wanted to put a last post on here letting anyone that’s interested know that i’ll be posting future updates as to my creative endeavors over at my newly designed blog and portfolio space.  blog here: http://jaredsmyth.info/main – and portfolio here: http://jaredsmyth.info

uprlip will remain as an archive online indefinitely. 
thanks again to anyone who read/commented/listened… hope to hear from you at the new site.

-jared

well, i’m done!  2011 saw a post each day from me on uprlip.  as i was putting the video above together today i looked back through the archive at all the posts… it overwhelmed me.  i felt accomplished in my goal and at the same time disappointed that some days weren’t as good as others… suffice to say that percentage-wise there’s not a whole lot from the archive that i would put on my portfolio.  that thought happened and then i was left with a decision:  option a, curate what would make the cut into today’s video based on what i thought was good enough and option b, include every single post as a factual document to what i actually created.  i went with option b: the video includes every photo posted to the blog throughout the year, as well as a randomly sliced fragment of every audio recording posted throughout the year.  what i realized (or remembered) is that this post-a-day goal, for me anyways, isn’t about every day being spectacular; rather it’s about the whole of the work… 365.  it reminded me that all the projects started and not yet finished (open source midi controller, etc, etc) are ok, they’re part of the 365 whole that is now finished.  it reminded me that the frequent and frantic 11:55pm posts of ‘just a picture of harper‘ were ok too because they, again, are part of the 365 whole.  it reminded me that, like life, art is about the good with the bad, the intentional with the unintentional, the plans versus the accidents…  it’s funny too, i think if i learned anything from setting out to, and then following through with this blog goal it’s that allowing things to happen as they will almost always works out better in the end than planning things out and then expecting circumstances to match up.

what’s next? as i see it now, uprlip will most likely remain active as solely an archive and i’ll go on documenting my creative work elsewhere.  things i’m looking forward to in 2012 are: focusing more on my illustration, design, photography, and visual arts in general. also, spending more time with harper and megan, less time on the internet (now that this is done), and more time reading things that i’ve been wanting to read for a while.

thank you for watching / reading / listening along with my year and especially to those of you who were frequent comment posters… a big thank you to you.  a simple comment was often more encouragement than you may know.

for new friends… old friends… friends i have yet to meet in person… friends i see every day… i feel happy to have you in my life.

much love to you all

- jared s

i can’t believe tomorrow is the last of my year-long daily posts.  flew by.  i knew i wanted to squeeze in one more 35mm post, before the year was up, and here it is.  shot on our drive back up from south florida over the christmas holiday on expired 200asa film with pentax k-1000.

goodnight all!  tune in tomorrow for day 365!!!

tiny sounds from a tiny drummer. sliced bits of a recording taken from a video on christmas morning of harper going to town on her new drum set.

this is from the ending to a new track that will be on an album from me released on the audio gourmet label early 2012.

*headphones suggested
tiny.drummer by jared smyth

beginning of a future series of postcards… maybe sometime next year.

3 more days!

simple, short test shoot with an intervalometer that i got as a gift from megan for christmas.

sounds recorded tonight with guitar, and a few delays.  time lapse : 1 exposure per 10 seconds for 1 hour

will definitely be doing more of these soon

goodnight all.

(- – -)

found image cutting.  home from vacation.  nice to be here again.

goodnight

drawn with a new wacom tablet megan got me as a gift today.  illustrator for lines, photoshop for colors.

hope all of you had a wonderful day with family and friends.  much love to you all.

as per megan’s family tradition at christmas, i attended with them my first catholic mass today.  the call and response chanting, and the general sense of foreboding fear and obligation that filled the room rather unnerved me…   it’s not that drastically different from the protestant faith services that i was brought up participating in, but even that would most definitely unnerve me as well now.  below is a recording from the service.

eerie. propaganda. religion is strange.

goodnight, and enjoy your holiday… however you celebrate it.

at the fradley’s (megan’s family) in south florida for the holiday.  took some time after my 3-hour nap today to play music outside by their pool

for: 2880, ebow, cb radio mic, piezo, and guitar

enjoy

drove down to megan’s family’s house in south florida today for the holidays.

a few sunset shots taken along the way.

goodnight.

just finished putting together a small run art edition for friends.  each comes with a polaroid shot on expired 600 film, and a data cd with a high resolution ‘wallpaper-sized’ polaroid image with a linoleum-block print by megan of a christmas ornament design she did just for this edition printed onto the disk, and four tracks of audio… two new pieces of music, and two tracks that were posted to uprlip at some point earlier in the year.  edition of 11 physical copies, for 11 friends.  below is one of the new tracks included in the physical edition.  enjoy.

goodnight!

741am by jared smyth

got three packs of polaroid 600 color film today.  the pack this shot came from expired in ’06.  they all have this same, gorgeous pink hue, and blotches of unexposed area.  incidental, random, beautiful.

goodnight.

first one of the year… well, except for this ill-timed / well-recorded one.

i always feel like i’ve really accomplished something worth my while when i build a fire.

goodnight.

new mm-cc post up!  session from last week with a couple friends.  we walked down to lafayette park with a few instruments and played an all acoustic session.  recorded on my field recorder, from about 20 feet away from where we were sitting in the park.

i shot the video today at the same location that i shot these photos at

enjoy!

goodnight

found a pack of forgotten shots today.  these were taken at the same time i shot the picture used for my thistle tee-shirt.  if i remember correctly it was on 400asa with my mamiya.

35mm shot of a white squirrel that i saw in the park a couple weeks ago, and unrelated to the white squirrel (unless you’d like it to be related… and then it is): new music.  a track i finished today for a new album from me coming out on audiogourmet.co.uk

on another note, i took a suggestion from a friend and deleted some of my older soundcloud tracks to make room for new ones.

for: electric guitar, classical guitar, and violin

burnout by jared smyth

decorated my parent’s christmas tree tonight.  harper had lots of fun running around putting ornaments on the branches

ball-point pen, & colored pencil.  for megan.

goodnight.

snapped this on my walk home from work today.  it was bright and cold.

tape loops today for my contribution to the upcoming digital-album from disquiet (http://disquiet.com) showcasing ambient music composed in correlation to images from instragram.  little sample of my progress below.

for: 6′ tape loop and 2′ tape loop of electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and a recording of 1/2″ tape rustling

snagged a couple new pentax k-mount lenses at a thrift shop today.

image above taken with canon digital, and the new 50mm 1.4

on another note: had a very wonderful mm-cc session this morning.  we walked down to the the park and recorded with acoustic instruments only, no electricity but the field recorder used to document it.  should be up soon.

a long time coming on this one.  if you’ve been following my progress throughout this year, you may remember the series of old man illustrations i did earlier on in the year… if not, here are the rest: 1, 2, 3, 4

this one’s a little different than the others in the series.  i’m happy with it that way though.  i intended to put a mouth on him, but i got to this point and just really liked it without one.

as i’m getting close to the end of this blog goal i’ve been looking back through my archive of posts for loose ends… seeing if there are things i want to finish up before the year is over.  t-minus 21 days!

found image graphic treatment.

recorded some tonight for an album that i’m playing drums on for the band, bluejay (http://bluejaysongs.com/).  i forget how much i love drumming because i don’t do it nearly as much as i used to.  here’s a short section of drums i’m particularly happy with from the song ‘request line.’

found image cutting.

goodnight.

evening of guitar & cassette loop explorations.  delay, volume pedal, and guitar.

freehand long exposure shots of the trees at lafayette park tonight.

enjoy.  this will be the last of my soundcloud posts for the year as i’m out of free minutes on there, and as much as i enjoy getting comments and ‘hearts’ on there, can’t justify spending money on something i can do for free on my own site, sans the social ego stroking that s.c. offers.

scraping.the.sky by jared smyth

been working off/on for a few months now on putting together a collection of my live recordings and releasing them.  home sick from work today so… naturally instead of relaxing like i probably should i took some time to finish these, and design the artwork for them.  the cover is a collection of photos, one from each location featured on the album.

tracks are:

New York City, NY – In/Out Fest 2010

Minneapolis, MN – Honey Lounge 2011

Tallahassee, FL – Engine Room 2011

& Jacksonville, FL – The Vault Gallery 2011

click here to download the collection if you like, or click the image above.

enjoy.

for: guitar, 2880 looper, cassette loops, kalimba, and found objects : recorded to 4-track cassette

*click here to see larger if you like

beautiful walk this morning recording sounds and snapping pictures.  these are some of my favorites of this tree that i’ve been passing every afternoon for a couple weeks on my walk home from work and thinking about photographing.

crops of three different shots at different times during the sunset in tallahassee tonight.  it was one of the prettiest i’ve seen in a while.  i love the grain that iphone photos have.  one day everyone will have cameras that make perfect, non-grainy photos… that’ll suck.

put this moss terrarium together today out of a mason jar and some moss i found on my walk home from work.  hanging squarely over our kitchen sinks.  the cradle i built out of 24 gauge copper strand.  washing dishes will be a little nicer now…. a little

silence.  a short, short story.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

nineteen people in a small, nicotine hot-boxed room.  eyes lilting downward to laps sprinkled in ash.  eye contact was made and then quickly averted.  left leg over right, adjust ass position… invert and repeat.
a man with a peacoat over his lap removed his wallet that bulged of old receipts and tossed it to the ground beneath his folding chair.  he was in the right-leg-over-left phase of the cycle. the receipts in the wallet were retained indefinitely out of a belief that they would someday help the authorities solve his murder.  the detectives would piece them back together into a cohesive map of his last month of buying…

“jones.  this man was a spearmint gum chewer, bought a pack each wednesday.  pass me that coffee.  call homicide.  tell your wife i need you late today.”

the walls were covered in panelling.  dingy faux wood grain for two feet, separated by an eighth inch strip of dark brown fibrous wood that screamed of the splinters that would wedge between the grooves in your fingerprints, if only your finger were small enough to fit into the crevice.  the grandaddy longlegs of the panelling world.  this type had come to popularity in the 1970’s, it had been installed in ‘68… ahead of the game.  then someone in charge stopped caring.  it remained unchanged ever since, save for turning a darker shade of yellow-brown each year.  perhaps on cycle with the fall leaves.  no one knows.

for four complete minutes there was silence.  you can’t buy that drug.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

peregrine falcon illustration for megan.

photo taken with my yashica 1c, and a graphic overlay done in illustrator. sketching out some ideas today for future album covers.

new music from my project with hunter pittman.  ’9511′
hunter played very minimal cello on this (we think… can’t quite remember what went into this recording… it was a few months back)
& i played everything else.

two holes in the silver dollar today.  grateful.

9511 by this town right now

white to move.  mate in one.

first reply with correct move gets their choice of my thistle teeshirt – or a copy of senescence on cassette + download.

graphic treatment to a photograph from the lake yesterday, and a one minute piece of music for rhodes, and a room mic.  thinking of writing / releasing an album of 40 tracks, one minute run time each, with one forty-minute long field recording spanning, unedited the full 40 tracks… thoughts?

take a listen below.

