Air King Blog

Mood Makers

2009-07-04T19:22:00.000-07:00

The living room studio had been taken over by gear: a 1/2" 8-track reel-to-reel (with one broken track), a large mixing board, 2 drum sets, many keyboards, guitars, an old upright and extremely out-of-tune piano, basses, amps, and bags of cables intertwined with toy musical instruments.

The Kimball Caravan sat next to the Optigan and both instruments faced out toward the window, overlooking the forest where deer drifted by slowly in the evenings. Some wore flowers in their antlers. The sound of crickets was constant and receded into an ambient backdrop they easily filtered out while recording only to be later detect it on tape.

Mixes were team events which physically resembled a game of twister. Arms overlapped and everyone waited their turn. Mistakes were made. Mixes were ruined.

Occasionally, frustrations flared. But eventually, things panned out right. Group hugs occurred. The deer nodded knowingly.

The song below comes from the room above and its goal was simple: record a song around a single, live take from the Caravan. Then track 6 additional instruments: drums, bass, slide guitar, hammond organ, toy xylophone.

Enjoy!

Mood Makers by airkingsound

Leonids, 1833

2009-06-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

"Some of those wandering stars seemed as large as the full moon, or nearly so, and in some cases they appeared to dash at a rapid rate across the general course of the main body of meteors, leaving in their track a bluish light, which gathered into a thin cloud not unlike a puff of smoke from a tobacco-pipe. Some of the meteors were so bright that they were visible for some time after day had fairly dawned. Imagine large snowflakes drifting over your head, so near you that you can distinguish them, one from the other, and yet so thick in the air as to almost obscure the sky; then imagine each snowflake to be a meteor, leaving behind it a tail like a little comet; these meteors of all sizes, from that of a drop of water to that of a great star, having the size of the full moon in appearance: and you may then have some faint idea of this wonderful scene."

And here's the song from May which carries the name of the event that evoked the description above:

Leonids, 1833 by airkingsound

This one heavily features:
- Sampled & processed Lowrey Carnival organ (do you see a trend?)
- Upright piano
- Craig from Madame Blavatsky Overdrive on bass (thanks Craig!)
- Various and sundry beats
- Wurli 200a
- A little synth here and there
- Audio Damage plug-ins (Ricochet and Eos)

Next? We've got 3 pieces in motion. One or some will end up on your doorstep in early July.

Pop Choice

2009-05-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

April brought our attention back to an old mountain cabin sampling session of a $36 Lowrey Carnival organ that our dear old departed friend Dennis helped cart back in his truck from the valley Salvation Army a few years back.

We've mentioned this one before, but it's really done now, so here 'tis:

Pop Choice by airkingsound

This one goes out to you, Dennis, though I think a guitar-based tune a la Johnny Cash would have floated your boat more.

This song is one of several coming over the next few months based around this organ, which has super cool beats and great little lead sounds. Not bad at all for a behemoth marketed to the masses of middle aged and middle class folks back in the day.

The bass, rhythm, and lead lines here all come from the Carnival, with the exception of some additional rhythmic bits. For good measure, there's a healthy does of Mellotron at the end, and bits of Wurlitzer Electronic Piano sprinkled throughout.

Holy cow. It's May already and a few new ones are on the stove-top. The Sirens will direct us on our journey here over the next weeks.

Give The Game Away

2009-04-01T20:58:00.001-07:00

Picture this: the vows are taken, the happy couple rushes off to the shave ice van, and this music begins to play.

Loudly.

And they're off.

New optigan-fueled album from Air King, for your listening pleasure.

A huge thanks goes out to Andrea Campi for the lovely picture used for the cover. Go check out his pics on Flickr. They're mostly taken with toy and antique cameras and are wonderful.

Next? It's April and we got a new song to record.

Shave Ice Get Away

2009-03-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

There's the plan. And there's the inspiration. Sometimes, they mesh. Sometimes, they're at odds.

When they're at odds, you try to make them mesh.

My plan for this year is simple. Record a Song A Month.

We did this in January. In February we recorded a whole album. In March, I've been side tracked. And very aware of it.

Then came the inspiration. Over a beer.

