Many famous guitars brands carry the name of their creators, and in the process becoming generic brand names. Like “Les Pauls” and “Paul Reed Smith”.
It shouldn’t surprise me to hear Mr. Paul Reed Smith talk about his PRS guitars.
But for some reason it does.
In a good way 
“… These are tools to play music on, that’s all they are really.”
Yes.
But what beautiful tools.
What beautiful art.
To make more art with.
~ Ivan
As you can tell from the absence of posts, Adrian and I have been busy.
With our day jobs and stuff.
Musically, I’m still keeping myself productive by hanging out at ccMixter.org.
Here’s the latest track that I remixed with my own guitars and arrangement, titled “Feel It Burning”. Technically not a
Starfish Stories track, but have a blast hopefully:
“Feel It Burning (ft. Snowflake)” by Ivan Chew, featuring vocal and piano tracks originally posted by Snowflake. 2009 – Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (3.0). Click here for how to give credit and other conditions.
I think around end Sept, Adrian and I would have more time. I might get over my procrastination and work on tweaking the sounds for the rest of the Crystal Tears album.
~ Ivan
Just signed up for SOFT – www.soft.com.sg – probably THE music forum in Singapore.
Here’s my first post, a self-intro:
Intro: Rambling Librarian (“0.5″ of Starfish Stories :: The Band)
Hey everyone, I’ve heard about www.soft.com.sg but only signed up today. Someone told me most people here are in the mid-20s. I’m not sure if at 37 I’m the oldest guy here.
OK, self-intro (I didn’t read any regulations against long intros… so here goes!):
1) I’m into rock guitar instrumentals (e.g. Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Steve Vai) and New Age sounding stuff (e.g. Enya, Andre Vollenweider)
2) Started on the guitar at 18 years old. More to impress the girls but soon got REALLY interested in guitars. Discovered more about electric guitars and gadgets. However, am never formally trained in music.
3) Stopped playing after NS. My guitar collected dust for almost 10+ years. Only resumed playing in 2006. When I discovered GarageBand. First ever GB track here: http://tinyurl.com/qfoc9
4) In 2007, I re-discovered a long-lost Sec Sch mate. He also just discovered GarageBand. Sent me a track via email. I added a lead guitar to it. Sent it back. To cut a long story short, 4 months later we self-produced our music album. We didn’t meet to jam nor record at a studio. Everything was done entirely using GarageBand. Then we released it online only. You might want to check it out here: http://seastars2007.wordpress.com/the-album/
5) We decided our music wasn’t too bad (my wife didn’t cover her ears). Plus we didn’t have to spend any money, thanks to the Internet. So we continued as a team and gave ourselves a band name. And we released our 2nd album early this year.
http://starfishstories.wordpress.com…ld-one-moment/6) Currently working on our 3rd music album. Probably going to release it this year. All our music is released under the Creative Commons license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/sg/. Meaning, anyone is free to use, distribute, share, remix… the ONLY requirement is to credit the band in the way we state (e.g. name and URL). No payment required — although if they decide to pay our of the goodness of their heart… ahem.
7) In my day job I work as a librarian (http://RamblingLibrarian.blogspot.com). What I do for fun, I post it up at http://MyRightBrain.wordpress.com
And now you probably know why I call myself “Rambling”.
OK, look forward to meeting more like-minded people at soft.com.sg
Cheers!
Ivan Chew
Very informative video tutorials from Dave Weiner’s Riff Of The Week series. Even though I use so-called “virtual equipment”, i.e. software instruments and digital simulations of amps and effects, I found the tutorials a great help in boosting my understanding of recording fundamentals.
Increasingly, digital music interfaces are modeled after physical ones. For instance, in GarageBand ‘06 and ‘08, when you adjust a stomp box effect setting, you adjust the slider. On a real stomp box, you turn a knob. In GarageBand ‘09 (I’ve not tried it but saw it at demos like this one), the interface shows a stomp box and you turn a knob like the real physical thing.
Anyway, check out the videos below. It was the closest thing for me to attending sound engineering school (not that I know what they teach at sound engineering school… never attended one):
Recording Acoustic Guitar (28 Nov 2007)
Read more »
Our first fan club was started by a fan “in the form of a monkey” – her words, not ours! But that club was for our first album.
