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Noodling

Well, instead of using my hardware synths, I decided to crank up the soft synth UVI Falcon thru Ableton Live. I think Falcon is considered a digital recreation. And it has so many settings, it could blow your mind. Anyway, I had a blast fooling around with the controls, and I saved some of them as presets.

I’m thinking that I should break out Pigments by Arturia, which is another soft synth and Serum, another deep and satisfying soft synth.

Maybe I need to take a longer break from using only hardware to make my music, since I seem to be stuck trying to wrap up the album which I had hoped would be a DAW-less creation. It’s proved to be more difficult to pull off than I originally had thought.

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Music distributor DistroKid is union busting

On October 21, DistroKid placed 37 employees, roughly 25% of its staff, on administrative leave, pending layoffs. These workers were all members of the DistroKid union, which had won its election in April with strong numbers. The affected employees make up 47% of the union, including 5 of the 7 bargaining committee members. They were given notice of this 1 hour before the union bargaining committee was set to resume negotiations with DistroKid over their first contract.

Sign the petition: Musicians stand with DistroKid workers! Tell DistroKid to stop union busting.

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Dropbox is Junk

Well, I’m officially tired of Dropbox and their lack of transparency. I have been trying for months to upload some files to my Dropbox account and have been mostly unsuccessful. It seems, if you don’t keep your app open on iPhone, you can’t upload anything. The “app” terminates any uploads and when you “restart” the upload, the file upload restarts from the beginning (and if any error occurs). This, in conjuction with the piss poor upload speed means, effectively, you can’t upload anything. Isn’t that the whole purpose of Dropbox?

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And If We’re Talking About Spotify Subterfuge…

Spotify reports bogus numbers to their patners. Here’s an example.

And as you can see, Spotify only reports 43% of the streams to SongStats.

And if you’re an artist looking to be paid more fairly, join http://Weareumaw.org to help a law they’re pushing to get paid 1 cent extra per stream, over and above what you’re already getting paid.

From Spotify

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BandCamp Sad

The reason I say BandCamp is sad is the discovery just sucks. I have fewer plays on BandCamp in four years as I have in a week on Spotify, a platform I don’t push. Spotify just sucks, where I’m getting less than 10% of my streams. So if you don’t find my music on BandCamp, it’s an also also ran.

This is in response to BCs selling our music to AI companies to generate fake music and fake streams to enhance their bottom line, cutting out artists from their efforts. After all does BC pay you to sell yourself out?

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Journal

Well, I’ve decided to keep a journal of the musical ideas I’m working on. During August, I had 7 working sessions where I did recordings that I’m considering keeping. This apparently totalled over 20 songs. And the ideas that I had during those recording sessions have completely escaped me. So I’m planning to record my thoughts in a journal with notes on the details of the recording sessions.

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More Music

Taking a break from making music tonight. Yeah, it’s 3:20 am, but I’ll get back at it until 5 am. I find my most productive time is after 11pm. And since there a few dogs barking, the vocals I rarely record are without extraneous noise. One mic I have, the RØDE NT-1, can pick up sounds as quiet as 5dB.