Extending on the “Little Chip” theme, I’ve created 11 highly audible alert tones for your phone or other purposes. They all use very basic tones and are kind of cute.

Use them for text/alert tones for iPhone or Android or any sort of application you might develop.

⇓ Download the mp3/m4r files

Little Chip Alert Tones, Vol. 1 by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

Whipped this thing up for our show this Saturday at one of my favorite places to eat and see music in town. Sketched on paper, scanned, and colored in Photoshop.

Frog soup will not be served.

I was sort of commissioned to do a poster for the PBR Art Pary held at the East Side Co-op in KC, where “local artists have created works with their interpretation of the PBR logo and are competing for cash prizes.”

It turned out a bit goofy, but I like it.

I did a series of posters for The Empty Spaces’ 2011 summer tour, affectionately nicknamed “soccer tour 2k11” after the soccer camp van we rented for transportation. They’re all slight revisions of a poster I did a while back that didn’t get much exposure. The illustration depicts what it would look like if aliens came to Earth and dumped a bunch of pink bubbly goo on some houses.

I’ve been playing with Mat and Will for a while in a band called The Empty Spaces, morphing out of Mat’s solo project. We recently recorded a four song EP that is now available from Golden Sound Records. I played drums, engineered, and mastered it.

We recorded it live straight to an Otari 1/4” 2-track tape machine. It was my first real experience working with tape, but after a reel and a half of unspooled mess I started to get the hang of it. All tracks were mixed through an Allen & Heath Mixwizard WZ2 16:2 board. Mat’s vocals ran through a JOEMEEK TwinQ with some slap-back delay from a Roland RE-501.

I played my Gretsch Catalina club kit with my Tama Starclassic snare. All drums were fitted with Aquarian Modern Vintage heads except the kick drum, which sported a Remo Coated Ambassador on the batter side and a stock resonant head. I placed sheets of paper over the snare and floor tom heads for a little extra dampening and high frequency attack. The cymbals were a 21” Zildjan Sweet ride, an 18” Istanbul Mehmet Sultan Flat Ride, and 13” Zildjan K Custom Dark hats.

The kit was miked with a Cascade X-15 stereo ribbon mic overhead. I did have to boost some 12-15k for some high end (15k is as high as the MixWizard’s EQ goes) but I was really pleased with the self compression and beefiness of this mic. The kick drum was captured by an AKG D112, and the snare a good ol’ SM57, both running through dbx 163’s with a considerable amount of compression.

The bass was played through a Gibson G100-B 2x15” amp and miked with a Cascade Fat Head about a foot and a half away.

The stereo output of the mixer was routed to the ins of the Otari and we monitored from there, doing takes of the songs until we had ones we liked. The tape was hit pretty hard; you can really hear it on the snare. It made us a little nervous to throw down live takes straight to tape without someone actively listening to the mix in another room. There’s no mixing post 2-track, so we had to get it right before we recorded. I’m happy with what we ended up with, but it’s definitely one of those EPs where you can tell the drummer engineered it.

As a tribute to our experience, we laid out the packaging to look like the boxes the reels of Quantegy tape came in. The disc looks like a little reel of tape. It’s entertaining so the music doesn’t have to be.

We go on a week-long tour starting this weekend, hoping to sell copies and have some fun. It’s my goal to achieve at least one of those. Dates are up on the website. You can download a digital copy or order a CD from Golden Sound Records for $4/$5.

I’ve redesigned my website several times and have spent the past few years running Chyrp, a lightweight PHP blogging/tumblogging engine. After I learned the lead developer would no longer actively develop Chyrp¹, I stopped watching the community and kind of let my site rot. I was busy doing Relatively Early work where I was exposed to Harmony and I instantly fell in love with it. Building and maintaining client sites on it is a breeze, and it’s fun to do. After learning what I could do with it I decided to port my site over, wanting to simplify things anyway.

Although I will miss being involved in the development community of an open-source blogging engine, moving to Harmony provides me with lots of data flexibility and options without the hassle of maintaining my own software installation. The guys at Ordered List keep rolling out awesome new features. No, it’s not free, but the monthly cost of hosting + a killer CMS is very fair.

As for the site structure, I wanted a simple blog where I could highlight some projects I’ve worked on without feeling like I was juggling a bunch of pages or splitting things up into categories. The home page is just a blog where you can access tags and archives at the bottom or from article headers.

