So we have a new CD in the works. It is sort of like what I was doing here, but it is on this other hosting site. It is much nicer:
As you can see it is pleasant to look at and similarly it is great for me. The benefits are: you guys get to see a wonderful new player complete with screensaver/visualization mode. So you get to enjoy full albums and songs while enjoying wonderful moving backgrounds. At least I think it does that... it should... I seem to remember putting that in there. Anywho...
The benefits for me is that I get to see how popular certain tracks are, and collect statistics on the frequency of songs played. And most of all, you can listen on your iPhones now. Right from this website if you browse here with your phone.
Music has been created and the uploads have been sparse. I will be attempting to add more music like I had been, but I have been pretty jaded with the hacking at the home office of the music. So I wanted to make sure I kept the reliance on that site very low. However, I realize that with a server and no reliance I am paying for nothing for $$$ a year.
Coming soon I will be reverting back to the old Following Satellites.com site. However like all things the site will be changing. From the unnamed players to players with the song names and the frequent stat checking technology I would like to have at my disposal. Also we will be having some great new features. The updates will be noted on the blog site. I have yet to fully design the new sites with my coding abilities as they are quite truncated. My old copy of Dreamweaver from college has gone missing, and I do not have enough money for the new version. So if anyone has a copy of that laying around I would LOVE a copy so I can start building a little faster than typing a single word, and then looking back at a website to see if I can go to the next word yet.
I have also been learning a bunch of JQuery to start building in that. Frankly, it is very confusing since I do not do it for a job and I have to learn by reading online and have no one to ask questions to. I suppose I could post in forums but I am terrible at speaking questions that I mean instead of making up questions that are irrelevant to what I really want to know. Cause frankly, I have no idea the right questions to ask.
So, the goal in the next month is to build a wonderful new Following Satellites.com site (not built yet 3-2-2011). With a collection of youtube videos in a special player and to have a bunch of our songs listed on the site in plain view for listening and listening in a jukebox type player.
With that said: I will not be making any more promises as I am already in WAY over my head with all the things I would like to have made, and I would like more to have been building them instead of talking about them. The downside is my Chrome laptop can type and update, but it cannot webdesign. Unless anyone knows of a web-based site builder that I can code and upload to my site using just the browser then I need to find a better way to build.
And now with THAT said: I have sheets and sheets of papers to make the best of what I have currently.
Here are some of the videos that we were talking about! Oh wait, did I not talk about them? If you are following us on the Following Satellites Facebook page then you already know about them, but if you do not yet follow that page, then I implore you to start following it now! And also you would have not seen these videos yet. So without further adieu:
This video is of the first practice we have had with our new drummer. The camera is a simple canon that badman walked around with for a second and then placed on a speaker. The rest is all captured with the tiny microphone on the camera. The drummer is playing this song for the first time that day. I think this one goes pretty well. Badman sounds like a recording, but rest assured he was there and making those sounds legitimately. Anyway this is the song we are launching our*single* as: No One at Your Door. You can find this for free download in pretty much any format you can think of at http://followingsatellites.bandcamp.com
This video is a continuation of the preceding video the camera is still sitting on the speaker and still recording. I forgot it was there and I forgot even more that it was recording. So I did not even notice when Badman picked it up to turn it off. This song is Empty Particles. It is a staple and if you have seen us play live, it was done last time acoustically, but it sounds so much more fun with the drums. The slowdown you might notice in the video is from the drummer and bassist following each other and then the rest of us responding to the slowing by slowing ourselves as we are good metronome followers. It is pretty funny how we can be so lead by the beat in music. Also I attempt to make a note that I just could not get to without warming up the voice. It made me laugh, hopefully it makes you laugh too!
Look forward to all this type of information on the new updated http://Followingsatellites.com/blog page. That will be soon, but again, I will need to find or buy a copy of Dreamweaver to make the speedy recovery and speedy updates I like to make.
It has been near an eon since I have been able to get back to this blog! I apologize, but I have been out of internet for some time and I have just recently received this blessed thing back into my house. With that said, there has been some dropping of the ball, and changes in the making.
For a review I can start with the stages of the "band." We have members, but we are spread thin like a pad of butter on sixty miles of dry toast. We have a new drummer though in the works. I think you will like him/her. They have been on the team for near the beginning but we never thought to use them in a live setting.
Our search for a completion to the band has been hard and the distance for the creeping along of the band has left me sort of ragged. I spend a lot of time creating and encouraging (in the way I encourage (belligerent nagging and living what I expect from others to do to me)) and hoping that we make is something about which we can be proud instead of music for the sake of money.
