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Live Music Update #1: Learning Guitar is Hard

June 3, 2015 by Ben

Last October I wrote about how I had a plan to eventually do a live performance, a kind of funk/electronic hybrid thing. So far I’ve put in 135 hours of guitar practice and bought and played around with the Electribe groovebox. I haven’t written an update in a while simply because there hasn’t been much to say. Practicing an instrument is a slow, often tedious process. Still, I have learned some things along the way. 30 minutes a day is […]

Categories: Uncategorized

30 Random Bits of Advice from a Music Guy

May 21, 2015 by Ben

I find myself with lots of little pieces of advice that aren’t big or complex enough to warrant writing a whole article. Here are thirty of them. See if you can make it to the end. 1. Use filters to shape your sound before resorting to EQ. 2. Velocity is the key to natural-sounding MIDI notes. Listen carefully to drum parts and melodies that you enjoy and try to recreate their velocities in your own work. Eventually you’ll start to […]

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Gravity Ghost’s music and the interpretation of art

April 14, 2015 by Ben

Gravity Ghost has been out a few months now, and the response to the game has been phenomenal. I’m stunned by the surprisingly poetic and emotional reviews. The game and its story resonate with people in a way that I didn’t anticipate. Because of this, what was originally going to be a simple analysis of musical motifs has become a bit deeper, exploring art and interpretation, which may give you insight as to how and why I write music. Of […]

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I Love Novels 2: more random book recommendations

April 3, 2015 by Ben

I may play lots of games and and work in game development, but books were my first passion. Nothing grabs a hold of my mind like a well-written story, and some of my fondest memories are of reading Lord of the Rings or Michael Crichton as an early teenager. I wrote some other recommendations a while back, and I can’t seem to stop myself from abusing my power as a well-read blogger to tell you about stuff I like. In what’s sure […]

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Question Time Part 1 – chords, impostor syndrome, and Dungeons & Dragons

March 18, 2015 by Ben

A couple months ago I started an account on Ask.fm, a site where people can anonymously ask you questions on any subject. Very quickly, I got far more questions than I was expecting, and most of them were great. I thought I would reprint some of the really useful answers (with a few edits for clarity) here on the blog, so that they have a permanent spot for my readers. If you’d like to ask me something, just go to […]

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My favorite games of 2014

December 30, 2014 by Ben

I figured everyone else is doing it, why not me? Some of these are obvious, but my hope is that you’ll discover something here you might not have otherwise checked out. Titanfall I think I put more hours into Titanfall than on anything else on this list. The last online shooter I really played was Quake 3, but I was surprised at how little adjustment I needed to fit in with this game. It is so delightfully complicated, with so many […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: games, notmusic

Color Sky – Remaking an old track – Part 1

December 2, 2014 by Ben

The very first track of Color Sky, Dusty Road, is actually a remake of a much older piece I made back in 2005. Back then I was using only physical hardware to make sounds. Here’s what I had: My 700mhz PC A copy of Cubase SE A Korg microKorg A Korg ES-1 drum machine The original Dusty Road was pretty ambitious for me at the time. Up to that point, most of my music was very ambient and abstract. Part […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Color Sky, music production

My live music plan

November 11, 2014 by Ben

As you probably know by now, I’ve written a ton of music. In the last ten years, I’ve written and produced over two hundred finished pieces. I consider myself to be pretty experienced in the music-making field. Despite all this, I’ve never once performed in a live show. This is something I’ve always been a little ashamed of, mostly because of the mild stigma that comes with being an electronic musician (“real music isn’t made with computers!” I’m sure you’ve […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: live music, music production

Color Sky – How I composed Metro Molecule

September 29, 2014 by Ben

As you may know by now, I’m working on a standalone electronic album called Color Sky, made to be thoughtful, dreamlike and groovy. In the last post I talked about the inspirations for the album. This week I’m going to go in depth into Metro Molecule, and reveal a bit about my composition process. Here’s the track so you can follow along. Emancipator First of all, Metro Molecule is a deliberate attempt to emulate the style of Emancipator, or at […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Color Sky, composition, music production

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