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ProfessorTomoe

The Album, and Other Music

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Ohh, it's so tantalizingly close I can almost feel the shiny new jewel case in my hand. If you've followed the forum, you may be aware that I need to publish an album by April to keep my Grammy voting rights. It looks like that may happen much sooner than that. All twelve tracks are complete, tested on a crappy laptop speaker, and await just one more road test. A cover is being designed, and publishing possibilities are being investigated.

Of the twelve tracks, three will be absolutely brand new, never published before!

Right now, that's all I can release to the general public. Watch this space for more over the next month. In the meantime, if you've got music to talk about, talk about it!

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A lot of music coming out nowadays uses libraries built for playback engines, such as Native Instruments' Kontakt. My new works take a step in the other direction. Sure, they use Kontakt libraries, but the vast majority of instrument sounds come from two pieces of hardware from the 1990s: the Kawai K5000R and the Mighty Roland SC-88Pro.

The SC-88Pro is what some call a "ROMpler," in that it plays back samples that are stored in ROM. It's a vastly underappreciated piece of gear, though. There are so many sounds built into it and so many ways to manipulate them that the possibilities are endless. It gets showcased in the first song on the album.

The Kawai K5000R is made by a company better known for its pianos, but for a brief time in the '90s, they put out a series of "additive" synths: the K5000 series. Most synths are "subtractive," starting with a sound and subtracting frequencies with filters to create an end sound. The K5000 series started with nothing and added waves at different frequencies to create sounds. It specialized in making beautiful "pad" sounds, or sounds to back up a group of melodic sounds, and that's exactly how I use it in the last song on the album.

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6 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I'm backing up my music system. I'm going to have so many backups when I'm done I won't know where to keep them.

As Chuck Berry observed in 1957, "...it's got a back up, you can't lose it."

7 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Question: am I the only music maker on the forum?

You may be the only one who admits to doing as much as a vocation rather than as an avocation or on a vacation.

My most original work was setting Psalm 30 NRSV to a Londonderry Air for a CD the Minister of Music produced for my Church.

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I've just learned something surprising. CD Baby is owned by Disc Makers. In other words, it's easier to start by going through Disc Makers, because they'll manufacture discs and get a bar code, then send it over to their CD Baby side for digital distribution. At least I have someone to talk to over there now.

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30 minutes ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I've just learned something surprising. CD Baby is owned by Disc Makers. In other words, it's easier to start by going through Disc Makers, because they'll manufacture discs and get a bar code, then send it over to their CD Baby side for digital distribution. At least I have someone to talk to over there now.

Good! Keep us posted. :)

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Made a slight change to the home page of my web site. The Irritable Bowel guide is no longer featured, although it is on the top of the literary page. I've made the front page more music-oriented for the duration of the album focus.

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The album cover is done, but we're having trouble coming up with other artwork that conforms to the printer's templates. As in, the person I'm working with doesn't know how to work with templates and can't easily do CMYK. If I use Disc Makers' own service, they will credit me $100 for already having the cover, but that's it. They want $350 for the rest, which is a rip-off for plain black text on a white background.

Does anyone know a graphic designer who will do the inner liner, back cover, and CD art for reasonable rates? It's just text using a Microsoft font against a white BG, rendered in 300 dpi CMYK. I can even supply templates. A copy of Photoshop is probably preferred.

Help?

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The album cover art is no longer a problem. In fact, I believe it's finished! A graphic designer friend of Mrs. Prof's came to the rescue. If this passes muster, I'm going to be ready to submit my album to Disc Makers by Friday!

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If you want to see the album art, send me a PM. All I'm waiting for right now is for the artist to fix about ten typos in her boilerplate copyright transfer contract. Once that's done, I'll sign it and be ready to submit!

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Just chatted with the artist on Facebook. She's going to have the copyright release paperwork proofread and sent tonight so I can send back the signed copy tomorrow and shoot the whole ball of wax to Disc Makers. Alllllllmost finished!!!!!!

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2 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Just chatted with the artist on Facebook. She's going to have the copyright release paperwork proofread and sent tonight so I can send back the signed copy tomorrow and shoot the whole ball of wax to Disc Makers. Alllllllmost finished!!!!!!

drumroll please....

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Well, mathematically, there's an interesting puzzle in relativity. There could be objects traveling faster than the speed of light... that would speed up as they lose energy. These mathematically-hypothetical particles are called tachyons.

No such objects have been observed, and we don't even have solid theories on how we could observe them. Another problem is that objects moving faster than the local speed of light lose energy, so most likely these objects would have been losing energy - and therefore speeding up - since the moment they came into existence. Unless there is something generating new ones, they would all be very far away from us; the entire area of the universe that is observable by ordinary means would be tachyon-free and near the middle of a far-distant cloud-shell of tachyons.

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