General Ramblings

Garage of Evil Albums Now Available for Streaming!

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This is about 2 months late, but, better late than never 🙂

13 years ago, I composed 3 albums for the Garage of Evil! The GoE was a joint venture between myself and a very good friend of mine, Steve-O. We were building a lot of animatronic props and other Halloween related goodness, and started to develop a bit of a following. Over the years, I fell by the wayside as other life events took precedence, and Steve-O and his amazing wife Lori took that football and ran with it. And kept running with it, until about 2 years ago, when Steve-O stepped down from the helm. Found a fantastic ode to what the GoE was here.

These albums were crafted to provide creepy background ambience to any home or professional haunt. Now, finally, 13 years later, you can listen to these dark, creepy soundscapes on any device anywhere. Amazon Music, Google Play Music, Apple iTunes, even use them in your YouTube videos and more! More information on the albums can be found below:

Dark Soundscapes Vol. I

Dark Soundscapes Vol. II

at.mos.fear.

Enjoy!

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Happy Winter Solstice!

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solstice chillIn 2001, I released this album, Solstice Chill in celebration of the Winter Solstice.

Measured in Kelvin – Part III was included on the 2002 Ambient@Hyperreal2 compilation album, along with a fantastic list of other artists https://www.discogs.com/Various-Ambienthyperr…/release/30910

Go have a listen if you’re looking for some relaxing, chill out background music. This album is available on BandCamp, Amazon, Google, iTunes, Spotify, and all of the other major platforms.

Use code “holidays” on BandCamp and save 50% on this and all other titles:https://musicalnature.bandcamp.com/album/solstice-chill

https://musicalnature.net/solstice-chill/

Join the Musical Nature Mailing List!

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Hey folks, quick update. Been an interesting second half of the year, with some things going on that have derailed my music development… which will pick back up soon. Have some collaborations and releases in the works. Probably not going to see much until the new year. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I have gone ahead and created a mailing list, as another touch point for my fans so I can share additional information, and offer mailing-list only promotions.

So, if you’d like to join, click on the link above in the navigation, or go here: https://mailchi.mp/53f4d220d223/musicalnature

Have a safe and happy holiday season!

Thank you and talk soon!

Skunk Works

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316px-Skunk_works_Logo.svgI haven’t done too much on SoundCloud for quite some time. It’s not really a great platform for marketing my music, especially now since they got rid of the groups there. I’ve long since cancelled my Pro membership, and have kind-of just let it die off over the past year.

However, it is a great little platform to get out new pieces of music I am playing with. So, if you’re interested, head on over to my SoundCloud page and see what I’ve got in the hopper and what I’ve been working on.

Follow me on there, to get notified of when new clips and tracks are posted! I’ll happily give you a follow back as well if you are posting to SoundCloud as well, so that I can be in the loop on what my friends and fans are also doing with their music!

Feedback is paramount, so please let me know if you like what you’re hearing there. It’ll directly influence what appears on upcoming releases!

[Skunk Works is an official pseudonym for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs, formerly called Lockheed Advanced Development Projects ~wikipedia]

Coming August 1st – 31 Days of Ambience

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31 Days of AmbienceBack at the end of May, I posted that for one month, I would create every day. Make something new… I called this 31 Days of Ambience. I had initially aimed for July, but, you know, life happened. I am however, going to do this for August.

August will not be easy to pull off, I am going on a week-long vacation with family on a lake in the middle of nowhere, I am closing (hopefully) on our new home… and so many other things that can easily push this to the back burner. This shall not rest there, and be delayed over and over.

I vow in August to publish a piece of ambient music each day. It will go here, on BandCamp, SoundCloud, and various FB groups. It will be available on Bandcamp for purchase if you see fit to do so… otherwise, it is yours for free. Do what you want with it. Create new works. It is free for the world to consume, in the spirit of Moby’s Long Ambients1. Like he said “and feel free to share it or give it away or whatever, it’s not protected or anything, or at least it shouldn’t be”. All I ask is a wee little credit line somewhere. Even a mention on twitter is fine 🙂

If for some reason I miss a day, due to, you know, life happening… I will make up for it. I promise. By the end of August, you will get 31 new tracks, ranging from short samples to long form pieces.

