New Beat: Dj Jesster "why me"

while i was driving home from work yesterday i heard an interview with linda rondstadt on NPR.  it was pretty interesting, and i thought to myself "i probably couldn't name more than one or two of her songs." so i went back to the lab, pulled some up and hooked up this beat..

Beats On A Plane

workin' out a new airbook this past week.. took a trip up to maine and boston.  had a nice little week and a half off.  while on the plane got to put these two beats together.

music made for a sizzle reel...

here's another piece of music that i made for a video.. it's the turner studios 3D dept's sizzle reel.  they had used some licensed music and the legal guys shot it down..   so this is the beat that i made to try and match it.  our creative director, Kasumi, said it needed to be an "epic" piece of music.  not sure how epic it actually is but i'm pretty happy with it.

Vinyl Collection Record Shelves

as a record collector i've always been into having a good looking shelving unit for your vinyl.  back in the day i had made a shelf out of some really long screw poles and cinder blocks.  it made it from my basement apt on linwood to the lofts on memorial and eventually to the house in east atlanta on cloverdale.  that thing was a beast.. everytime i moved i had to lug around about 16 full size cinder blocks on top of all that vinyl (which is already pretty heavy itself.)

every move i made resulted in about 200-300 records getting donated to goodwill.  i would go through the collection and see what i could knock out to make the move easier.  some of these records i would look at and say "man, i'm never going to play that, i don't need it..." of course now i wish i had them all back.

well, now at the house on lenox (and having been there for over a year) it was overdue for me to get all the vinyl put up nice and neat.  since the move it was previously stacked pretty hap-hazardly in the corner.  i thought about making some shelves custom, but once i found these sefora 500 shelves it seemed like it would just be easier (and nicer looking.)  also, the dimensions of those shelves seemed like they would fit just right in the area i had in mind in the studio.

i got 'em off of musician's friend for about $140 each.  they came with very little instruction but were easy enough to figure out.. it's kinda ikea'ish in that it's pretty much particle board all the way around.  once you get 'em put together though they're solid enough.  they claim to hold 500 records per shelf (which in this case would be 1500 records) but i would say they're closer to 400.  i don't like my record shelves to tightly stacked anyways, i need room to breathe so i can peek at the covers without pulling the album out.

right now they're not in any order at all.. at some point i'm going to go in there and organize 'em.. doubt i'll have the patience to alphabetize them all but i will prob do a general "genre" sorting.

overall i'm happy with the shelves.  i'm very happy about getting my vinyl in a nice place.. it will definitely lead to me getting back into collecting and listening to my record collection.  hopefully we won't be moving any time too soon so i can enjoy these where they are.

dj jesster "Flowers For Weezy"

Wasted Potential Brass Band ~ crawfish boil

two "knock-off" beats

so here at work we have what we like to call "Demo Reels" aka "shzzle reels" or show reels or whatever.. they're basically video montages edited to some cool music that we use to display some work that we're proud of for our perspective clients. in 99.9999% of cases like this the music that's used for these things is normal licensed music that you would hear on the radio, spotify, itunes or whatever.. like actual real music (no needle-drop b.s.) .. well for whatever reason the legal dept ran through it and decided that we can't use that music because we could get sued.. so i volunteered to make a couple of versions that are "loosely inspired" by those tracks that we could edit to. one is "inspired" by the m83 song "midnight city" and one is "inspired" by the DJ shadow song "building steam with a grain of salt" ... in both cases these videos are going to be noticeably less cool than they were before but it's enough to get the legal department to leave us alone and go back to doing whatever it is they do from 9-5. here's what the new tracks sound like.

beat 1

beat 2

since they're .wav files it may take a sec to load. just like a fake gucci purse you get off the street corner? when the actual videos get posted i'll put a link up so you can see them in context. hope you dig it.