A colleague of mine was talking about his upcoming Wedding in his native state of Hawaii. And he mentioned that the get-away vehicle was going to be a Shave Ice van, driven by some eager 22 year old who was going to do it for free. Then someone mentioned ice cream truck music and that's where it hit me.

No. Optigan music blasting from the Shave Ice truck. The same Optigan music I made for my friends Geoff and Lizette when they got married several years ago. This was one of my favorite projects. I took 2 weeks and fired up the optigan and made a soundtrack to a wedding.

So, March will see another album. One that's already done. I'll mess a bit with track order. And in my usual graphic design ninja way, I will find a cool pic on Flickr, get permission to use it, add the album title and Air King Sound to it and presto. Album.

So, you will all have some pretty cool optigan music to listen to in about a week's time.

Jet Lag

2009-03-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

For the month of February, we took the RPM Challenge and created a new Autopilot record. We are pleased to introduce Jet Lag.

This one was a bit different than past ones in that we widened the circle and got MANY great submissions from a bunch of very talented folks on soundcloud.com. We also gathered some sounds from freesound.org.

And to boot, the great, great photo from the album cover above comes from Hamish Innes-Brown on Flickr.com who kindly allowed us to use it here.

So, it was a fantastic collaborative affair and I'd like to give a huge shout out here to everyone who contributed:

vanhainkoti - anu - luc shylavani - cott - rhythminmind - drox - corsica - hangar17 - cora - justin3am - acclivity - seeshy - mbo - troj - ermine - timofei - morgantj - james uk - ndrobinson - erh - audiactiva - pcaeldries

This is your album.

Now, time to check it out.

Jet Lag (Full version):

JetLag by airkingsound

Jet Lag (Cut into 11 tracks):

RPM Challenge: Be Part of Autopilot

2009-01-31T20:18:00.001-08:00

The RPM Challenge starts tomorrow and we're gonna do it again. Write and record an album in the month of February.

But our album will be a different album. It will be an instant album generated in under an hour. We will push "play" on Autopilot and the magic will begin.

However, there is much work to do to get to the point where we can push that button. First, we need to build a brand new sound pool. The pool contains the beats, melodies and sounds that get mixed together and tweaked often beyond recognition to create something new, everchanging.

And we don't want to do all this work ourselves. And so, we are pulling together a global crew for the effort.

SoundCloud.com has been a great help here and has introduced us to all sorts of cool new music and musicians from all over (Finland, Singapore, Barbados, Germany, Italy, England, Brazil, US, etc). Among them, we've found many willing participants.

How bout you join in as well and drop us a file?

The types of files that work best are:
- Beats (no bass lines, no melodic stuff on top)
- Arhythmic melodic pieces (ie. ambient)
- Soundscapes (field recordings, short wave numbers stations, control tower intercepts, etc.. Go crazy.)

Format requested:
- 256 kbps MP3

No 4 bar loops, please. Give us full length performances that we can toss right in the pool.

So, drop away!

Send us your track

Some Strategy

2009-01-28T21:29:00.000-08:00

And here it is:

The song for January.

Some Strategy by airkingsound

It's full of bits and pieces from present and past.

A piano I still regret selling years ago (Baldwin Acrosonic).

A childhood nylon string guitar I sometimes regret still having (especially when it comes to tuning).

Organs. My numero uno go-to organ, the Kimball Caravan, is the star of this show.

Mellotron, yes. Optigan, no.

Next stop: February and the RPM Challenge and another song.

(And I never did get around to posting the king tones.... We'll see what comes of that idea.)

New Gorillaz

2009-01-17T19:31:00.000-08:00

Gorillaz have a new album due out this year and everything Damon touches is alright by me.

The samples from this album below, unveiled by the man himself on Radio 1, are demos, and they sound like it.

"Broken" is very chill and the most realized of the 3. It heavily features an organ that may be of the grandma variety, judging by the drum beats used and the arpeggiating pass lines. "Electric Shock" starts with an out of tune orchestra, which is joined by more organ; it abruptly moves to an 80s vibe which eventually outros with a The Go Team-ish female vocals singing one line: "That's electro shock." Stylo is more 80s beats and syncopating basses and is, uh, just plain weird.

Check em out below.

