Last weekend the band Alice and I began recording their second full length album.
August update! Drum recording
This past weekend I had the pleasure of engineering two drum recording sessions with my friend, drummer Steve Kefalas. We recorded songs for two artists, Vanessa Bley, and Kylie Hughes. In addition to being an absolute blast working on the respective material, Steve and I are getting some great drum sounds out of his LA based studio.
Recent remixes
I recently did a couple remixes for electro/industrial bands We The North, and Nahja Mora. The We The North remix is out now, check it out below:
Studio Tips: “Reamping” A Snare Drum
Here’s a handy trick if you ever end up working on a session where a snare bottom track was not recorded. All you need is a snare drum, a mic, and a speaker or guitar amp. (A reamp or “backwards DI” can be very useful as well).
MOTU Digital Performer Tips: Beat Detection in DP9
A short tutorial on how to use the beat detection engine in Digital Performer. We show you how easy it is to slice up a short drum loop.
New I, Parasite EP, A Diminished Tomorrow, is out now!
New music updates: 2015
I just finished the new I, Parasite EP, A Diminished Torrow and it’s currently awaiting mastering. More on that soon.
I also finished a remix (as I, Parasite) for Alien Element “Big & Tall (Road Kill)”. I’m not sure when that will be released.
And finally I’ve just started mixing the second release from Audio Resistance, Checkpoint Poverty. While I’m working on this, I highly recommend you check out their debut album:
Preview of the I, Parasite remix of “Follow” from The Dividing 10th Anniversary vinyl
An off-the-cuff preview from a test pressing.
Back and there again – From Actionscript to Haxe
About a decade-plus ago I was really into Macromedia Flash and Actionscript. Unfortunately I never managed to focus my web dev day job around it, but I was really into doing my own website and weird little motion graphic projects. Eventually I fell out of it — right around when Adobe stepped into the picture. I had never really thought of trying to make games, even though that’s something I’ve been interested in for a long time.
Fast forward to 2013 and I’m learning Objective-C to write my first mobile app for iOS. With iOS7 came Sprite Kit, Apple’s 2D game framework. After messing around with it for a bit I came to a couple conclusions: I’m not a really massive fan of Objective-C in general — it feels a bit clunky to use as a game making language — plus if I’m going to make a game, I really don’t want to lock myself into a single ecosystem.
After a bit of searching I discovered Flixel and FlashPunk, but was honestly somewhat hesitant to return to the Flash world. Fortunately that’s when I discovered Haxe, OpenFL, and HaxeFlixel. So far it’s been an interesting combination of familiar and new. HaxeFlixel is a great game framework to get started with. I may play around with some others, like HaxePunk and HÖVE (a Haxe port of the Lua based Love2D), but right now it serves my needs perfectly.
I’m going to post a bit more as I get deeper into it and about the game projects I work on. More to come soon.
Another site update
This time I’ve moved the blog off of Tumblr and back here with WordPress. I hope to get more into writing about music/mixing stuff I’ve been involved in as well as the game development I’ve started to do is year. Should be fun.