Just released my 2010 show reel. This features work from 2009 and 2010. I’m getting excited about the work I’m putting together for 2011!
Have a looky here now:
Tim Rice Motion Reel 2010 from Tim Rice on Vimeo.
Ever since I’ve started making music I’ve been giving it out for free. Trent Reznor of NIN has started releasing his music for free as well; check out The Slip. He urges musicians to put out their music on their own to avoid labels and recommends hand making limited albums to sell at shows. But this is recent for him, there are plenty of artists who have been releasing free music from the start.
I decided to start with easily the most prolific and popular of the bunch. Hailing from Miami Pretty Lights is primarily the work of one person, but when touring he brings a full band. In his recorded albums he fuses punchy Hip Hop drums with deep synthesizer bass all composed with an Electro House sensibility. They’ve sold out numerous shows world wide and when they toured San Francisco last April it was way OVER attended. Great for them though, because this (along with their merchandise) is how they make their money. I highly recommend buying a ticket early for these guys if they ever come to a city near you.
This funky Swede has had regular rotation in my house ever since I discovered him. He sounds like he took everything good about funk from the 80’s and made it contemporary with sampled drums. His skill on the keyboards is hard to ignore as you hear a Fender Rhodes take the lead role in many of his instrumental compositions. His links are a little small so look for the albums “The Future” and “Peel”, produced in that order.
I wish I could remember how I found out about Datassette, but no matter how the story goes he makes some great tracks. Much of it is inspired by, and created with, vintage video game synthesizers. Both Datassette and Datashat are the brain children of J.M.Davies who releases most of his tracks under a Creative Commons License. So feel free to listen and even sample, just give credit where credit is due. My top pick is his remix of Happy Up Here by German production duo Röyksopp. Rarely do I find remixes that are better than the original and luckily, this is one of those times. While Datassette does release most of his music for free; Happy Up Here is one of the few with a price tag. However, you can listen to it on YouTube for free. Be sure to peruse his downloads section as he has plenty of original tracks and a few DJ mixes that are all well worth your time.
If your not so into the synthesizer focused music than maybe this 3 man production team will tickle your fancy. I’ve listened mostly to Sir OJ and would highly recommend checking out his solo release State Beat tape. But you’ll have to download it from Stricktly Beats since his website no longer exists. I think the only reason they haven’t started producing mainstream MC’s in America is they live in the Netherlands. But There’s also a broken link to Dok’s most recent beat tape and Sir OJ’s website gives a 404 error. So maybe they also need to work on consistency.
I hope I’ve introduced you to some great music because Paul Pre has introduced me to countless musicians through his mixtapes and I need to pay it forward. While Paul doesn’t produce any tracks on his own, his mix tapes are top notch and stay within this still nameless sub-genre of electronic music. Broke beat glitch hop? Maybe, as long as we don’t call it IDM. All I know is that I like it…and as people get tired of Dubstep’s strict adherence to 140bpm, they might look for something fresh with similar sub bass but free from the guidelines that define it as a genre but inherently limit it composition wise. Let ‘em have it Pre!
Using three new plug ins for After Effects I made a short video to my song Future Past soon to be released on my latest album Feel Free. Till then have a look n’ listen!
As the After Effects class I’m teaching at the Academy of Art advances I’m having to come up with more and more practical examples of the techniques i’m teaching. Here’s a video i made so my class can learn how to operate a camera parented to a null layer. Is started by importing a Grunge map and making a new composition to the size of the grunge map then animating the text to get the timing right. I then changed the comp size to the standard NTSC DV preset and animated the camera. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.
Flower Kinetic Typography from Tim Rice on Vimeo.
I’ve been teaching After Effects at the Academy of Art recently and have been making a lot of new stuff. This is one i made in a few hours to a song a made a few weeks ago. For the background I used two solids, one purple and one dark purple then put a circular mask on the dark one. I then added a particle emitter called Particular to another solid and played with the settings a bit, i came up with the subtle starry background you see. I may end up redoing this and add a 3d camera so you can see that these particals are actually in a 3d space.
I then used the paint effect on a new solid to draw in the background to the text and animated the offset. You have to select paint on transparent otherwise you won’t see the background. I made two text layers of INQL where one was the stroke and the other was the fill and precomposed it. In this way I was able to add a randomized strobe to the precomp and treat them as one.
