Warm up

We are looking to do a very low key warm up within the next few weeks in front of a few friends prior to the Berlin gig. Watch this space...

February 10th - first live gig

Also pretty cool - apart from the obvious ecch-ness  of being 4th on the bill - are the details of the upcoming gig in Berlin:

Year of the Dragon

OK so first thing to mention is this: 

Which is pretty cool. BS music is all about looping and actual keyboard playing now.

Not really a king of sleep at the moment

Woke up 3 am. Stayed up for 3ish hours. Went back to sleep. Got up 9 for breakfast (it's free). Went back to room. And back to sleep until 12 (why did I have to do that? Bad idea) therefore cannot talk to anyone in the UK cause it's too late. Wandered around Melbourne shops looking awesome. Found an indie record shop to hang out in called Polyester Records. Then back to hotel to grapple with Launchpad again. Fighting off sleep again. Jesus.

Ableton technical breakthrough

Great! Just discovered the Freeze Track functionality. The idea is simple: Ableton loads in all your effects, midi settings etc whenever you activate a track. So something like Arabesque which has 10 tracks, lots heavily effected was running at 150% memeory requirement. Sonically the impact of this was to reduce everything to a horrible grining crashing sound at max volume. If it happened onstage it's the end of the party. But simply do Freeze Track on each channel - turns them into samples - now it's running at 10-15% cpu usage i.e. coasting.

It's not just the sound improvement - it's giving me a lot of confidence that I can use this machine live on stage !

YES!!!  HOORAY!!! LOVE ABLETON!!!

New Gizmo

I found an iPod app called SynthStation which is a bunch of synths and a workstation that all goes on your iPod and makes flights pass more quickly. Then at the weekend I realised I couldn't wait till Christmas so I went out and got myself the little keyboard controller. 

Cool, huh? That thing in the middle is your actual iPod, plugged in - the rest of it's just a controller.  It's tiny, not much bigger than two hands. Plenty of concentration and memory powers now required to work Black Snowflake now! But it's not finished yet - I just need the Microkorg now and that's it!

It shall be mine.

Kings Of Sleep video

Music by Black Snowflake. Recorded at Finiflex on 2nd September 2011. Video by Brian Douglas Shanks.