All posts by : polygecko

Hey friends,

Winter is coming. But so is sweater season, an excuse to grow my beard and reasons to stay indoors and write music. Admittedly, I have been delinquent with updating this blog of late. I’ve been stupidly busy between work and school. But I only have one more month of school until I’m done… where did the time go?

Musically lately, I’ve been refining my process, thanks to the course I’m taking at Berklee Online. My instructor Loudon Sterns is showing me the way to enlightened electronic music crafting. I’m just a young padawan still, but soon I may become a Jedi Knight.  The last project I did for school was a Trance song I call COCO.

This week is just a light automation project before diving into House for three weeks and finishing on French House / Electro, which I’m really excited for.

My drummer Andrew and I went over some Poly Gecko songs both released and unreleased last week and it’s slowly coming together. It’ll still be a few months before we’re able to play live, but I’m beyond words for how excited I am to be moving in that direction finally. Andrew is such a talented dude and it’s gonna be super fun sharing a stage with him.

James and I are nearly done with Immigrant Song. It’s all recorded now, I just need to put on my mixing hat and make it sound pretty for you guys. You’ll hear it before the end of the year. Speaking of 2016, I decided to stop drinking until such time. Once and a while I need to prove to myself that I don’t need liquor to have a good time. I’m about three weeks without it now and I feel much more productive and energetic, but maybe that’s just placebo. Either way, I’ll revisit my friend Whiskey in the new year. Until then, not a drop shall enter me.

Things I’m hooked on right now:

1. Play With Me! Collection by Matador. I can’t even remember who told me about Matador, but I’m glad they did because he’s dope. Continuous mixes are growing on me – Andrew Bayer did it so well on their latest release – and Matador is no exception. All the songs off this album are great but the 53:00 continuous mix is where it’s at. The songs are even better when running into each other. My favourite cut off the album has to be Bsunday. It’s kinda repetitive, but #DatBass
2. Evergreen by Broods. I live and breathe Lorde and when I discovered this act, also from New Zealand and produced by Joel Little, I had to check them out. I listened to their EP, titled Broods EP for a long time before scoring this full-length album and it’s so good front-to-back. Right off the bat you’re hit with Mother & Father, and forever attached with Bridges and L.A.F. It’s a super fun album with really great textures and dynamics.
3. Good For You by Selena Gomez. I don’t even care what you say, this song is catchy.  As much as I might like to, I can’t stop jamming this tune. It kinda reminds me of Royals how it;s mostly that same groove the whole way and it doesn’t have some big explosive chorus, it’s just chill and sexy and I love it.

Stay friendly,

Ryan

Hey friends,

I hope you’ve been well. Let me brief you on what’s up with myself.

I’m now three weeks into my course at Berklee Online and I’m learning tons of great information. I had to design a kick drum from scratch using Native Instrument’s Massive and that was hard, but a really cool experiment. Then I went ahead and designed an organ sound for something to do. I’m familiarizing myself with all the control in Massive. It’s a super deep program so it’ll take a while before I fully harness it’s ability. If you’d like to download my kick drum I made, click here. You will require Massive to open that file.  Aside from designed kick drums, I’m also learning lots about sampling. I never really got into (external) sampling because I had such an extensive library of samples already but it’s pretty neat what you can do with recycled audio. It’s probably not a practice I’ll have a lot of use for in Poly Gecko but it’s a great lesson to learn nonetheless.

Aside from that, I’m working on a few new tunes. The Frost, Atoms, Arcade @ Midnight and Escapable. Atoms is going to be the coolest song I have so far I think. I’ve started to figure out exactly how to marry organic instruments and inorganic sounds. I want to share it so bad, but I want to make it presentable first and there’s much more work to be done. My friend and graphic designer James and nearly done our remodelling of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song. And it is almost nothing like the original. We dropped the tempo, but most notably dropped that driving bass line. We’ll be done recording parts by this Monday and then the mixing process shall start. Expect to see it in November sometime.

Also expect to finally see my remix of Joel Freck’s Take My Hand finished. Finally. Finally. Finally. I keep going back on it and making minor adjustments, but at some point it’s going to be released and it should be now. When I asked a friend if it sounded done, he quoted Leonardo Di Vinci by saying, “art is never finished; only abandoned”. And that’s exactly what I needed to hear.

What am I listening to currently? Well…

1. Do Androids Dream by Andrew Bayer // This EP is just so deep, rich and well-produced. I must have listened to Tomorrow Boys roughly 100 times this last few weeks and I’m not remotely tired of it. I think this would be considered Trance music and if it is, it’s without doubt the very best Trance I’ve heard.
2. In Rolling Waves by The Naked and Famous // Much like their previous album, Passive Me Aggressive You, this album is so dynamic. It can go from single piano notes, to a tsunami of guitars and drums. Often times when a mix is intentionally overdriven I have a hard time liking it, but this group and Sleigh Bells are the only two groups I’ve heard pull it off. Kudos to the engineers.
3. Caracal by Disclosure // These two are rapidly becoming one of my favourite groups.  Their combination of pop and techno and fat basses is #winning. Also, any group that features Lorde on a track gets an automatic A+ in my books. Their new stage setup is so cool, too. They each have a giant oval of a desk with synths, drums, guitars, software, etc and they actually play electronic music live instead of pressing play and walking away like a lot of other acts. Check out their performance at iTunes Festival from September because it’s the greatest.

