Thaaaaat's not brown sugar...

I was about to shake this into my coffee, when my friend Phil stopped me and pointed out what I was about to do. Assuming that's labeled correctly, that would have been a bad latte.

So what was I meeting Phil about? Mostly just to hang out for a bit, actually. But we sometimes discuss the goings on of his company, Lecker Klecker, and specifically, his awesome forthcoming indie opus, King Voxel.

But you feel you must ask: "Mike, isn't Marvin's Mittens your forthcoming indie opus?" Yes. That one is mine (and the rest of the Breakfall team's). King Voxel is Phil's, and I'm doing the music for it, if you'll recall.

Having little to do with any of that (except that I started it while waiting for Phil, and finished it on the bus ride home), here's Waiting for the Cubeman:

Monday of Recovery

After, *ahem* perhaps slightly too good a weekend, I'm taking it a little easy this morning. No reason not to be productive with music, though...

Anticipated vs. Actual

Life is full of disappointments and nice surprises, of all shapes and sizes. Am I the person I expected I would be at this stage of my life? Pondering these matters can keep you up at night. At which point, if you really can't sleep, you might as well make music.




The cell phone playlist continues to grow!

A Weekend By The Water

Canoeing, swimming, beer, margaritas and BBQ. And now, on my phone, amazingly portable studio technology. What an awesome, relaxing summer weekend. Here are the two new tunes I made with Caustic 2.

PINES AND NEEDLES

LAKE PARTY

They've been added to the growing playlist of experimental noises and electrofunk made on my phone.

Music from My Cell Phone

I'm having a blast with Caustic 2. For a while, I've been thinking about getting into chiptune production, but I found working in most actual chip tune editors too restrictive. I do like working within constraints, but I just didn't like the totally different workflow of things like LSDJ. Caustic does lots of the things I like, but it doesn't have endless pools of samples and effects to wade through (so much as, say, Reason). It immediately lends itself to work on crunchy grooves - all about simple synths and drums with a few effects. I can just take a few minutes wherever I happen to be to work on making cool patterns and rhythms. Good wholesome audio fun.



EDIT: scroll down for more tunes, which I'll keep adding to this playlist.

Caustic Rocks It

I just downloaded the future, to my phone, for $8.



Ok, so it's a pretty unremarkable piece of music. Not terribly good, even. But I made it on my phone in 20 minutes poking around in Single Cell Software's Android music making software, Caustic 2. Lots of big companies I like are making iOS versions of their Digital Audio Workstations, but I hadn't found something I loved for my Android phone until an hour ago.

But it was an hour ago when I first downloaded this nifty little app, and I found my way around its enormously intuitive interface and made a (ok, not great) track since then. It runs very smoothly on my Samsung Infuse phone. My iPhone wielding friends have on occasion mocked my phone's size, often citing it's near-tablet proportions. But I've never been happier to own this phone than now, with the slightly oversized screen affording pretty much the best interface I can imagine carrying around in my pocket (yes, it still fits EASILY in my pocket).

So I own a great little studio for making electronica, and it fits in my pocket. Neat.

By the way, the Caustic 2 demo is only restricted in saving/loading/exporting. So download it and try it!