I have to say, Mellotronic turned out pretty well. I’m really proud of the design on this one.

Granted, this is probably four, two, and eleven copies, respectively, more than I’ll ever actually need but, you know, positive thinking. (And right now there are more commas in that sentence than potential buyers of my music. No, Scott… think positive[ly].)

The upshot is that now you have an additional option for purchasing these albums (since I know you want to! [positive])… you can order the CDs from Kunaki, download them (some of them, anyway), or you can buy them directly from me, if you happen to be within a several-foot radius of where I currently am.

Sweet.

When it comes to vintage (pre-digital) keyboards, there are a few legends: the Hammond organ, the Rhodes electric piano, the Mellotron, and of course, the Minimoog.

I don’t own any of those actual instruments, of course (although an old friend of mine has over the years possessed a large number of them, and used them on some recordings we did back in college), but I have been extremely impressed with the generic replications of these timeless (OK, hopelessly dated, but eternally retro-cool) trademark sounds that Apple has provided with GarageBand. (OK, there’s no Mellotron in GarageBand, but as I’ve learned and demonstrated, a dead-accurate add-on is available.)

Most of the recordings I’ve made since I started using GarageBand (in early 2007) have been brimming with these sounds, most notably the electric piano, and only slightly less notably the organ. Although I’ve been obsessing over the Mellotron lately, my favorite keyboard sound to employ for solo parts is the “Analog Mono” synth, which is fairly similar in tone and timbre to the venerable Minimoog. Read more »

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of my new EP, the one I’ve been talking about for the past several blog posts… Mellotronic: Far Out Sounds! (And Other Space-Age Hyperbole). Yay! (Ugh, is that really, really how it’s spelled now? Really?)

But… well… Houston, we have a problem. (Sorry, had to say it, what with the “Lunar Landing” track and all.) I noticed when I was uploading my tracks that, for some reason, the title track always showed up with a running time of 0:00, instead of the correct time of 4:44. The other songs show up fine, but no matter how many times I tried uploading “Mellotronic,” it always came up as 0:00. But when I played the sample in the account area, it worked fine, so I figured, we’re good to go.

Not so fast. I just went onto the actual page where visitors see and purchase the album, clicked the button to listen to the clip and… what the hell??? It’s not my song, but the Three’s Company theme song. Three’s Company!!!

Hmm… well, OK, are there any brave souls out there willing to shell out a buck and see what you get when you actually buy the song? (I guess I should just contact their tech support, but this is getting kind of fun… I’m curious what’ll happen next.)