Oneminute by jared smyth

megan, alphie (the ausie shepherd above), and i took a post-dinner, pre-nap walk down to the lake near my parents house this afternoon.  it was so peaceful & beautiful.

recording above taken on my phone at the lakeside.

happy thanksgiving all!

today i’m thankful for my two beautiful ladies, & the wonderful year i’ve had so far.

hand drawn, photographed, photoshop’ed, -> hated : vectorized, removed data, removed more… liked.  subtraction is better than addition.

i got to bring a violin home from work recently.  i have never experimented with one before today, and decided to sit down and try to make something pretty with it.  i used my 2880 looper, and a cb radio mic to record (hence the title… it gets pretty fuzzy).  no other instruments or effects.

life hands you lemons… you make lemonade.  yesterday my trusty 3gs iphone took its last spill, and the screen completely shattered.

here, in raw, unedited (beware the loudness) form are a few select recordings taken with the phone over the time i had it.  unintentionally i was creating an aural documentary of the time… pieces of my life captured in sound.  bits of harper crying when she was much younger, circuit bent casio keyboards, rain, bus rides, guitar melodies, just life.  here it is for you to enjoy.

released as cc sharealike (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).  by all means re-purpose this collection, or bits of this collection as you like.

download link for the ‘album’ here: download here

well… shit

for: guitar, free bells, framed bells, toy keyboard, & lemon/black/matte tea

enjoy the track, and if you haven’t tried that particular combo of teas i highly suggest that you do so.

 
half asleep, tea brewing in the other room by jared smyth
 

wacom-drawn self portrait.  lots of these flying at you recently… i know, i know.  just happy i got my wacom working again.

it’s friday, two weeks done at the new job, and my parents have harper until the morning… date night with my lady starts now!

found image cutting, and wacom-drawn vector overlays.

“tents in the sky…. keep your ass dry.”

one could just as easily substitute ‘fly’ for ‘dry’… it’s a modular slogan

i think it would sell.

investors?

some photos taken this week and last on my bus ride to work every morning.  i can’t quite say i’m enjoying getting up this early (6am) everyday yet, but at least it makes for some nice meditative time on the bus, and good lighting for photos.

45 more days of posts and i’ll have met my goal for one straight year of daily posts.  what will it feel like to be done?  i imagine that it will feel a lot like sleeping… because that is exactly what i’ll be doing with my extra time, and… in fact that’s what i’m going to do now.

illustration from (this) polaroid & a short excerpt of some music i worked on today for a collaborative project i’ve been working on with darren harper.

enjoy the sounds.

from a bus ride.

illustration from a picture from josh mason and my recording session from last weekend.  2 ebows, one autoharp, lots of lines.  this may / may not show up in the packaging for the record we recorded… we’ll see.

http://sunshineltd.info

site i designed over the past month or so for sunshine ltd.  css3, html5 audio players, wordpress core, major php hacks all around, tool tip pop-ups, javascript & jquery background animations, custom store… it’s pretty.  check it out, buy a tape, enjoy some music.

* just found out that on windows machines the text does not render correctly on the release page.  i’ll be fixing this in the coming days… in the meantime, you could go buy a mac, or you could just stop using computers… your choice.

new track. anechoic.

cassette tape loop + guitar + scratchy potentiometers
[audio mp3=”http://uprlip.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/anechoic.mp3″ ogg=”http://uprlip.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/anechoic.ogg” width=”870″ height=”35″ volume=”false”

in a similar way to how i reamp video that i shoot (example here), i took photos tonight of our tv screen while we were watching a nova documentary on mammals that build houses.  been wanting to try this out as a post for a while now, just wasn’t sure what i wanted to photograph for it…   the two above are a couple that i particularly liked.  documentaries almost always have such nice scenic landscape shots… glad i chose to do this tonight, very happy with the subject and the results.

diptych from this weekend’s recording session with josh mason.  been listening to the rough tracks today a lot… really happy with how they turned out.

on another note, first day at the job went well… taught drums, and piano a bit and brain-stormed some amazing ideas that i’ll get to start working on soon for arduino-based accessibility devices for developmentally disabled individuals to interact with daw’s and computers in general… for instance tomorrow i’m going to begin working on an interactive hopscotch game with knock sensors in the squares that react musically when people jump on them.  very excited to have this job.

short video clip of my live set from this past friday at the vault gallery.  thanks to josh mason for the photo above, and thanks to allison mason for the video clip.

start my new job tomorrow… sleep for me.

josh mason & me.  no effects, no overdubs, no edits, all acoustic… there’s lot’s more of this that we’ll be releasing some year in some way.

porch by jared smyth

photos i took this morning around 6 from the bus window on the way to jacksonville.  just got done playing the show… went pretty well.  will post some audio sometime soon.

goodnight

hand-drawn diagram of my setup for my live set with josh mason tomorrow night in jacksonville, fl.  jumping a bus at 5am tomorrow.  can’t wait to shoot some video through the window as we drive.  early morning bus trips are almost always really nice, as everyone else on the bus is usually passed out, so it’s a nice time to be quite and look out the window…. one of those things i enjoy.

new mm-cc post, finally!  created the video for this one as an image sequence shooting bursts of trees and powerlines in rapid succession, and then importing them (5,000 of them) first to camera raw for editing, and then to premier to composite as a movie clip.  i like the method, and the results… think i will improve at it with time though… this was a good ‘test run’ of sorts.

click the image above to go to the mm-cc post, and check it out.

took this shot of harps yesterday before we went trick-or-treating.  she’s such a goof for the camera… well, in general.  35mm lens with cpl filter.

on another note:

i should have the next mm-cc post up tomorrow.  worked on editing it for three hours tonight and it’s pushing midnight now, so… time to call off the effort, and just settle for posting this picture.  also, about ten minutes ago i ran out of scratch disk space on my main hard drive and premier shut down on me… lost about an hour worth of edits…. sigh.  the mm-cc post that i’ve been working on is from almost three weeks ago… i’ve been so slow about getting this one out.  mostly because of having a herniated disk in my back and not being able to sit for very long to work on it.  oh well, life goes on.

look for the mm-cc post tomorrow, hopefully it will be done!

goodnight

preview of some new music i’ll be playing live in jacksonville, fl with josh mason (sunshineltd.info) this coming friday, november 4th at the vault gallery.  come out if you’re nearby.  click here to see the facebook event for the show

fade to red by jared smyth

the leaves of the tree in front of our house are slowly fading to red.  graphic treatment to a few layered photographs that i shot of it today.

fyi: The reds, the purples, and their blended combinations that decorate autumn foliage come from a group of pigments in the cells called anthocyanins. Unlike the carotenoids, these pigments are not present in the leaf throughout the growing season, but are actively produced towards the end of summer…. trees are diabetic?

we took harper out to walk around the tallahassee museum for their halloween / fall festival tonight with my mom and dad.  lot’s of fun.  she was dressed as a ladybug, and it was fairly ridiculously cute.  these are a few medium-long exposure shots of the nature trail that they had set up… looking up into the cypress trees in complete dark.

good times.

final birthday present to myself… for this year anyways ;-) : fender jazzmaster!
two tracks, ebow + jazzmaster, volume pedal, mxr delay, 2880 looper, ableton.

this guitar will take some getting used to after using my danelectro for so long… i already love it though.

 
jazzmaster by jared smyth

pen & colored pencil on paper… & a bad photograph… that’s what happens when i wait until 10pm to do my creative thing for the day.  oh well.  that’s part of the story.

goodnight

some old 35mm shots from when i screen printed my thistle tee shirt.  which, by the way i still have plenty stock of.  they’re on sale now for $10, on american apparel 50/50 white tees…. which makes it a pretty great deal!  snag one now!

go here to buy a shirt if you like

for: rhodes, mic’d rhodes, and randomslices for maxmsp processing several field recordings. recorded to 1/2″ tape with no overdubs, and no looping.

enjoy.

a mad lull by jared smyth

26+1

some preview frames from the next mm-cc.org post from last sunday.  i’m doing something a little different with this one… i’m making a sort of stop motion short film of rapid-burst shots that i’ve been taking of highly overexposed captures, mostly tree-tops with massive lens flares etc.  i think that it will be pretty neat when i’m done with it.  taking each and every frame into camera raw dialog and applying presets to it is what’s taking the most time.  i’m at 9,000+ still frames now and probably will need a few thousand more to finish it up in the next couple days.

found out that a local pharmacy has a special on photo developing on fridays and it’s super, super cheap… ran there today and dropped off about ten rolls of undeveloped shots.  these are some from last weekend.  first shots from my new canon ae-1 that megan snagged me for an early birthday present.

photos from traipsing about the cypress wetlands that surround the tallahassee museum.

to see all the above photos and a few more full resolution, go here: /////////////////

got my controller project talking to max6 beta today.  the above screenshot is of the input section of the max code (sans connectors so you can see what’s going on without cables blocking your view).  all 12 of the momentary switches are showing up in max, as well as the full 0-1023 range of the potentiometer… which is pretty epic in-and-of-itself, as that will allow for software-to-software routing of triggers based on physical events on the pedal while the pedal is still sending midi out to whatever hardware you might connect it to…. for instance: run the midi out of the pedal to your microkorg (or other synth) and connect the usb to your computer, and route whatever you like from max to ableton (or other d.a.w.), and trigger events at exactly the same time on external hardware, and in d.a.w. with a single push of a button!
 
the output section is much more complicated than this and i did not finish it today, as all of the serial data that you might want to send to the arduino from max will need to be stored in ‘progmem’ rather than flash, and i have to read up on that a lot more than i was able to today… ie: this will take me a little while, but when i’m done you will be able to define functions from max for each momentary switch and the potentiometer and then save those to the pedal for use later without a computer.  !!!!

getting pretty excited about this project!

goodnight.

more work with mic’ing rhodes tines and recording the line output at the same time.  this is a sketch that i will fill out more soon.

291 – unfinished by jared smyth
 

rainy roads and a drive home at night : 12″ shutter, 35mm lens, t2i

wrote this piano piece this afternoon.

for: mic’d rhodes tines (oktava mk-012 overhead, and cb radio mic wedged between the case and the harp board), direct line rhodes, brushes on a drum head, and bells : mxr delay on the mics

hope you enjoy it.

peaks & valleys by jared smyth
 

a day at the lake with megan, harper and megan’s family. got some very pretty shots.  the lighting was a bit terrible at first, but got really beautiful just before we left. also there was a girl at the lake with an 8 week old miniature pig that harper loved and got to play with… good fun.  larger views of the above shots are below:

acoustic guitar, field recorder, front porch :  two takes, one left, one right, one reversed, one forwards.

goodnight

illustrated koala line work.

today is cousin stirling, the architect’s birthday.  why not go with the passe depiction of modern architectural design, and then simplify it further as a birthday tribute?  sounds good to me.

photo of the pierre koenig designed stahl house overlooking LA (1960), by julius shulman – illustrated diptych by me.

happy birthday stirl’

shots of the moon at 5 second exposure with different aperture settings for each.

getting so close to finishing my midi controller project.  the only thing left is designing the custom case, and cutting a faceplate.  shot a video today demonstrating the press+hold function that i’ve coded into the switches used as a 100% wet, square wave tremolo. this could also easily be set to a more standard, sine wave tremolo by modulating that volume sliders in sequence.  all sounds made with a guitar and the 2880, no external processing done. also, the push+hold functions multiply the delay values in ratios to each other when used simultaneously… pretty cool for multi-timed effects.

here’s the video i shot today:

& here’s some copy i wrote up about the pedal:

open source arduino-based midi / usb foot controller

fully functional with any midi or usb compliant device

all switches offer three modes for triggering:
- momentary press
- press +hold &
- just released

push+hold functions, by default send a sequence of midi data out the midi port.  the rate of this sequence is defined by the position of the potentiometer or the expression pedal jack

this function is especially useful for the ehx 2880 multi-track looper in regards to the following push+hold functions:
- mute / unmute (square wave 100% wet tremolo)
- L / R pans (auto pan, midi cc’s variable 0-127)
- reverse (on / off in rapid succession)
- octave
and lastly: by far the most intriguing possibility of this:
- sequencing the pitch slider position to
exact intervals as you see fit

ehx 2880 multi-track looper layout :
1) midi out
2)
select track 1
select track 2
select track 3
select track 4
3)
mute/unmute track 1
mute/unmute track 2
mute/unmute track 3
mute/unmute track 4
4)
mixdown
mute/unmute mixdown
mute/unmute dry out
mute/unmute all play tracks
5) usb out
6) expression pedal
7) potentiometer

this project has been approved at kickstarter.com and will be up there as soon as i finish a case for the first unit.  please don’t hesitate to let me know if you’re interested… not sure of price yet, but i will be offering kits that come bundled with my code(s) and also fully assembled units.  like i said, this unit is fully functional as a standalone midi controller for whatever you’d like to plug it in to, and also works as a midi device with your favorite DAW over usb… so having a 2880 is not at all necessary.

finished writing the code for my arduino-based open source midi controller today.  feels so good to compile, upload, and have everything work.

for: acoustic guitar, and kalimba – recorded to four track cassette, no looping, no effects, one CB radio mic

 
evening floor by jared smyth

1/12 of the code i wrote over the past few days… coming together nicely.

florida is doing it’s usual thing and not making up its mind about the fall weather, and continuing to relapse into summer.

for: acoustic guitar, electric, lap harp, field recording, and 2880.

