Happy Birthday Chilljam! :: Blog Entry
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Happy Birthday to chilljam.com!
Over the course of this year, all of us have undergone huge life changes, from watching our militaries go to war overseas, to helping our children figure out the first months of life, to new jobs and changing industries as the economy collasped beneath our feet, to finding our way in a restructuring world. It’s amazing what happens in a year’s time in the life of just a couple of people.
This website documents our experiences over this time.
New chilljam.com music podcast available!
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Now you can listen to each chilljam.com music release immediately as it comes out, at your convenience!
Please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, any of the podcast sites noted after the break, or just manually subscribe to the feed yourself at
http://chilljam.com/?feed=podcast
When we took a look at the old site, there were several problems that we were specifically looking to address in a redesign. One of those issues in particular was the fact that the content we were generating was only available to people who regularly visited the site on a week to week basis. However, we realize that we all have busy lives and it’s difficult to remember to check any particular web page regularly every single week without fail. Things come up and life gets in the way sometimes.
So this new site focuses a great deal on the ability to syndicate the content across the internet. Setting up a podcast mechanism helps in doing this.
The chilljam.com podcast is just another great way for you to be able to listen to the music.
Read More and see where else the Podcast is available
05.5.08Using FL Studio again
A couple of weeks ago, I posted some of the old Haywire Transmission stuff I did prior to joining the project to the page. Some posters on another message board mentioned that they enjoyed that stuff and it spurred me into looking into using it again. So, on Saturday, after my wife and I got back from an appointment, I spent a couple of hours putting together some stuff for us to use in the project.Â
Using FL Studio has some nice aspects but it can also be a huge pain. One great aspect of using it is that it gives us the ability to employ a huge number of instruments and sounds in one package that pretty much plays itself when set up properly. It’s great as it makes the 3 of us sound like we’re playing 20 or more instruments sometimes. It can really fill in the sound, giving us some freedom to try other things than we normally would.
However, it’s not a very flexible program to use for live situations and can be difficult when employed with groups like The Chill because the basis of the music is improvised. I’ve learned some methods of changing the sounds in a live manner but it can be frustrating and limited.
In any case, because we’ve been working on The Daily Routine theme lately, and I work primarily on computers all day, I thought it’d be interesting to throw in some midi bleep-bloop and glitch sounds in there so we tried it out yesterday and it went well.Â
Unfortunately, it looks like the recording equipment may have had some difficulties however, so it looks like we may not have captured the session as we’d hoped. Neil will listen to what was captured yesterday and hopefully, it’ll still be enough to post a couple of worthwhile songs to the website.Â
05.1.08The Daily Routine
There are a couple of new songs up from our session last Sunday on the Music page.
Lyrically, I concentrated on things I think about, see, or do during my daily commute and the grind throughout the work day. I have quite a commute each day starting with a drive to the train station, a long train ride from Baltimore to Washington D.C and then I take the Metro to the office. Along the way, there are various people or things I see or may feel that I thought would be interesting song material.
I’m sure some people probably experience some of the same thoughts on a day-to-day basis and I thought it’d be interesting to put those ideas into songs.
Also, there’s a new animated picture up on the Musicians page that Jeremy put together. It’s similar to the one that was presented there before but he sped up the timing on it so that we sort of mix together as you watch it. It’s pretty awesome, check it out.
Neil also got some great pictures at our practice session Sunday. I’ve got to probably compress them down a bit as they’re too big for web presentation so I’ll try to have those up in the next day or so.
04.24.08New Recording Set Up
Well, on Tuesday, Neil set up the new digital recording gear that he purchased. The new gear looks pretty nice and it will make it easier to mix down each instrument individually again, rather than use the single microphone that we’ve used for the last couple of recordings.Â
Personally, I like the idea of making at least slight changes to our recording set up or gear with each new set of recordings. It’s fun to experiment with the different sounds that can come from recording or playing the music in different ways and it makes each set of recordings unique in their own ways. It doesn’t have to be something so significant as all new equipment with each recording, but just making slight changes to the sounds can really add a lot when you listen to the sound over time.
