It’s been dark on this blog for a while now.  Thought I should update on what I’ve been up to:

• Revising my novel.  Yup, my novel.  I’ve written and co-written a fair number of music software titles, but I’ve also written an urban fantasy piece of fiction.  ”Urban Fantasy,” for those who aren’t into genre descriptions, basically means a story that takes place in our world, but with vampires or other supernatural or fantastic elements.

• Speaking of music software titles, I have a new book out now!  I co-wrote the new Logic Pro 9 Power! with the spectacular Kevin Anker.  If you use or are interested in using Logic Pro 9 you can do worse than giving our new guide a look.  I have more details on Logic Pro 9 Power over on the Geartalk blog, if you’re interested.

• Working on the Ember After song “Shallow”—that’s right, I have been working on new Ember After music!  And this song is so good, that I’ve renamed the EP to reflect that this song will be the title song.  (AKA, the Misery EP is now the Shallow EP).  The song will hopefully be finished by mid-June, with perhaps a third new song, maybe an instrumental, around the same time.  I hope to release the Shallow EP this summer.  Yeay, new music!  This song will also introduce a new Ember Member…oooh, how exciting!

That’s a quick list of my recent artistic endeavors.  I’ll hopefully keep this blog updated more regularly at this point, and perhaps even update the whole emberafter.com site for the new release.

It’s been a while since I posted a blog entry here. One of the reasons is I’ve actually been working. I’ve been working both on getting the new Logic Users Group platform up and running, and finally on more Ember After songs.  Towards that end, I finally took possession of a fantastic new guitar, which I detail here in the geartalk blog.   I also have just ordered a Dave Smith Instrumens Mopho, a fantastic analog monosynth based off the Prophet 08, but with some special editions just perfect for grinding mean industrial music: sub-oscillators, feedback, audio input.  Tasty treats, all!

Dave Smith Instruments Mopho

But all this has got me thinking about this whole Interweb, and how much time can be spent communicating on it.  Ember After has a web page, a Myspace page, an iLike page, a Facebook page, a Bebo page…I’ve almost lost track.  And of course Ember After is on Twitter.  To keep up to date on all of these would leave no time to be creative!   (Let alone do a full time job, if recording and performing music isn’t paying the bills).

And it’s not just typing to your huge (ha…) fanbase, it’s keeping up with other people—the whole point of this communication is that it’s supposed to be two-way, to bring people together, and not simply be another one-way announcement system.  But it all eats into what limited time there is to write music, which ultimately is the reason that people are following/friending with Ember After to begin with, right?

Somewhere in there is a balance.  More successful acts have discussed hiring a marketing company to take care of the mailing list/updating news/blog aspect of their “music business.”  That can really help free the artist to both communicate and create…if you’re successful enough to afford it, or have a record company willing to pay for it.  As long as the updates and blogs and tweets come from the artist, if they are propogated and managed by hired help shouldn’t mean the communication is less authentic.

But for those of us who don’t have the means or the success yet to hire a team, we’re left trying to figure out how to keep these dozens of sites and networks up to date while at the same time finding the time to make the music that you are communicating about.  And it’s a double edged sword—without communicating, nobody knows that you’ve got the music out, and without the music, there’s nothing to communicate.

For now, I’m shifting the balance towards creating.  I’ll still try and actively post whenever I have a moment, but that’s proving to be not as frequent as I wish.  I hope that makes sense.

Ember After started crawling out of the mirky depths of the current underground music scene in very late 2007. 2008 was the year that Ember After started trying to find it’s darkly mechanical groove.  So how did it fare?

Well, in some ways it has been slow.  It took far longer to get our CD together and reviewed than anticipated.  It ended up being late 2008 before our debut album, Grasping At Straws, was available in all the formats we’d wanted.  But we’re finally here, with our CD for sale at CD Baby, and orderable elsewhere on the net, and the digital music available, copy protection free and in high resolution from iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, eMusic, and other download sites.

As with any group that isn’t making money hand over fist, it becomes difficult to move forward in a huge way.  We can’t afford a major marketing push.  We can’t afford to make videos for as many songs as we’d like.  We can’t afford to do as much promotion as we’d like.  But hopefully, little by little, we’re making ourselves heard.  Its tough to tell from Myspace profile views and plays and modest independent sales just how many people are tuned into what you do, but if you’re reading this we thank you from the bottom of our hearts—its the encouragement from you that helps us carry on when we stare into the empty hole that is so much of the rock scene today.

We’re taking the holidays off like most of you, but we’ve already got a single in the can called “Misery” that we’re extremely excited about—this is a fantastic song to dance to, to play, and hopefully to play live once our next album is completed!    We hope you like it, and we hope we can roll it out with a video and a bit of a media splash.  We’ll see.  Our first album took years to complete, but we hope to have the second one finished and available within the next year—we’ve got some great stuff and we want to share it!

