So what exactly is DUB45? Well the site is live so you can go have a look for yourself but effectively its a tiny record label, or netlabel, which is releasing music for free as well as (hopefully) selling it, but the name hints at the long term aims of it. Basically I am releasing a virtual DUB45, or 7″ single every three or four weeks for the next year, with the aim of generating enough interest & support so that I can start to release tunes on vinyl! A marketing geek might call it crowd sourcing the funds to press vinyl, and that is an aim, but the more important function of DUB45 is for me to have a vehicle through which I can release music.
Now don’t worry, I won’t mind if you don’t like my music – I subscribe to a few blogs which when I finally heard the authors music I was non-plussed by it, but I still enjoy reading their blogs & thoughts… So if spacy subby electronic dub music doesn’t sound like your thing, just ignore this – I won’t be writing squillions of blog posts here about it. But I will undoubtedly reflect on the process of setting up & maintaining DUB45 as for me it is an attempt to engage with the new music (non) industry, in an evolutionary way that makes sense to me. But before I rant further, check out the little promo I shot the other night…
Of course the little spaceman had to be involved… and the robot panda girl he met at a disco… and my modular synth, multiple space echo abuse, weeks of annoyed neighbours & some lovely mastering by Angus McNaughton of Auralux Mastering in Auckland!
Its been 12 years since I released any music. Back then recording studios were steam powered (well the pressing plants were anyway) and through the connections of a dear friend I was hooked up with a german record label called Incoming! who released an album of mine under the name Short Fuse – yes this was the 90s and I was making proto drum&bass albeit with a jazz influence. Back then I was using a Mac Quadra 900 with a 4 channel ProTools card, Samplecell and a 16 track Tascam reel to reel (if you really want to do some time travelling & see what was possible with 8MB of RAM, that Short Fuse album is free to download from here)
But way before then even, dating right back to my youth, dub reggae has been constantly on my sound system. And so it was perhaps inevitable that I would make music influenced by dub, and of course I have been doing exactly that for the last twelve years but I never felt anywhere near finishing anything. In fact I enjoyed not finishing music, it was my guilty pleasure. But over the last few years I have philosophically shifted my mindset to believing that you MUST finish things & release them, or they might as well have never existed, but more importantly nothing is learned from them… Over the years I also began to notice that when I worked on a film soundtrack for three or four months, some of the most important work was done in the last few days and even hours. Proximity to the deadline meant that the work rapidly evolved from being good to being very good to finally being as good as it can possibly be and THAT is a major progression. All those unfinished tunes sitting on your or my hard drive will likely always just be average at best, because they haven’t had the relentless attention and focus that comes with completing a project to a deadline. So DUB45 is for me a series of musical deadlines, and every time I finish & release a DUB45 I will learn very valuable lessons and I will creatively evolve – its a positive feedback loop. The most exciting thing for me with DUB45 is not necessarily any immediate results, the most interesting aspect is going to be felt ten releases from now.
Another aspect of my motives are to play music. Don’t get me wrong, I love noodling around in front of the computer as much as anyone. But its been great to get back into playing music, as opposed to programming & editing music and sound all the time. And that title above has become my mantra; DUB IS HAPTIC!
Choice sounds! Will be having a proper listen tonight 🙂
Great… I in fact love dub, though I’m am not knowledgeable about it. But I like what I hear so far.
That’s a gorgeous website, with gorgeous sounds.
Wish you the best from the other side of the planet!
is that I peter king acetate record?
hah! no, for the shoot i used a 10″ of locked grooves by Alva Noto
mainly because it probably took me an hour to shoot that shot
& i didn’t want to have to worry about the stylus moving into
the centre of the record….
It’s still 203 this side of the world, but I like your release date. Wish you all the best with the label Tim. I like the 4D mix very much, and the spaceman video is fantastic. (I guess that’s your funky Jitter patch in action? Still, have to admire your patience getting the shots together.) Cheers, Dan.
thanks Dan! re the Jitter patch – no, it was cut like regular chickens
(sorry for the Amon Tobin sample)
I shot a very rough version about 2 weeks or so ago & then reshot it properly
once I knew what I wanted etc… I do own Final Cut Pro but I actually did the
picture cutting in ProTools manually as I did it at the same time as cutting
the 8 minute version of the tune down to 90 seconds….
so i shot about 1200 photos, imported them into Quicktime Pro as an image
sequence exported it as a 1080p PhotoJPG movie & then cut it like a normal video..
Have fun with your new venture ! Hope it’s fun and you learn a lot of thing here too 🙂
I Loved my Tascam MS-16 16 track reel to reel.
I still miss the smell of rubbing alcohol and ritual of head cleaning. I think it set a tone and mood that I still associate with creativity and trial & error.
I also miss the time it took to rewind a tape. sometime that little rest was a good opportunity to reset the ears, or start a little side conversation with a client, often that break was a good change in perspective that was better overall.
But I Still love Pro tools.
Good to know about a Matering plant in Auckland too. Does this Angus have a website?
Once you had all your tracks across to the multitrack I loved how you could grab the pitch control & speed up the entire track, or slow it down in that lovely analogue way!
& alcohol is still needed, cos god knows those space echo heads get clogged occasionally eg hey how come it wont feedback into saturation/distortion?? clean the heads!!! ahhhh whoah!! LOOK OUT!
not sure re website – cant find one, will check & get back to you…
Wow, Tim. Wow. Gorgeous in all ways. I’ve been following the net.label thing for a while and I’m always shocked at the quality of the releases, and your efforts here are helping to up the game. The track hits me where I live, aesthetically, very much the kind of thing I’m into these days. Cannot WAIT to hear more. Congrats! (Kudos on the stop motion, too, yer a more patient man than I, great results)
The only two things I was not able to get into our shipping container when we moved from California here to New Zealand were my BBQ and my Tascam MS16 16 track. I do miss that machine cause I am a sucker for anything with a VU meter. I think the story goes that a few of Princes early stuff was cut on one of those guys.
Yes Vari speed was very cool. And of course the whole flanger effect came about with this sort of unintentional abuse of gear in a cool way. I wish things like that were easier to do in Pro tools.
Doesn’t PT 8 let you half speed record now? I’ve known about the Scrub shuttle speed for one track, but I’d like to be able to do that to all the tracks and have it attached to a jog wheel to further slow it down by hand. like a speed control timeline. maybe one day……… I’ve read about back when it was a big deal to hook up a pan controller to a mixer. And that it was a big knob like a small wheel you had to ask specifically for at studios. I feel a bit like that with this idea for pro tools.
I suppose this is done now with a mix file and a warp maker. But it’s not as fun as grabbing something and pulling……
on a side note, Tim have you ever messed with any of the Spectrasonics Omnisphere, and Stylus RMX stuff? any thoughts on those guys?