Busy busy

I will update this for real soon. Lots of exciting things I’m looking forward to in the near future!

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 General Stuff No Comments

Slow Tune Progress (but that is good) & DubFWD

I’m taking extra care with the rest of my music making fun so I may not post tunes for a while, but I’m working hard to get stuff out that I can really be proud of.

I’m now affiliated with Binge Records and am actively looking for dubstep talent to sign. If you want to send some tunes in for consideration an avenue of contact is the contact form on this blog. If you prefer, my AIM screenname is “hubsmoke”. This would all be easier with DubFWD…

Which brings me to update that the DubFWD service is coming along nicely. I am nearly feature complete (WiX mentioned a cool idea to me today, so I’m going to have to add that before I consider it feature-complete) Anyhow, soon on to minor GUI fixes, then internal testing, then public testing. Woo! It’s really cool and will smooth out the process of sending people tunes better than any other service out there (and for free!)

Also, DubFWD - Dubstep Radio (formerly The Crackpot: Dubstep Radio) will commence this Sunday morning from 12AM-2AM (Saturday night/Sunday morning!) on WMUC 88.1 FM broadcasting from College Park, MD

Show Profile: http://wmucradio.com/station/shows/876

Listen every Sunday from 0000-0200: http://wmucradio.com/wmuc-high.m3u

Big ups to everyone that has given us support so far for the DUB:FWD show in Bmore! Much respect! 

Big ups to Danny for getting his design portfolio up and running: http://www.coldfrontdesigns.com

Big ups to Steve and Caylan for making shit happen!

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Thursday, February 19th, 2009 General Stuff No Comments

Upcoming Shows

Hey all! I’ve teamed up with WiX and Coda of JumpDownMusic to present you with the following Baltimore dubstep event for March 18th, 2009. It’s gonna be a great time, so make sure you get out and party with us, along with brilliant dubstep producers ULTRABLACK and NUMBERNIN6

 

Also the day before, Ultrablack, WiX, Coda, and myself will be performing in Philly as part of the Magical Ultrablack + Hubsmoke + WiX + Coda Topless Two Day Tour of Philly and Bmore!

 

Update (2/19/09): Harrisburg, PA show now confirmed Braptizm @ Spy Club (Friday, March 20th) Flyer on the way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So all the info:

3/17/09 - EC09 @ Liquid Charm (Philadelphia, PA)

3/18/09 - DUB:FWD @ Club Orpheus (Baltimore, MD)

3/20/09 - Braptizm @ Spy Club (Harrisburg, PA)

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Friday, February 13th, 2009 General Stuff No Comments

DubFWD Progress!

I’ve been working on DubFWD.com nearly every day and have made quite a bit of progress. Uploading and transcoding to 128kbps mp3 works, and the upload process is streamlined to the max for ease and simplicity. The key to this site is everything is sooo simple. I’m having a lot of fun working on this, and I hope I can start some alpha testing when it is feature-complete within the next couple of weeks. The first cut of the DubFWD Audio Player is featured in this screenshot:

Click to see it big! Anyway, still got my work cut out for me in terms of the UI, player interface, and logo, not to mention ironing out some whacky initial bugs I’ve been seeing. Anyway, comments are appreciated. Also, my brother has been pushing to change DubFWD to dubFWD (notice the lowercase ‘d’), what do you think?

BRAP!

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Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 Technology 1 Comment

More Dubstep: “Heroin Eyes” and DubFWD!

    

Heroin Eyes by hubsmoke

Finished this one up recently…now I’m going to change gears a bit in my production. I think I’ve done a good amount of experimentation with this particular crunchy sound, and I’m going to experiment a little bit more. I was really proud of what I did with “Wound”.  It received the best response I’ve ever gotten for a track so far, so I felt a bit uneasy with going outside of that sound. Though I’m still very in love with these tracks, I want to branch out way more and go crazy with experimentation. My brother showed me some of Distance’s dubstep work and it was no surprise to me that both he and I both come from a metal background. I’ve really fallen in love with Distance’s sound and I’ve become a bit inspired to widen the spectrum as he has with his productions. I’m not saying I’m going to try to emulate his sounds or anything like that at all, just simply experiment more and try to give my productions more of my own character. I’m still learning so much on the technical side of things, but I really enjoy the process and can’t wait to give it another 6 months to see where it goes.
Through experimentation I’ve learned a lot about mixing and a teensy bit about mastering these past couple weeks. There is so much value in mixing down correctly. I did some reading to try to improve my mixdowns and I’ve learned that it is very important to:
1) Set all of your tracks’ volumes (sub, drums, synths, etc) all the way down when the arrangement is complete and you’re ready to mix down
2) Turn up your monitors very high until you can bring up the drums to about -15dB with it sounding as loud as you can bear it (it’s all about monitor levels…seriously, louder the better)
3) With the drums at the right level, bring in the sub-bass until it’s working with the kick drum nicely (this can be tough, but you just have to do it the best you can and make sure you test it on a different system if possible)
4) Mix everything else in one at a time, and get all the levels so the master level peaks at about -6dB max (less if possible, if it starts getting to even -3dB, I say start over and turn UP your monitors)
5) Then bounce out to WAV and master with EQ til the sound is to your taste and you can mess with stereo panning and all that (but I don’t really know much about the right thing to do for that) and mess with a limiter until it doesn’t go above 0dB.
This method is probably very obvious to most people (or maybe not, or maybe it’s not even “correct”?!)…but for me, “Heroin Eyes” was the first time I did this, and I think it sounds more “mastered” than my other tracks. At the same time, I’m so new at this that if I get any of these tunes signed for a release I will most certainly have the mastering outsourced to someone with more experience and actually knows what they’re doing. I’m happy with what I’ve done so far, but there is an incredible amount of knowledge to gain simply through mixing down and mastering alot of tracks.