I am not alone in my desires, but the actual purpose is starting to escape me and I am not able to handle the demand for basic music. I want incredible and earth shattering and I have only been producing puzzles of music and complex designs unfinished and unposted. The very basics of music we have started to polish up and I am finding that I am struggling to make myself power through older stuff that isn't down right perfect. So I need to change a few things to make them more exciting; To the chagrin of the Badman. I think he will be fine with it in the long run, but the growing pains are becoming very real and some what painful... as it were.
As a month in review I have been slowing down because I am losing my roots, straying too far from my muse and wellsprings. So, I am going to go back to them and work on only music that Badman sends down to me for our project and leave the rest of the creation to my side projects. Places where I don't expect constant toiling and constant creativity from anyone but myself and I am free to be as daring as I want with music that might fail or be odd, but I will be fulfilled by it.
I am not the lead singer for Following Satellites and I need to remember that and leave the lyrics up to the Badman for the FS projects. So expect from us a lot more hip hop if Badman is up to it.
From now on I think this blog will be used for my experiments and like noted above my scratch pad for musics which are not Following Satellites productions. This will be again: The Ehk'olite (featuring BadmanJ)
As far as Followings Satellites is concerned visit: http://FollowingSatellites.com That should give you the best impression of work we are doing as a team. The production will be a lot nicer than this stuff, and the songs should be coming much more slowly there, but they might end up being of a higher quality. (Your preferences may vary)
For the BadmanJ in all his glory, check out http://badmanj.blogspot.com If that is not up yet, I will beg from the BadmanJ to get it working.
Howdy! We have a Blog up at http://FollowingSatellites.com/blog It contains a bit about us. As a Band called the Following Satellites. This will continue to be a Scratch pad of information and music for the band but recently we have been working on getting the songs up to par with that of what we want. So that means less new stuff and more of the same older stuff but made better. So far we have been working a lot on the No one At Your Door song, and trying to get that right. The BadmanJ has been with the condenser mic for a week or so now so those lyrics should be tightened up soon. And the other stuff I should be recording will be up as soon as the Badman get his stuff together.
Thank you all for listening and exploring our music. I must say I have been having a great time making everything for everyone, and I am sure the same could be said from Badman. But I'll not put words in his mouth.
I did not write anything of worth tonight but tomorrow I am hoping for a more exciting musical night. I wrote some stuff, but the music was less than 30 seconds long and fairly uninteresting so I am leaving it off for tonight.
The process tomorrow should knit together better.
Look forward to giving you move music on the morrow.
Hi ya! I am terribly sorry about shorting you guys out on music recently! But if you have not already heard, we have a band now! The name of the band is Following Satellites! Come over and visit us on our new website! FollowingSatellites.com You might recognize a few songs.
Right now we have been working diligently as a band trying to get together all of us and crank out some good old fashioned hits in the form of songs.
I have not been over here in some time, but I am scratching together other songs in the mean time I will get on this site in a few days, but for the most part I have been really hard at work perfecting the other songs for the show we have.
That is right, a show! October 15th, 2010! At Gullifty's Underground. Come see us play. The whole gang will be there: The Ehkolite, BadmanJ, Muzz, BoneJob, and Jmac.
Rap, Rock, and a whole lot of red and white! Come out and get a button or sign up for a post card mailing list!
For the Audio broadcast of the text below, please click this button!
Greetings fellow lovers of music!
We had a short break due to some silliness with viruses on the internet. My computer got hijacked and beat up pretty badly. Browsing for hard drives none the less! My virus protection did only so much. But it snuck in through a Sun Java hole. It ate up my hard drive and corrupted my windows system. So... I could not keep the computer on for more than 10 minutes. Then poof!
Any way, so that happened. Luckily I use a program called Dropbox which i SEVERELY recommend. It is how we work on music together to make all this stuff. It holds all your files in a cloud above the computer and stores it on their servers, and on any computer that your Dropbox is installed. Therefore, I kept 25gigs of our music safe. The other stuff, I need to recover safely some place other than my current computer.
Yes, yes, I should go to Mac, but to be quite honest, Mac is not yet ready to use the programs and interfaces I use for making music. As a matter of fact, the main program I use is only in beta on the Mac now.
So, virus aside, I could not work on anything on the internet. So I could not post any music since then. I guess the 27th of July. But I have not stopped working. This means, you may not even see this post on the main page of the site due to the large volume of music I am going to lay down on the site today. The iTunes podcast is going to get a HUGE update as well. Some of the music is vocal laden, one of them is an eighteen minute freestyle with no music from BadmanJ. I was thinking about posting them all starting today and giving a buffer, but I do not want an excuse to slack off and not be making music for a single day, so I am going to drown you in music now, and keep adding new stuff in the coming days.
