Category: Music

Vince Guaraldi is one of my top 5 favorite pianist of all time. I love this album so much. Merry Christmas everyone!

I’m excited to announce my new project: Pit Witch. This project will be my solo music and sound creations with a focus on ambient, experimental electronic, EDM, global trance, electronic jazz, and spatial genres. The project will be under the Open Ocean Studios label, which is my recording studio here in Santa Barbara CA.

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For my first release, I bring you “Flipping the Sand”. This song has technically been 13 years in the making, because it’s about the time I’ve spent with my good friend Christ Esten going to see the band Phish on New Years Eve starting in 2010 (more on that below). I wrote this as a show of my love and friendship for Christian since our experiences together have inspired so much in me to create art and music. The lyrics to the song are here and will make sense once you know a little more about what Phish does for NYE shows:

“Flipping the Sand”

Bring a gold compass to abide

The source of nature is rooted inside

Take it all in and give it all out

Bring a Winnebago to a campout

The major obstacle at every stage in the path of enlightenment is in our own thoughts

Thoughts keep us separate, even the thought of unity is far different from unity

The thoughts keep coming, each one making it’s bid for our attention and identification 

The world swings around once more

You heard the flock to the golden shores

Dancing around a flying street meat

We pray good deeds to a ball

Show my shadow to help me evolve

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My obsession with seeing phish NYE shows started because of their ‘musical gag’ that they performed in 2010; Phish has a song called “Meatstick” which is arguably about the bass player’s (Mike Gordon) fight to remain a vegetarian while on tour in Europe (or Japan, I can’t remember). There’s a famous chorus reprise in this song after the jam that features the lyrics of the chorus in Japanese.
Building on this theme, Phish had groups of people come out on stage dressed as many cultures from around the world sing the chorus of the song in their native tongues. Unknown to the crowd, Phish had put the backing music on loop and had snuck off the stage. After a little bit, Phish came out, but this time at the back of Madison Square Garden suspended in a giant hot dog. They proceeded to fly above the crowd where they then set down on the stage and proceeded to jam out the rest of the song into the final 10 second count down into 2011. It’s a memory I’ll cherish forever, and this was only the first. You can watch the full performance of Meatstick here.
Phish always does something special on Halloween or New Years, you can actually check out the list of their musical gags here.

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Streaming now on all platforms! Click here!

When Dannah and Suzy approached me about helping them create a podcast, I jumped at the opportunity. Suzy is a death dula and Dannah is a all around badass that has created a non-profit to support all sorts of activism in the Santa Barbara community. Problem was, they had never made a podcast before and didn’t know anything about audio production or audio gear. Luckily I own a recording studio here in Santa Barbara called Open Ocean Studios.
Unluckily, Our Everything Bagel did 7 episodes for season 1, but Suzy moved away and so there won’t be a season 2. Sorry fam!

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We recorded their introduction episode and it went well. I used Shure SM7Bs with a cloud lifter because Dannah was a little soft spoken. I setup the room with a table and some water. It felt like a nice relaxing podcast studio! After we finished rolling, I noticed that they really needed a introduction. So I produced this sound design for them! I quickly put together a script and I had them read it back and forth. I was imaging it would something like the Radiolab intro with a build and a release. I then had them both say the title of the podcast in an enthusiastic way.
When I got home, I pieced something together. I took a piano and played a dissonant dominant chord and then recorded the audio file out. I then reversed the piano audio to give it a build/rise. Then I wanted something like a heartbeat, but wanted to make it more modern to I grabbed a synth, set a white noise oscillator, set a high-pass filter, turned the envelope to have a really quick decay to an inaudible sustain level, and then I added some delay and voila! A modern heartbeat. Then I wanted the release to sound like confetti exploding from a cannon, but first I made the piano chord resolve with an arpeggio. I then duplicated that arpeggio, recorded it out, reversed it and pitched it up super high. I added some quick tape delay and that gave me my confetti sound!

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For the podcast itself, check out the production. I recorded, mixed and mastered the podcast myself!

I’m a giant fan of Spotify. I’ve been a subscriber since 2013! Before Spotify existed, I relied on a massive 400GB music library that I had been building since 2003. When I got to Berklee College of Music in 2005, the exchange of music was overwhelming. The size of my library had tripled in just a couple of years.

Once Spotify came around, my need to rip CDs and trade music became obsolete. I could discover new artists by going down tangents like the ‘if you like this artist, you’ll also like…’ services that Spotify offered. I was instantly hooked.

Pandora was another way to discover new music at that time, but I found their algorithm for introducing new artists to be quite shallow, to the point where it seemed like it was repeating the same songs in the same order. Spotify, on the other hand, would gently deviate from the artist or genre you were listening to, and over the course of an hour, you’d find yourself in a brand new genre and space you didn’t expect. It was magical.

So, what to do with all this new music to listen to? Well, I wasn’t a playlist type of person back in 2013 because I found the iTunes playlist interface to be annoying and too much work to organize. Also, Spotify had an advantage because, since I didn’t have an existing library, I could build playlists as I discovered new music rather than needing to sift through my existing library to organize them into playlists.

So, I made playlists, but I didn’t want them to be categorized by genre or artist. Instead, since I was already streaming different artists at different times of the day, I wanted the playlists to reflect those moods or times of day. That way, I didn’t have to think too hard about it in the future. I could just put on my ‘RISE’ playlist during my morning coffee, the ‘CHILL’ playlist when I’m winding down at night, or my ‘TRIP’ playlist when I felt like I needed a dose of psychedelic music. The only small exception was that I created a ‘REGGAE JAM TOWN’ playlist, but I think reggae music is not just a genre; it’s also a mood. Are you feeling irie, mon?

