I’ve been enjoying playing a bit with Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch – it’s an implementation of a few different algorithms for time-stretching audio to insane levels – we’re talking slowing audio files down from a few minutes to to potentially hours.

In particular, it’s served well as a tool to provide interesting source material for new textures and sounds. I’ve been primarily grabbing ambient parts that would form a big-sounding aural bed underneath whatever I was doing, but now I’ve just recently discovered that some great effects can be got by chopping up the audio at random. Like this one here (the source sample was the synth line talked about in my previous post).

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This sound was created – again in Audiomulch – by triggering short, segmented sound bites that I’d captured out of the stretched audio via a drum sequencer.

Right, back to work…

Here’s a lame excuse to test out a very cool audio plugin for Wordpress; I’m contemplating the idea of using it to occasionally post snippets of little aural experiments I’ve done to get feedback on. Most of them aren’t very good, so don’t get too excited.

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About this one: we recorded a demo of a possible new song last Monday, during which I jumped on the keys and emitted a lot of ambient dreck. At the end, however, after the song had finished I stumbled upon a 4 bar moment that I kind of liked but never actually performed properly.

At 1am this morning Yimmy sent me an mp3 of the demo which inspired me to try and make something of that little 4 bars. I hacked it up mercilessly in CoolEdit and then dropped it into Audiomulch. What you hear is the hurried creation of various elements over the space of 30-45 minutes before wearily hitting the hay. The mix was quickly done just now to capture a snapshot of it in its early stages before I started playing around with it too much more.

I’m not sure what I think. I still like the sample but as for the direction this headed, probably not quite what I’m after.

Anyway, any comments? Like or hate?

Last year the new U2.com was launched. Along with it came their new fan club, in the form of a US$40 per year subscription service for the website. Many fans viewed it to be a bit of a poor deal; I was one of them.

Basically it offers some paper thin content, streaming access to all of the album tracks and videos (I already own them!) and little else – pretty much all that’s of value are Willie’s diaries (visual designer for U2’s stage shows). Oh, and it gives access to The Edge’s new blog – but so far he hasn’t actually written anything except for a lengthy plug for the Music Rising foundation he helped kickstart.

To sweeten the deal, they offered a live disc featuring a smattering of tracks from their Vertigo tour for fans who signed up.

“Big deal” I thought. And didn’t sign up.

This year, none of the subscription services have changed, and yet I’m rabidly signing up as fast as my little credit card will let me.

Why? Rather than some random Vertigo disc, instead the subscription comes with a double Zoo TV Sydney live CD set and two Zoo TV era posters. Achtung memorabilia baby!

Well, now you know: if there’s Zoo TV schwag to be had, you’ve got me hook line and sinker.

Turning our place into a makeshift home studio, demoing some new tunes for Reason.

Buried behind the macs there is my new NAD C372 amplifier which is hooked up to a pair of Jamo E875s. Very happily, using the set-up for monitoring turns to have worked out even better than I’d anticipated.

Photo by Carly

Two days after putting my new blog up, and I’m now…

• The number 1 result on Google for Joe Hardy (up from page 1, position 6)
• The number 3 result on Google for Joe Blog (up from page 2, position 5)

Talk about overnight improvement! A lot of my approach with the new design had SEO enhancements in mind, but there was no way I was expecting that kind of immediate effect.

Here’s what I made a point of focusing on most:

• Making proper use of document structure (ie tags like H1, H2, H3, STRONG etc)
• Ensuring that the page hierarchy was as simple as possible (not too many nested DIVs, avoiding tables, etc)
• ALT attributes on images, TITLE attributes on links
• Using the awesome Wordpress URL Rewriting ISAPI Filter for IIS by Dean Lee – great work Dean, thanks!

That’s pretty much it.

Yes, I know that I really have no need to be getting top rankings out of Google. But it’s certainly educational and it’s helped me get a good grip on what search engines look for.