I was pretty surprised at how good the Lonely Microphone sessions sounded and they’re actually some of my favorite recordings now. At first, I was just thinking that they’d be decent enough for us to just listen to for personal purposes but, after listening to them quite a few times, I really like the thick muddy sound that came out of those recordings. The music sounds alive in a way that can’t be found in multitrack production recordings.Â
However, I’m really excited to see how the new recording equipment sounds and explore the different possibilities it offers. We’ll likely post up the sounds once we get a couple other kinks worked out with sound levels and record this weekend.
04.21.08Emailed Music
I just loaded up a collaborated project between me and a couple of friends I went to college with. We tried for the longest time to figure out how we could make music while living so far apart. After we figured it out, we put these tracks together in about 4 or 5 months through email wave files back and forth, and these tracks are what we came up with.
It started with an electronic drum beat from Warren Carroll in Richmond. Then I layered all kinds of tracks with piano, bass, strings, horns, synths, and bells. Beavis in DC would then put the final guitar touches on them.
Enjoy the emailed music.
04.18.08The Haywire Transmission
I loaded up some of the solo stuff I was working on when I initially joined Neil and Jeremy some time back. This is really just a mix of various electronic pieces that I was working on after my last band, Stars Burn Out, broke apart.
It seems that each time that I leave a band, I still feel a need to write some kind of music and it’s often easiest working with computers in those situations. They’re a great way of putting together polyphonic material even if you’re not in a position where you can play all of the instruments.
The real limitation with writing music strictly on computers is the lack of feedback from other musicians. You really get to miss bouncing ideas off of other people. After writing a good bit of this material, I started to get tired of my own ideas.
So it was great when I first joined Neil and Jeremy that I got to use some of this material in a live situation. I’d basically play my laptop as an instrument alongside what Neil and Jeremy were playing.
It was pretty limited as a live instrument, however, so I’ve since dropped using it on a regular basis. It also gets a bit tedious writing on a laptop and requires a lot of time, which I don’t have much of these days.
By the way, I don’t really have real cover art for this stuff yet. I’ll probably draw something up on Monday.
Hope everyone enjoys it.
New Links
I added a couple of links to the Links page. Â It looked pretty empty and I wanted a place where we could share any of the music we’re interested in at the moment. Â
To me, listening to other bands has always been a kind of fuel to add to the fire. Â Often, I’ll hear little things in other people’s music that I’ll note and want to use whenever I play. Â Sometimes it even happens subconsciously. Â I’ll play something and, in listening to it later, I realize that it’s been influenced from someone else’s work. Â
Anyways, most people that know me would probably note that I change my musical interests on almost a weekly basis. Â One week, I’ll be listening to a style of music that’s totally chill and relaxing, the next I’m solely listening the loudest, most abrasive stuff I can find. Â It all depends on my mood and how I feel like influencing it. Â
Recently, I’ve been train commuting into DC which can be a harrowing experience at times. Â People are rushing back and forth everywhere and in every direction. Â Everyone’s got somewhere to be and they’re all trying to get there as fast as they can, myself often included. Â However, in this commotion, there’s an excitement that’s hard to explain. Â It just feels so “metropolitan”. Â
In an attempt to try to keep myself calm amidst this mass confusion I’ve been listening to some more relaxing stuff, or at least stuff that seems to flow with the movement of the crowd.
Anyways, check it out and feel free to post your thoughts. Â Thanks.
04.16.08We’re set up!
Well, in an effort to avoid the boredom of not really having anything to do at work and due to some problems easily sharing songs with others, I thought it was about time that The Chill needed a web site. I went ahead and set up the basics and we’ll probably add some more as needed. The primary thing that I think everyone will be here for is the music so I went ahead and set that up as the landing page for now.Â
Just about everything that I’m aware of is here from music that Neil and Jeremy were playing before I arrived through last weekend. There are a couple of things left on our old MySpace page that I’ll need to figure out how to get to. Unfortunately, I don’t have a the information to get into that page right now so I can move it over here. Perhaps we’ll do that later.
In any case, I hope everyone enjoys the new stuff as well as the old. Please feel free to comment as you like.
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