We're so close with the new AD product I can practically taste it. Adam is doing the OS X builds today while I assemble all the materials we need to sell it. The only things remaining are some minor housekeeping, presets, and the manual.

I'm not dropping any more hints at this moment, except to say the following: it is a sequencer/synth (groovebox in the pidgin of our business, although I believe that term is mis-applied, as it doesn't really groove, and it certainly isn't a box). The UI is blue, it is quite strange--the strangest plug we've ever made, and that's saying something--and people that make IDM, ambient, and minimal will be exceedingly happy with it.

So, don't expect to hear much from me until it is released. We're in the final Death March phase of the operation and I'm sitting in my darkened office muttering the St. Crispin's Day speech to myself. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

As promised, here's some initial numbers for Resistor, the EP I put out on Bandcamp last week. (If you're just joining us, scroll back a couple posts for the full skinny.)

Plays
Bandcamp has a fairly extensive stats system, and shows you the difference between plays on the site and plays via an embedded player, and also shows you how many people played the whole song versus people that just played part of the song. I personally don't think that latter information is useful, unless the partial plays far outweigh the normal plays. In this case, they do not, so we'll just lump 'em all together.

The long and short of it is that I got 7,255 individual song plays. This is naturally heavily weighted towards the front of the album, with Metatrak alone getting roughly 40% of all plays. This isn't surprising in the least, as you all do what I do, which is listen to the first 10 seconds of the first song, and make a snap judgment on whether to listen to more. The embedded plays (plays from either here, CDM, and Matrixsynth, the only sites that embedded the player to the best of my knowledge) accounted for almost exactly half of all plays.

Sales
In 10 days, I received a total of 148 paid downloads, for a total of US$655.17. This works out to an average of US$4.42 per download. As a pay-what-you-want album, this bit is significant, I think. The first and second days, the vast majority of the payments were US$5.00. For the most part, anyone that contributed more, I probably knew them, either as long-time fans of my oeuvre or people I talk with often. The average has gone down significantly in the last couple days, as have the purchases in general, but right now, we're at US$0.09 per play when you put everything together. This is a very high number by any metric you could care to name, and in that regard I count the Bandcamp experience as an absolutely smashing success.

I think it's worth mentioning a couple of things at this point:

My third SMG album, Burn, sold 64,000 copies its first year of sales, and is now up in the quarter million range, according to Soundscan. The amount of actual cash money I received in artist royalties from that? US$0.00. So, in that respect, Resistor is a far more successful record.

The actual cost of making the EP is tougher to pin down. It's pointless to figure in the cost of the gear itself (roughly US$28,000 at current values) as I didn't buy it expressly for making this collection of songs. I also don't value my time in dollars earned, but rather in accomplishment. Time that doesn't result in accomplishment (that I can point to and say "see, I made this!") is time ill spent, and thus a cost, in my stilted worldview. But since the time spent on this resulted in the accomplishment of the release, it is at parity in this particular case.

If I was to relate these figures to the release of an actual CD, like we would have done as recently as three years ago, this would be an incredibly dismal failure, I wouldn't lie to you. But the obverse is that my wife and I didn't have to fight over cover art and bios for a couple weeks, we didn't have the massive front-loaded costs of the pressing, and we didn't have to package hundreds to thousands of CDs and go wait in line at the post office several times a day for a week.

I purposefully did essentially no promotion aside from my post here, Twitter, and asking Matrix to put up a blurb. Peter Kirn put up a nice post on CDM of his own volition, and there are some various other mentions here and there, as well.

Which brings us to the next phase. Now that sales are essentially idling, I'm able to do individual promotions and see the direct effect, and I'm looking for some suggestions and ideas in that regard. What would be the proper course of action at this juncture? We have a little money we can spend on advertising, but I'd rather keep it in the free realm, for obvious reasons.

Step 1: Stumble bleary-eyed to the bathroom and do the things that Men Do in the bathroom in the morning.

Step 2: Get a Lo-Carb Monster, my MacBook Pro, and a pack of cigarettes, and go outside on the porch to properly EQ my nicotine and taurine levels so I can function in polite society.