Now that we’re a band, here’s our Facebook fan club.
We’ll use it more like a mailing list.
Updates and stuff for our adoring fans (yeah, right).
At most one email a month, in case you’re wondering.
I think once in two months tops, realistically.
See you there.
Go post on the fan club wall or something.
~ Ivan
Adrian told me about Jamendo.com some time ago. Was pleasantly surprised to find lots of radio-friendly CC-licensed music.
It took me some time to get our SeaStars 2007 album uploaded to Jamendo (it only accepts WAV format, which is a pain to upload, at about 35MB per song!)
Here it is! http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/37025
Before that, I decided to create an email account for the band (details at our Jamendo profile page).
Jamendo is a social networking site for musicians: upload your songs (singles or full albums), license it under CC, share it, let people discover you, discover musicians you like, post comments/ review their music. You can also see a consolidated page of the comments you’ve posted. The site also recommends stuff that you might like (unobtrusively, I might add).
They also offer stats on your music (no. of downloads, plays etc).
You can offer friendship requests and receive requests as well.
Gotta admit I’m a bit skeptical about “I wanna be your friend” requests, ‘cos I think some musicians who offer friendship often do it to publicise their music rather than make friends. Still, it’s a way to discover other people’s music.
I’m glad Adrian told me about Jamendo.
It’s a very well conceived social networking site for musicians, based on a CC-licensing concept.
Nice.
I like it waaaay better than MySpace music.
~ Ivan
I missed our National Day ‘cos I was away for this. Anyway, here’s a music video:
Link
Produced by a Singaporean company and the National Heritage Board:
This year’s video is unique compared to those produced previously. It takes the form of an original song, written and composed by SPINN, a leading video production company in Singapore . This is the second successive year that this 11-year old company has won the pitch with the National Heritage Board (NHB) to produce the National Day video.
This 4-minute video in English celebrates the ordinary heroes in Singapore – the Singaporeans who have contributed to making Singapore what it is today – whose contributions may have sometimes gone unnoticed. It features the young, the old, those with special needs, those who have contributed to the community and the country through what they do and their selflessness.
Nice.
So refreshing to have a rock sounding version for a NDP song.
And very nicely produced too. Must have taken lots of effort, judging from the production quality. I won’t be surprised if they get more jobs after this. They’re good.
Hmm… Maybe next year the NDP organisers will have a “make your own MTV” event as part of the celebrations. And make it a remix/ mashup effort too. Let people deposit video or music clips, for others to remix.
~ Ivan
This online resource would come in very handy if we want to source for free soundclips and loops.
It’s called Soundsnap.com:
From the website:
What is Soundsnap?
Soundsnap is the best platform to find and share free sound effects and loops- legally. It is a collection of original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD’s.It was originally started by a small group of sound people from all over the world. Our common belief is that sounds and samples should be free for everyone to use in their projects, commercial or not.
Our users are a diverse mix of sound designers, sound artists, web game developers, filmmakers and music producers. Hobbyists and home video makers are welcome too.
Learned about this resource via Murm.
~ Ivan
Sanitised version of our SMS conversation around 8am this morning:
Adrian: The seastars blog has been hacked into…
Ivan: Really? Wat it look like now? We must change all wordpress passwords then. Hacked using either of our accounts? [As Ivan was replying to Adrian, he's thinking, "Alamak, this Adrian must have left his password lying around in school"]
Adrian: how do i know this sort of thing? wah piang there’s lots of crap in there lah… some of the music is still there.
Ivan: Can only look at it at home later. Hope the hack is only to seastars and not our other blogs. Must check if still got (my) RSS feed as backup.
Adrian: what day is today lah?
Ivan: [Pauses for a split second. Breaks out in a grin in mid step while walking to a meeting venue and giving others the impression he's one card short of a full house. Replies:] Somebody is too free. Thks for the laugh though. U realise ur credibilty has taken a dive, don’t u? heh heh
Adrian: hee hee hee… The world is too serious… Glad I made your morning. What credibility?
Ivan: Dude. What would Gandhi say?
Adrian: He’d laugh out loud
Yeah, I really think Gandhi would
But Adrian, try it again and well… remember the Cry Wolf story!
~ Ivan
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