The past weekend, due to a postponing of my near cross country trip to Wisconsin due to a work related schedule conflict, I spent some time in Lancaster with the boys and we cleaned up and made a few pretty awesome songs. Full lyrics, full band sound, and just a few little glitches but we are going to be practicing these things, and use them as live music with all of the group together so they are more like photographs of where we want to be. I know you will like them, as I am a big fan. Especially Justification. One of the only songs on the site with a chorus.
Well, I am off to do some serious programming to get everything a working. And remember all that stuff I was talking about near a month ago. It is coming together swimmingly. We will have some good news in the next two months. Come October, we will be ready for some good stuff, and something pretty huge I am hoping to have all worked out. How is that for mysterious. Bite your nails and drink coffee afraid to fall asleep in case you might miss it.
Ehk'olite out.
PS: I did not write down all the information in every song like I usually do for the past seventeen songs at least, so the information under above the song will be sparing, but if there are lyrics involved, they will be posted, so you guys on the iPods and iPhones will be able to read the lyrics with the song playing if you have iTunes Podcasts coming at you.
I welcomed to the world today a new band mate: a wonderful new white guitar! Now I can make more music! So I put together a song called On Fire But Under.
I wanted to remind everyone that this is a sketch book of music. On the back burner we have a good thing a-growin. When it is ready you will be first to be aware! I have a lot of programming to do, and a lot of re-recording to do. But I am excited enough to be excited but not stop working on it due to excitement.
All the songs you are hearing (As a near milestone: we have posted nearly 200 songs just this year! And every day this month we have posted a near full song a day.) here are just demonstrations of the work we are doing. The team as we are is breaking into creating some things that are just good fun. We have new equipment and we have new ambitions. This month of songs is just a good water mark of what we are capable of creating within set limits, and so far it has been in a lot of peoples opinions a bit of success, albeit still fledgling. The work put into songs for the output are pretty much a full on 100% gain in efficiency. A full lyrical set, and a full guitar set, and a full drum set, and coming soon full bass set. I would say we have a lot of work. I'm not kidding! A LOT of work to pull together something that will really make the rounds on people's mp3 players with any regularity. But I am confident that we are up to the challenge. I'm running at full speed again after a small break and I will hopefully be bringing this type of energy to the project for years to come.
The guys seem ready to run too, so keep checking back for updates and I will get out 30 songs this month to satisfy my longing to prodigiously generate song ideas. Next month: we get down to business. The first thing on the block is a list of our "top rated" songs with links to the music, then we are taking a poll for your favorites out of the ones we have chosen. Then comes the hard work, but the most rewarding. We will be rewriting lyrics, perhaps adding completely different lyrics, or just rewording things that have not been sitting with us. Polishing up the guitar and drums. Adding live mixes into the fray. Better recordings of words (read: air conditioner off, and use of condenser mic), tighter note control, and quicker changes. Also maybe some YouTube videos of the bunch of us putting together music.
Once we have everything rolled out, I have a secret project that is really (if I finish it) going to a visual experience. I would not expect that for about three months or more.
Again these are grand plans, but the real work has just begun and I am not going to count my chickens before I finish this month. But who ever wants to start running with me, start your engines... this is going to be a hell of a ride!
Hey there loyal following. I have terrible news. I, no longer, can make music. I'm sorry if this is upsetting to you, but things have become unusable and broken. So until things become fixed, I cannot make anything new. The BadmanJ might do somethings, but he tends to be busy.
I'm sorry I could not get a full month of tunes to you with lyrics in each day. Rest assured I have at least five in the hopper, but like I said, they are unable to be created.
So we have a bunch of new songs to post tonight, however: The disk on which we keep the songs is full. So until the server disk gets moved to another machine, we are stuck at this many songs. Awesome... Well we will be alright, that will not stop us from working, but the song posts will be stashed away until the server move which I am initiating tonight with an email.
I am working on harder things trying to polish them up. Secondly, I am working on older songs to put together a best of these 145 songs posted online. Both of these things are taking my time up. Also I am working on the acoustic versions of the songs so we can start playing places without the use of massive computer assistance.
BadmanJ is working on writing to a few of the songs. One of which is Incredulous. We like that song a lot and that translates to acoustic very well.
So we will be holding off on posting new things for a couple of days, or else I will drop a few random things on here, or post up a few older pieces you may not have heard. Keep checking as I will try to update with tabs, or signatures of songs. We are also thinking about doing something like an interview on here. Videotaped or just audio I have not decided.
We are still moving our feet for action, but we just got mired in the sacrifice part of doing something worth doing. So I am sacrificing my daily post so I can be more productive on things of past.
Enjoy the back log! Check out November of last year and go forward. It will be great to see the amount of growth we have achieved.
Looks like we missed a night due to my abuse of prescription sleeping pills and a bottle of liquor. Meanwhile BadmanJ overdosed on grapes and fell victim to choking due to the surplus of unchewed grape flesh left in the throat after failing to swallow said poorly chewed grapes.
