Ted James
Rudolf 8-Bit Me
Have a Seat on my Holiday Chair
A Lo-Fi gift to you!
19 plays
Listening to The 8bits of Christmas and decorating the tree.
Decorating our majestic white pine with rad new bulbs and listening to X-mas in Frisko on Soma.FM.
Hollow (Demo)
I don’t want to grow up
Don’t want to live for real
I Don’t want to have a coffee cup or office meals
Don’t want to talk a bout the market or the stock exchange
I don’t want to have to talk about your bad day
Filed in: Ted James music electronic
49 plays
Paper Eagles (Version 20081202)
Dying to be cryptic in art - Opposite of life
Convinced I’m on the steel table waiting for the knife
And you might do good to hold on for longer than you can
Reread your inhibitions that you drew out in the sand
A million others offer up another fallen sky
I’d like to take a number but the queue is getting high
Preparing for the last day only opens up the door
If I was breathing in the vapors I’d be out for sure
In every single issue of this magazine I die
I wish for silly little things that I can never try
Knock me over, pick me up and leave me on the shelf
There’s never any apex when you know the way it ends
A million paper eagles strung from one end of the fan
The blades and I are spinning and it’s getting out of hand
To overcome a lifetime of a lifetime of a lie
I’m breaking pencils at my desk and I’m still only 5
Filed in: music ted james providence electronic
78 plays
Filed in: ted james hills & valley providence music drone ambient electronic
Updates?
Yes. Lots. Music related? No, not really.
I have kinda been slacking in the production corner lately. I’ve been busy with shows and general life stuff. Excuses. Excuses. I will have some time this week to hopefully square away a few more tunes to get a proper demo together. Check out the ones selected thus far (they are right in the header, no matter where you are on this site) and leave me some comments with your feedback.
I have decided to pick up where I left off with the Hills & Valley series. After my 2 most recent performances (which both went very smoothly) I have gotten excited to further explore the Hills & Valley sound and process. I’ll be doing VIII - XIII in the second series. I am also exploring means to get the original 7 releases pressed to CD and/or vinyl.
Filed in: How To vocals auto-tune ted james logic psp audioware macbook music electronic music<script type=
“How do you make your voice sound like that?”
I get this question a lot, so I figured I would take a stab at actually explaining it.
For Hello, I recorded 3 vocal layers all through the built-in mic on my MacBook. Two of which were in my normal speaking pitch, and one an octave up.
I put a noise gate on all three channels and a spreader on each of the lower octave takes. The stereo spreaders allow you position the track in the spectrum which work great in conjunction with the pans. I let one channel lean to the left so you could better hear there were a few of me in there.
I wanted to make this sound mostly human so I went easy on the pitch-correction (auto-tune) and only applied it to the falsetto track. To make the falsetto track step from note to note I set the response speed to fast. Since I was recording this while sitting on my couch with a beer in my hands, I turned off the D#, F# and G#, where my voice accidentally slid to a few times. It’s actually these little mistakes that let the pitch-corrector work it’s magic, so to speak. When the response time is turned all the way up these “mistakes” force the corrector to jitter between allowed notes, struggling to avoid the notes that have been turned off. You can use this method to get those Lil’ Wayne vocals that must cost him so much. I detuned the track a bit too, just to give it a bit of harmonic tension since all my notes were now proper accurate. Fuck accuracy.
Now for the fun part. I have each of the 3 vocal layers each routed to 3 separate channels, the main out for each track all routes to Bus 13. Bus 2, 3, and 6 all have some form of delay effects to compression to EQ and a stereo spread before hitting the master. I’m not going to get too into revealing my trade secrets here, but the idea is to set up a few bus channels with different types of effects on each and then route those bus channels to different bus channels. Most of the bus channels that I set up resolve at bus 13.
Bus 13 runs everything through a standard Logic compressor and a lightly driven tape emulator (PSP Mix Saturator - Part of the PSP Mix Pack). It runs through a few more of Logic’s standard dynamics processors, some more EQ and then out to the master.
Yesterdays (9/28/2008 edit)
Its been nearly a decade
Now its so far away
I’m still having those flashbacks man
I had had one today
I can still smell that greenhouse
See that smile on your face
We had some good days
Then they locked you away
Thats the funny thing about yesterdays
The feelings close but you can’t reach
The only thing that you can change is your mind
I remember it clearly
I’m sure you do the same
We stayed up for a month straight
Just making drum and bass
I got high and that keyboard
Smashed all over the place
I still have the cassette tapes that
We made for that rave
(True story)
Thats the funny thing about yesterdays
The feelings close but you can’t reach
The only thing that you can change is your mind
Filed in: ted james paper eagels electronic providence music
50 plays
Coma
I have been working on Coma since January. From a workload perspective it’s a monster. There are so many parts that it is becoming more and more difficult to manage and master. This is the most recent version as of today, and at this point is all running live (MIDI). The only pre-recorded parts are my vocals. At this point, most of the lyrics in place. I did manage to add the bridge last night, but am still shy a few verses.
Hey now
I can see you standing there
Yeah it’s a wonder I’m not dead
I’ve been laid out here for days, I guess
I can’t seem to move myself
That seems hardly different from any any other day I’m dealt
And as far as I can tell there is no Heaven or Hell
Which is fine with me
I couldn’t stand to think that I’d be going somewhere else
All my preconceived notions realized
Secretly hoping every night
To wake up feeling something
To wake up feeling nothing somewhere else
Even after I’ve been silenced We’ll be looking back on where the time went
Fingers crossed and eyes defiant
Always thinking there’s a way to find it
Filed in: ted james music coma new album better off ted
31 plays
Filed in: ted james so strange providence music electronic
So Strange (Remix)
I brought So Strange back for my last show and couldn’t help but tweak it a bit.
Here is the most recent version, complete with halftime breakdown and Lil Wayne “Lollipop” style vocal processing.
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