278 – fragments.of.fall by jared smyth

i’ve been working on an open source midi controller (it’s more than that… but that’s the simplest way of describing it).  tonight i got harper to repeat it a few times after me.  i dare say it’s probably the cutest this blog will ever get.  listen below if you like adorable.

i love my kiddo.

goodnight.

finished my processing app from yesterday’s post.  click the embedded java app below to check it out.  let it play out for a while, and then click again to see a new drawing generate.  each drawing will be completely different.  also, the longer you allow it to run the more dense it will get. enjoy.

a few still frames from a processing sketch i’m coding to use perlin noise to simulate wind growing into diptychs that eventually morph into inkblots as patterns develop over time.  i’m working off the methods defined in this sketch, and heavily modifying the core of it to invert the x,y grid.

night in front of our house.

picked up a cheap book of full-page photographs from the french revolution today… great for collage.

music for: air organ, guitar, lap harp, glockenspiel, and found objects : photo of rain on a window screen

rain down screen by jared smyth

i recently designed a web site for the japanese record label, analogpath.  i utilized wordpress with a custom theme, and many, many, many mods to the php core.  further development included: html5 + css3 audio players for compatibility with non-flash browsers, and dynamically updating content on the artist’ pages based on custom meta-data structures and calls that i developed within wordpress. click the image above or here to go to the site.

also of note: my album, ‘sanibel’ which you may remember from these posts: 01, 02, 03, 04 will be coming out on analogpath in the next month or so.  i have remastered and mixed the tracks linked to above as well as adding about three minutes to the run time of ‘surface.’  to complete the album i added two more new tracks to the work, which haven’t been released anywhere else.  in the end i think that it may be my favorite complete work that i’ve composed so far… i think you’ll really like it!  look for that in the near future.

took a walk around my grandfather’s old house + land today.  polaroid shot on impossible project’s silver shade 600 film

our house.  shot on impossible project silver shade polaroid film.  love the blown-out fade of the power-lines.

pulled out the monome tonight and made some noise.  boinngg sampled into mlr.

monome running boinngg+mlr, drums, rhodes, and bells

092311 by jared smyth

new track from my project with hunter pittman.  this is for a compilation coming out soon on c.n.c records.

written / recorded late last night

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hunter: bowed guitar + effects

me: guitar, piano, drums, lap harp, bells, goat’s feet, and looping

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enjoy
Hevel Qayin by this town right now

found image cutting.  sharpie and negative space.

old polaroid. new music: excerpt from a long-form improvisation i worked on today.

for: guitar, kalimba, lap harp, rhodes, drums, bells, found percussion, tape loops, & electronics

new digs.  that’s all.  got bored with the other design… this is better.

also, you can now tweet posts from the bottom of the content right down there… you know, if you want to.

mod’ed my ernie ball volume pedal this morning by adding an extra 1/4″ input.  it’s wired in sequence from the original input, and i’m sure there is a cleaner way that i could have wired it up… but my testing didn’t show any other points on the board that produced signal through the wet output or the tuner output.  though i did discover that this board is exactly the same one ernie ball uses in the stereo volume pedal, sans another resistor and the tuner output being jumped to what would be the left input (ie. the one i just added), rather than being jumped to the dry signal… i may consider making this an actual stereo mod in the future, but i’m quite happy with just two mono inputs summing to one output for now.

work in progress. started today | rhodes, guitar, loopers, drums

254 – beneath the surface. creeping up by jared smyth

forest fading :: found image cutting

a little collage inspired by perusing (again) friend and sunshine ltd label-mate, david andree’s blog.  quite fond of the results he produces, and figured i’d have a go at it.

harper and i played some music this afternoon.  i fingered chords and selected looping points but she did all of the strumming /  plucking that you hear.  love that kid so much.

recorded to 4-track cassette.

i had the amazing honor of getting to perform live with john vanderslice tonight utilizing my piezo -> cv gate -> synth’ setup.   i had such a great time, and john was as nice a fellow as you could hope to meet.  i have some video of the performance that i will add to this post tomorrow, but for tonight i just wanted to put a post up in the spirit of the 1-a-day blog goal i set for myself. video below, enjoy.

goodnight.

collage made from dwell magazines.  super fun to make… put bon iver on really loudly and start cutting.

3/4? 4/4? 6/8? … 5/4!!!! 16 hours later… my crappy guitar riff is made into this…. we have progress.

hunter played this loop

my buddy hunter & i have started back up with our collaborative music project called ‘this town right now.’  we started a soundcloud here, & tonight we sat down to write a little bit of new music.  below is a sketch that we came up with.  we recorded to four-track cassette on my yamaha mt4x.  enjoy.

001 by this town right now

got some 35mm film developed today.  i love these two.

goodnight

full, unedited recording of my live set from the senescence album release show.  enjoy.

a friend of mine, jordan fore played a set last night for my senescence release show under his moniker, murderer.  i recorded it on 1/2″ tape on my otari mx5050.  mastered it today, and here it is for your free listening pleasure.  i highly suggest that you download and listen to it… it’s quite wonderful… 30(ish) minutes of droning, bowed guitar, through dual deluxe memory man pedals.  worth a listen or a few in my opinion.  recording of my set coming tomorrow.

live show went wonderfully tonight.  thanks to hunter pittman for the picture above.  i recorded the whole set on 1/2″ tape, so i will post some audio tomorrow.

goodnight

set up this touchosc patch for my album release show tomorrow.  no computer on stage, no audio processed by computer…. let’s see how that works out.  excited for the show.

trying something new.  needs bass.  needs slide guitar.

4 guitar parts, rhodes, glockenspiel, drums, ebow’d guitar

240 – long.way.home by jared smyth

night sky with stars & silhouette of a bush to the side of our house.  2 minute exposure.

goodnight

piezo –> trigger/midi module –> midi/usb converter –> laptop –> reason –> redrum –> matrix sequencer –> control voltage splitter –> synth(s)

in case you were interested.

drums-to-cv-gates-in-reason fun all day.  got the nanokontrol talking to reason controlling envelopes and filter cutoffs of the synth racks… makes performing live with this set up so much easier… no mouse = happy me = happy dance.  video below.

short composition for harper tonight.  modeled a harp (or something close to it) in logic and then used three iterations of it to create the following piece.  goodnight.

235 – for.harper by jared smyth

first in a series of images for a lightbox fading slideshow header for a site i’m building.

field recording of a massive storm we had this afternoon.  rhodes, ebowed guitar, recorded to 1/2″ tape on the otari.  enjoy.

233 – storm by jared smyth

loaded my track, ‘surface,’ from the album, sanibel into ableton, chopped it, sliced to midi a few times, triggered slices from flin.  interesting results.  a little hypnotic.

goodnight

played around with my monome today using the app, flin.  this is what came out.

so, sometimes with this thing-a-day goal of posting something creative everyday that i set for myself, i have to well… get a little creative.  today is one of those ‘creative’ days.  the code you see above is something i came up with today to fulfill a function on a site i’m developing currently.  i’m pretty happy with the site so far, can’t wait to show you all what it is.  this particular code is fairly simple (and i’m sure someone else, or many people, have done this exact thing before) but, i’m incredibly proud of myself for writing it.  i almost squealed when i got it working.  if you are interested in what it is that it does: read on, otherwise… goodbye.

what it does:

the code you see in black is obvious to many of you i’m sure.  it is the standard tag for html href links.  nothing complicated about that.

what you see in blue is php that calls to wordpress custom meta data labeled “artist_URL_01,” and “link_text_01″ to fill in the URL and link text (ie. the text that you click on to go to a link).

so, like i said, super simple… people have done it before probably, but what’s important is this… i did it today.

vector illustration of solanum jasminoides (potato vine).

my album, ‘senescence’ was released today on the sunshine ltd. label.  has your cassette player gone the way of the dinosaur?  not to fear: every cassette comes with a digital download code, so you can still listen to it on your favorite steve jobs approved device.  very excited about this release.  i hope you enjoy it.

purchase here if you like: http://sunshineltd.storenvy.com/products/139479-smyth-senescence-c73 

for your ears, here is the closing track from ‘senescence.’
senescence_08_’end’ by jared smyth

pen & diluted-acrylic on paper – rhodes, guitar, and field recording of a lake-side birthday party we went to last week.  best sunday afternoon i could ask for.
225 – ficus_urostigma by jared smyth

If you happen to read this blog, and are in tallahassee, fl tonight i highly suggest you come out to the moon (1105 East Lafayette Street) for the Pyramid production of their original play, ‘don’t stop believing,’ written and put on by clients of pyramid. doors at 5:30pm, donations accepted, but entrance is free.

i designed all the music you’ll hear in the show.  8-bit style covers of 1980′s hits.  this afternoon at rehearsal i stole a second with amanda mcdonald (36) of tallahassee’s pyramid studios, where i’ve worked on-and-off for the past four years.  this is what amanda had to say about her mixed-media piece, ‘earth, air, and fire,’ that is pictured above and is featured in the pre-show gallery opening tonight: “earth, air & fire was fun to make.  flowers are my favorite to work with for art.”  when i asked amanda what her plans were for the money if the piece sells tonight she replied, “well, i could give it back to pyramid because of all the budget cuts from the governor… or i could save it.”  i personally think it speaks volumes about the value of a facility when the clientele that themselves pay to attend, are eager to give back to it.  the budget cuts that amanda referenced have severely effected our clients, some worse than others.  but pyramid is resilient and is still going strong, as you will see tonight if you come out.

amanda is a great, intelligent and wonderful person… not to mention a very talented artist as you can plainly see above.  i’m honored to know her, and to be her friend.  a big thank you to her for letting me talk to her, and photograph her for the blog tonight.

amanda occasionally updates her blog also, if you’d like to keep up with her, and send her any encouragement via commenting on her posts i’m sure she would love that.  her blog is here —— http://livingwithcp.wordpress.com/ ——

again, please come out and support us tonight if you’re able to.

 
223_like_this by jared smyth

http://jredsmyth.com

ok, last post about my personal portfolio site for a while (or, at least i’ll try to not post about it). it’s just about all i’ve been working on though… today i spent far longer than a person with a better grasp on javascript would have taken, no doubt, to write a javascript, html5, css3, and jquery music player for my site… which all adds up to looking nice, and simple, and being fully functional on devices that don’t support flash. it still has a few aesthic bugs to it, but i’m done for today… been staring at this screen for 7 hours now. legions on eyeballs. not really. goodnight

silk screened these business cards today.  i’m always talking to random people about collaborating on this project, or collaborating on that project and without fail they always ask me for my business card… now i don’t have to tell them i don’t have one and scribble down my email address in caffeinated handwriting for them.  feels good.  on another note… thanks to some jquery coding i got the background images on my portfolio site  auto-rotating…. it’sa nice!