To highlight projects I thought were significant I threw together the campily-named “Lifetime Achievements” section. Clicking on the tagline in the page header reveals an icon grid of blog posts about big projects. I had a little too much fun with CSS3 animations and transitions. The name/date sorting functionality is made possible with Quicksand. I think it will be a fun and fairly painless way to document things I’ve worked on.

The overall design and colors are based on my favorite shirt:

I’ve moved most of my old posts over, but this is more of a fresh start. A webby do-over!

¹ Although it seems that semi-recently Chyrp was kicked into active development again and released a 2.1.

Everyday/Everynight’s new album etc. is now available on Golden Sound Records. I recorded and mixed the album and Josh Williams at BRC Audio Productions mastered it. It’s by far my favorite album of theirs to date. Still eclectic but very concise and flowing. Good and dreamy from start to finish.

I made heavy use of the ART Quadra/FX’s dynamic delay (check out the vocals on “Lolita”) and Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo.

I’m happy to announce the release of my band’s first album, The Perpetual Machine. It’s a project that was probably over two years in the making. I was fortunate enough to assemble the incredible band that is Fullbloods and make some great friends in the process. Mission accomplished.

The record label and online music distributor I created with Matt, Jerad and Mat. It has been a long time coming and it’s finally at a state we’re proud of.

Golden Sound sells full albums, available as CD + Digital Download packages or Digital Download only. We’re putting a lot of our philosophy about making and appreciating music behind this project, and I hope it shows. Your Golden Sound Records account tracks all the music you’ve purchased from us so you can return and download your albums as many times as you need in four different formats.

We encode each file with lyrics, album art, and track information. We also credit participating musicians on each track of a release and provide our artists with electronic press kits.

We’re excited.

My band, finally epitomized as a website. That’s me in the center with the rippling muscles. Glenn Shipps did an amazing job with the artwork.

I put the site together, building it on harmony, which I enjoyed thoroughly.

Poster I did for the Empty Spaces/Fullbloods/Kuhls show on January 8th.

See you there?

Last weekend marked the third year Matt and I (Relatively Early Development) participated in the Rails Rumble 48-hour-stay-awake-until-your-eyes-bleed-code-and-do-nothing-else-rush-to-the-finish web app development competition.

As usual, we ended up building a tool that we wanted to use internally. This time it ended up being sort of an email toll booth. Matt and I found ourselves pasting company email drafts back and forth to each other for approval before actually sending something. This was a pretty annoying process. The remedy that we blew a weekend on is called Make Sendable, and we think it’s pretty cool.

A Heartwarming Story of Make Sendable Use

• Matt and I have set up a Make Sendable account (red.makesendable.com) which we are both members of. Our company email addresses are associated with this account.
• I have taken on the task of coming up with an estimate for project we’re bidding for and I need to email the client. I draft the email and send it to email@red.makesendable.com from my company email. In the subject, I include the intended recipient’s email enclosed in square brackets.
• The email hits Make Sendable, creates a new message on our account, and shoots Matt and email. The email includes the message and lets him know there’s it’s awaiting his approval.
• Matt visits the message on Make Sendable. While we usually tend to agree on absolutely everything, Matt has some problems with my email. He highlights and comments on specific pieces of the email, offering alternative verbs or correct grammar or crap like that.
• And then, after he picks apart my email, he pours salt in the wound by revising it. The nerve of that guy…
• After a day and a half of self-doubt and career re-evaluation, I come to terms with Matt’s revisions. The guy isn’t so bad after all. I like it all, except for a few minor things, which I comment on specifically.
• I make one final revision that I feel is perfect. Matt sees my genius and thinks it’s perfect too, so he approves the message. Since there are only two people on our team, two votes is a unanimous approval, and the final revision is automatically sent on to its original recipient. We throw a party.
• When the party is over, I sulk back to my computer and take a look at previous revisions to see just where my business sense went wrong. I vow to never write a bad email again, but just in case I do, we have Make Sendable to prevent it from going out.

Things we learned

• “contenteditable” doesn’t work on iOs devices. We ended up swapping out the original message body text with a textarea input on selection. It ended up not working on iOS anyway, so I imagine we’ll just convert that part to a contenteditable div when the contest is over.
• Be extremely clear with your app demo/examples. Judges might not actually use the app.
• Outsource as much as possible. We would never have gotten the email interface in if cloudmailin didn’t exist

Download 16 bit 44.1 khz AIFF (986kb)

Recently I have been in the process of recording a 12-song album with my band, and we’ve been doing a lot of tinkering in the studio. I’m really happy with the drum sounds we got on a particular song and thought I’d share a perfectly remix-able loop.

