Synoiz Music Blog

Posted 30th April 2009

Hello everyone,

I'm not very well today, no idea if it's the swine flu or not but got headache and general nasty symptoms, will go to GP if it keeps up but until then am resting it up... ish.

Just three little morsels of news for you today. Firstly, you can now watch my slightly electro-sun VBlog in the park on YouTube (or by using the player below!) in it I discuss things like progress on "Soundtract", what's happening with "Ambients" and just generally ramble like a fool:

Dance EP : "Tanz! Tanz! Tanz!"
Finally I've got a name (albeit a silly one) for the EP of "dance" tracks that I've got lying around my hard drive. I'm just sticking them altogether on this release because they're kinda nice and I can't see them ever fitting on anything else! Not even as b-sides! Currently the tracklisting is:

• They Both Want It
• In Stitches
• Hilditched
• Dissonant
• Not A Zombie
• Uppers and Downers
• Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers
• Mr Leonard

If you've heard snippets of these songs before then you'll know what to expect! It's too early to say but I'm thinking it will be free as the songs are heavily sample-based and I can't be bothered to get clearance! You can hear one of the tracks "Uppers and Downers" on YouTube or by watching on the player below:

"Ambients" Mastering

It's nearly here! Next Tuesday I will be going up to Edinburgh to master the "Ambients" album with my brother and then it'll be ready to release onto iTunes and in CD format. I'll no doubt tell you more as things progress but I'm both nervous and excited right now!

Oh yeah, hello to all my new MySpace friends, you're all very cool even if some of your profiles are a bit nuts!
See you all soon!!

Posted 22nd April 2009

Ooh look it's a blog.
I haven't done one of these in a while as I dangerously moved into the world of VBlogging. It hurt.
If you didn't get a chance to see my VBlog on YouTube, you can watch it below.



If you can please vote for it and comment, I must say it was quite weird but is probably more interesting than this outdated text nonsense!

"On The Nightwaves" Music Video
In other news (I've been told off by Lee because apparently I don't mention them enough) one of the side projects I'm in "On The Nightwaves" (Click here for our MySpace) have been shooting a music video for one of our tracks called "Take Me Away".

The shoot was done in a day and is currently off being edited or whatnot, so we should see something from that pretty soon. It's our job to get a "final" mix of the song sorted to use on the video but we're struggling with finding a nice guitar sound, I think we're gonna try swapping the electric for an acoustic.

Ambients Mastering
Finally (For now) I must admit I'm quite excited, on the 5th of May I'm going up to Edinburgh to spend two days mastering the "Ambients" album with my brother Ghostsmut. It'll be quite mad to be fair, finally finishing it all off. And then after that it'll get put on iTunes and stuff. How exciting!
I haven't done this before so I'm expecting it to be quite a tough slog sitting down and changing songs that I'm already so used to. Obviously we'll want to make the tracks as good as they can possibly be, I'll just have to not be so precious about it all!
Currently I'm (slowly) remaking the track "Moonlit Streets" as I just wasn't happy with the quality of the original recording.

Anyway, there's another VBlog coming soon! Stay tuned and keep the messages coming :D

Posted 28th March 2009

Hey everyone, I've had a great week so far, hope that you have too. Lots going on at the minute so just rolling with the punches really. Got a few things of interest to mention now!

Earth Hour (28/03/09 - 8:30pm)
Just in case you get this in time and haven't heard about it, at 8:30pm on Saturday the 28th of March (today), the WWF are holding international Earth Hour, where participants are asked to turn off their lights (and if they can, any non-essential electrical items, ie: not life-support machines) for an hour in an effort to raise awareness of climate change. God knows why wrestlers are so bothered about it all like but when it's such a small thing to do to make a difference, why not eh?

You can find out more at: http://www.earthhour.org/

Personally, me and Lee (From On The Nightwaves) will be working on a few new songs together by candlelight on my terribly dated battery-powered keyboard lol (we're talking 1992 here), anything we come up with will be posted in time :D

New Tracks for you lovely people
I've become a bit slack on the old trackage lately so if you haven't been following me on Twitter you won't have heard the new tracks I was showing everyone there days ago luvvy.
I've stuck a player below so please give them a listen!