I'm actually still in the middle of Step 2 as I write this, so it might be a little gamier than normal. I was perusing my RSS feeds just now, and I've set up several search feeds for Phoenix Craigslist. One of them has "Drum Machine" as its string, and today it gave me this little gem:

Roland TR-505 Drum machine/Sequencer $200

This is another piece of my collection that I regret to let go but I haven't been using it much in the last couple years and I'd rather get some $'s out of it and have someone making use of it as part of their collection of classic electronic musical instruments. [...]. This unit is still very popular for its cool sound and its old-school Roland sequencer which has a "feel" that has no comparison. A lot of pro's still insist on using the 505 as a click track when working with Pro Tools because it adds a little life to your music as opposed to an ultra-modern click track (metronome) which has absolutely perfect time, the 505 and 606 have very close to perfect time but tend to have a little bit of "push and pull" to them that is the sound and feel of classic hip hop and music from the golden age of MIDI :)

Now, whatever with the 505 itself. It is obviously not a favorite of, well, anyone. This is largely because it sounds like shit, and is most assuredly the red-headed step child of the TR family. (We only say this because we've never heard Madonna's infamous TR-404.) Whether it's worth $200 -- and it's not -- is between this guy and the witless sap that buys it from him. Since this is Phoenix, that witless sap has probably moved to the San Fernando valley by now, and is currently working as a grip on Anal Amateurs 49.

(Cue several comments from people that own a 505 and are trying to make themselves feel better about paying actual money for it, plus the mandatory "it sounds awesome circuit-bent!!!")

Pro Tips: There is no "golden age of MIDI." The 606 doesn't have MIDI. No self-respecting hip-hop producer would ever admit he used a 505 on a record. Pro's [sic] don't use the 505 as a click because of its "feel." It has no feel. It's a 505.

Seriously, dude: just because it has "TR" in the name doesn't make it magic, and no amount of con on your part is gonna change that.

I feel bad about leaving that previous post up for 5 days, especially since Matrixsynth just turned five (CONGRATS!) and he posts more in a week than I do in a year. In my personal opinion, though, he needs to be medicated. He's making the rest of us look bad.

Anyhow, the Bandcamp experiment is a smashing success. I will say that we used to move a lot more units when we printed real CDs and stuff. On the other hand, it was a gigantic pain in the ass to pack and ship them all (Hello, four trips to the post office in one day) and it's really, really nice to have making the album itself be the hard part of the operation. I'll put up a numbers post as soon as I have a bigger pool of data, but suffice to say that my experience with Bandcamp is, on the whole, quite positive.

The album is also in iTunes now if that's your thing. Since the audience here is largely musicians, a majority of whom have released music digitally, I won't go in to the vagaries of why I'd rather have a Bandcamp purchase than an iTunes one, given the choice, but it should be fairly obvious even to run-of-the-mill consumers.

And our newest game show: Feature Or Bug? While we build these AD products, there are a lot of cases of Shit Just Not Working Right. I'm generally in favor of trying to harness the event for repeatability, and Adam is generally in favor of making everything so it doesn't, like, crash and stuff. Somewhere in the middle is where our product line lives. Now, before all the "I'm with boobs" comments come, which will make Adam look bad and me look cool, it is worth mentioning that the bug that resulted in that particular audio file is absolutely not something that can be included in anything. It's a seriously unstable situation, and making the customer's system freeze up is generally accepted to be a Bad Thing.

But that said, it does sound kind of cool, doesn't it?

I just put the finished Micronaut EP, Resistor, up for sale on Bandcamp. The Micronaut page is here. I put it up for "pay what you want, at least a dollar," as I'm relatively interested to see how it works out. The Bandcamp site is fairly easy to work as such things go, and gives you a nifty embedded player to use, to wit:

I'll also be placing the album in Tunecore as per usual, to spread it to all the other services. Once it has been up for a month, I'll do a "Numbers" post like you often see the big iPhone devs do, so you can see exactly how it worked for me, as a relatively known artist. (Relative to, say, my sister, who is not.)

Regarding the album itself, it is what I feel are the best tracks of my weekend work over the last year and a half. I completed 15 tracks in all, but (as I hinted in the last post) I feel that the majority of them were quite derivative. I'll probably put them in my Soundcloud account for interested parties.

