OMNIVERSE & Other News

Not a lot of time to write this up because we are in the middle of painting the studio in preparation for moving stuff in, which is slated to happen at the end of the month:

But in the meantime, I am nearly done composing my next album, tentatively titled ‘OMNIVERSE’. Not only that, we have pretty close to finished tracks (mostly waiting on final tuned vocal tracks from me) on well over half of the album! The album will feature Luka, of course, as well as Avanna and Dex from Zero-G. At this point I am shooting for a roughly late June or early July release, which seems totally doable unless ‘life’ happens, heh…

Here is some awesome cover art by Space Robinhood, which I commissioned. He is also working on art for several single releases, so everything is on track (ha!) for releasing when the music is finished.

So, some updates regarding my previous post: I am no longer streaming Final Fantasy. It was a fun test, but ultimately off brand. A lot of my Vocaloid community colleagues have indicated that they would love to see streams of me tuning the Vocaloids, so if I can figure out an effective way to set that up I will!

I may also give up on Trello for organizing albums. I’m not 100% sure what I will ultimately use to manage my music projects and share that process, but Trello isn’t cutting it for me, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve taken to using a physical white board and/or scraps of paper again instead. I will find a shareable digital solution eventually, but Trello doesn’t seem to be it.

That’s all the updates for now. Should be able to do more updates more regularly once moving is complete and the new studio is set up properly. In the meantime, rest assured that I am constantly working on stuff, I just don’t always have time to post about it 🤓

I Love Luka

So this is just another quick update, really. I spent a little bit of time updating the rest of this site, so the RePulse track pages are more up to date. I may still add more to them but I think they’re pretty consistent now and it should be easy enough for y’all to find tracks if you want to stream or purchase them. I’ve added pages for my upcoming holiday EP featuring vocals by Vocaloid Megurine Luka (巡音ルカ). There isn’t really anything on them at the moment, but the placeholders are there, so as I start rolling out tracks and/or promos, info, etc., they will have a home.

Quick Shameless Plug

At least for the foreseeable future, my plan is to keep certain ‘add-ons’ exclusive to Bandcamp. If you want the full RePulse experience, including full resolution download options (like FLAC or ALAC), the video version of the full album (including all of the YouTube promo videos plus three otherwise unreleased videos) and the 24-page uncensored digital booklet featuring art, lyrics, etc. to accompany the album, you’ll need to purchase it from Bandcamp. Furthermore, there is a second version of the album ‘RePulse: Stripped‘ which features the tracks without samples (i.e. instrumental versions), and it comes with a 36-page exclusive ‘archive’ digital booklet with even more uncensored art and design work, behind the scenes notes and unused materials, etc., for the true die hard fans. You know who you are.

So, About Luka

I’m a little over halfway done crafting tracks for the upcoming holiday EP featuring Luka, and I am so happy with her performance so far. She has managed to learn the original Ukrainian words to a popular Christmas song, the original French version of O Holy Night, “Cantique de Noël”, and several fairly complex jazz-style vocal arrangements, without blinking an eye. She has a huge range, never misses a beat, never sings off pitch, and is perfectly content to spend hours experimenting with weird ideas for harmonies and styles. Of course, she also never really has any ideas of her own. I have to literally teach her every note, every inflection, every word in every language I want her to sing. So I guess she’s far from perfect. But does that make her less, or more human? Probably less. I’m going to go with less. Anyway, I love her. Not in a creepy ‘gotta buy a body pillow of her and cuddle with it at night’ sort of way (glares at friends who have suggested such things…) but in the same way I love my Moog synthesizer and my Mac Pro*. They are amazing tools that let me express myself musically in ways I never thought I could. Luka may be the best of them yet, and she is just the start. I will definitely be delving deeper into this, possibly moving on to Cyber Diva and/or Cyber Songman next, since they are apparently based on American voices and therefore perform with less of an accent. (Secretly I kinda like Luka’s accent though, it makes her feel more like she has a real personality than if she had, for example, a broadcaster-style American accent.)

So that’s it for now. I’m going to be super busy the next couple of weeks but then hopefully I’ll get back to updating things more regularly. Let me know what you think about Luka and the upcoming Holiday EP project, check out RePulse because it’s amazing, and generally keep in touch because I like hearing from y’all!

*Okay, fine… I ‘might’ have occasionally thought about cuddling with my Moog and my Mac Pro…