I then made a new adjustment layer and animated a lens flare on it. I also added a glow to this layer and set it to only glow vertically. I changed the opacity so both the flare and glow would fade out together. After animating the rotation and scale of the text together i added a radio waves effect to the Paint Background and put a Brightness Contrasting effect on the whole comp and faded it out as I reverse animated the Paint Background. The effect you see on “Inquell.net ‘10″ Was called lens blur, and I used a triangle shutter setter. OK, enough talk lets have a look:
So, i’ve been working with a friend who’s putting together a small production company called Digital Green Hat. Most recent and prominant of this is the video we made for the after party to San Francsico’s Greenfest at 1015 folsom called Pulse of the Green put together by CommuniTree.
Getting in for free to do some work was a pleasure, but the real treat was the exclusive interview with one of my favorite hip hop acts Dead Prez. The video is posted below or can be watched on YouTube.
Hey everyone,
I recently worked with an Emcee out of Hawaii named SubVerses for a compilation album called Evolutionary Poetics. The album will be out in febuary and you can find it on the website. It features artists such as The Goddess Alchemy Project, Souleye, and even Sizzla appears on a track. You’ll have to wait for it to be released to hear the full track, but until then have a listen to a short clip of it:
So I’ve never really been that focused on making money off my music. I’d rather give it to people for free and just get paid to play shows. Recently I’ve received a few requests to use my music in a couple videos. I was thrilled to receive exposure through videos, and more than that environmentally focused videos. The first of which is from my friend Alex Vanderweil at Forestethics, and the other is from a company called Solar Design in the UK. They somehow found me in the cluttered mess that is Myspace. Anyway, here are the videos my music is featured in. all of which were taken from the album “May No Day Be Wasted”. Click to download full album.
What do you love about bass? My favorite bass sound is an upright bass. It has such character. When you hear the tone it’s not only the bass note, but all the overtones that make it what it is. The difference between a perfect sine tone and an upright bass note is what’s called Timbre (“Tambur”). Every sound has its own timbre and its timbre is what makes it unique.
When producing hip hop and electronic music the bass is very important. Many tracks don’t even have a bass line, but are still supplemented with a low kick drum. The 808 being the most common example of this.
Can you hear it? It’s so low that if you’re listening on quiet laptop speakers you might not even hear it.
The 808 kick got its name from the Roland TR-808 drum machine. It wasn’t sample based, it actually used a very low sine tone and modified the pitch and decay to make it sound like a kick drum. To give an 808 a different timbre often times people will add distortion of some type. The two types of distortion are Even or Odd, AKA Symmetrical or Asymmetrical. When using Odd distortion the overtones will be every other octave. Such as C1, C3, C5, C7. While Even distorts in an even pattern every octave and can even include fifths and thirds. Ex: C1, C2, G2, C3, E3 etc… Even is generally more pleasing to the ears and sounds more natural. Analog tube distortion is a good example of this. Odd distortion generally comes from digital distortion. If you have a guitar handy you can hear even harmonics on the string when you put your finger over the 3rd, 5th, 7th, or 12th fret and pluck the string.
Another example of this is the difference between simple and complex oscillator tones. Such as simple Sine, and complex Sawtooth, and Square. Sine is just one single frequency but when stacked in even harmonics it will create a complex sawtooth wave. When the overtones are stacked in odd harmonics it will become a square wave. Now we’re getting into the interesting stuff.
I’ve learned a lot about from a music genre called Dubstep. It originated in the UK and utilizes very deep “sub” bass. Every producer has they’re own method but the common formula is a synthesizer with a LP (Low Pass) Filter.
Sawtooth Wave no LP Filter
Sawtooth Wave with LP Filter
It’s the same sound we make with our voices when we say “wow”. Our lips act as a filter for our voice. The tone of our voice is actually a very complex wave form.
So try experimenting with distortion and harmonics. If you have a Bass that sounds too loud try adding some distortion to brighten it up its timbre. Many times the actual bottom note of a bass line isn’t reproducible by many peoples speakers, if you add some harmonics more people will be able to hear what you’re playing!
This is a pretty neat tool. It lets you copy the logos of other companies but insert your own words. The output isn’t particularly high resolution, but it is fun.
Logo54.com Logo Maker
Here’s an example I made using the Nintendo font.