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http://jredsmyth.com

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new design for my personal portfolio site today.  not much content yet, just a link-hub for my content elsewhere online.  also, the background image randomizes on every load.

]]> http://uprlip.com/archives/2646/feed 0 http://uprlip.com/archives/2643 http://uprlip.com/archives/2643#comments Sun, 07 Aug 2011 23:07:06 +0000 smyth http://uprlip.com/?p=2643

35mm, 400asa, mamiya mxs-500.  taken at gumbo limbo nature center in south florida.

shot of my ladies at the lake today.  wonderful day.  friend’s birthday party this morning, and then a date for megan and me this afternoon.  we walked around antique shops and in an awesome town about 40 minutes from here.

yay! music again!  guitar+rhodes+fire.field.recording+chimes.  enjoy the sounds

216 – fire&chimes by jared smyth

been thinking very visually lately.  as evidenced by the past few day’s posts i suppose.  tried to play some music today and after making a minute-long loop, i just left it looping and came right back to working on this.  i go through phases…

spent most of the day wondering how this is going to work out… big plans.

tree to the right of our front porch.

wish i could ctrl+z a few steps back on this drawing… alas, such is the downside of analog art.  knowing when to quit, right?

wonderful mm-cc session this morning.  very busy day afterwards of shooting/editing the video (though, there wasn’t much editing to be done… it’s just a single long shot), then house to be cleaned, and a friend’s birthday potluck.  all around a beautiful sunday for music, family, and friends.  now… the sleep.

click here to go watch/listen to the mm-cc session from today

goodnight all.

power outage on our block.  our house is completely dark, save for a few candles and a flashlight.  had a bit of music i worked on earlier today, but can’t post that from computer with no internet access.  megan and i decided to try some light painting with my iphone… which, without manual shutter control doesn’t really work too well.  nevertheless, i layered a few different shots from our tests together in photoforge2 for iphone and… here we have it.  a creative post for day 210 is done. time for some candlelit reading.

megan inked and i colored.  wonderful night with my lady.

wired up a piezo to a 1/4″ jack today and then glued the piezo between two pieces of cedar.  in florida this time of year everyone has a fire in the afternoon. so i figured i might as well burn a piezo in our afternoon fire and record the output.  that is to say, maybe this wasn’t the best time of year for me to to do this… so much sweating/ so much smoke not drafting out of the flue… oh well :)

no instrumentation laid on top of this, just a selection from the raw recording below.

i recently snagged a 2880 four-track loop pedal with foot controller and have been practicing with it for my upcoming live set(s).  here’s an improvisation that i played using it for looping.  no vsts or daw-based editing whatsoever.  just as i played/looped it is how you hear it.  the consistent field sample throughout the track is some weird grounding noise i recorded coming from my computer speakers the other day. enjoy.

-smyth

putting together these visuals for an upcoming show.  reamping direct from computer screen… may or may not go to vhs with these… still can’t decide.

taken with mamiya msx500 and pentax k1000 in sanibel, florida.

i love going through my external hard drive and finding treasures of sound that i had forgotten about.  today i was looking through old ableton projects and found this recording that oscar quesada and i recorded a few months back.  it’s an improvisation on a rhodes theme that you can hear in many of my works… i really can’t seem to get enough of playing it.  i wrote it originally for the soundtrack to private eyes, a short film that i wrote the score for.  oscar was over at the studio one day and we decided to record him laying cello over the top of the rhodes theme as i played it.  if i remember correctly we rehearsed it once or twice and then just hit record.  take a listen below if you like.

 
frantically.adrift by jared smyth

i mentioned in a previous post a while back that my former employer, pyramid studios, a day training art/music center for adults with developmental disabilities commissioned me to create instrumental covers of a select group of pop songs from the 80′s. well, needless to say this is a little unusual given my typical style of music creation. i thought it would be a fun project, and i love pyramid and its students, so i took the gig. i really shot for “as cheesy as possible” with these… i’m fairly sure i achieved that. today i finished up mastering the songs. below is one of my stylized tracks for you to check out, you may recognize it ;-)

my collaboration album with my friend hunter pittman, old field, is now available to download for free from the cnc-records website.  we recorded this throughout the course of a single day, at various locations around tallahassee leaving the naturally occurring soundscape of the locations in place, and simply improvising over the top of them, and recording it all with my field recorder.   click the image above to go download.  enjoy.

study on splintering individual planes of 3d illustrated objects away from the parent objects.

designed this show poster for my upcoming show with josh mason, jordan fore (murderer), and truewill mashburn to release my cassette, senescence on the sunshine ltd label.  08/31/11 – gonna be fun!  come out if you’re in town.

click the image above to go check out my first attempt at html5 graphic programing.  pretty simple, repeats itself after a little while, but…  nevertheless still a good “get my feet wet” exercise.

day 4/4 in sanibel.  we’re home now, and i finished this track once we got back tonight.  late last night megan, and her younger sister, tara, and i walked out onto the pitch black beach (no moon in sight) and i got them to hold a flash light for me / protect me from the dark so i could throw a piezo into the water and record the waves from underneath the surface.  it’s good to have girls in my life that will put up with those kinds of nerdery.

thinking this may be my favorite piece i made in the sanibel series.  hear the results below.

 
*taking this track down for now… the album will be out soon on analogpath.com

day 3/4 in sanibel, florida.  went for a walk this morning and recorded the waves crashing with faint sounds of tourists chatting in the background.  also something else to listen for in this track… at one point a very old german man with a tobacco pipe slung from the corner of his mouth as if it was about to slip through his old, crackled lips and onto the beach at any moment walked up to where i was squatting in the sand, recording sounds and taking pictures. he stood there for a few minutes…. finally i said hello to him, and asked how he was, looking off into the ocean as if to find his answer to the simple question in the crashing waves, he took the first draw off his pipe since he had planted himself there and replied in a thick german accent, “i’m sfine sthank yous.”  at that point i suppose our interaction had been fulfilled and he wandered off.

take a listen below

*taking this track down for now… the album will be out soon on analogpath.com

day 2/4 in sanibel florida with the family.  woke up early this morning and recorded the sound of the myriad of bugs buzzing that florida morning’s have to offer, then layered ebow’d guitar, glockenspiel, lap harp and kalimba over it.  recorded to cassette 4-track.  harper had so much fun at the beach today, we swam a lot, then napped a lot, then swam some more…. i think listening back to this recording, and then probably napping some more is in order.

*taking this track down for now… the album will be out soon on analogpath.com

blossoms

*taking this track down for now… the album will be out soon on analogpath.com

did a simple polaroid lift today for the first time.  the transferred print is drying now… i’ll add a photo of the finished product when it’s set.

thursday is a friend’s birthday and tonight is a dinner for her.  harper (my 19-month-old daughter) and i decided it would be a good idea to make some music for her this afternoon.  such a good time: harper and i improvised together for about 45 minutes and i recorded it.  i attached a surface mic to her little lap harp, and gave her one of my glockenspiels to play also.  all i played on this was a little rhodes piano swelling in on cassette tape loop, and then i overdubbed some with me playing her lap harp too.  then i sewed this felt cassette cover and made a tape of this track for my friend’s birthday. take a listen to harper’s experimental music genius below.

for a friend by jared smyth

randomslices – 2011 – jared smyth @ uprlip.com, jredsmyth.com

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download randomslices here
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randomly play back slices of looping audio infinitely changing from a single sample.  my goal was to build something that simulated scanning through radio stations in high speed, and in a semi-quantized fashion, but utilizing a single sample as the source material for the bits of sound.

depending on how you set up the controls (which i have left totally up to the user… they don’t auto load any default other than zero, as loading some default would be pointless anyway, the numbers are relative to the length of your sample) you can achieve a set of sounds ranging from harsh and glitchy to smooth and organic.

play around, have fun.  if it seems to have frozen for a bit and is not producing audio, it’s not frozen… you’ve generated some exponent that is either slicing too small to hear, or is beyond the end/beginning of your sample’s audio… to get it making sound again simply adjust the ‘set time’ control

let me know what you think of it, where you use it, and where i can hear the results.

there is a demo video below showcasing the more glitchy side of what this app can do. also, there is a short track i recorded utilizing one 0.04 second sample in randomslices rewired into ableton, showcasing more of the subtle, textural things one can achieve with randomslices.
enjoy!

randomslices

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audio:

used the ‘drunk’ object in max/msp, and also the ‘metro’ object for what i got started tonight on this max application that i’ve had the idea for for a while now.  the audio used for the sound below is the original track from this post… no editing.  loaded that sample/song into the app and pressed the ‘go’ button, what you hear below is the result…. once i started the app i didn’t adjust a thing, it just processed the audio and spit it out in realtime as you hear it.  the app should be ready for me to release tomorrow or the next day hopefully.

old bits of windchimes i had around that my friend meg gave me a while back.  this treatment to the snare really shines best when played with brushes as more of a textural thing… but, the example below is with sticks, and is a pretty full on beat.  the sample below is from part of a track in progress for a collaboration album between myself, john keston, and david andree.  this is me on guitar, drums, and music box cassette loops.  can’t wait to hear what david and john do with this section, and the more subtle, brush-on-treated-snare sections of this track…

built this box for my music box today.  closed loop for now, as i didn’t have the proper tools handy to cut slits for a composition sheet to enter and exit.  built out of scrap guitar sound board left over from my friend barth who is a luthier.  bake stained with espresso grinds. short improvisation i made with it today, run through delays, reverbs, and onto cassette loop.

made this short demo video of the cassette loop from yesterday’s post.  rhodes through mxr carbon copy delay, and dsp 128 reverb. enjoy.

tapeloop.inaction

a while back i made a short 6 second cassette tape loop & ever since have been wanting to make a better/longer one.  today i modified marcus fischer’s design slightly for a longer cassette loop (his original design can be seen here).  the only changes i made from his design were adding two more spindles which you can see in the center of the cassette above… i really think i could squeeze two more in there, thus adding more time to the loop… if i build up the patience again i’ll try that.  splicing the tape together was probably the hardest part of it all… marc suggested that i get a splicing block to ease the process, which i definitely will do before i attempt this again.  all-in-all i’m really happy with this.  on the slowest speed of my yamaha four track machine i can get almost 30 seconds out of it.  audio example with kalimba and guitar below.

made this 1/2″ reel-to-reel tape loop tonight.  an audio sample from rhodes piano is below.  i played one clean loop, and then one loop layered over that where i was stretching/pulling the tape as it was playing back at a slower speed.  megan even hung out with me while i was doing this!  great night.

really didn’t like the painting i did in this post from day 70 at all, and was quite tired of looking at it in my house.  today i took it off the easel and masked over it in a creamy sort of off-white and then attempted to simulate the middle-frame exposure that you get from 35mm cameras some times.  sort of worked.  i don’t paint very often, and when i do i usually love the process and also usually hate the results.  at least it’s better than it was before.

end pictures from my recent trip to minneapolis, begin test run with yard sale-picked yashica camera:

//end massive day 182 post.  flickr page with all of these pictures in larger format here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jredsmyth/sets/72157626977759843/

tallahassee: the muskogean word for “old field”

back at the beginning of march, my friend, and longtime collaborator hunter pittman & i drove around tallahassee (where both of us have lived most of our lives) & played live, improvisations on guitar (him), and bell set (me); recording them with my field recorder leaving in all the artifacts of sound that each location had to offer.   you may remember posts about it here, and here.  well… we finally got around to being ready to release it.  what we’ve come up with is one 14:32 duration track that catalogs our day, and the compositions that were created on the spot around the town that we love/hate so much.  it was a great day, and it is wonderful that this project is coming to release, i hope you will enjoy it.  our friends jordan, and michael over at c-n-c records agreed to release it digitally for us!  look for that in the next few weeks.  here is a short clip from a section of the track.

took a lot of today to re-setup my studio equipment.  console wired to otari tape machine, tape machine wired back to console, and firepod wired in with 8-in / 10-out, & outboard effect rack gear wired up to the aux sends/returns.  i love the process of setting all this up again, and getting it super-organized.  time to mix / master all the open projects i have going on.  so much music soon.

more work towards the btfl/lcl magazine layout and photography i’m slowly but surely working on.

click the photo to go to the mm-cc post

a very quick edit, and the mm-cc from minneapolis is online.  this video is different from other mm-cc video’s i’ve done in that it shows mostly the tools used to create the sounds, and the people using them… which is completely different than my usual method.  i think it really fits for this one though.  we recorded for an hour and a half and the mood in that room by the time we were done was really the most serene thing i could imagine, and i wanted to capture that.  not sure if i accomplished that or not, but the video is an effort at that at any rate.

now… as for the other hour and twenty-seven minutes of audio we recorded that is not represented here… well, just keep your ears/eyes peeled, it may show up soon.

home from minneapolis… the trip was so amazing.  photos above taken on the flight home.  t2i, circular polarizer, and graduated filters in camera raw.

goodnight

a few still frames from the video i shot at the absolutely wonderful mm-cc session we had in minneapolis this morning.  david andree, and john keston participated & i have 1.5 hours of sound to edit down, along with some great video shot where we recorded it at john’s house.  sleep now, back to florida tomorrow, and then edit.

goodnight

rough excerpt recorded from my field recorder of last night’s show.  better, multitracked audio and video coming soon.
*edit – 12-16-11 : took this audio down, there is a much better version included on my live.collection album, if you’d like to check that out click here

beautiful window in the front of john keston’s house.  so tired now, the show was amazing tonight… great crowd, dosh & ostracon killed it, and i snagged dosh’s naoise ep on white vinyl.  sound / video from show up tomorrow hopefully.

goodnight.

made it to minneapolis tonight, 12.5 hours & four flights later.  these clouds were crazy dense over minneapolis as we were coming in, and i got in a bit of trouble from the flight attendant for using my camera while the “no electronics” sign was on.

if you’re around the area, come out tomorrow night to honey lounge in minneapolis to hear me, dosh, and ostracon.

2 track album, released today of josh mason’s full live set from atlanta, and the last track that i played live the same night.  stream for free or, help us release more albums in some physical format by paying $4 for the download pack.

link to album here

preview of some practice that i did today for my set this coming friday in minneapolis, at honey lounge.  i’ve created a 25 minute video (which the picture above is from), which i will accompany with a live soundtrack.  some of these sounds are probably familiar if you’ve been paying attention to what i’ve been posting recently…. the live soundtrack that i’ll be performing is an extended composition that i’ve been creating from the soundset of this track that i posted on day 156.  enjoy the preview.  goodnight.

built this RGB light fixture today with individual dimmer controls for each color.  i accidentally blew up one of the dimmers i bought (apparently power-in does not play well with power-out… go figure), so for now the green and blue bulbs are on the same dimmer, while red is on its own.  at this stage it is crude to say the least, but i have plans to snag another dimmer soon, and not blow that one up, then create a better, more permanent diffuser/shade for it.  good father’s day fun: build things, blow things up, eat dinner.  goodnight.

three stills from the visuals i completed today for my show this coming week in minneapolis with dosh, and ostracon.  i’ll be playing a thirty minute soundtrack to accompany the visuals live.  so excited for this show!  goodnight.

got a roll of 800asa 35mm back today that i shot while in atlanta last weekend.

the full set can be seen here

major revision to my max/msp app, grainbox today.  enabled it for use with live input.  within max or runtime you should be able to set your dsp inputs 1/2 respectively to whatever inputs from your audio interface you’d like to effect and… voila!

below is an improvisation from today with rhodes, & guitar running through livegrain, and then into the yamaha four track on a ten second cassette loop and then back into livegrain before heading to ableton for recording.

click here to download livegrain – v0.1- – - – - http://uprlip.com/liveGrain-v0.1.mxf

-smyth
166 – livegrain by jared smyth

picked up this yamaha four track cassette recorder on the cheap today.  i do love a good deal.  to sweeten the deal i got an afternoon nap during a rainstorm, and the cassette unit has beautifully scratchy pots.  i turned my field recorder on from the bedroom this afternoon while megan and harper were playing in the other room, you can hear that field recording throughout the track below.  you can also hear those scratchy pots with some delay on just that sound.  the rest is the usual suspects: rhodes, guitar, delay delay delay.  enjoy.

click the still frame above to go to the mm-cc post from atlanta with josh mason.

http://mm-cc.org/archives/115

if you’d like to see a set of photos from my atlanta trip… they are: here

video from the last third of my set at the telephone factory lofts in atlanta with josh mason

live.atl from Jared Smyth on Vimeo.

video stills from last night’s work that davidson thomas and i did in christopher moulder’s studio.  shooting a crystal sculpture chandelier that christopher designed.  didn’t really have to do much to make it look beautiful.  it really is one of the most beautiful, interactive sculptures i’ve ever seen.  should be some new mm-cc content up tomorrow with a soundtrack from josh mason & me, and video from the above stills.

goodnight.

wandered up onto the roof of the telephone factory lofts.  found this beautifully textured window.  mason/smyth live in atlanta album cover?

getting preped for the show tonight with josh mason at the amazingly talented christopher moulder’s studio at the telephone factory lofts in atlanta.  lots of beautiful things to see/hear tonight.  the glowing orbs of light behind josh in the photo above are from a sculptural chandelier that christopher moulder designed.  if you’re nearby, come on out!

nephila clavipes – taken with my asahi macro and t2i.

day after tomorrow is the show! so excited!

more work on a similar theme as yesterday’s post.  audio results below.

been playing around with the idea of combining two different types of music that i tend to make: ambient/textural drones & triggered cv gates with acoustic drums.  for a while they’ve been separate in my head, but i think i’m getting closer to melding the two in a way that’s pleasing to me.  check out what i did today with said attempts.

recently a friend of ours, lilly gave us a clipping from a potato vine.  we’ve had it in our kitchen window in this old milk bottle since then.  it’s amazing watching its leaves turn to face the sun every morning.  it has little purple flowers spurting off of it and also, as you can see in the second picture, taken with my asahi macro lens, is sprouting roots… which look incredible close up.  goodnight all.

date night with megan tonight.  after we walked around the first friday galleries we went up to the top level of a parking garage looking over a busy road in tallahassee.  shot this, and also more video to work with for visuals while we walked around and talked.  now music’ing/movie’ing.  perfect night.

little preview of the visuals i’m working on for the much-talked-about (by me) show i have coming up with josh mason in atlanta.  used josh’s untitled temple bell track, and one of my practice sessions that i recorded for the show.  video below.  the end.  goodnight.

more work on the visuals i’m creating for my upcoming show with josh mason in atlanta.  these shots are from the first re-videoing faze of the process where i run the finished edit out to our hd tv (lovely texture it gives it, huh?), and video that image, cropping the tv out of the shot.  then i take that hd video and run it to a very old, very finicky vhs deck with an equally old tape in it (the machine “ate” the tape three times today). once that’s done i run the vhs tape at a slightly slower speed back out to an old, 13″ tube television and again re-video that to get even more texture.  it’s quite fun, but also quite a pain as everything’s done in realtime.   everything except the final render process… which is some ginormous multiple of realtime… which my macbook is struggling at currently.  27+/- hours to go until it finishes rendering the fifteen minutes that i got done today.  woo!  goodnight all.

got the layout for my soon-to-be-released album artwork done today.  my buddy davidson thomas (his website is under construction, but there’s the link anyways…) did the original drawings you see and i laid them out for the cassette today.  super excited for this release.  check out more info about the label at http://sunshineltd.info & more info about the label founder, josh mason at joshmason.tumblr.com

here’s some very minimal music i played today with rhodes, bowed guitar, and cassette field samples.  enjoy.

more practice for my upcoming live set today.  also took a long walk with harper in the stupid florida heat.  plus i took some time to draw this diagram of my setup for the show.  if this looks confusing… that’s because it is.  below is a nice recording of what i played today: recorded live with the setup you see above, no overdubs or edits.

number 4 in the oldman hand-drawn vector series.  not accustomed to drawing smiling faces… this one presented a bit of a challenge.

taking a break from the oldman vector series tonight to work on visuals for the show i have coming up in atlanta with josh mason of sunshineltd.  getting excited for the visuals for this show.  the image above is a reflection into a lake near my house.  i’ve been editing down about three hours of random footage i have into a one hour loop that i’ll then dub out to vhs and glitch out a bit (as i did in this post). then we’ll be able to run the hour-long visual loop throughout the night straight from vhs to projector.

third in the old man series of hand illustrated vector sketches.

second in the old man vector series.  went for a more graphic style than realistic in this one.

illustrated with wacom tablet tonight.  a few hours later, 197,000+ anchor points…. goodnight.

05.24.11 edit

home from work propping up my broken toe, so i figured i would refine this a little bit… better colors, more defined shading on the right side:

decided to remix & play some drums over the top of efterklang’s song, ‘modern drift’ today.  all samples aside from the drums that i played are from the original song.  all recorded out to 1/2″ tape on otari mx5050.  enjoy.

developed these shots today.  800asa shot on mamiya msx-500 with 50mm lens.  i love the way film handles color.  having a subject this cute helps too.  goodnight.

recorded drums to 1/2″ tape on my otari reel-to-reel.  no effects.  drums recorded with one sm57 in, what is quickly becoming my favorite mic positioning for drum recording… over the kick, capsule at a right angle to the rim of the snare, pointed at where the floor tom would be if i used one.  then i took that recording and dubbed it onto a separate track on the tape and eq’d that with almost all hi’s and mid’s… which is what you hear that sounds like an effect.  feel free to use this for whatever you like, providing credit is given.  let me know where i can hear what you do with it.

started working on a project today that i’m pretty excited about.  i’m photographing all of the clothing that the screen printing shop that i just did my shirts at has to offer.  our idea is to make it as valuable a product as possible by making it less of a catalog, & more of a quarterly printed on thick recycled paper, and matte finish inks.  the first edition should be out in fall, and will feature all local tallahasee non-models aka, normal people.  180 pages of photos… that happens to also serve as a catalog for the shop.  we would like this to be something that people will throw on their coffee table and actually pick up to flip through, rather than just a catalog.  i’ll be doing the photos and the layout.  there will also be an online version of the edition as well.  goodnight all.

actualized this tee shirt between last night and today.  photograph of a dead flower near the house that my great-grandfather built on the outskirts of tallahassee.  taken with mamiya msx-500 on 35mm 800asa film.  screen printed with a four-color process from a custom pallet, on american apparel 50/50 tees.  click the newly added store button above to go snag one for yourself or a friend. (if you are local, or going to see me at a show soon, save yourself some shipping cost, and me some paypal cost and wait to get it in person… send me an email and i’ll hold one for you).

made this today out of left-over oak sheet from our bed frame build i did the other day.  may add more to it… megan will probably add some color elements.