No that is not true, but we did miss a night due to slow connections on the computer. Tonight though we have a few items to post. One a dance song, and another a drummed version of an older song, and something I just made tonight.
The Badman and I are going to be gone for the rest of the week and will not be able to update any information. I might send a post, but probably not. I will catch up with you when I get back and in the mean time enjoy some of the classic hits!
Hey guys, it has been quite some time since we posted. We have been working on some good stuff. And I have been living like a rock star. So that sort of cut into my posting schedule. Don't worry we are back on track now. Even more we have a twitter account on which you can follow us. More on that later. Or you can search out the Ehkolite.
Ok, so the goal of the night: Post all the new songs. I will do just that and if I want to go back and fill in the description I will. I hardly remember the stuff I used, I have it documented however.
Gather round and take a listen and by the way: I love the song Twisted ver2. It is so 80's hair metal.
I took some time tonight to just read and be inspired by music and geniuses of the world. Frankly, I was just empty tonight in a wonderful but odd way. I wanted to write a song that was 9/8 mixed with 3/4 tonight. I got pretty far, but I was stunted by the recording glitching up a lot and the composition. I had a sound in my head, but the actual recording was not right, and if you did not know what I wanted yet you would be confused by the noises. So I am saving that piece for later until it is better.
I read a bunch of Wikipedia articles tonight too. I am glad to have had this night to work on getting refreshed. Not that my music is draining, but it is nice to take a moment to reset. It has been a heck of a run. From this James Beat 12 to Ghosts it has been quite a bunch of fun. I am very glad to have you all aboard listening.
The future goals for the band are to continue to gather the parts of us that are most sensitive to light and bring them out to examine in the form of music and to present the members of the band with an image that we can face as a real thing instead of a personal clock, ticking slowly down into a moment of depression or loss.
There are a few additions to the mix coming soon I hope. I am not committing them yet, but they are peeking over the horizon. Just over it, like jumping fish. Jumping fish catching damselflies.
If you have not heard we are currently searchable on iTunes. That is a lot of fun.
Not tonight! I was working on other things, and then when I started working on some music things sort of did not come together like they should have, so I have two songs, that are pretty poorly made that I felt uncomfortable putting in the juke box or on the flash player. But if you want to still listen to them, I will post them on here in link form.
For the future we are working on big things here at the Ehk'olite. Look forward to them. In the mean time, enjoy what we have up on the site already and thank you again for checking us out!
So I am trying to get a player to work so we can just stream all the songs in one place, but I am having difficulties. The guys at Big Contact are assisting me, and hopefully we will have this corrected tomorrow.
The Song Ghosts is nearly complete as well. The final stages of mixing are in order, but we are going to wait until this weekend to finalize it. So either we will mix it up or scrap it and start again with new vocal placement and new guitar. Same basic design, just different placement of the music.
I am still working on Pineapple in my free time between work and working on Ghosts. But for the rest of the week, I am letting go of Ghosts so I can play some more songs, and work harder on the ones I am leaning towards polishing up.
Tonight I will leave you with a pretty crazy version of the final song. It is mixed to death with super effects and oddities I could find in our program. Enjoy!
Mind you, this one is called MixDeath. As in the death of mixing. LIsten with head phones or good speakers to be thoroughly disappointed! Hahahahaha!!!
Don't worry this weekend we will have the nearly complete one posted for you.
This song is such a wonderful song in my head. I need to get it just right but for tonight I have only a snippet as the majority of tonight's music was replays and parts of songs and nothing really 'finished' well as finished as they usually get on this site. But recently, and by that I mean tonight, BadmanJ and I have started to bring out the polish and shine on the songs we have already recorded and posted here. To name a few of the ones we are doing: Pour, Gravity, Pineapple, Incredulous, Ghosts, Ribbons. So new music will be mostly little snippets like tonight. The main work will be on cleaning up and refining the stuff we are most excited about. Plus there are a lot of chords, strumming patterns and lyrics to suss out and get ready for presentation. Some of the songs will be changing slightly but the cores will be there. Mostly the things changing are the little strum hiccups I make and some of the 'lead' guitar parts will change to adapt for a longer version of a song. We got the new speakers tonight so we are ready to mix professionally now with a very neutral sound stage.
But about this song Pineappple: It has a 500ms delay on it with a slight cavernous reverb. It is mostly action style playing with no hand resting from sliding up and down the strings. You can kind of pick that up from the delay string slide sounds. The rhythm guitar is three different chords with varying strum patterns. No amp, though I tried the plezio but I did not like the texture of the sound that came out. The open guitar worked a lot better for my ears. Enjoy, this is very short. is a 5 second delay before the music kicks in when you hit the play button.
