What's Happening: Week of August 20, 2018

First, I want to announce that the prospective podcast I had announced a few weeks back is now on indefinite hold. I'm not holding my breath for it to actually happen at this point. Sometimes things just don't work out, and we move on.

Now for better news.

My featured stock music item this week is Inspiring Podcast Intro (30 Second). It's got a sort of magical feel to it, very light and uplifting. You can also license it in 15 second and six-second bumper versions. I hope you'll check it out.

Finally . . .

I have a new item in the pipeline and there's a story behind this one. A few days back a good friend called and asked if I could put together a game show parody intro with a brief scripted announcer bit up front. I grabbed my item Big Band Swing Intro (Short), channeled my inner Johnny Gilbert, put it all together and sent him two versions about an hour later.

Then I got to thinking. I don't really have anything that would work as a kind of kitschy game show parody. So, inspired by the theme from the long running game show The Price is Right, I put together an intro that might work for podcasters or other media producers looking to take a tongue-in-cheek approach to their material. I purposely used a special VST plugin to try and give the final version a sort of "retro" tape saturated 1960's-70s vibe. I call it "Fun Upbeat Retro Intro." Here's a sample of the thirty-second version.



I also put together a 15-second version, a bumper version, and a loop that doesn't contain the original melody but instead has little accents in the flute and muted trumpet. I'm also experimenting with a new watermark I created that also touts my main website ("thisbrucesmith.com"). If I decide I like it (or I see more traffic at the home page) maybe I'll make the adjustment permanent.

I've got a bunch of stuff currently in the pipeline, so keep tabs here and on my Twitter feed (linked in the top menu) for news of when and if things become available. As always don't be surprised if I get in a mood to write and put out updates or articles in between Sundays. Thanks for reading, and please stop by again soon.

In The Pipeline, August 14, 2018: Two New Items

I'm pleased to announce two new stock music items, one with variations, awaiting approval to go online at Pond5.

The first item is "Lifestyle Podcast Intro 3." This one has three versions: a 30-second full version, a 15-second short version, and a seven-second bumper. Unlike some of the other intros I've described as "lifestyle" intros, this one is very simple and mellow. Check out this preview of the full version.



The other new item is also pretty basic. I call it "Somber Moment." It's a looping underscore featuring strings, piano and marimba for sad, pensive or anxious scenes. Here's a preview of part of the track.



Stay tuned here and to my Twitter feed to be the first to find out when these items go online (or not).

Twenty Years Of The "Cher Effect"

Twenty years ago this summer I was working in my "former life" as an IT contractor. At the site where I was working someone had a radio in the office. Different people had different tastes, and the dial went back and forth between country, rock and pop on a regular basis.

One day, the radio was tuned to the local pop station (which was actually more "adult contemporary") when a dance song came on that I hadn't heard before. The voice sounded really familiar, but it was strange somehow. It didn't sound quite . . . human.

It was Cher, and the song "Believe" marked the first notable use of auto-tune in a hit single. Auto-tune is a digital effect, originally created and released by Antares Audio Technologies in 1997, that automatically corrects the pitch of incoming source material. If you set the effect a certain way, pitches that are very flat or sharp will "snap" to the correct pitch, creating a robotic effect. This was quite striking when applied to Cher's voice, because her singing style has always relied heavily on starting very flat and then sliding up to the correct pitch.

It reminds me of a guy who was getting a similar effect years earlier. Roger Troutman was active in the soul/R&B scene in Dayton when I was growing up. He experimented with an early version of what would become known as a vocoder. The vocoder (or "voice encoder") could modulate a signal, say a synthesizer, to make the sound of words. It was Roger's "thing" and he used it to great effect on what may be his best-known single, with Zapp.

"I Want To Be Your Man" combined the synthesized vocals with human voices to a degree that I still find stunning even today. By 1998 though, with the advent of auto-tune (or the "Cher effect" as it was long known) anyone could sound like a vocoder.

For a while, it seemed, everyone did.

There was a period of several years going into the 2000s where it seemed every new single that came out featured heavy-handed use of auto-tune. I've heard some singers try to imitate the effect in live performance. Auto-tune has become so common in pop music that Progressive Insurance made fun of it in one of their commercials a couple of years ago.

Of course, like many things that are overused, it eventually got old. Auto-tune is now so maligned, producers have dialed back somewhat on its use. They no longer generally go for that "Cher effect" so much. If you listen carefully though, you'll still occasionally hear very subtle pitch shifts in song vocals that tell you auto-tune is still alive and well.

Which, really, is sad. After all, "to err is human." To err with deep feeling can be divine.

What's Happening: Week of August 13, 2018

First, the usual stuff...

My featured stock music item this week is Positive Perspective. It's another one of those simple, pleasant background tracks for presentations, explainer videos and the like.

The podcasting project I was talking about over the last couple of weeks is temporarily stalled. I hope we can get it off the ground and start production this week. (Fingers crossed.)

I think I may have mentioned at some point in the past an idea to take some of the stuff I never released and put it out someplace under the banner of "Lost Decades." I've been going through some of the stuff I had from the 2000s and punched them up a little bit. So I plan this week into getting ASCAP clearance to exempt Bandcamp from publishing royalties so I can put them out there. Assuming all goes well. I also envision doing the same for stuff from this decade and the 1980s. I'll give further updates as I go.

I also intend to work on some new podcast intros, this time in the "lifestyle" or society/culture category, and maybe some other things as well.

Now I want to give a quick mention to the new video I uploaded to YouTube for my recent stock music item Realize The Dream. If you haven't seen it, please check out this blog post. It features a looped animation of my logo spinning on a 3D globe. I like it, but it was quite a hassle to put together. Let me explain...

I saw a bit of information about Microsoft Paint 3D having a new feature. It now allows you to save your projects as simple animations. Sounded great! So I spent some time figuring out how to create one. First, I was able to import a copy of my logo and make it a sticker. That was actually pretty easy.

Where it got tricky was getting the animation right. First I had to fix it so the canvas would not appear in the animation. Making the canvas transparent was not enough; I had to hide the thing entirely. I would have thought making the canvas transparent would have done the job, but no. Not very intuitive.Then there was a lot of playing to get the globe centered correctly. How did I know it wasn't centered? My logo wobbled! After some work, I got that resolved.

Saving it turned out to be a hassle too. The first time I tried to save it to MP4, Paint 3D crashed! I restarted Paint 3D and was able to save it successfully. However, it changed the dimensions of the video to something different than the original dimensions of the canvas (why? beats me!) so that when I tried to import it into Mixcraft 8 Pro to to add the music and text, it was very slow. When I tried to drag it across the timeline to loop it, Mixcraft crashed.

After having that happen a few times (Grrrr....), I remembered that I have some video software that I rarely use. I imported the MP4 file into that and exported it back out to Windows Media (WMV) with 1280-by-720 resolution. I was then able to import that into Mixcraft and it worked like a champ. I hope Microsoft will continue working on the animation to improve, because I do think the results were pretty neat in the end. It beats just looking at a static logo for three minutes.

And that's all I have for now. I hope you have a terrific week, and thank you for stopping by.

Realize The Dream: Royalty-free Stock Music

Here's the video for my new stock music item "Realize The Dream." I plan to go into detail later about how I came up with the animation, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy.

If you like it, it's available to license now at MotionElements.