Most of the instrumentation in these tracks is hardware. Adam often says that his day job is software, so when he makes music he wants to use hardware, and I'm beginning to be of the same mind. When you've spent the entire day staring at a monitor tweaking presets, there's something inherently more visceral about grabbing a knob and getting an immediate and satisfying result. This isn't to say that "analog" is an important aspect. While it's true that the majority of synth sounds you hear come from the MKS-80, Source, TETR4, Mopho, or CS-5, there is a fair amount of digitalness in these tracks as well, in the form of the TX802, TX81Z, and AlphaSyntauri. (Most of the pads on these six tracks are Syntauri, which will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with that box.) Anything that sounds like a piano is a piano, namely the lovely Yamaha CP80B that takes up half of my office. Drum sounds come from a variety of sources, but in most cases are either the TETR4 or a real 909 I had borrowed for a while in PDX. There is some Tattoo, notably in DSP3 and Metatrak.

This entire album was mixed to stems, out to my Mytek 8x192. I used the internal summing buss of the Mytek to sum the stems. I have a Dangerous D-Box, but I feel that the make-up amps in the Mytek (which have a rather API quality to them) add a nice color that the incredibly transparent D-Box lacks. The only two reverbs used are Eos and my Lexicon 300 hardware unit. Since I use the Lexi as a digital insert, and it basically predates the thought that someone might want to use a higher sampling rate than 48, that's the rate I work at. Obviously, the AD line gets a heavy workout here, and I also use the H8000FW as a pair of inserts. Usually you'll hear that on the pad sounds, as that's where it's happiest.

Nerdgasm aside, and on a personal note, whether you like the music or not is utterly unimportant to me. I finally feel (after four full-length albums and one EP, natch) that I'm finding a voice for the Micronaut project that matches my internal music. I'm pretty happy with these tracks and their abstract nature. Next up is the final mixing for the RT60 album. We're not putting that out in public until we can get vinyl pressed, though. Essentially working out how to pay for it at this juncture.

Man, this was a tough week. I find myself at (or possibly over) the limit of the number of individual things I can successfully focus on. We've got the next AD product chugging along, I'm doing some contract software work for another company, I'm trying to finish DronestationX, I am one mix away from having this Micronaut EP done, and somewhere in there we managed to ship off a metric fuckton of t-shirts and an MKS-80, and I wrote my monthly column for Computer Music.

Sometimes I don't have any issue with this many plates spinning. We managed to release 8 full length albums of my own music (plus quite a few records from other people) in the first half of the '00s while I worked a full time job. Social life? Not so much, but it was Chicago. Half the year was a wash because of shitty weather anyhow.

Nowadays it's tougher, though. Ever since we moved to Portland in February of last year, I've had terrible anti-completionist syndrome. (The dreaded ACS!!! O NOES!) I start a lot of songs, but I don't seem to finish many. Well, that's not strictly true. We're one track away from the holy Finished land on the RT60 full-length, and that track is mostly recorded. I have actually finished about 15 tracks for this Micronaut EP; it's just that 10 of them didn't make it past my internal A&R dude for whatever reason. (Mainly that reason was "this sounds like a Chosen Lords outtake...")

Anyhow, long story short, my shit is a jumbled disaster right now. My office looks like Hurricane Cables And Floppies passed through, immediately followed by Tropical Depression Empty Monster Can. It's sort of a fractal mess, where every individual pile of shit is a mess unto itself, continuing down to the size of a rack screw. I've found that going down to the bare metal is really the only solution to this scenario, so as soon as these two albums are completed (O, Happy Day!) I'm gonna go to Home Depot and rent myself a front-end loader, clear this shit out and start new.

Some various things to report upon, in no particular order:

1. I put my MKS-80 up on the 'Bay. 'Tis here. Pool not included. That bad boy is done sold.

2. My lovely and talented missus is packing the Full Of Techno shirts as I write this. All the US orders will ship bright and early Monday morning; I would be shocked if they weren't in your greedy little hands starting Wednesday. The non-US ones will probably go out Monday evening or Tuesday morning at the latest.

EDIT: All USA orders have shipped. Foreign orders will all be out Tuesday morning.