got a nice message yesterday morning from a fellow monome user / musician, earsmack.  he simply said that he was inspired to put a bass line over the top of the audio i put up from this post.  he then pointed out that it happened to be sunday morning, he happened to be drinking coffee, and making music collaboratively with me / my track… and well, those are the requirements for an mm-cc post.  it was, as i said, so nice to get this message and music from him…. i didn’t think i’d be doing mm-cc anymore over the summer as i’ve had to move my gear out of my studio, which you can read more about here.  then i checked the mm-cc.org uploads and nightmorph (joshua saddler) had uploaded a video clip of people ice skating.  it all came together for mm-cc to happen this week!  pretty cool huh?  i took joshua’s video clip and mirrored it left/right on a 720p pallet and then flipped it, stretched it, moved it around… you know, mussed it up.  layered over the top of the video are a few polaroids from this post.  once laid out i then projected the video directly from adobe premier and then visually-reamped it with my macro lens, & canon t2i.  ok, this is enough typing for one night for me.  if you want to participate in mm-cc please send me an email at smyth@uprlip.com – i would love to have you involved.  goodnight all.

click here to go to the mm-cc post with the video and audio: http://mm-cc.org/archives/96

built this minimal bed frame for us today out of cabinet-grade oak and birch plywood.   the painting in the background is one of megan’s… i know you can’t see it all but isn’t it great?  i think so.

picked up this rhodes today from a local music store.  they told me that they thought the preamp circuit board was burnt out because it didn’t make any noise when plugged into an amp.  this rhodes had great tolex, with minimal rips, & the legs and sustain pedal were both still in the lid compartment. so i decided to make an offer of $150 on it just to see if they’d take it, and they did.  when i got it home i opened the case up and found out that the preamp had been replaced with an aftermarket one with the inscription of, “cy harmonic booster” screened onto the circuit board.  don’t know much about that yet and haven’t had time to research it, but what i did realize is that this particular preamp requires power, so i wired up a 9v battery to it, resoldered the ground wire for the harp board / pickup array and voila! it works, and sounds beautiful.  not a bad deal at all.  really little (like 30 seconds) of a hastily recorded test with the new rhodes and some drums is below.  enjoy.
*edit – had to play more with the new rhodes, and ended up uploading a different recording which i like way more. it’s about 4 minutes long.

had to make a responsible decision today to move all my gear out of the studio.  the florida summer heat is getting too intense already for me to feel comfortable leaving drums and other gear in there.  no ac, and minimal insulation = not a good space.  i had to move stuff into my house to be able to maintain a constant temperature for it.  oh, well.  i’ll have my dream studio (aka one with ac) one day.

your name was tom, and you cleaned the building next to my house everyday.  you were a friend of bill w’s.  we talked over the fence everyday when you came to clean the building.  last night you shot yourself in the head.  i wish you hadn’t done that.  i’m going to miss you.

sometimes life sucks. but… you just keep going.  it always gets better again.

i’ve been smoking a pack and a half (ish) a day for about seven years.  i’ve been fed-up with myself about the habit for a while now, and yesterday, and today… i didn’t smoke a single cigarette!  that’s the longest i’ve gone without one since i started in the first place.  i know… two days doesn’t seem like much, but it’s huge to me.  here is a little guitar music i played tonight.  three takes layered together, one of them with heavy delay and pitched-up reverb.

shot for the first time with polaroid film from the-impossible-project today.  love the way these came out.  i’ve got three shots left…. hmm, what to use them on?

been trying out different tools in illustrator with vector patterns.  this is a series of minimally edited patterns laid out over the top of a root pattern with a singular highlight color pattern underlay.  illustrator really is the best.

today is megan’s birthday.  we woke up and took a walk on the beach looking for shells.  i casually dropped a clam shell with the ring you see above in it onto the beach.  then i got down on one knee… and blah blah you know the rest.  if this is confusing to you for any reason… ie you thought we were already married… what with us having harper and having been together for a a while now… well, you’re just over-thinking this aren’t you.  we decided to wait on this after having harper to make sure we were doing it for us, and not harper.

megan was very surprised, and surprisingly… the ring fits her tiny finger perfectly.

day one of vacation was fun.  swimming with harper, hanging with tara (megan’s little sister), and took a walk down to the canal beside megan’s parent’s house and snapped a few pictures of these magnolia blossoms.  goodnight.

purple flowers planted next door to our house.  vector grid design overlay.  now we’re off to boca for the weekend: megan’s birthday, and mother’s day.  yippee vacation.

disposable camera. thrown into a pool a few times, and then i let it dry for a week, and had them developed.  loving it.  definitely going to do more photos with this technique.

35mm shot on 800asa with my mamiya msx-500. printed on white american apparel teeshirts.  hopefully they’ll be ready in time for my upcoming show which you can see a flier for below.  very excited about this show, and you can check out the sound design, music, and other random projects of sunshine ltd label owner, josh mason here: http://joshmason.tumblr.com/

let me know if you’re interested in a shirt to help me gauge how many to screen.

goodnight all.

was lacking ideas for video for today’s mm-cc post so i took a look through the archives of openprocessing.org & found this sketch that i liked a lot, then set my canon t2i with my macro lens up in front of my computer screen and videoed the output of the sketch.  simple, done, on to the rest of my day… aka swimming in a kiddie pool with harper.

click here to go to the video / audio of today’s mm-cc

recently my job hired me on the side (as-in, not for the usual work i get paid to do there) to create some covers/instrumental versions of a select set of hit songs from the 80′s.  sounds right up my alley aye? sarcasm there, no?  so, i need money and i took the job, plus i had the idea to do these covers in true 8-bit format…. straight from the n.e.s. and all that, and that sounds like a blast to me as i would never give myself a chance to do something like this for my own music (8-bit and ambient don’t seem to go together very well).  i’ve got about fifteen songs to do and will probably release them as a for-free download album when i’m done with them.  so, look forward to that… more sarcasm?  anyways, i got this true 8-bit composition program today called milky tracker.  it’s a little complicated to figure out how to use, but as a test run i did the following with a few samples of leaves rustling  for the percussion and one sine wave for the rest.  it’s an 8 bar loop repeated a few times.  enjoy.

pen on paper.

shot these awesome clouds with a new 35mm lens today.

awkwardboy.com | | built a website for my studio today. trying to start recording more projects here to pick some extra cash / experience.

been wanting to do a site design with css divs and borders as structural and geometric elements of the design.  think i accomplished that here.

click the picture above if you want to go to the studio site.  not much there for now.

recently my buddy hunter did a photshoot / design with all of his old film cameras that he shoots with all the time and then put it up on his site.  we hung out and did a similar shoot with a bunch of my gear from my studio today.  i edited them down in the image you see above.

no video today for mm-cc.  had one friend in town that was planning to come out (people were busy due to the holiday), but i went ahead and called it off, and just played around with a piano sample that joshua saddler sent me.  joshua is an amazing pianist, in my opinion, and i’m so glad i got to play around with this sample today.  my little rhodes swells on top of it blended nicely too.  check out the post, and the audio over here: http://mm-cc.org/archives/86

this morning i was in the studio super early mixing my new album, and harper came running out (trailed by megan) bringing me a little flower from the patch pictured above.  i laid it on my rhodes and watched it slowly fade, and wilt all throughout the day as i mixed.  pretty appropriate considering the name of the album, senescence.  i love my girls.  what a great day.

i did a quick recording session with a band called amplifier worshiper today.  they are michael amason, and jordan fore.   no overdubs, lots of tape hiss, lots of noise, and even more pedals.  the first track from the three tracks we recorded today is below.  enjoy.

finished tracking for my new album today!  lots of mixing / mastering to come before releasing it.  speaking of releasing it… it will be released on sunshine ltd records based out of jacksonville florida on a limited run of 100 cassette tapes with included digital download codes.  the name and theme i’ve selected for the album is something that’s fascinated me for a while now, senescence, the change in the biology of an organism as it ages after its maturity.  very much looking forward to this release, and so happy to be representing / to be represented by such a great label.  what will probably be the first track for the album in its current, unfinished state is below.  enjoy.

here is the video / audio from this past sunday’s mm-cc.  it was hosted by charlie visnic in california.  he had very short notice that he was hosting it and didn’t get to shoot original video this time around so he used archive.org footage, stay tuned though, he will be hosting mm-cc the first sunday of every month over summer.  video below.

mm-cc – 04.17.11 from Charlie Visnic on Vimeo.

more work on the mural for the front of my studio today.  starting to get some depth to it.

g’night

so, the building my studio is in used to be a two car garage detached from our house, and the previous tenant removed the roll up door & put in large windows.  large windows are nice but not in a recording studio… i recently filled them with 5.5″ thick mineral wool & then sealed them with old plywood (it’s not intended to be a permanent fix… just something to do the trick while we live here).  today i decided to grab some spray paint & have at the old plywood.  it’s been so long since i’ve done any graffiti or spray painting at all… took me a little bit to figure what i was doing.  i’m pretty sure i’ll keep adding more to this piece in the next few afternoons.  needs more overlays and definitely more fades.

today i plugged in our new drier and for some unknown reason got a jolt of 220volts into my left arm… fine, maybe not the full voltage went into my arm, but it still hurt a lot.  here is an image.

gonna try to stop shaking now, and go to bed.

sleepy guitar music.  goodnight all.

went to the park and played with (chased) harper around for a while.  we had a blast.

…and a second video from my set monday night.

smyth live – 2 – 4.11.11 from Jared Smyth on Vimeo.

video of a brand new track that i played for the first time live last night.  thanks to my buddy hunter for videoing.  thanks to the built-in mic on my t2i for the autophasor on my cymbals.  video below: enjoy.

smyth live – 04.11.11 from Jared Smyth on Vimeo.

tonight i opened for mount kimbie at the engine room.  it was good.  i am exhausted.  goodnight.

mm-cc – 4.10.11 from Jared Smyth on Vimeo.

piano samples loaded into mlr for monome, & then recorded to 1/2″ tape on the otari mx5050 mk-iii.  1968 rogers holiday kick drum, mid eighties ludwig brass snare, recorded with one sm57 to the above mentioned otari.  shot on canon t2i with asahi 50mm prime lens.  enjoy.

quadrants from Smyth

hung out with my friend, davidson today & played around shooting video & taking pictures with my macro lens of us dropping india inks into a layer of baby oil that was floating on water. the video from today turned out pretty great too.  will probably make it to this week’s mm-cc.  lovely results.  we’re going to try it again tomorrow with a more limited color palette.

photo below of how we shot this.

also… wanted to add an unedited shot from the video… these yellow droplets look so cool.  i like my edits to the above still frame images, but the original is just so good it needed to be represented here too.

played around with this today.  recorded to 1/2″ tape, then messed around with in ableton.  much more upbeat than any music i’ve been doing recently.  loving the rhodes tremolo and the drums. it was fun.  enjoy.

a couple weeks ago i started recording a song for a friend of mine, brandon basino. i really love brandon’s lyrics, and i’ve wanted to record a song of his for a while.  i’m glad we’re getting to do this track together.  we got guitar and vocals recorded and then haven’t had a chance to work on the song since.  today i was kinda bored and decided to throw some drums on the track (which was slightly more difficult than i expected since we hadn’t recorded the guitar or vocals on a metronome, which you can tell by the general not-tightness of this demo).  well… if you give a mouse a cookie… i ended up playing rhodes, and xylophone on the track too (near the end, if you listen all the way through), and then decided it needed some hand claps… it’s now 11pm & bed is in order for me.  i think it turned out pretty decent, sounds a little thin, but we’ll most likely re-track with a metronome before “real” parts (as opposed to my “fake” parts i played today) go onto the track, and i’ll have a chance to multitrack into logic, whereas today i just dumped all four tracks from the otari as a stereo pair into the computer before overdubbing more…  i’m done talking, enjoy the demo below.