Come party with me at Purity Ring at HPX next Saturday,

Ryan

Hi friends,

How are you? Good? Good. I feel like we haven’t talked in a while, even though we did less than two weeks ago. Let me update you with the current affairs in GeckoLand.

Tupper Ware Remix Party picked the winner for their remix contest for The Hit (featuring Ninja Sex Party). It was a Polish gentleman by the name of Phortify, and it’s dope as heck. A previous me would’ve been jealous and sad but the current me is rockin’ out so hard to this. When they announced that Phority won I was actually so happy. I went to work with a spring in my step. I just truly enjoyed the process and am so thankful they released their stems for me and many others to play around with. TWRP just released their new EP, Believe In Your Dreams. I just purchased from BandCamp and can’t wait to listen to it.

Download my version of their remix here: [purchase_link id=”416″ style=”button” color=”green” text=”Download The Hit Remix!”]

I’ve been practising a lot with the talk box lately and damn, it’s hard. I can get all the vowels down alright but sounds like B, H, P and V are actually so tricky. In due time… I’ve met with Poly Gecko’s live drummer now a few times and now the live keys / guitar player once. We’re going through PGEP and another unreleased song and deciding what parts we should each do and which parts Ableton can do. Obviously the more we can do live, the better – but we can’t do everything live.

I’m also really exciting to be going back to school in September. I’m going to Berklee School of Music. But no, not in Boston… I’M GOING TO THE INTERWEBS. I’m going to be taking Producing & Composing Electronic Music online for 12 weeks starting next Monday. Having gone to school for Recording Arts, some of this may not be new knowledge but there sure will be plenty of songwriting tools I will pick up. I’m really excited to learn more about this genre and put things I’m learning into action in current songs and upcoming ones.

Finally, the mid-month tradition of the music I’m listening to! Emiliana Torrini has been in heavy rotation lately with her album, Tookah. I’m truly a sucker for female vocals and she is no exception. My drummer Andrew has got me really deep into London Grammar and their album If You Wait. This is some very ethereal stuff that lets loose from time to time and oh man it feels good. Check out their live performance from Montreal to see what they’re all about. And finally, Wolfgang Gartner. I always meant to check out Wolfgang Gartner ever since he collaborated with Deadmau5 on Animal Rights and then again on Channel 42 and I’m DEVASTATED I put it off for so long. His 2012 album Back Story is absolutely so money. Almost every tune from the album is unreal. I can totally see why him and Deadmau5 got together – they have a lot of the same sort of ear candy and I love it deeply.

Stay dope,

Ryan

Hey friends,
Sorry I’ve been terribly delinquent about blogging this last month. Jeez. I’ve been putting a lot of energy lately into a remix of The Hit by Tupperware Remix Party. It’s due at the end of the month and I’m only about half done so the pressure is on. I’ve got the basic gist of it but it’s actually a steep challenge to remix a song that is perfect to me already. Here’s their video, also quite possibly the best music video of all time:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/uOWWaRbZucE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

I saw them live earlier this month at the Seahorse in Halifax and god damn… what an experience. My knees are almost done recovering from all the bruises incurred from my run-ins with the stage. Much like when I saw St. Vincent and she inspired me to buy an analog synth, TWRP has inspired me to buy a talk box. And I shall do just that today!

I’ve also been working hard on The Narrows with my friend / live drummer, Drew. He’s a really good writer and it’s awesome to have his input on my songs. The songs make sense to me but he’s really good at trying to make them make sense to everyone else.

My graphic designer / colleague / friend James and I are also working on a cover of Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin. I’m playing Maschine and synth on it while he’s doing the guitar, vocals and piano. We’re going to spend some more time working on some of his originals and other covers and see where it takes us.

I’ve been listen to Random Access Memories by Daft Punk like crazy lately. The song Beyond has been in my head seemingly for days now, which further justifies the purchase of a talk box. The whole album is really great though. Of course the hits like Giorgio by Moroder and Get Lucky are the most popular but songs like Beyond, Contact, The Game of Love, and Within are solid tunes as well. It’s a little bit of departure of what I hear in my head when I think of Daft Punk but for me, it was instantly a timeless album.

Talk soon,

Ryan

Hey friends,

I just thought I’d do a quick post to keep everyone in the loop of thingys. PGEP was released on Monday and I’m pretty happy with the feedback I’m getting so far 🙂 Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded or checked it out! If you’ve yet to download it, use this free button to add it to your cart: [purchase_link id=”109″ style=”button” color=”white” text=”Purchase”]

I was going to try to take the rest of July away from writing and just mentally unwind a little bit and make sure all my ducks are in a row for “chapter two”. I took about 70 hours and then dove back into some tunes, mostly collaborations that with any luck will be released by the end of the year.  I’ve decided that my next EP will be titled The Narrows EP and will probably three or four songs on it. As for a due date, I’m uncertain. There’s a few other collaborative projects that I’m putting most of my energy into.