3. DronestationX, the iPad version of Dronestation, is nearing completion. I've added a few features, and given it a UI much more suited to the iPad's form factor. I'll be submitting it to Apple at some point this week, and at some point after that it will either be approved or not.

4. In Phoenix, 5" long flying cockroaches fall from the sky. We were having a dinner party when the first one showed up, and one of our guests was all like "you'll probably never see another one again. They're really rare." Well, I guess we're just lucky then, because our back yard is starting to bear a striking resemblance to Klandathu. It's really, really unpleasant.

This methodology naturally brings to mind the work of Diego Stocco, which I find incredibly fascinating and inspirational. Every time he puts up a video, I actually set aside a block of time to dissect what he did and think about its ramifications, and as a musician, that's about the highest complement you can give another musician, I believe. Obviously, Mr. Stocco's main forte is sound design, but I find what he does with the sounds to be extremely refreshing, and the resulting music is fulfilling without being oppressively songish.

This all dovetails with my favoritest band of all bands, Neubauten, who are the unquestionable masters of creating music out of the detritus of modern society. And there's a lot of detritus to go around. They've got much more traditional in their old age, as the video below demonstrates, but they still use essentially the same tools today that they did early on. They're just better at bending those tools to their will.

I propose that sound design and songwriting using invented instruments requires as much practice and virtuosity to pull off as, say, being able to play Dueling Banjos. It's doubly impressive for the fact that the instrument didn't exist prior to the musician imagining it as such. But ultimately, it's all pissing in the wind if the song itself isn't interesting to a non-musician, right?

So we had a board meeting over at ADHQ last month, and decided that we wouldn't drop any info at all about the next AD plug until the day it went on sale. The reasons for this were largely marketing-related. When I put up the videos on YouTube and the teasers here before-hand, they get a shitload of views, and we were hoping that if we were gonna get those anyhow, we might as well take advantage of the situation and actually have a product, you know, for sale and stuff.

It's killing me, I gotta be honest.

I want to talk about this thing soooooo bad. Adam completed a crucial puzzle piece today, and now the thing actually works, after a fashion; it is missing a large chunk of personality, but it has its brains, for the most part. You already know that it is an instrument, of course. I can also say that it is generally aimed at percussion-oriented duties, although it isn't a drum machine, in the strictest sense of the phrase, and it can do music just fine, as long as you aren't too particular about what the word "music" means.

The only other thing I can say is that all the pieces are in place now, and it's really just a matter of hooking everything up at this juncture. Everything we needed to invent for this plug has done been invented, so the license-plate making part of the operation has now commenced.

God damn, this is killing me.

Updates! Updates! We got 'em. Whether you want 'em or not is another matter entirely.

First up, the next AD product is coming along nicely, except that Adam has run in to one of those things that he has a knack for running in to, the which I don't fully understand. I code vicariously through him. But we're truckin' along. That will be next, then the other half of the Discord3 update.

Speaking of the other half of the Discord3 update, a note came through the VST dev list today that 64-bit Cubase 5.5 for Mac is available as a dev preview. We'll have D3 OS X 64-bit ready before it is actually released.

In other news, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that our good friend Hugo has released a new sample set, volume 3 in his excellent Taped Drum Machine series. 'Tis here. This one is my current Goldbaby Favorite, because he thought to include an RZ-1, which is the drum machine I used to make my very first demo, back when I was knee high to a short goat. There's also a Kawai XD-5 up in that bitch, which is a hidden gem in the world of drum synths. Or at least it was, until I mentioned it. Go watch the eBay prices rise now.

And finally, in non-synth news, as a late birthday present (because on my birthday I was, you know, in Idaho) I got the Camera Of My Dreams, a Mamiya 645. It isn't exactly the model I wanted--I was eyeballing a Pro, because I'm pro as fuck and having a camera that says "Pro" on it really just sums that up nicely--but it came up on Craigslist here for a price I couldn't refuse. I just ran an expensive roll of film through it, and it is now getting expensively processed. I decided to forgo the expensive scanning; I thought it best to wait and see if I could actually take pictures with the damn thing and if they were actually worth looking at. We'll know this afternoon, I guess.

EDIT: As you can see from the image above, I got the roll back. This camera takes fucking amazing pictures, but is unforgiving as hell. Gonna take some learning.