In other news, I’m building a prototype of a service I’m calling “DubFWD”. It will essentially be a place exclusive to dubstep producers (and DJs) to upload unlimited tracks for free. I plan on have many features tuned to the needs of the people on dubstepforum such as easy high-quality mp3 sending (possibly with the option to mass PM a set of users on dubstepforum, something that is currently unavailable on dubstepforum, but I think I know how to do it externally), also charts for tracks with the most views for all time/year/month/week/day as well as once-click mp3 request, easy display of the producer’s (or DJ’s) preferred method of contact for inquiries, as well as a one-click way of letting a producer know you’ve used their tune in a mix or live. All free! BUT, this is only a local development prototype that I’ve JUST started. I’m experienced with web application development, but I’m definitely going to face some challenges I never have before, so I cannot promise anything at the moment. I can say, that I have registered www.DubFWD.com and www.DubForward.com (cuz I really don’t want to say “Dub F-W-D” anytime I’m talking about it haha). I’m posting all of this information here because I’m trying to really commit myself to finishing it as soon as possible.
I’m no graphic designer, but I made a quick logo that is certain to go through some changes by my graphic design friends, but I’m all ears for feedback, suggestions, and what DubFWD may mean to you if you’re a dubstep producer/DJ.
DubFWD!

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Thursday, January 8th, 2009 Music, Technology 1 Comment

Toast of War 2

I got a message just now from a fellow named Max:

Hi, I was just curious if your still working on ToW 2?

Thanks.

- Max

Oh? and happy new year!

Just to share the information, here’s my response:

Hey Max,

At the current moment, we’ve been working on a different game with an artistic style akin to Toast of War. We chose to do this in order to familiarize ourselves with Adobe’s changes to ActionScript so that we can utilize the technology to its fullest potential with the next Toast of War. Through this process we have been creating a Flash-based game engine that we plan to use for ToW 2, thus making development of the underlying technology less of an issue for ToW 2 so that we can put a greater focus on gameplay and content in its development.

My brother and I have big plans for Toast of War 2, we will release it this year, and it will be really really cool.

Thank you for your message, I realize we’ve made this a long wait, but we’re going to be able to put much more time into this project over the next few months. Happy new year!

-Sina

I’ve had a bit of a busy year, with school especially, but I’m going to have more free time over the next 6 months and I plan on devoting much of that time to Toast of War 2.

Here’s a look at one of the characters from the game that we’re currently working on, we’re codenaming “Swann Briggs”.

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Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 General Stuff 1 Comment

New Track, “Sunder”

This is one for a big system with very loud bass, moreso than the rest of my stuff I feel.

Monday, December 29th, 2008 General Stuff No Comments

hubsmoke.com

Very simple, www.hubsmoke.com. Took less than 2 hours from start to finish, because it is extremely basic and mostly static… Used PHP for this without a framework, figured it wasn’t required for such a small job.

Stay tuned for the mp3 vending machine, more tracks, and maybe even some progress on that flash game!

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Friday, December 19th, 2008 Technology No Comments

Ready Rock on the Reading Railroad

Hello there. I just finished off a new track called “Ready Rock”, celebrating how ready we are to rock our socks off and just rock out. Who is we? Who knows! What does the stuff I say mean? Doesn’t matter!

Anyway…just a quick post of my new tune.

 

Also, I got on my first flyer for a party on January 17th at The Black Hole in Baltimore!!
Stay tuned for the launch of www.hubsmoke.com - future home of my hot traxxx, sensual mixes, event information, and all that dubstep related goodness.
I’ll do that one in Ruby on Rails maybe, I want to add some stuff like a password protected 320 mp3 vending machine haha. Actually, that’s not a bad idea…

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Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 General Stuff No Comments

Two New Tracks

Thought I’d post these bad boys up. These tracks are definitely much cleaner than the stuff I’ve done before. This is because I decided to stop using Reason as a sequencer and just bounce out loops to a different wav sequencer. Takes away all the blips and clicks. A big change with these is also the drums sounds…less reverb and more pop in the snare, cleaner hihats with sexier rhythms, and a kick drum that is EQ’d to cut through the sub-bass just enough to be heard without interfering too much (hopefully, if I had a better sub to monitor on I’d know for sure haha).

Soundcloud is a great service if you’re a DJ or producer…unlimited file sizes, decent stat reporting, and good presentation of tracks. Too bad the Pro versions are obscenely expensive…I’m not going to ever pay ~$760 for a year of the Pro Max account… Maybe $100, but only maybe.

Tracks following. Feedback, crits welcome and wanted!

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Friday, December 5th, 2008 Music No Comments
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