Here’s a two-bar drum pattern I played which I’m naming the Lucky Chopsticks Break for reference. Recorded in Studio A at BRC Audio Productions and processed at home.

• 18” x 14” Mahogany kick drum with coated single-ply coated heads on each side - AKG D112 placed on the batter side, very close to where the beater hit
• 14” x 5.5” Tama Brass Starclassic Snare Drum with Aquarian medium weight Modern Vintage heads - Sennheiser MD421 with a ton of 4k boosted on the Trident 90 EQ
• 14” Zildjan CIE Hi-hats - SE Electronics SE3 as an overhead

High-pass, buss compression, and the new Ableton Amp on the “blues” setting was all I did with this thing.

• Native tempo is 85.88 bpm
• 16 bit 44.1 khz
• 
  Lucky Chopsticks Break by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
  Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

Everyday/Everynight’s new album, “Trust: A Trip To The Center Of My Head” comes out today.

I engineered the sessions in the band’s house. Most of the base tracks were done live within a weekend’s time.

This is the last micro-site I’ll make for myself for a while… I promise. View it in Safari, Chrome, or some other WebKit-based browser. Until everyone else catches up and implements CSS animations, transforms, and gradients as well as WebKit does, I’ll be happy to serve up a degraded experience to them.

⇓ Download mp3

⇓ Download 24bit AIFF

Everybody does a cover of this song at some point, I’ve heard. I did mine about a year ago and never did anything with it. I made it a rule to use no digital synthesizers in this recording. The bass is a Yamaha CP-30, the drums and percussion are acoustic, and the rest is guitars. The swelling pad sounds were achieved with electric guitars through a Multivox Multi Echo MX-312.

If I remember correctly, most of the instruments were tracked mono with a Cascade Fat Head. Electric guitars were a G&L ASAT Special Semi-Hollow (Tribute) and a Mirage Beram. I think I ran them through a Electro-Harmonix Stereo Pulsar into an early 90’s made in USA Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. Drums were recorded with two separate distant-miked full kit tracks (panned hard left and right) and one close-ish miked snare track, all hitting the Pro VLA II pretty hard. That’s about all I remember. Enjoy.

Update: I added a chain for one of the guitar sounds in this recording. Shows a little about how I got the sound.

Goodbye Horses by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

I’m a big fan of Mint and use it to monitor stats on this site. During a span of free time yesterday I decided to create a new Style for it. The current native styles use a lot of images for rounded corners and shadow effects. As much as I like the Dark Pepper Mint theme, I wanted something lighter without being blinded by white.

There is heavy use of border-radius, border-image, box-shadow, and text-shadow CSS3 properties in the style. I also threw in some webkit-transition for tab background color animation and webkit-gradient for pane header backgrounds. I’m happy with how it turned out. Plus, Matt points out that using this Style on the iPad makes him feel like he works for NASA.

Tested in Safari 4, Firefox 3.6, Chrome, iPhone Mobile Safari, and iPad Mobile Safari. Webkit is a winner here. Internet Explorer untested and unsupported.

You can download the style from the Peppermill and fork it on Github.

Matt suggested a while ago that, since I own “rossisbrown.com”, I buy the domain “whyisrossbrown.com” as well. After about three minutes of laughing, I did.

I am now using it to point to a portfolio (or what I’m calling a Portfolio Machine) of both my web and music/audio work. Looking at it makes me think of a wood and plastic iPad. I built and designed the thing, with occasional input from Matt.

The page is javascript-heavy. The portfolio items, shown as VHS tapes on a shelf, are made up of markup generated by underscore.js, meaning I only have to update a nicely formatted javascript file to add new portfolio items. It also means search engines won’t crawl it, so there’s a trade-off. It’s a work in progress, but I think it’s a lot of fun. The next version will include direct portfolio item urls and back button functionality, provided by Sammy and Matt’s brain.

It’s open sourced on Github with very little documentation, so fork it and hack away at your own.

Matt and I have been working on Signal Chains for a few months, and are finally somewhat ready for the public to see it. I’m going to create a crisis here to make what we did seem so much cooler:

The Problem: Audio gear is expensive. Few brick and mortar stores carry expensive audio gear and will let you get your grubby little hands all over it before purchasing. Conversely, when people post audio samples online, you’re not always sure what is involved. Is it really that mic that sounds that way? Or is the preamp they’re using coloring the sound?

