Marten Jansen Rock Music

I Can Hear Your Voice

admin — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 18:02:45 +0000

Hello Music Lovers,

My new song is called “I Can Hear Your Voice” and will be released on July 16 from:

iTunes
Amazon MP3
Spotify
eMusic
Rhapsody

Just so that you know: I’m not making any money with this. So far Spotify has reported one stream, the rest nothing. Of course I inquired with the music distribution sites I used, but they are just saying that the above-mentioned sites (and others) are not reporting any streams or downloads. The streaming and download sites delegate their contacts with artists to the distribution sites, so I would have to sue the former to get any information out of them. For me that would be to great of a financial risk. What exactly makes these companies release the implausible data is a question that each person is free to speculate on, and please do, but don’t feel deterred by all of this to download or stream my music.

Art is stronger than politics!

Marten

Ultra Violet

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:22:42 +0000

To be painfully precise, this song will be available (from June 18) from the following stores:

some stores, such as Spotify, may take up to two weeks longer

iTunes:

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, French, Guiana, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay and Venezuela

AmazonMP3:

Austria, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States.

Deezer:

Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and United Kingdom

eMusic:

United States, Canada, all of the European Union

Google Play:

United States

iHeartRadio:

United States

MediaNet:

Canada, United Kingdom, United States

MySpace Music:

Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States

Nokia:

Australia, Austria, Brasil, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

Rhapsody:

Germany, United Kingdom, United States

simfy:

Austria, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland

Spotify:

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States

VerveLife:

United States

Zune:

Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United States

Feel Alive

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:32:40 +0000

I’m learning this as I go. Some songs are available on iTunes and Spotify, one is available on iTunes only, some earlier songs are on a host of download and streaming sites. The current song, dear reader, will be on the following sites:

iTunes
Amazon MP3
Spotify
eMusic
Rhapsody

I sent the song to the distributor today and it should be available on iTunes within a couple of days. Spotify needs up to 6 weeks, which is their problem, right?

Hopefully there will be no ****up on the song’s pricing on iTunes as with the previous song, in which case you should try another site from the list above.

enjoy/regards

Marten

He Was A Middle Aged Caucasian

admin — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:37:34 +0000

Holy Smoke!….for the lack of stronger language….

I asked the music distributor to fix the typo in the song title, but it’s still present in the album title. Never mind about that. That middle aged caucasians can’t spell is well known.

A slightly bigger problem is that the song is listed at iTunes as costing $8.99. This is not something I did and I asked the distributor to fix it (by email, that is…by phone their “wait time is longer than average”).

The only download option for $1.99 now, is www.cdbaby.com , which is…….the distributor…..

Just another day in the music business…..

thanks/regards

Marten

Jazzmine update

admin — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 17:07:29 +0000

I have added an update to the song Jazzmine Revolution, because I felt it wasn’t quite right. I made some changes between 2:10 and 2:20. I don’t blame you if you don’t notice the difference at first, but the change gives the second part of the song a more natural flow.
You can tell apart the old version from the new version in that the old version’s file name is jazzmine.mp3 and the new version is jazzmine-revolution.mp3.

I’m working to get my new track on music streaming sites like Spotify and iTunes. If I can get my end of the process done next week, then it will be another 5 weeks for Spotify to be able to list my song on their site, so the song’s release date will be some 6 weeks from now, IF I hit no snags.

———–
Update, Aug 23th: it seems I uploaded the wrong file. Forget about the file jazzmine-revolution.mp3, the correct version is JazzmineRevolution.mp3.