Gorillaz - Broken (Demo)

Electric Shock (Demo)

Stylo/Binge (Demo)

Autopilot Greatest Hits #1

2009-01-17T18:59:00.000-08:00

3 notable moments from the past.

Autopilot 020507-2139 by airkingsound

Autopilot 051607-1056 by airkingsound

Autopilot 041707-1201 by airkingsound

My People

2009-01-15T13:26:00.000-08:00

Yes, I've found them. My people.

They post. They share. They comfort. They give tips.

My people.

People who talk about "Cascading Strings". People who know what you mean when you say, "The Entertainer". People who perk up at the mention of "Swinging Fingers". People who take pictures of "Poly-Synthesis Percussion" buttons.

People who bemoan the weight of them. People who have no room for them. People who kill the mice eating wires in them.

People who take pictures of them. Lots of pictures.

They name them Thomas, Allen, Walker, Rodgers, Kimball, Wicks, Baldwin, Hammond, Lowrey, Gulbransen, Wurlitzer, Vox, and Farfisa.

They absolutely love their manuals, reeds, pipes, draw-bars, tone-wheels, and pedals.

They absolutely love them, my people. And you can feel their love here:
The Organ Forum

Look Around You - Music

2009-01-15T10:15:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Netscrap for this one.

Link

RADIOAKTIVOX!

2009-01-10T22:08:00.000-08:00

God Bless the crazy folks at Optigan.com who have made the first new Optigan disc in 34 years. Bless them so fools like me can throw $100 down to buy it.

And I will.

Enter RADIOAKTIVOX!

If you're not familiar with the Optigan, go to Optigan.com now. Air King owns an Optigan and uses it (and the fine samples available from Optigan.com) HEAVILY.

Here's the proof:

mineral by airkingsound

Time Box

2009-01-04T18:50:00.001-08:00

It's all about time-boxes this year. A fixed amount of time to get stuff done. Deadlines.

Here's what's in store:

One Song Per Month
Fueled and egged on by co-conspirators Derek and Geoff, we will put out one song a month in 2009. There'll be a lot collaborating back and forth, using SoundCloud.

RPM Challenge
We'll do it again in February and once again it'll be an Autopilot project. That means 27 days of creating and gathering sounds and 1 day of outputting an album of generative music from our little machine. I've already hooked up with some talented musicians on SoundCloud who are game. Are you? drop me a line.

Weekly Blogs
They're gonna keep on coming. Once a week.

King Tones
We've created a lot of loops over the years, and we use some of them for ring tones. You should be able to do that, too. We'll start making these available for download (Free). 10 per month.

Air King Faves
Mixed in with the blogs will be some shout-outs of the tunes we like. A lot of them are from our various vinyl finds out there in thrift store land (Grady Martin anyone?).

Well, I just took care of the Weekly blog task. Now off to start working on Song #1, which is an instrumental heavily featuring the Lowery Carnaval housed in my mountain studio get-away. Think Ennio Morricone as played by Grandma on her home organ, as interpreted by Air King.

Review

2008-12-24T15:32:00.000-08:00

We didn't get to everything we set out to do in 2008, but still, we got a lot done.

Played the Fillmore on New Year's Eve 2007
Ok. Right. Technically not 2008, but a great start to the year nevertheless. Played keyboards with Madame Blavatsky Overdrive and opened up for Les Claypool. At the Fillmore, to boot.

Started a Blog
Every person should write a blog, have a child, and plant a tree before they die, right?

Recorded a new Autopilot record
And gave it away for free... Won Out Over came out real nice. We took the RPM challenge, pulled together a nice new sound pool and generated a 45 minute Autopilot excerpt in 28 days. It could not have been done without great contributions from Anu Kirk, Geoff Marx, and MBO. Thx!

Download it here.

Airline All Transistor
We released a bunch of recordings from our Airline All Transistor sessions. Here they are:

Bits, Bits, Bits
It wasn't all mastered, some of it was not even complete, but it's all about getting stuff out there. Here's a sampling:
Player Piano
Won Out Over [full album download]
Lisbon At Twilight
Pop Choice
Say
Sod
World Needs Now
Younger Demo

Found SoundCloud
Great site. Simple, reliable, with a sizable community of musicians that has led us into some unexpected and cool collaborations with like-minded music makers and bit crushers. Check us out in the cloud.