The Solution: Signal Chains is essentially a way for audio engineers (or those who call themselves audio engineers) to share their signal flows through audio samples, documenting each piece and process involved. It does this by providing a somewhat standardized method of doing so.

The Pieces

Gear

The building blocks of Signal Chains. The tools that real engineers use to accomplish the sound they have in their head. Gear can be added by anyone, but and emphasis has been put on search in order to avoid duplicate entries. Gear can be added straight from the gear type page or on the fly during chain creation. When “browsing mics”:http://signalchains.com/mics, for example, I can select Condenser from “Type”. Doing this shows me only condenser mics in the database.

If I want to further narrow my search, I can enter AKG in “Make”. At the moment, there is only one AKG Condenser in the database (let’s change that!), so the C414 is listed. Alternatively, if I don’t find the AKG Condenser I’m looking for, I can add it by clicking the New Mic button. Doing this will over time build a large database of audio gear, with which we can take over the world.

Viewing a gear page gives you a list of chains that gear is involved in, allowing you to hear it in different scenarios.

As a side note, the whole concept for Signal Chains came from the amount of visits I get to my post about the Cascade Fat Head. I made a little song to test the mic out in different applications. Apparently lots of people want to know what this thing sounds like, so why not provide one central place for them to do so?

Chains

The heart of Signal Chains is, of course, the chain. A chain is involves the following:

• An input source – Microphone or Line Input
• A preamp
• Optional extra gear – Dynamics Processors, Equalizers, Effects Processors, and Converters
• A 30 second audio sample of the recorded audio
• Optional (but encouraged) notes about all gear used in the process.

The gear is displayed in a virtual rack where it can be reordered with drag-and-drop ease. Notes are displayed in the rack, and the individual gear’s pages can be accessed easily. Gear is added one item at a time to encourage thorough explanation of each piece. Chains can be tagged with terms for search purposes. At the moment, I’m using them to label “what instrument”:http://signalchains.com/tags/guitar is being recorded.

Users can Like and Comment on chains, hopefully fostering a community environment and further discussion about the process involved. Likes are virtual pats on the back, while Comments are a way to make it known to the public that you are far superior to the user who created the subject content. You know, just like anywhere else on the internet.

Audio

Arguably the most important piece of a chain is the audio. Nobody cares that you used all this expensive (or inexpensive) gear unless they can hear what it sounds like. This is why a chain requires an audio sample. Samples can be up to 30 seconds and need to be in some high-quality format (AIFF or WAV). Once you upload the sample, Signal Chains converts it down to MP3 and OGG formats and provides a nice little inline audio player for quick listening. The high quality audio is provided for more detailed analysis if someone chooses to download it.

Users

In order to take full advantage of Signal Chains, one is required to become a user. Users, as if by some magical super power acquisition, gain the ability to create chains and gear, comment on and like chains and gear, and follow other users. That’s right, we’re doing the whole Twitter relationship thing. A user has their own dashboard populated with activity from people they follow. It’s a quick and easy way to make sure your friends aren’t doing anything better than you.

The Nerdery

Signal Chains is a Ruby on Rails app developed by “Relatively Early Development”:http://relativelyearly.com (Matt and me). All the art and design was done by yours truly, while “Matt”:http://twitter.com/guitsaru made everything work wonderfully. If this thing takes off, we have big plans for it.

For now, you may want to follow @signalchains on Twitter for updates and all that jazz. If you’ve got some feedback for us, go crazy on our support site. If you’re interested in advertising on the site, contact us at info(at)relativelyearly.com.

⇓ Download the mp3

A remix I did of “Salt” by The Sailor Sequence. Enjoy the headroom.

I was planning on sharing the Live set as well, but it’s pretty large. I’m holding out to see if Ableton’s Share feature can handle stuff like this.

Salt Remix by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

⇓ Download the MP3

Disregarding audio quality, playing quality, singing quality, lyrical quality, and overall quality, I put this song together tonight.

Most of my gear is in several different places, so I’ve convinced myself it’s alright to make crummy recordings using the MacBook built-in microphone. The bass is the only exception, recorded straight through an FP10 pre, which I borrowed. Mixed in Ableton Live 7 without care. Enjoy.

Smile by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

This has been finished for a while but just recently released. It’s the debut release of a band several friends are in, Everyday/Everynight, and it’s called Moon Phases. I recorded, mixed, mastered, and played bass on this thing. I also painted the first moon on the cover art. All tracking was done within three days at my house. Mixing and mastering was done at The Punch in Lenexa, KS.