Free

admin — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:51:18 +0000

Free…I like free. I want the people in the Middle-East and North-Africa to be free. I want everybody to be free.
Economically, free means something different, in the English language. It means that you don’t pay for something, like air, or sunshine.
On the Internet free has been important. Microsoft got a foothold in the browser market, because Internet Explorer was free while Netscape was not. As the Internet developed during the late 90s and the early 2000s, free became a given right to the Internet consumer.
Free is good, for everybody and for me too. People can view my paintings, read my articles and download my music for free, which has brought my creative spasms to the attention of many, not as a goal in itself, but because it gives me a chance (no more than that) to escape the fate of the much beloved and equally much derided starving artist.
But make no mistake. For a lone webmaster working on a shoe string budget, it takes a long time, a lot of work and skills that aren’t a matter of course, to get any kind of search engine ranking. And even then it takes ten years at least to get to anything that resembles critical mass: that the peoples regard you as worthy of their precious approval. I dig that, no questions asked.
Thanks to the notoriety of my paintings my music got downloaded from day one. I put them online as soon as they were ready and people listened to them. Everybody happy.
Until I started to get some rather unpleasant vibes along the lines of: “It goes on….and on……and on…..giggle-giggle…..”, meaning that a new parasitic relationship had been born. No hard feelings, but that’s just what it meant and it was my fault, so it was time to quit, I had no other choice.
And now all the new songs I have made are “burning in my pocket” as it were. I’m dying to get them out, but I can’t, the system doesn’t work.

From BBC website:

“If your business plan counts on copying going down it’s the wrong business plan. It just won’t work.

“What you’ll do instead is finding yourself locked in an arms race with the people who you’re hoping to sell things to.”

I dig that too. Punishing the Internet user for illegal downloading is nonsensical. You, the free-downloader are my friend, not a criminal.

Why the system isn’t working is a multi-faceted question, which I can’t get into. I can only do my part:
I’m rocking – : http://rocking.mobi.

Time Goes On

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:43:39 +0000

My new song is titled Time Goes On. I drew upon similar resources as in Your Dreams and You Said with the difference that Time Goes On is 9 minutes long. Previously I didn’t have the confidence to move beyond 4 or 5 minutes and would end a song at the first opportunity.
Time Goes On is an “open ended” song. It doesn’t go out with a bang but ends in a kind of ambiguous way. I don’t quite understand the ending myself, so an update may follow. Don’t download at random, in anticipation of an update, because I will mention any updates in this post.

Now, with Time Goes On finished, I will have the opportunity to work with the new virtual instruments I bought. Hopefully my laptop has enough RAM to support that, because RAM is really the bottleneck in computer based music production. The problem is that I will have to buy a whole new computer just to double my RAM, because it seems to me, correct me if I’m wrong, that computer manufacturers now articifially limit RAM capacity and RAM expandability. A correct business decision undoubtedly, but a major headache to me.

The thing to watch with Time Goes On is that it’s a 13 MB download. This is just the consequence of home recording, because in order to get a decent sound quality you can do little compression to reduce the file size and even then some parts sound a little scrappy, especially the electric guitars with all their overtones.

In this song I used:

Vocaloid Miriam
Pro Tools loops and sounds
Vocal Foundry
Voices of Africa
Nu Metal City 2
Dubstep Plates 2
Symphonic Manoeuvres
80′s Punk & New Wave
Superior Drummer Avatar, Twisted Kit & Electronic
Ableton Live Suite 8

You Said

admin — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:52:03 +0000

You Said is an ode to guitar rock. During the 1980s I was a fan of guitar bands like Dire Straits, U2, Simple Minds and The Stones, but then, at some point, guitar rock became so predictable and retro that I switched to House music, until in pure desperation I switched to classical music, mid-90s.
Now, as a song writer, I feel strangly attracted to styles of guitar rock which I wouldn’t touch as a listener, such as Nu Metal. I have realized that EZDrummer (and Superior Drummer) complements my style in that its makers seem to originate from Hard Rock. You Said makes ample use of EZDrummer’s Expansion Kit called Twisted Kit which was put together by renowned drummer Michael Blair and consists of things like cake pans, drawers and other unorthodox drum items.
Like in Come and Your Dreams I make use of the Vocal Foundry sample DVD, for vocals.