The first track "Uppers and Downers" is just a dancy track I did on the train back from Edinburgh, the samples in it are from the trailer for Capcom's new game "Bayonetta". It's not for any particular release but I'm considering releasing an EP of all my dance-tracks just so you guys can get to them.
The second "Don't Ever Back Down" is from the upcoming album "Soundtract" and is intended to be the battle music for a Sci-Fi spaceship game (Like EVE Online or such).

International Munchtime
In other news for Earth Hour I will be making a special lunch for myself, Lee and my housemate just because I felt like a change.
I've made Thai-style Egg Fried Rice to have with eggy bread (my dad's recipe), Chinese noodles with soy sauce, Italian-style pizza baguettes and for dessert, a German-recipe coconut cake to have with Belgian ice-cream.
Your mouth watering yet? ;)

Synoiz on Facebook
Finally, I've added some new tracks to the Synoiz Facebook (Friendly Fire and Technological Waltz from the upcoming Soundtract album). I'm quite shocked that I only have 25 fans on Facebook so if you're interested in my music then please check out the page and become a fan!

Hope you're all doing well, catch you later and I hope you like the new stuff!

Posted 22nd March 2009

Righto, I'm doing this on the train because it's the only time that I actually seem able to sit down and not get distracted by anything (speaking of which, try typing "distracted" on your QWERTY keyboard, it's a very soothing circular motion when you can touch-type lol, oh yeah getting distracted...).

I just thought I'd do another blog so soon because loads has been happening lately (I've barely had time to sit down for the past 3 weeks) and if I don't force myself to type it up I never will!

New Album "Soundtract" News
Quite a bit of news on the new album, I've got like 31 tracks out of the 40 I intended to get done, now I'm going to write like 4 proper songs for it (3 "ending themes" and one in-game vocal track) and then try to sort out the remaining 5. So any ideas of game music/emotions you'd like to see attempted, post me a comment!
It's really strange seeing how this album has shaped up. I can't really remember being at the same stage with "Ambients" because that just flew by in a few weeks, this is 40 tracks so even if it flew by I'd probably still be catching the tail end of it somehow.
I think the reason why I'm getting a bit strained with Soundtract is because I've been putting off some of the more stressful tracks (things like the opening themes or general walking-about music) as they're so tough to get right.
Also I'm a bit worried about what people will think of it all, I mean, when I step back and think about it, it's a 40-track album of just background music ranging from chill out techno -> fantastical new age -> experimental horror. Now I know that I'd like to stick that in my HiFi regardless but I'd really like to know if anyone else would!
Maybe I should release it in three parts... So if you only really want the horror stuff you just download that or such. I dunno. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Lori Cunningham / Ghostsmut Giveaways
More important than anything I'm up to however is the fact that there's lots of free-stuff up for grabs from two of my favourite artists. Lori Cunningham is (for a limited time only, she said) is offering a free three-track download from her amazing debut album "Unseen" (seriously, if you like female vocals in any way Enya/Evanescence/Kate Bush etc then you really should check her out). You can find out more about it on her blog here:
Get free sample pack of Lori Cunningham's album "Unseen"

Also while we're on the subject of free stuff, my brother Ghostsmut released a compilation of all the b-side-type-tracks he has left over after completing his debut album. The tracks were all cut due to length restrictions or because they were too samey to tracks already on the album. The album is called "Besides & Suicides" and is pretty damn good, you can download the whole album here (Including my favourite track of his "Let's Live As If We're Dead" which I argued a lot with him about when he took it off his first album):
Download "Besides & Suicides" by Ghostsmut on Last.FM

Ambients / Music Videos
Yes, yes, they are coming, however we're doing them all at once because of time restraints on our locations and so it means all the editing will need to be done before anything can actually be seen.
As for the actual release of Ambients, I'm still trying to sort things out with Konami about the sample in Another World. They say it's okay if I only make a small-run of physical CDs but not if I put it on iTunes which is ideally where I'd like it to go :(