Copyright Claims and YouTube

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Ever get an email like that after posting your own music? I get them all of the time. When I first saw this, I was all confused… I knew this was my original work! How can someone else have a copyright claim on my music?!

Generally, it is not something to worry about. If, like a lot of indie musicians out there, you are using CDBaby to distribute your music, you most likely then signed up for Sync Licensing when you distributed your music there. The link there to Sync Licensing will take you to this page under your artist account, which explains more on how it works:

 

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In fact, if you scoll down to the bottom of that page, you will see this important notice:

Important note for YouTube users: If you log into your YouTube account and see a copyright notice next to your videos, don’t worry! CD Baby will collect money for the usage of your music in videos (this includes videos you upload). This notice means the content ID system identified your song and it’s now setup to generate revenue for that video. You don’t need to take action. CD Baby is not claiming ownership of your song.

See? all should be just fine. This confused me when I first saw it… so hopefully this post helps another artist along the way.

Ambient Musician (or really any genre) HOW-TO Posts

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In addition to letting folks know about my new releases, projects, etc., I am also going to start publishing posts about industry trials and tribulations, and even as granular as using some tools – physical or software.

For my day job, I am a Senior Architect who works around assisting customers with Microsoft SharePoint and Azure. I am also very involved in the SharePoint community. I speak at conferences, run the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group, I run a fairly popular blog (according to the stats) on SharePoint, Azure, and other things… I do a lot of knowledge sharing for my work life. And thinking this might be useful for my non-work life as well, well, one aspect of it at least.

FEEDBACK folks! Would this be helpful? Am I wasting time? Let me know! Drop a comment below…

The MP3 Is Officially Dead… or is it?

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npr-music-rgbInteresting article on the evolution of MP3 format via NPR… I still use MP3’s daily. Maybe I am just old school? I even used to have a close friend about 20 years ago who went to college with Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster. MP3’s will always be a thing for me. It’s kinda like holding on to all of my cassette tapes after I got my first knock-off Discman.

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/05/11/527829909/the-mp3-is-officially-dead-according-to-its-creators

Almost everything I create gets exported into a 44. KHz WAV file, and then shortly thereafter, gets converted into 360 bitrate MP3’s for distribution. For hour-long+ tracks, I convert those into FLAC’s for BandCamp so I can get around the 600MB file limit, and not have to split up my long form tracks.

I am interested to know, from other ambient artists, or any musician out there… do you think the MP3 is dead?

Props go out to Keith Ritchie for sharing this originally on the Book of Faces.

31 Days of Ambience

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PROFILE PHOTO 022317-em

In an effort to create more… I came up with the idea to take a month to generate some sort of ambient music each day and release it to the world. Be it a minute, be it an hour… to produce some piece of music on a daily basis for an entire month.

What would you, my few followers, think of this? Would you listen? Would you want to get the collection of this afterwards? Would you want to have this as a resource to use in your own music?

Let me know. Planning on July to start doing this… more updates to come.

Test of Wedding Cocktail Hour Music Installation

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This is a test of the music installation I am doing with my music for cocktail hour following the ceremony at my wedding.

See this post for more information on the setup: https://musicalnature.net/2017/04/27/new-music-installation-my-upcoming-wedding

One change I have done from that post was use a separate cheap MP3 player into the auxiliary port on the DOSS Touch portable speaker so I could better control the playlists themselves.

In the video I say the track is “The White Horse” off my album Eavesdropping, but, it is actually “Victoria”. “The White Horse” was on JUST before this video was shot… sorry for the confusion!

Please, if you feel so inclined, throw this video a like and leave a comment!