Twitter
Why blog when you can twitter? Posted many tweets in 2008. I'll still blog. I'll still tweet.

In the Scrum tradition, a retrospective will come next. But all for now....

Lo Fi Looper

2008-11-13T23:54:00.000-08:00

It's all about data and looking at the stats from the site and, in particular, the blog here, I can conclusively say that the audio links that are posted within the blog get WAY more play than the individual files inside the Autopilot player.

The good news is that there are some good folks who not only bother to check out the blog, but who also bother to listen to the tracks.

The opportunity is that more people need to find their way to the Autopilot page.

So, here it is: http://www.airkingsound.com/autopilot

"Autopilot is Air King's generative audio software system which takes disparate audio elements from a LARGE custom sound pool and combines them in a random manner to create an infinite, everchanging, never-repeating landscape of sound."

Check it out. Many, many, many hours of good listening, with many surprises and unexpected turns.

And to further test my original theory, here's yer weekly high-lighted Autopilot excerpt right here:

AUTOPILOT 030607-2117

Play it and prove me right!

auto optigan and mellotron

2008-11-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

Blast from the past. Mellotrons. Optigans. Bits from a show we did with Future Farmers.

Fed into Autopilot.

BTW, check the tweets for the more frequent lateness. It's much more interesting to me than blogging these days.

Thursday night Autopilot Excerpt

Autopilot Weekend Excerpt

2008-11-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

Here's another piece from the perpetual machine:

Autopilot Weekend Excerpt

And there's hours more here.

All free.

Well

2008-10-10T23:06:00.001-07:00

Another session chopping up bits of my Dad's Jazz piano recordings and feeding them into the machine...

Tonight's session drew from two impromptu recording I had him do on a TASCAM 388 (1/4" 8-Track) about 10 years ago for a soundtrack to an 8-MM film my friend Mike made called WellBeing.

That title is a good tie in to the various ideas at play here:

Memory --> Damage --> Reconstruction --> Interpretation --> Expression

And I just make music, so back to that: I fed the bits through Audio Damage's Automaton and Ricochet, and spiced it with some verb.

It sounds like Pole.

And it's mostly slowed down, process piano. That pleases me greatly.

Well

steering veering

2008-09-07T22:54:00.001-07:00

After a delay, back to the blog. Those who know me, know my Dad was pretty ill - viral meningitis and encephalitis, a broken hip for good measure, and he was lost for a while.

And this weekend, as we all sat in the Bay Area heat, eating Italian food, enjoying ice cream and coffee into the evening, you couldn't help but notice that this is quite a return.

From 10 weeks on his back in a hospital, and then a nursing home, he's now been back at home for 2 months.

And running on all cylinders. Not bad.

So where was I?

Radiohead Nude Remix? Just listened to where I left off 3 months ago. It's still there. Good ideas, far from complete...

My focus is elsewhere. Watching the flutter in and out of consciousness and of reason has got me thinking about new angles.

I've been listening, sampling, and chopping up old jazz piano recordings I recorded of my dad, which in turn has got me listening, sampling, and chopping up old recordings in general. And now, I start to feed them all into the machine.

Here's tonight.

steering veering

Raw. An off the cuff line that warbled on an old Tascam 388 (annoyed me at the time, but I love it now), my Monitor 10 shortwave captured in the Cascades and a loop my friend Geoff made.

Nude Remix, Session 2

2008-04-16T17:24:00.000-07:00

Long week with bits and pieces of work done here and there.

I bailed on driving to Vallejo to buy a second Kimball Caravan organ on Saturday and spent the time instead working on the Nude Remix.

I have now spent about 6 hours total on this project. And I'm ready to stop and get back to the MBO vs. AKS Autopilot project.

I'll be heading back out to the Theosophy center on Thursday for more mayhem and will likely emerge with a CD of sounds in hand.

But I still need to mix nude a bit more. here's a teaser of what's in motion:

Nude Remix Rough #1

Be happy. Goodbye.

Nude Remix, Session 1

2008-04-07T00:45:00.001-07:00

We headed up North this weekend with a friend from Germany to show him the mountains, Lassen Volcanic park, a mountain bar, etc.