Most importantly, I’m ramping up for a live show. Poly Gecko has never played live and it does present some challenges but I’m waist-deep in tackling it. Hopefully this ol’ MacBook can handle it. I’ll be running Ableton Live to spit out a few stems while I attempt to play a combination of Maschine, synths, vocals, vocoder live. Oh, and I think I found a really cool drummer who’s willing to do this stuff live with me. That’s a big deal. Not only will it be unreal to have drums coming live from someone’s capable hands but he’ll feed me energy live and it’ll be a way better show overall. I’m also looking at picking up a DMX interface and writing a sick live show to go along with these tunes. I’ve got plenty on my plate entering the later half of 2015.

As always, I’ll include some music that’s entertaining me of late. Solar Echoes by Nigel Stanford is an amazing instrumental guide to why I love electronic music: nothin’ but ear candy. Meridian EP by Zola Blood has also caught my attention. The group reminds me of Tremors by SOHN. Super fat synths, really spacious songs and beautiful hooky vocals that’ll stick in your head all day, but in a good way. Last by certainly not least, Transition Roads by Ominar. You know when an album starts with the lyric “Like a candle strike, we are the perfect match” that it’s going to be amazing. Every single song from this album is really great but my favourite has to be Distance. This is my favourite album to come out of Halifax in a little while. Ominar calls herself Dream Pop and it is most certainly that. It’s super chill and I urge you to take a listen for yourself.

Until later,

Ryan

Hey friends,

It’s now only 10 days until I release my debut EP, PGEP. It’s kinda weird because it feels like I’ve always been working to release something, anything. And now that it’s finally done and nearly ready to be released, I’m still rather shocked. That being said, I have plenty of upcoming musical adventures to keep myself occupied – and you entertained, of course. For each of the songs on PGEP, I made a short teaser video. So far I’ve uploaded one of Forrest, Num3rology, 82 and Infancy <See below>. This Sunday I shall upload the final one, Only. Only is probably my favourite song on PGEP, but ask me tomorrow and maybe it’ll be a different one…

After PGEP, I’m going to piece together a live set. I’m aiming for about 30:00 to start and play a few shows and see how I feel. I really have very little experience playing live, let alone by myself so it’s a bit nerve-wracking. I’ll get over it though, this is what I want to do. I think my live setup will consist of triggering stems from Ableton Live using my APC40 MkII, then using Maschine and a Roland JDXI live for synths and drums. And of course, an SM7B for vocals. It’s challenging to do everything live off-the-floor so I’ll employ Ableton to spit out some basic stems and I’ll play and loop overtop. Oh, also, a lot of lights and lasers.

Alongside the work for a live set, I’ll start work on my follow-up EP, tentatively titled Thresholds. I really haven’t decided many details but I have a rough picture of what songs should be on it. One is called Utifi and you can find a demo of it on my SoundCloud. Listening back to that now, woah, it’s come a long way. There’s about 5 other songs in contention to be on Thresholds but I’ll narrow it down more as it draws near.

I’ve been working a lot on my music theory as of late and I’m learning a lot. A year ago, I knew shit all when it came to the language of music. I knew a major scale on my bass and that was about it. I’m finding my writing is improving immensely as I spend more time learning the theory behind it.

I’ll check back in on Monday I imagine after the album is mixed and mastered by my good friend Luke Batiot. I’ll probably post a comparison of my songs pre-mix and post-mix and you’ll be able to tell why a good mixing engineer is worth every penny.

A long slow goodbye,

Ryan

Hey Friends,

Just checking in with ya. PGEP is coming along swimmingly now. Of the 5 songs, 3 are absolutely complete, waiting to be mixed and two more need just a little bit of work before I’m done. Check out the premix of 82 here! It’s truly so excited being this close to finishing this project; it has taken me years.

At the same time the EP will be mixed, I’m also getting my remix of Take My Hand (Joel Freck ft. Cameron Hawes) mixed for release. It’ll be released this summer and will need to be danced to pronto.

There are some cool acoustic guitar and Maschine songs coming down the proverbial pipe, too – inspired heavily by To Record Only Water For Ten Days. Also, another collaborative song with Karver is in the oven and baking on 450°. There’s plenty of projects to keep both you and I entertained.

Lately I’ve been listening to Noontide by Canadian electronic duo known as Humans. I’m devastated that they played in Halifax in March and I didn’t know of them at the time because I would’ve loved to see their jams live. It’s the perfect mixture of dance, techno, and reverb. I love all the different sounds they employ on their songs: huge, badass synths and then another synth part over it, so tranquil. The vocals are also excellent. Whenever I hear some awesome electronic music like this, it lights a fire under my ass.

Until there’s more,

Ryan