The main challenge throughout the whole process was not an uncommon one: retaining the dynamics of the songs without isolating you to a quiet room and an awesome stereo system. It’s definitely on average “quieter” than a lot of albums, but we all agreed it was an appropriate album for that sort of thing.

Matt and I just finished this year’s Rails Rumble competition. For those unfamiliar, teams are given 48 hours to design, develop, and deploy a Ruby on Rails based web application. Our entry is was Operator.

I did all the visual design for Operator; we didn’t use a single stock image. I didn’t worry about IE at all during this 48 hours, and the site uses a lot of CSS3 attributes that make it prettier. Take a look at our team page for a look at the technologies used.

The landing page was something I threw together in Illustrator. All the icons were made in DrawIt. I’m pretty proud of my little creations and I think it will be a very useful service once we can really spend some time working on it.

I thought this was funny: Our commit graph, shown by the hour, for the weekend.

We finished our development a couple hours before the deadline, and I thought we used that time to push up a pretty bugless app. Unfortunately, after spending some more time with it in Firefox, we noticed there were a couple of hangnails on Operator. Apparently, Firefox doesn’t like console.log unless Firebug is on. Neither does Opera. Neither does IE. Major bummer.

So, if you take a look at Operator in Firefox, playing messages from the answering machine and adding tags to calls via drag-and-drop will not work. Everything else seems to be fine, though, and you can still add tags from the call tags section and listen to messages from within each call. Moral of the story: WebKit rules. Go download Safari or Chrome and experience web how it should be experienced.

Some other entries from the KC RoR Community:

• Twitassist.me
• Lowdown

Great job guys!

I co-mixed and mastered Matt Dill’s Lila Rasa, which is a beautiful and haunting album. It was a lot of fun to work on. Give it a listen.

I’ve been sitting on these for a while, and now they’ll finally see the light of day. I present to you Little Chip Ringtones, Vol. 1. This implies that there will probably be a volume two.

⇓ Download the .m4r files

This download is a zipped directory of .m4r ringtones of the following nuggets of aural delight:

“Asia”

⇓ Download the mp3 I’ve never been to Asia. This is proof.

“Going Up?”

⇓Download the mp3 Working title was “Rossa Bossa”.

“Skills”

⇓ Download the mp3 You’ve got them.

“Arpegginator”

⇓ Download the mp3 Highly audible synth ringtone. Bring sexy back.

“Sunbrella”

⇓ Download the mp3 Leftovers from a school project.

The first four ringtones use the same synths. They were created in Ableton Live. I might post the .als file if anyone is interested.

Enjoy. Feedback might encourage more.

Little Chip Ringtones, Vol. 1 by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

⇓ Download the mp3

This will probably get remixed, but here’s what I’ve go so far. The idea, mostly: electronic instruments on the left, real instruments on the right. It sort of happened.

It’s finally released!

A while ago adcBicycle began working on and near completed a new album. He ended up disliking what he came up with, so he sent all the songs out to some “friends” in the “electronic music community” to remix them.

For some reason (mostly due to em411) I was one of those. There are a lot of great musicians on this compilation, including He Can Jog and one of John McCaig’s many monikers. After I heard everyone else’s remixes I realized I did the least rearranging/adding/fun stuff to the original, but I guess it still turned out pretty cool. The whole album is great, and it’s neat to see everyone’s style influence Matt’s original idea.

Definitely check it out. It’s a free download. My contribution is track 3, which was track 6 in Matt’s original album order, and is titled “Needs #5”. I hope that’s confusing.

I made the mistake of using “Albatrocity” as a handle again. Apparently there’s already a band or some band’s album named that. I should have just stuck with my original name. So just to make things clear: On adcBicycle’s _Through the Mirror_, Albatrocity = Ross Brown.

Spread the word about this if you like it.

I recorded, mixed, and mastered the newest release from Doby Watson, Twenty Two. I also sang background vocals on a couple tracks. We went through several different sessions to arrive at the final result.

⇓ Download the mp3

Started this a while ago. Sort of finished it the other day. It’s a weak ending, but I like the rest of it. Plus, I got to overuse my new Pro VLA II

Banana Gun by Ross brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com/contact/.

⇓ Download the mp3

This is a piece I’ve been working on for a while. I tried to experiment with things I don’t usually do, and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.