Shuffle & enjoy!

RISE

MEDITATE

REGGAE JAM TOWN

GET PUMPED

SET BREAK

PARTY!

TRIP

CHILL

SLEEP

Here’s a couple bonus playlists….

JAZZ

CLASSICAL

My good friend started a podcast about the drama and secret lives of NFL players and asked me to do some sound design work for it. I jumped at the opportunity because I think having a podcast for non-football NFL gossip is original and interesting. Here’s all of the SD I’ve done for it so far

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The following playlist is for a segment in the show called “The Final Goss” which is a pun combining the last boss in a video game with the final piece of gossip (“goss”) of the episode. He wanted it to sound something like the “Finish Him” in Mortal Kombat. I gave him 3 plain versions plus some versions with gongs and other actions like tea cups being smashed, punches, etc. For the voice I used myself for the actor, pitched it down, and added some reverb to give it a booming character effect. My favorite bounce is the “Final Goss with gong 3” version. Enjoy!

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The next episode, my friend asked me to do sound design for a segment called “Pop Quiz”. This sound design was super fun because it gave me an opportunity to create game show sounds in addition to the intro dead pan teacher saying “pop quiz.” I decided to make the intro a little extraordinary by adding in a heartbeat which puts you in the anxiety ridden experience of being a kid who just had a pop quiz dropped on them.
I also had a lot of fun adding crowd reactions to the contestant getting the answer right or wrong, a suspense ambience with heartbeat, and (my favorite) the “time is up” buzzer. I also put a bonus demo of the first intro (more abstract) I made which the producer wasn’t fond of before I took a more realistic direction.

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The next sound design I did was for a segment called “Drip, Drip, Drip”, which is about the NFL player’s fashion. The producer wanted something simple so I just throw together some drip/water sounds. I wanted to make it cave like, so I took some of the drip sounds, rolled off the top end, and added some reverb to them. The producer also wanted it to be rhythmic so I set a tempo on the session and snapped the drips to the grid (except for the cave sounds). The last water sound I wanted more like a ‘palunk’ sound of a big rock being dropped into water. So I slowed and pitched a drip down and it worked like a charm. Enjoy!

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The next sound design I did was for a segment called “Feel Good Stories”. I wanted to make is calm and serene, so what’s better than a barber shop sound?! I’m a terrible singer, but I knew I wanted 4 voices. So I first worked out the 4 parts using a piano. I tweaked each part using midi so that it made sense in terms of which voice moving where. I used a simple ii – V(b9, v13) – I cadence as the blueprint. I recorded each part using my own voice and then fixed up the parts using Waves Tune (auto tune). I showed the demo to the producer who had asked for an sigh of relief in there, but he forgot to mention it couldn’t be longer than 5 seconds. So I recorded the auto-tune’d voices to 5 new tracks to make the warping work better, then shortened each voice and tweaked the formants parameter until it sounded realistic. There’s still some artifacts in there probably from the auto-tune/warp and the FFT it went through, but I think it’s good enough for production. Check out the demo and the final version!

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The next sound design I did was for a Thanksgiving episode. Yum! The producer wanted turkey sounds. I didn’t have a turkey to record so I found some sounds on the interwebs. Turkeys sound pretty crazy but I didn’t want to confuse the listener so I just grabbed a classic turkey sound and sliced and duplicated the sound and pitched the duplicates so you can’t tell if it’s the same turkey. Pretty simple!

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The next sound design I did was for a segment called “Touch Down”. This one was super fun because he didn’t have any specific directions. But if it were anything like the Feel Good Stories segment, it probably had to be short around 5 seconds. I knew I wanted a stadium vibe, an uproar, the sound of players playing, an announcer yelling “touch down” over the stadium speakers and my favorite; the DJ air horn sound. This required A LOT of layers. I wanted the listener to feel like they are on the side lines. I grabbed multiple stadium sounds where I found a spot where the crowd goes nuts, and I lined up the timing with the sound of someone getting tackled in a football practice sound clip that I found. I wanted to keep the QB saying “hike” in there, so I cut the football play to make it as short as possible while keeping it realistic. It sounded kinda like it could be a 1 yard rush into the end zone. Once I lined those up, I recorded myself acting like a announcer yelling “touch dowwwwwwn” and pitched my voice down to make it sound more football like. Then I found a airhorn sound and added in. But I wanted all the ambience to sound like they were in the stadium, so I added a lowpass filter to them since the further things are away, the less you hear the top end. I also wanted the announcer and the air horn to sound like they were coming from loud speakers so I added some delay (with pre delay), reverb, and rolled off the top end a little bit. That way the sound echos and feels like it’s bouncing around a massive stadium. Enjoy!

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The next jingle I did for the podcast was for Christmas week for a segment called “All I Want for Christmas”. I wanted to do something that sounded like classic christmas songs, strings, handbells, sleigh bells, brass, etc. I thought about sampling my own sleigh bells and handbells, but I actually found a free Kontakt library from Fracture Sounds and it was a perfect fit! Work smarter not harder. So I pieced together the jingle and ended up adding the strings and brass using Session Strings and Session Brass in Kontakt. It worked great. The last was getting my vocals, originally I wanted to make it sound more like Bing Crosby or something classic, but it’s really hard to make your voice sound like that I found lol. So I decided to go the more ‘pop’ route and use iZotope’s Nectar to add the harmonies and WavesTune to pitch correct it. The last thing, is I wanted the strings to stick out better on the 3rd bar, so I put the brass pad in the 2nd bar and then cut it out of the 3rd bar but then had an ending hit with the brass. It’s the little things that go a long way! Enjoy!