Every year my parents, some family friends and I all go to the Shambala Festival. It’s pretty much a hippy family music festival with loads to do and spend all your money on. Recently however, it’s gone away from that sort of feel. The music goes on later in the night, there are more fighty, vomity chavs and people now ask if you have any MDMA rather than marijuana or crumpets.

To be honest, I quite like that I can stay out until 3 in the morning at a dubstep gig. I enjoy the less family-oriented side of things at the festival, but it’s just not as nice as it has been in previous years. I have really fond memories of my first Shambala, whereas I can’t really see that happening with this year. I enjoy myself, but in a different way. At least it’s still bloody nuts.

Besides Mum and Dad, the whanau this year consisted of Brendan, Juliet, Louise, Jo and Hannah. Ethan couldn’t come to Shambala with us this year because he’s off doing Camp America. It was really weird to not have him there and I think I’d have had a lot more fun had he been there. Just not the same.

As usual we rented a tipi rather than staying in tents. We couldn’t have fires inside the tipi this year, so we had to buy a fire-wok and firewood (rather than chopping bits off the nearby forest). That was kind of cool because it got us outside, rather than just sheltering in the tipi for a weekend. We also get to keep the fire-wok so I’m picking up some firewood today and we’ll have dinner outside around the fire tonight. Yay.

On the last night of Shambala Hannah and I went and saw a few DJs. One was called Gaslamp Killer. His cuts were really messy, sometimes he’d just run off stage for a breather and he only played the sucky bits of songs that I love. Come to think of it, he was actually a really awful DJ. However, he was a brilliant entertainer on stage and he played a lot of really underground stuff from L.A. that no one had heard before.

Primarily he played dubstep and other heavy electronic stuff, but then he got bored and played some rock ‘n’ roll and Radiohead. At least he has good taste.

Below is a slideshow of my Shambala photos, I can’t be bothered to write any more. I’ve been up since 5 due to Shambala-lag…

This week I went to London again and hung out with my cousins. On the way there, Mum and I went to the airport and picked up someone I used to hang out with when I was quite young – Lara Shirley. I haven’t seen her in at least seven years, so that was cool.

She only stayed at my aunt and uncle’s for the night, then went and continued her travels (gap year) in the morning, but we got some good talking/reminiscing. The latter was mostly her telling me what happened when we were younger. I can remember Lara-ness, but not specific events. One year makes all the difference when you’re that young (also she’s quite a lot smarter than me – International Baccalaureate and everything!).

She’s going to go to a university in America to study how to save the world (or something) and see how that goes. That sort of trumps going to Rainville to study thinking (although nothing’s really here, no one exists and we have no free will so what does it really matter?).

It’s really cool to see that we’re into similar things. FAIL Blog, CTRL ALT DEL and Garfield Minus Garfield cropped up in conversation a few times.

On an unrelated note, I managed to get £8 speakers from a charity shop in London that actually work. Success! Who says that you can’t get £8 speakers from a charity shop in London that work? No one, that’s who – and this is why!

I haven’t got much else to say apart from that it’s awesome and you should listen to it, but I thought it deserved a blog post rather than a tweet.

Hey look, everything looks different! And oh snap, it looks just like my Bandcamp page. Insanity gone mad!

Dad and I have been working on the site for the last few days trying to get it to be all linky and mind-meldy with music.jakedubber.com. I’m pretty confident that we’re done, but if anything looks out of place or just plain doesn’t work, please let me know. Nice one.

The 30 Days album is up on Bandcamp and you can go and download that now if you want (click the album cover on the right or the ‘Music’ button up the top). I’ve been through them all and taken out the horrifyingly bad bits and added some nice bits too (bonus!).

The whole album (and everything I do from here on out unless I say otherwise) is under an Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike Creative Commons Licence. That just means you can remix, tweak or just use it, as long as: a) you credit me; b) it’s for non-commercial purposes; and c) is released under the same license as this. If you want to release it comercially then get in touch and we’ll have a chat.

Even more awesome, I’ve had my hair cut short. Ish. Here’s a comparison photo:

It’s meant to be a bit more spiky than it is there, but I’m working on it.

Having finished the 30 days of new tracks, I’m now starting to put all the tracks up onto Bandcamp so that people can download the finished album. I’m going through all the tracks and fixing all the little mistakes that I overlooked in the original production. I’m only halfway through at the moment because I’m at my aunt and uncle’s place in London helping to look after my cousins.

Unfortunately (and understandably) my aunt and uncle don’t have the fastest internet in the world and so the uploading process is taking a little while at the moment. I’m heading back later tonight, so the whole thing should be finished and uploaded by the 15th.

In the meantime you can still listen to the tracks on my Soundcloud page and in my previous posts.

The vocal sample is a recording of some guy reading The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe I found here and then transposed down.

I was trying to think of a good alias to go as for dubstep production. You don’t get Michael Jacksons or Herbie Hancocks in that scene. You get Ruskos, 16 Bits, Chrispys, Caspas and Skreams. Can anyone suggest a good name for me? The suggester of the best will get a photo of me wearing all of my t-shirts at the same time (I’ve always wanted to do that).

Enjoy.

I think it needs a better beginning, it could be longer, it needs a proper melody and better mixing (it was mostly done on headphones which don’t give me a great representation of the actual sound of the song).

Enjoy.

I played with sidechained compression on the arpegiattor synth and the wobble to get the ‘breathing’ feel that dance tracks have often have.

I’ve been listening to pretty unrelated music – NWA, 16 Bit and Iron Ears. Cool stuff.

Today’s track is a nice chilled dub track. I sampled about 5 seconds of audio from a Henri Chopin Concrete Poetry thing I found on the sound page on UBUWeb.

The track is circular, so if you listen to it on repeat you can’t hear where it ends and starts again. I love that in relaxing tracks.

Today I tried to use the Session view in Ableton Live rather than the Arrangement view, which is what I always use. I’ve never made a track like I did today and it makes the structure of the song really interesting. The song goes with the way you feel at the time rather than being totally planned, because you can play the track in a non-linear way.

I did end up doing the final mix in the Arrangement view because it’s a lot easier to control automation from there.

The main part of the song is all about the gaps. The silent bits are just as important as the loud bits and the whole thing sounds really cool (and looks awesome in the Soundcloud player).

I used hocketing again, it just makes stuff sound more complex and clever than it really is.

Let me know what you think.