New Music Friday Minus One

Rather than spend all my entire night studying for a physics exam, I'm going to tell you about the music that's hot on the SBlock playlist right now.

Aesop Rock - Zero Dark Thirty: a standard Aesop Rock track. Off his most recent project, Skelethon, Zero Dark Thirty uses the Tragedy of the Commons to illustrate a theme that's been common to many of his songs: the clash between "unsigned hype" and the beast that is the music industry.

Yonas - Drive It like It's Stolen: this dude came on the radar a few days ago from a friend (props Brad). He's got a free mixtape on datpiff, which is pretty dope; this song's beat is from the Glitch Mob, Brother Ali is featured, and there are some other familiar covers. He's got a great flow, some wit to go along with it, and makes good use of cultural references without being over the top most of the time. Oh, and anyone who takes shots at hipsters is a-okay with me... "RIP hipsters I'm a backpack killa". Not that I hate hipster, they're just easy targets.

Tornado - Kill the Noise (remix): found this near the top of beatport's dubstep chart this week and have been bumpin it ever since. I really like the use of the slow attack bass to signal a change in the song is coming. The percussive, bell at the high end/organ at for the lows synth is what makes this song awesome - great sound design indeed. My one dig is it does have a very stereo typical intro and outro (so friggen long), but it's still a great track.

Next week look forward to some scotch and more Scott Block.

Dubspot and Ableton 30/30

Dubspot provided me with yet another reason to toute their website. The advice provided in their blog's posts and the youtube tutorials are easy to understand and have expand my horizons in many ways. Dubspot is a music school in New York city that specializes in DJing/performing and all aspects of production. I first discovered Dubspot about two years ago while browsing the internet for production tutorials and have been avidly visiting and watching since. Having just bought Native Instruments' Maschine a few short months earlier, my production progress plateaued to somewhere above semi-terrible. Enter the Dubspot. I watched as many videos as possible, thus developing my current style of music. A video that directly influenced my production stems from a sound design segment about layering synths. Now listen to my beats. My synths now go HARD, like shatter 1 and a 1/4 inch lexan hard.


Fast forward to a week ago. I'm taking a break from my creative destruction using my current opiate of choice, facebook, when this link popped up in my feed: a free course from Dubspot on Live. Are you serious? Normally these course run over $4K. Not surprisingly, I signed up. I've never taken a music class before and always wanted to. The biggest draw to the course for me, besides it coming from Dubspot for FREE(!), is that it covers the basics of Ableton Live, a program I'm unfamiliar with. The other two members of 4D2D put Live to good use and it has a unique interface for music making (clip launching), therefore there isn't really a choice in the matter. This clip launching function gives Live individuality among other, more simple programs *cough*fruityloops*cough*. This allows for slick recording and performance, something I would like to try my hand at so I don't perpetuate the era of "Pressing Play" (more on that soon). After I finish the 30 lessons, a short overview and review will be in order for those wondering if it was worth the investment time. Hopefully, I don't end up like Kevin Durant after the finals - disappointed.