Nice weekend, nice weather. Still lots of snow, but things are warming up.

Today, we visited Hog Lake Plateau in the foothills, a lake that appears for about 6 months per year, and saw the blossoming spring flowers, a few snakes, and a family of white swans.

In Red Bluff, we stopped by the "chicken lady" to pick up some pastured eggs, and spent some time with the hundreds of heirloom birds, guided by a calico cat who neither seemed bothered by the birds nor seemed to bother them.

We fed a tortilla to the alien eyed goats for good measure.

This all got me itching to work on something and the Radiohead nude remix that's been on the music blogs got the better of me.

Back in the city, with the whole crew asleep, I spent $6 and a good 2 hours cutting up the "stems" and wasn't inspired by anything except for the "string fx etc" stem and vocals. I cut them into a bunch of little chunks. 2 main string loops ended up being basis of the remix. I found one optigan drum beat that fit right in with these and that beat goes without any variation the whole time, supported only by a shaker loop from a MBO session. It has a Ghost Dog vibe.

Pretty simple.

Wistful optigan powered pop. Look for a clip in a few days.

AKS vs MBO Recording Session Vol. 4

2008-03-28T13:33:00.001-07:00

Thursday night, I made the weekly trek out to West Oakland and recorded some bits for a new song: Anjuna.

This is a different type of song for MBO. They call it a bit CSN. For sure, it's got a smooth and folksy little vibe about it. It even has female background vocals.

Basically, the main progression is C Maj7 - D over an A pedal tone. I played rhythmic wurli throughout and then worked on a rhodes part with glock on top for the bridge, which created a nice moment.
There're no vocals yet, so let's see what turns it takes over the next week.

Before we recorded, they also played me the current state of Aphid, which I totally dig. They added lots of weird sounds over the last week: ebows, treated musical boxes, weird samples. Aphids. Sweet.

After the session, I kept them up late again, dissecting Anjuna and re-dissecting Aphid for the new parts.

Craig also included some extremely cool textures he created with an 8 string bass through heavy pedal action. These textures go into Autopilot as is. They're perfect.

The project raw file directory is growing, and now I get to paint some sound and tweak. It's starting to get interesting.

AKS vs MBO Recording Session Vol. 3

2008-03-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

True to their word, the good folks at optigan.com indeed sent me a free update to the Optigan sampler disc I purchased several years ago.

And it's a great update.

Now, not only do I have WAVs of each of the original samples (which I had to hand edit once I had extracted them from their crappy Akai-formatting wraper), I also have a bunch of new Chamberlin RhythmMate samples, which are extremely cool.

These samples played on strips of tape that fall against tape play heads, much like a Mellotron.

I loaded up a bunch of these into Acid last night and came up with 2 new rhythm tracks. I tend to let things be straight for a while and then start apply subtle effects with envelopes to add some flavor and change up the pace where needed. Again, AutoPilot will apply its own magic as well.

Another cool thing about the Optigan CD is that it has the original artwork from every disc, as well as several brochures in PDF format which are ripping. The Optigan was a real product with marketing dollars behind it and it was marketed to people who weren't musicians.

Push a button!

AKS vs MBO Recording Session Vol. 2

2008-03-19T01:28:00.001-07:00

I hung out with MBO last night and got to listen to the progress made on 2 new songs ("James Pain", "Aphid").

Last week, I had recorded some piano, farfisa, and a crazy sounding solo for "James Pain". Last night I heard the final version of that song, vocals and all. Ripping!

Then, we recorded keyboards for "Aphid", a strange but cool anthem-like song about, uh, Aphids. We layed down harmonium and piano passes and tweaked them through a Boomerang. (Boomerangs rule!) Next, we recorded several different parts using the classic MBO palette of piano, glock, celeste.

Good, clean fun.

Then, I made Adam and Craig stay up and we dissected both of these songs for use with the new AutoPilot project. It was midnight by the time I got home, but I couldn't help myself and took some of the vocal tracks and a Boomerang-warped piano file and started experimenting with TimeFreeze. Wow! The results were almost completely removed from the source and resulted in a huge pulsing soundscape. Weird. Awesome.

I need to read the manual and learn how to work with this app, but I can tell right now we're gonna be friends.