Okta 4: community ambient project [express your interest!]

[coldbrightsunlight]

Had a listen now, and I enjoyed the whole thing a lot! Feels like a lovely year for tracks. Great job everyone

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

And we'll have a little bit of money for the ILF slush fund to pass along as well!

[cantremember]

Any chance there is going to be another Okta this year?

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

Short answer.... quite possibly?!

It actually passed through my head the other day — the first couple wrapped up in September, though the last couple slipped a little further past that.

I'm always game, but I didn't want to be too pushy about it. To some extent I was kinda waiting for a post like yours to make sure someone else was hoping it would happen.

So, before a formal sign-up, let's survey the room: can we get at least a half-dozen peeps who would want to take part in another collaborative ambient album project?

[Paul_C]

Count me in - I've done nothing this year so it would be nice to do something.

[moid]

Thread ressurection! My son just reminded me that we haven't done an okta recording for a while, so if this runs again we'd be up for it of course!

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

Okay... while bumped, anyone else in the mood, now that we're in the wintry doldrums time?

[lumena]

I am interested and I have time right now.
Sign me up.

[moid]

[dubkitty]

i'd love to, but i still don't have any way to transfer stuff from here to the internet. my only computer is a laptop from work and i can't do anything fun with it.

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

Well, it does look like people are interested... Tell youse what, I'll start a new thread this weekend and we can get into some specifics and maybe shake out one or two more folks.

And if anyone has an esoteric file-handing routine and can think of a workaround for dubs, speak up!

[moid]

Dubkitty can you record music on your phone? I have a free app on my iphone called voice recorder which can be set to record WAV files (or mp3) and I've used that to make field recordings and acoustic instrument ideas when I wasn't near my PC. It's kind of lo fi, but that's never bothered anyone here You could then email those files to one of us and we could put your tracks onto Heraclitus' googledrive - It doesn't help with the editing part of course, but I'm sure we could use parts of your contributions in tracks on the album?

EDIT: I just had an idea about the editing - if you can get something recorded and you could then listen to the tracks other people record on the googledrive, if you could go really lo tech and right a description / timing of which tracks you want to mix together/ how you want to edit them then I could have a go at doing that for you if that helps? I am no expert in this area, but it might work? Or if there is someone else here with more production knowledge who could do this better than me or suggest a better way then speak up!

[dubkitty]

i can, but the microphone on my iPhone SE isn't very good for close-up recording, though oddly the videos i took at the extremely loud Ride concert the other night sound great. how is it that Ride playing "Leave Them All Behind" at ~124 dB comes out better than recording a loop 6 feet or less from an amp that's not playing all that loud? i occasionally record whatever loop thing i'm playing with and send a 30-45 second clip to my gf, and they always sound terrible. i saw a wireless Bluetooth mic set on Amazon that looks interesting and is less than $20.

i also have a Tascam "linear PCM recorder" i snagged because it was an old item that had been kicking around the Design Department for years and was going to be chucked when they remodeled the offices. i've never actually had it out of the box, though, and that would also entail transferring files somewhere. i could probably copy files from the recorder to the computer, but again there's no way of editing. but i was thinking of my potential role more as creating stems that people could rework. whether i'm dedicated enough to do editing workarounds is another question.

there's also GarageBand, but the iPhone interface is utterly incomprehensible to me. and i used to do stuff in GB when i had a working, non-obsolete Mac.

[dubkitty]

well, apparently i tried to figure out GB on the phone at some point. i opened it up and started poking around and found a guitar track i recorded in 2021 shortly after i got the phone...just a little 2-chord sequence with a Bigsby through broken-up fuzz probably on the CVJM because it's very much a Kevin Shields stylistic bite, but that indicates i did something with it.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Hahah hope it works!

Yeah I'm in why not