click the blue image above to go to an animated gif of an animation i did tonight.  i’ve never done any flash animation before, and decided to give it a try tonight with some simple shapes, and tween (flash’s term for movement).  did this in 30 minutes or so tonight.  looking forward to trying this out on a weekend soon, when i have more time with one of my more complex vector designs.

megan selected a set of wurlizter samples tonight and we played around with them loaded into my monome application, grainslide (http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=app:grainslide).  get’s a little scary at parts, but i love it.  enjoy.

mm-cc was so good today… i played around with some samples that my buddy charlie sent me, and also noise/drone cassette loops that i got in the mail yesterday from josh mason.   here is a short video i shot (sorry for the overdriven audio… got a little overzealous).  enjoy, and check out today’s mm-cc here: http://mm-cc.org/archives/51

mm-cc – preview – grainslide

more rain drop photos.  love ‘em.  here’s a previous day’s post where i took similar pictures and played some music.

my buddy hunter and i played a 2 hour improvised set tonight with guitar, monome, rhodes, and drums.  it went really well (in the way of live improvisation), but i am way too tired to edit the video tonight.  here is a still frame from the video i shot.  hopefully will get the video edited tomorrow and get it online.  goodnight

there is this very old house, called the yates house that has been under renovation for a while now, and i pass it every day on my walk to work.  this afternoon i decided to walk up around it and take pictures.  the old single-pane windows in it are amazing, in-and-of themselves they have so much texture from the glass dripping/melting (?) over the years, not to mention the amazing stained curtains, and random things from the last tenants that were left behind.   also, i’m 1/4 through my year of daily consecutive posts on uprlip!  milestones are cool!

macro. wood covered in dirt dobber nest remains.  goodnight.

i’m releasing my next album on cassette, & on an awesome label sometime around june of this year.  here’s 10 seconds of what i’ve been working on.

my buddy, hunter gave me a few old lenses yesterday.  i’m loving this asahi 50mm prime lens which i happened to already have the k-mount adapter for for my canon t2i.  the pictures above are very closely shot reflections in the roof of a black car.  the depth of field on this lens is so crazy.  looks really great for video too.  can’t wait to get my screw mount adapter in the mail so i can test out the 135mm prime lens he gave me too.

ahh such a good day.  i won’t ruin it with too much talking.

thanks to:

hunter pittman for guitar

thomas randolph for bass

meg fulford for hanging out

and jordan bishop-smith for hanging out and sketching the drawing above.

i played my usual set up: rhodes, monome running field sample slices, and xylophone.

check out the video below, and click here to go to the mm-cc.org post on this and download the full, unedited audio as well as the edited audio.

preview of some video that i’ll be using for tomorrow’s mm-cc post.  the song is from the soundtrack i composed for andrea theile’s film, Private Eyes last summer, download the album for free here.

harper’s been throwing up, and not able to sleep for a a few hours now and i’m sitting up with her while megan takes a turn sleeping.  i’ve also been coding php and java for the last 6.5 hours or so, so my creative drive is down to “what images do i have on my computer already that i can do something with… ?”  the answer to that question is the image above which i rejected for day 82, but my tiredness/dead brain tonight has assured me that not only is it a good enough image to have made the cut for day 82 but its quality deserves a day its own…  sleepy logic.

multiple exposures layered together from outside my studio tonight.  more mixing happening on this project…. should be done soon.  …to all a good night.

http://mm-cc.org – - click this text link or the image above to go to the new site.

new website finished!  very happy with the simplicity of it.  let me know how it looks for you.  and please, make use of the participate link, and upload form that i built.  upload your audio files, video clips, photographic work, drawings… etc and they will be re-purposed & used in the next, weekly session of mm-cc under the the same creative commons attribution share alike license that everything else we do will be under.  if what you upload gets used in a session in any way, you will get a credit on the post for that session, and a link to your site also.  hopefully you’ll get involved! looking forward to where this will go.

working on a website to showcase the movies, art, music, coffee spills… whatever, that comes out of my sunday morning music and coffee collaborations.  was hoping to get the site done for tonight’s post but it’ll have to wait… too tired.  here’s the header image so far.

started a tradition a while ago to have an open invite for friends to come over and drink coffee and make music on sunday mornings at my place.  that trickled off when we moved last year, and i recently decided to start up again with it.  not a big turn out today but it was fun.  my coworker thomas showed up, my buddy hunter, and also my friend biff but purely as an observer which i welcome also.  we recorded the session with two sdc room mics to 1/2″ tape on my otari.  the following video is something i’ve been wanting to do for a while also, so i figured today would be a good day to tackle it.  i shot video with my canon t2i of some branches/blossoms with trains passing in the background.  i used my old quantaray 22-80mm macro lens to shoot with, stopped down to 3.5.  then today i took the video output from my t2i (which is 1080p) and ran it out rca into a vcr, onto vhs at the highest speed the vcr would record at.  i then slowed it down to the slowest playback speed (which caused those linear glitches that you see), and then i filmed the lcd tv as the vcr output was played through it.  essentially it’s like re-amping (which i do with drums all the time in recording more info on that here) for video.  i dig it.  enjoy the music and the video.  goodnight.

mm-cc.3.20.11 from Jared Smyth on Vimeo.

little piano piece i’m working on… not quite there yet.  recorded on my macbook’s built-in mic.

new versions of my max/msp programs grainBox and grainSlide today.  major fix for the issue of drag-n-drop that people were having (that is a cycling 74 side issue, not me… btw).  there are now ‘read’ buttons for each sample in grainSlide, and one ‘read’ button for grainBox that loads an individual sample.  should fix everybody’s problem with drag-n-drop functionality.  downloads below.

grainSlide – v0.6.zip

grainBox – v0.2.zip

vector designed grid layered a few times over a dark b/w image of clouds and blurred trees.

bits of a new (massive) illustration i’m working on.  definitely couldn’t finish it in time for tonight’s post but as i was working on it i realized that while zoomed in at around 800% (or more) it looked interesting out of the context of the full image.  i had a great day.  did you?  hope so.

goodnight

created this vector template today for my mixing process.  it’ll make it way easier to write down, and remember settings for each channel strip as i go through each track for my new album.  i was just scratching down notes on random pieces of paper in the studio… now it’s all legit.

oscar, my buddy who you may remember from this post came over today and recorded cello over a rhodes composition that i recorded for my upcoming album.  unfortunately i am still without a decent analog-to-digital converter so you’ll have to settle for the built-in mic’s recording quality on my t2i rather than getting to hear it post-tape (as if any method of recording could make oscar playing cello sound bad). if you like, watch the video below.

cello.to.otari from Jared Smyth on Vimeo.

i abhor this…  but, i did something for a blog post today.  check

my otari mx5050 finally got a test run.  works beautifully.  dusty, dirty, wonderful, 1/2″.   here is a track i recorded on it today.  field recording from the beach yesterday morning, layered with mic’d rhodes-tines, direct-in rhodes, and guitar.  enjoy.

went out with hunter and recorded with guitar, and xylophone all over town.  we will be releasing an album soon (within the next couple days)

(3-23-11*edit… or not)

(07-24-11*edit… ok now it’s released).

enjoy the preview track below that we recorded in an abandoned boxcar today. no computers. just instruments, delay, and location.

worked more on a little piece of the melody from yesterday’s post.

megan and harper are heading out of town for a week  tomorrow to meet the new baby cousin down south.  i rocked harper to sleep tonight and decided i would compose a little music box melody for her and then make a video of it for her to watch while she’s gone.  enjoy the video below.

lullaby from Jared Smyth on Vimeo.

been practicing through an old book on triplets around the drum kit.  this is a really bad recording of me playing an derivation i came up with today off of one of the triplet beats in the book.  played at 133bpm.  wish this recording was more clear… quite proud of the actual beat, and the kick drum triplets that i worked in.  i tried to work with the audio a bit in audacity (free recording software) on megan’s computer tonight.  hopefully my macbook will be back with a new logic board on monday…

toggle switches are harder to illustrate than one would think.  also, i did this illustration in ten minutes.  device photos, demonstration, and pricing (if anyone wants to buy one) available soon.

****edit:121411: note, this project got abandoned for my 2880 controller project… it does more than this would’ve done anyways.

so, i was really excited about making some music for tonight’s post… alas my macbook pro is still not working after three trips to the repair store.  random shut-downs all the time, and major overheating even though the fans are running.  i decided to take it apart myself tonight and see if i could see any obvious hardware issues.  there are a couple burn marks in a few different places but nothing cracked or broken.  my plan is to take it back to the shop tomorrow and see what i can get done about it.  put it back together and it’s now running at 179ºF. hopefully something works out, no budget for a new one anytime soon.  little stressed about it….  but… life goes on, and i’m sure it will work out.  goodnight all.

upon the request of megan, i’m posting the color version of yesterday’s post.

started work tonight on a second pot.box.  this one for a friend.  we got a late start on it so this is as far as we got.  hoping to incorporate a few more options in this one than the last one had… toggle switches, push buttons, etc, etc.  goodnight.

reamped the cello track from this day into the sunn 6×10 cab through the music man head i mentioned yesterday.  then recorded that with a close mic’d sm57 run quite hot into my tascam cassette deck. added a nice bite to it.  i dig it.  gonna try this with drums soon for sure. give the audio track below a listen and compare it to the original post linked to above… let me know what you think. i think i like the original and this version layered together.

*this track takes about thirteen seconds to come in just fyi.

two things: one) i got this music man hd one thirty tube head, and 6×10 sunn cabinet today for a ridiculously (unbelievably) good deal, they will most likely (definitely) become my friend/bandmate Hunter’s because he deserves to own an amazing guitar rig like this more than i do, and it’s pretty much his dream setup; and two) evidence of Hunter deserving to own this more than me, here is a little piece of music we played on my porch this afternoon him playing a beautiful piece on a hand-built classical guitar and me playing bells with violin bow and mallets.  you can hear my foot crunching the tempo into the leaves in front of the porch.  enjoy. goodnight.

recently i bought an otari mx5050 mk-III-4, 1/2″ tape machine off ebay, and it came in the mail today. i can’t wait to record with this onto tape rather than just using it as an analog filtering amp as i did tonight.  audio below is as it was recorded.  no editing at all.  enjoy.

saw this beautiful 1970′s floral pattern on a plate in the kitchen at work today.  i knew instantly that i wanted to illustrate it.  after i got done illustrating the images you see above i thought of how much they remind me of something my friend jordan bishop-smith would wear on an over-sized sweatshirt or sewn to the back of a bright (neon, velvet) hoodie, so i decided to name the post that….  couldn’t decide which color scheme was my favorite.. i think i like the last one best… what do you think?

finished my delay sampler today.

download here: uprlip.com/grainBox-v0.1.zip

please let me know how you like it, where you use it and also if you find any bugs, or have any questions… i’d be glad to try and help.  credit for the original grain delay must go to: michael edwards such a great little platform for me to start this project from.  for a nice starter: load some samples in, turn your grain delays on and then cut the density down to very little (2-4) and raise the grain length up as much as you like… very high (like 200).  such a great effect can be produced by doing this, really smooths out the glitches.  you can hear this effect in the past few audio posts i’ve put up here.  hope you enjoy using this.

