Well i’m not sure if this can be categorised as “music”, but anyway… Got bored the other day and took apart my sister’s toy electronic keyboard* and rewired it a little bit. (Hayley bought me an electronics kit (”Draw and play your own electric music!”) - this reminded me of the circuit bending workshop I’d been to a while back, and so I connected the two devices together…) The keyboard has several demo tunes built in, record / play feature, microphone and a drum kit capable of both traditional drum sounds and animal impressions. the rhythm section also features beats such as DISCO, ROCK, BLUES, and my favourite, “NEWNEW”.
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Have been messing around with the mindblowing Reason 3 for a week or two now. I always seem to start lots of tracks but never get round to finishing them. Here are a few snippets of things I’ve made so far… if you like any then let me know, that might just give me the inspiration to finish them off!

Candidate 0 (1,014kb mp3)
Candidate 1 (749kb mp3)
Candidate 2 (587kb mp3)
Candidate 3 (1,560kb mp3)

stream all these to your audio player

Have been trying to get hold of a router for Dad’s business. Up to now I have always used and recommended dabs.com to everyone but semi-recently they’ve gone downhill and removed their telephone contact information, dealing only with customers via email. Which would be fine if they didn’t have an 8 working hour delay for dealing with customer enquiries. My advice is, if you know exactly what you want and there’s no chance something will go wrong with the order, then go ahead and take advantage of their slightly cheaper prices. I’d given them the benefit of the doubt up to now but have now given up. Placed a new order with novatech in the end and their sales staff were very helpful. Didn’t cost much more either. Chucked a DVD writer and 25pk blank DVD-R’s (for about a fiver) in for good measure

Have upgraded to Wordpress 1.5, which has some sweet new features, including a Theme Manager which allowed me to install the beautiful “Falling Dreams” theme created by Razvan Teodorescu.

You may also notice the “Interesting Stuff” section on the right hand side, this collects interesting (to me, anyway) links I find while surfing the web.

My second contribution to the Album A Day project. I saved loads of time by writing this album at 255 BPM then I slowed it down to 120 BPM. The end result is a musical abomination, 23 minutes of material recorded and mixed in 20 mins flat.

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