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.