New Monday #90
Happy Monday -
We’ve spent the past few weeks in 1975, but now we’re back to the future.
We released a new plug-in last week—apologies for the tease! Chocolate Milk is its name, making things sound better is its game.
The Chocolate Milk Gooderizer
Our new plug-in is a Gooderizer. It makes anything you stick through it sound gooder. Better. It gives you the flavor of analog tape with none of the downsides, and more control.
How does it do this? It splits the audio into three bands and processes each band differently.
The low end goes through something called MOO, which is saturation to add bottom-end thickening and warmth. I wrote about this last week, didn’t I??? Ya put a little MOO on things and BOOM! Instant bigger butt.
The midrange goes into the SQUISH, which is a compressor. What this allows you to do is add some of the squashiness of tape compression without the loss of transients. SQUISH it a bit and your signal sounds a bit more punchy and defined. For me, this was always where analog tape fell down: if you hit it too hard the signal might get thicker but the punch and liveliness would diminish.
The highs get the FROTH, which is a shelving EQ using a vintage Baxandall EQ curve. It allows you to add a sweet, natural sparkle to things.
The net result is Chocolate Milk simply makes anything you run through it sound great, in a way similar to but better than tape. The front panel has easy controls; flip around to the back for a lot more options and sonic tweakery.
Michael at Colorful Tones studio made a walkthrough video. Check it out on YouTube here.
What’s it good for? Everything. Get a demo and see for yourself. We will be releasing videos on it for the next few days.
Peter Baxandall
You’ve heard the name Baxandall tossed around. Peter Baxandall was a brilliant engineer who came up with his EQ circuit in 1950. Rather than patent it and make money on licensing, he published it in Wireless World magazine. His circuit sounded great, and was inexpensive and easy to make. It spread across audio like wildfire and it’s found everywhere—home hi-fi systems, car stereos, audio consoles, guitar amps, plug-ins, Chocolate Milk, etc. The Baxandall EQ is one of the great innovations in audio engineering.
AI Updates
Our favorite boogieman is back. I’m not sure this is good news or bad, but...
George R.R. Martin, the author of the book series A Song of Ice and Fire (better known perhaps by the TV series Game of Thrones) has been given the thumbs up, along with a handful of other modern literary heavyweights, to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement. Were they using AI to write the books for the series that George so far hasn’t delivered, or perhaps just a rewrite of Season Eight??? Read the article and find out!
More specifically to music: if you’re writing and dealing with ASCAP, BMI & SOCAN, there are some updates regarding registering compositions made partially with AI... whatever that might actually mean, how it might be proven...
Ai yai yai... Here’s a press release regarding this.
Here’s an attorney explaining this.
Louis Cole
Who is Louis Cole, you might wonder? Only a DAMN GENIUS. An udder creative maniac. Udder in homage to Chocolate Milk.
Trained as a jazz drummer, he’s a multi-instrumentalist and composer who releases music under his name, with a group he formed called Knower, and a duo called Clown Core. Musically, he’s all over the place, mixing jazz, avant-garde, trip hop, R&B, free jazz, video game soundtracks, classical, electronic music, whatever. Orchestras, choruses, 8-bit synths, jazz drums, funk beats, atonality, all at once. And it’s catchy. Some of it’s gorgeous.
He loves to record in his house—here’s a video of him performing live with singers, a rhythm section on the stairs and in the bathroom, a full horn section in the living room, a keyboardist in the kitchen with the keyboard on the stove. He’s on the porch with the singers. Amazing bunch of players. And they’re having so much fun!
For Louis Cole, fun seems the key to everything.
The fun, and creativity, flows everywhere. He and his friends/co-conspirators make insane videos, directed by Louis Cole and often featuring his very bizarre choreography. He works with next to no budget, but it doesn’t seem to faze him. God, I love this guy. He’s tremendously inspiring.
If there’s one video to watch this year, this is it. Watch the whole thing. You must.
Words don’t do this guy justice.
Louis Cole - his latest album, which is unclassifiable. It’s his best quality recording to date.
Nothing was cut with the Metropole Orkest, a hybrid pop/jazz/classical orchestra out of The Netherlands. Excellent players, perfectly suited to Mr Cole’s insanity.
That’s all for now. Y’all enjoying Chocolate Milk?
Warm regards,
Luke