got this 3.5 octave set of bells at goodwill today for $25!  what!?!  such a good deal.  played around with a few different melodies tonight, and then started playing with my violin bow on the edges of the tines… instant gorgeous.  this recording doesn’t really do the acoustic sound of the bells+violin justice… i think i had my highs trimmed a little too hot, and didn’t really pump the mids that it needed.  ends up sounding kind of “shrill” rather than how full and warm it actually is. this recording, again, features the grain delay i’ve been building in max/msp.  such a good day with my ladies.  such a good day all around.  hope you all had a great one.  enjoy the sounds below.

so… i have an awesome lady and she decided to get me the music box kit you see above.  i made this looping melody for it then recorded that with stereo piezos on the ends of the island it’s sitting on.  the delay return of this recording is running through a grain delay that i’ve been writing in max/msp, should be available for download soon.  enjoy.

day 42 revisited.

i went with meg tonight to visit a client from our work that is in the hospital (icu) and not expected to make it much longer.  to call her a client is not enough.  she is a friend.  she did not respond to us while we were there, but i asked her if i could turn my recorder on while we were there anyway, and i did.  the following is not meant to, in anyway glamorize this scenario or what our friend is going through… it is simply the way i know how to deal with things that life throws.  sample from her hospital room, and three piano parts i composed.

goodnight, love to all

tonight i worked on a track for a while that i was going to use for tonight’s post but in the end i didn’t like it all that much… so, rather than starting over completely: i rendered the track from ableton, brought it back into a new project reversed it and mussed it up a bunch (by that i mean “secret-sauce”) and then i took the pizeo you see above and reversed its connections (which makes it a low-fi speaker) then dunked it in the glass of water and played the reversed track back through it, while recording the underwater audio with the piezo on the outside of the glass.  i ended up blending the original (reversed original) back in with the underwater piezo track, and throwing a little of the ice.melt.piezo track (here) in with it all at the end.  quite happy with these results.

with the help of a couple friends i made this necklace for my lady.  it took me a good five minutes to convince her that i actually made it (i’m not ‘the jewelry making type’ so to speak).  my coworker, rosie (her site here) made the copper feather for me, which in my opinion totally makes the whole necklace.  i got the quartz crystal from a local hobby shop and built the cage for it out of copper wire; the .45 bullet casing from my dad and suspended the cowrie shell in it; then my friend jordan helped me attach the clasps.  lot’s of collaboration going on on this one.  megan loves it, and i got major love points for it.

more sounds from yesterday’s trip out to my grandfather’s house.  i realized late last night that there was one audio file from yesterday that i really wanted to play around with and had forgotten to for last night’s post.  here it is.  slowed down a bit, and grain delay added.  enjoy.

went out to the house that my grandfather built today and shot some photos and recorded some glockenspiel with meg, davidson, and scout (the dog).  i recorded in stereo with two piezos today.  the recording below is a layering of two separate tracks: one recorded in the bedroom my grandpa used to sleep in, with one piezo on the window and one on the sink, and the second recording is with them on opposite ends of a propane tank.  such a great day.  goodnight all.

goodnight.

built this cassette tape loop tonight.  it’s about a 5.5 second loop. played room-mic’d glockenspiel onto it, and looped it over itself about five times dubbing back and forth from a second tape machine with a standard tape in it.  i then flipped the tape and reversed the audio.  the delay is all mxr analog delay, and the reverb is a blend of room and digital. enjoy.

day 40! not really a milestone, other than the fact that it’s ten more than thirty and twenty more than twenty… you get the point.  i’m excited that i’ve made it this far.  these are some old shots of light bulbs taken on my mamiya/sekor msx-500 35mm slr with 100 speed film.  edited them into these diptychs today. goodnight all.

decided to play around with adobe premiere today.  it’s the first time i’ve ever used it, and i’m pleased with the results.  the controls are quite like photoshop so it really wasn’t as difficult as i thought it might be to achieve the results i wanted.  video shot of the blue window above, the screen with trees blowing in the wind, and the blinds.  you can see the blinds throughout the film working as a vertically moving saturation/color filter (subtly, but they’re there), i simply set that video to “hue” blend and turned the opacity down a bit, then allowed it to work as a moving filter for the other clips to lay under.  i played guitar run through my mxr analog delay over the video and layered in the field recording from yesterday of me walking.  if you’re having trouble sleeping… this should do the trick.

hazy.day from Jared Smyth on Vimeo.

went for a walk around the block, and recorded two separate files: there and back.  in the recording below you’ll hear both of them, one with large reverb, and the other one super-dry.  i would usually take these recordings and play some instrumentation of some sort over them, but tonight i liked them just the way they are.  feel free to play something over them yourself : i’d love to hear it if you do.

got the computer turned on log enough tonight to load these photos in and tried to get some audio ready for the post, and then it pinwheeled for about ten minutes.  ugh.  i often wish that everything i am interested in was not so dependent on the use of a computer.  really hate them for the most part.

today was mildly rainy and grey all day.  i loved it.  we walked around railroad square, a local art park here in town for the first friday gallery hop tonight and i snapped these pictures.  the one of the girl above is our friend and coworker, meg.  she’s been sick for a bit, but finally feeling better so it was great to get to go walk around and hang out with her.  i recorded the music below this morning with the sounds of harper and megan in the background doing their morning things.  it’s a little piano melody i’ve been playing around with.  added the usual suspects in ableton.  enjoy.  goodnight all!

so, today i realized that my firepod (my multi-channel interface that i use primarily to record drums) is broken completely and it will take 4-6 weeks to get it back from the factory for repair.  i was slightly bummed out to say the least.

oh, well… here’s some rhodes-n-beats

extreme close up of some dark fabric with minute ambient light filtering into the lens.

two things: 1) i recently read an article about how to record strings (or one method anyway), and tried that out tonight with my friend Oscar playing cello, and i played a bit of rhodes piano, and 2) i finally gave in and downloaded the hipstamatic app for iphone…. i refuse to just let it do the work for me though, so the image above is actually three different hipstamatic shots layered into photoshop by me with different blending modes, and a few other things done to them.

more on the cello recording: basically the method i read about (from an interview with john vanderslice) is this… take a a ribbon mic (he used a coles 4038, but i don’t have a $grand to spend on one of those yet, so i substituted an akg large diaphragm condenser), and place it 6-8 inches from the sound hole on the string instrument and eq that with most of the mids you want in the mix, then take two small diaphragm condensers (i used my oktava mk-012s) and place those equidistant from the sound-hole(s) on either side of the instrument, i decided to place mine about 3ft back, and then you eq one of those with all your high frequencies that you want in the mix, and the other one with all the low frequencies you want in the mix, and then hard pan those left and right, while the center mic stays… naturally, centered in the mix.  pretty genius right?  right.  i personally think it sounds really good.  what do you think?  it may have also helped that oscar is an amazing cellist (i had to fight with him to leave the dissonance in this track… ).  take a listen to the track below… it’s the outro/ending to a new song i’ve been working on. 2 tracks of cello here, and one track of rhodes… all with the usual tape delay.  enjoy.

megan and harper have been out-of-town since thursday morning.  tonight, i finally dumped a ton of old pictures off my camera.  these were on there from a few weeks ago, they reminded me how much i miss this one.  can’t wait for the return tomorrow.  so many baby hugs for me.

goodnight

found these shots taken with my pentax k-100 while i was in new york back in september for in/out fest (here).  the film was extremely expired, thus the strange, and unexpected lighting and coloring on these.  love ‘em.

this is a track i started working on today.  loving my new oktava mk-012s for drum overheads.  this is not mixed at all yet, just a sample from what i’ve done so far.  woo-hoo!

got some work done in my studio today.  primarily those white panels on the walls and the two hanging above the drum kit.  i built them from mineral wool and 4″ frames, with muslin fabric covering them.  they do wonders for the sound in my studio… so i can actually begin recording soon.  just waiting on my oktava mk-012 stereo pair to come in the mail and i’ll be set.  goodnight.

all these dead flower pods beside our house have been catching my attention.  decided to photograph one after dark tonight.

we recently got a new shag carpet for the house.  tonight i was thinking about how much i love it (it’s the little things in life), and i decided to snap some macro shots of it.  goodnight.

a few days ago i asked an online-friend of mine, marcus fischer if i could sample/remix some material from his album arctic/antarctic and post it here on uprlip.  he told me to go for it, so… here it is.  the image above is the cover of the album that i sampled material from.  i lowered, then raised the resolution quite a bit and then moved a few strands of the image left and right… i felt like this was a good representation of what i did to the audio from the album.  if you haven’t checked out marcus’ blog dustbreeding.com — do so.  there is a great archive of posts to dig through from when marcus did his own 365 day project in 2009.  the two tracks i used for my track below are arctic 3, and antarctic 1.  i only used sound from those two tracks.  enjoy.

got this danelectro u2 guitar today.  it’s a deep purple color… which rules.  played around with a tape loop of me playing it tonight, and then layered some drums over the top.  the timing got off with the tape loops some but i decided to leave it as is.  hunter likes the new guitar so much he had to be in the picture with it.

so… i’m not big on photos of me for the purpose of promoting my musical endeavors but i have a project or two coming up (more on that soon) that call for this kind of thing.  so here it is.  my press photo.  hunter came over today, and snapped these of me, and i laid them out, and edited them tonight.

got my computer back today… still not fixed… taking it back tomorrow.  on a better note: i’ve been practicing walking with harper recently (her walking, not mine… i do pretty good at that), just holding her fingers and letting her lead me wherever she likes around the house.  well, much to my joy she kept saying “p, p, p!’ today as we were walking, which is her word (letter, syllable, baby-talk) for ‘piano.’  she walked up to it, let go of my fingers and started banging away, reaching high above her head and standing on tip-toes to reach the keys.  about 5 minutes in i thought to turn on my field recorder.  i played some pad sounds down in the background on this.  goodnight.

thanks to the megan for letting me use her comp for the last two days.  tonight i really wanted to make some music for my post, and was excited to really push myself to make something without the use of a computer.  so… i overdubbed take after take of noise from my loop pedal onto my tascam tape machine then back to loop pedal then, back to tape and so on.  then i re-amped that track from tape and recorded the room sound of that onto my olympus field recorder.   i love how mushy and saturated it sounds…  the rustling noises are from some leaves outside my studio.  enjoy.  cheesy graphic above is courtesy of megan.

my laptop went into the shop today.  glitched out screen and constant hard-resets to it had me worried, so i’ll be without it for a week or so now.  thank god for applecare.  used megan’s computer tonight and photoshop to create the image above.

inspired by john keston’s post over at audiocookbook.org (here), i froze a piezo’ element… i recorded the output of the frozen piezo while heating it on the stove.  love the little blips and pops that it created.  i layered a few different organ drones from my korg ms2k over the top.  a little long, but worth listening to the whole thing (i think).  enjoy.

it was raining super-hard this morning and the pictures above are taken with my t2i, with an old pentax macro lens.  the water droplets that you see are actually suspended in air, rolling off the eve of the roof.  i set my shutter speed quite fast (1/1250) to capture the beads of water clearly as they were falling.  here’s a little music that i made with a few field recordings and my monome (here) running flin (here) to control 5 or 6 midi tracks in ableton.

helped my dad cut up a bunch of fire wood today.  when we were about to finish up for the day i turned my field recorder on and captured some recording of the splitting machines going.  then tonight i played my lap harp with a violin bow on it, and the classical guitar from this post: http://uprlip.com/archives/1300 to play a little over the top of that recording.  enjoy.

i took the title track from my last full length album and remixed it to a degree tonight.  click http://jredsmyth.bandcamp.com/track/rundlyn to go listen to the original and or download the album if you’d like.  remix track below.  enjoy.

no filters here:  all three of these diptychs came from one jpeg originally.  blur was created by file format glitching.  the original image that i worked from was a picture of the door to our old house.  goodnight.