Free Tracks on Twitter
Oh yeah... you know, if you want some free songs you should really start following me on Twitter, I've got a nasty habit of putting demo versions of tracks I'm working on there for people to download and listen to...
http://www.twitter.com/synoiz


Happy Birthday Ghostsmut!!!
In more important news, my brother (the artist known as Ghostsmut) had his 30th birthday on Thursday. I can't believe it either as he's always seemed to me like the youngest person I know (he's pretty damn immature lol), doesn't look like the age landmark will affect him at all though so huzzah!
Me and my mum were visiting him in Edinburgh on Wednesday so I'll put some pictures from that in another blog soon when I'm back on my main computer. Oh I think there's a video too, me and my bro being very, very un-PC :D

It was a wonderful day there on Wednesday, I think I'll post some more videos on YouTube, or maybe just a big crazy montage. Yeah a montage would be best I think. One day I'll move to Edinburgh I hope.

As I say I'm heading back up there now because we knew that with bro's party being tonight that he wouldn't really have enough time to distribute between everyone while also playing the host (I know I'm always dashing around at these kinds of occasions). The theme of the party is Arnie. Yes... some of the costumes should be amazing (mine is not lol). MY NAME IS NOT QUAAAAAID!!!

Posted 15th March 2009

Finally, another blog! And yeah I know I said I'd do one on Thursday night the day after the video shoot but I failed. I can't believe how hectic things have been this past week, I barely got any music done even though I was working on Synoiz stuff all week. Does that make sense? :D

Well basically Wednesday was the day from hell. I got up at 9am (not too bad) and had to go to town to pick up things like razor blades (to get a good shave for the video), to pay my rent and to get additional costumes from Primark for the extras. Sadly for whatever reason I have a £300 withdrawl limit on my account so had to go to the bank specifically and get them to give me money over the counter without my chequebook!

All that went quite well until I tried to drop it all off at Ian's where we were meeting later and he wouldn't get out of bed! So I had to carry 4 heavy bags literally across the city to go home get bathed and shaved and then dash through to Newcastle for hairdressing appointment.

This is where it got worst cos during the train journey all I got was txts or calls with bad news, being told that we had lost one of the cars and so I had to organise some other way to get the extras to the set on time, then being told that the lighting rig and second camera weren't actually working and that it was impossible to get new parts for them that day. I ended up getting quite angry about it all (I mean, there's been two months to just plug the stuff in and go "oh it doesn't work, I'll order some parts in before we have to do the shoot..." rather than checking it on the day of shooting).

Then I got off in Newcastle to find that my order of prop masks had not actually
come in on time and that we had to make do with the masks we had. Finally got to the hairdressers and after 40 minutes walked out with exactly the same haircut (and problems) as I walked in with albeit slightly shinier.

There's a lot more I could rant about as much more stuff went wrong but essentially I think that gives off just how stressful the day was for me.

However, when we finally got to the shoot and I met up with the extras and nattered on with them everything kinda fell away and I started enjoying myself again. Here's a video I took on the set:



Ian Lawlor (director) and Mark Liddle (co-directing) really took the reigns well and just fell into their roles and did a wonderful job (Also kudos to Mark Junkin and my mum for providing lifts at the last minute and for being wonderful).

Sadly we didn't manage to get all the extras scenes done in the one night as we'd hoped so we explained to the guy who owns the location and he has mercifully said he'll give us another few days with the location. All the extras had fun and are going to return back and hopefully we'll have it in the can.

The next bit of shooting is actually tonight, and ironically the electricity and gas have gone off in my house so I am unable to bathe or work on music or anything so am staying at a mate's house until I can get in touch with the landlord... Grrrr. In fact I'm typing this on Mr Macbook while lying on a mattress in their spare room. God it's a classy life lol. Let's hope it goes well again today and we get things sorted. Once again thank you to everyone involved, especially the extras for being so wonderful and patient!

(I have loads more to say but this blog has been long enough, I might try and d =o a VBlog in the future if these get any longer!)

See you all later! :D