As far as communication goes, this website has been pretty quiet for a while now, but next year that will change.  If you follow the Ember After News page, you’ve already noticed two things: we are now on twitter (http://www.twitter.com/emberafter) and there is now a two-way link between our Twitter page and our News page.  This way, we can update the News page far more frequently with Tweets instead of waiting for weeks or months until we have time for an essay-length update.  Also, we’d like to encourage two-way communication with those of you who want to follow our creative process—that’s what Twitter is good for.  We’ll continually be looking for ways to improve our communication.

So that’s it for now.  Thanks everyone for reading, for downloading the music if you have, and for buying some songs or the whole album if you have.  We’ll hopefully have more good stuff in the near future, and we’ll definitely keep you informed!

I generally don’t bother forwarding on anything, since I know it will get around eventually. But I found something particularly uplifting about this. I guess in these days in which so much of our world is in turmoil, this speaks to something…else.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Regardless of your politics, the recent announcement that Senator Edward Kennedy has a cancerous brain tumor is very sad news.  For those outside the USA, he is the only surviving brother of the late president John F. Kennedy, and he’s been in the Senate for over 40 years.  He has been a passionate and gifted senator, hence his state continually re-electing him.   The cancer he has can be treated, but the treatments usually prolong life for a while, they don’t result in complete remission.  My heart goes out to him and his family, and I wish him strength and luck and prayers as he faces this disease.

Letting your fans remix your songs is all the rage, at least with cutting edge artists.  Now Radiohead wants to get into the action.  So they’ve created a website so fans can remix the current single, Nude, from their  current In Rainbows.  The general idea is that they give you a few “stems” (submixes of elements of the song) and you can use these to recreate the song however you see fit, then upload it to a special website.  http://www.radioheadremix.com/information/

Conceptually, I think invites to remix a song is a great way to encourage fan interaction…But I think Radiohead is actually going about this in a pretty sucky way.
1) You cannot download the stems for free; you buy EACH STEM individually from the iTunes Music Store
2) You are not even buying uncompressed WAV files; you’re buying 256k AAC (“iTunes Plus”) files.
3) Only if you buy all five stems at once THIS WEEK do you get to download a GarageBand format song file with all of the stems added.
4) Five stems only?  Trent Reznor, who offers FREE downloads of stems in WAV or GarageBand format at http://remix.nin.com, offers dozens of stems for NIN songs…

All this makes me wonder: is Radiohead serious about encouraging fans to remix their music?  Or is this just another marketing campaign?  From a PR point of view, Radiohead will definitely get press from this, and of course the stems for sale mean that the single itself will generate more money than just the single itself (especially considering that it was available for free).

Regardless of what I think of the song Nude, (personally, I find it dull), or Radiohead in general (I am a fan), I am disappointed in they way they chose to do this.  Maybe I’m just being skeptical…but I think this is just a sales ploy, not an attempt to build an interactive fan community, the way Nine Inch Nails are.

I saw something sad today.

I was waiting in line, when in front of me, there was a young skinhead. He had a pleasant enough expression on his face, but his body art was far from warm and cozy. He had “HATRED” tattooed on the back of his shaved head. His arms were fully tattooed as well, and he had swastikas on his hands.

But that isn’t what I thought was the saddest thing.

To me, what was sadder was that he had a non-tattooed, rather pleasant looking young lady hanging on his arm.

The mind reels…Why would she demean herself to be with someone so obviously racist and confrontational? She has to know that she will be considered to have the same closed minded loathing of anyone who doesn’t look/pray/think exactly like he does. Does she feel the same? Does she believe that if he treats her well, its okay if he treats others like dirt? Does he treat her like dirt, but her self-esteem is so damaged that she feels she deserves the abuse, or that he’s all she’s worth?

Then again, what if I’m wrong about him? What if, like the movie American History X, his tattoos represent an earlier philosophy, and now he’s seen the light? Maybe hatred isn’t inside his head, only tattooed on its surface?

Personally, I find that unlikely. If he no longer felt the phrase “HATRED” represented him, he could wear a hat to cover it, grow his hair, etc. But it does point out the power of symbols. Clearly, he wanted to make a statement with his tattoos. And I accept that statement for what it is: a complete pigheaded groundless loathing of anyone who is different from him.

Did that girl find that sexy? Did she want those symbols to speak for her? Did she somehow think that she could hang on his tattooed, swastika-bearing arm without those symbols infecting her like an angry cancer?

I don’t know. But I hate to see women demean themselves to the level of their dumbass boyfriends. It’s just…sad.

Welcome to the first post in the Ember After blog!  The News blog will be focused on Ember After and Ember Member updates, and the Geartalk blog will be focused on my latest adventures in musical software and equipment.  But this blog will hopefully evolve into more general musings and chat.  I intend to add links, images, podcasts, and so on as time goes on.  Enjoy, and don’t forget to sign up to the RSS feed!  — Orren