Your Dreams

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:43:16 +0000

Ok, so this track is a little unorthodox, as I always try to push my envelope. In my opinion it’s an artist’s obligation to be unorthodox (while making art, that is) because art is, or can be, escapism. In the visual arts you can work towards realism, but even there art is only interesting, in my opnion, when reality becomes the artist’s creation, as it were, as opposed to art being a mere copy of reality.
As for pushing one’s envelope, I worked myself into a lower back pain on this track and even then it’s never finished. It’s got some weird hamonics, but please listen to the track several times to get a feel for it, before you dismiss it as weird. The vocals you hear consist of English language vocal samples, but reversed. So it’s English, but the other way around. I did that to get the vocals to be a little more interesting, because it’s very difficult to find interesting vocal samples.
I renamed the track to Your Dreams, which is from the lyrics of one of the vocal samples. Prozaic, but self-evident.

Expect at least one update to this song, because I’ve detected an harmonic mishap and a mixing issue. As for the harmonics, the part between 1:15 and 1:32 min. is experimental. It’s a pivotal part of the song, but I don’t really know what I’m doing there. If it were “wrong”, as so to speak, the song wouldn’t be able to continue in the way it does, but it isn’t entirely “right” either. I put right and wrong between quotes, because music isn’t exact science (in practice, exact science isn’t exact). Near the end of Requiem for Batman there are some chords that sound “off”, but without them the ending would be dull and only the very attentive listener will detect the offness. So, what to choose, the smooth version or the more dramatic version, that’s an artistic choice, which transcends musical rules. (The same applies to the intro (00:02 – 00:27) of Your Dreams.)
As for the mixing (this is geek stuff), the penultimate part of Your Dreams, where the Vocaloid begins, sounds unstable. This may have something to do with the compressor’s reaction to the bass sound and I spent a week trying to fix that, only partially successfully. Oddly enough, it appears neither in the sequencer, nor in the .wav file it produces, only in the .mp3 file. It will take a better geek than myself to get to the bottom of this.

On Nov 24th I updated My Dreams. Check out the intro and the 1:15 – 1:32 part. Also, the piece now has a 96 kHz sampling rate (instead of 48), which gives the piece a better overall sound quality. And the above-mentioned unstable sounding part got through the MP3 converter better this time. No idea as to why.
Which sampling rate produces the best result is an art to me (if not coincidence), rather than science. Of course I tried higher sampling rates the previous times, but then it didn’t improve the musical value.
The human ear is not supposed the be able to hear an improvement of sound quality above 44.1 kHz, but if a file conversion from the lossless .WAV to the compressed .MP3 is required, then there’s no doubt that increasing the sampling rate makes a big difference.
However, a more realistic sound doesn’t always produces a more musical result. I learn as I go.

Nov 25 (v2): Another update. The intro is always the last part of the song I write, because it serves as a kind of blueprint for the rest of the song. Its purpose is to set the song up. “The meat” of the song is often three part counterpoint, or more, with which you can’t start a song, because that would leave the listener confused from the first moment on. The maximum number of melody lines that a listener can hear simultaneously is two. If there are more, then you still hear two and regard the rest as harmony. You assume the additional lines are there, based on what you expect from what you heard previously. So a convenient way to start an intro is with two part counterpoint, although there may be expections: as long as the listener can grasp the music without prior knowledge.
The difficulty with My Dreams is that the intro must set up an unorthodox harmonic structure (I think, I’m not a musicologist) to a simple melodic theme. So the intro contains the theme, which suggests straightforward harmony, but at the same time it must have notes that are external to this simple harmony to set up the more complex harmony that follows. The “external notes” make the intro sound illogical, so the two have to be balanced: the intro must make sense in its own right and at the same time set up the unorthodox harmony that follows.

Nov 26 (v2.2): Another update: I changed the strings following the intro. This blog’s MP3 files have “tags”, some of which show up on your player’s display, such as the song’s title and an image. The MP3 files also have a “comment” tag, which isn’t generally displayed on your player, but I use it to add some technical information, such as the song’s version. Today’s version is 2.2, hence the (v2.2) next to Nov 26. Just in case you feel the urge, if you download a tag editor, then you can access the comment tag and see which version you’re dealing with.

Dec 3: Update v2.3.
I changed the 1:15 – 1:32 part on Nov 24th, which necessitated a change to the strings of the part following. The objective is not necessarily to make the part in question sound better, rather than to improve the flow of the song overall. If all these updates piss you off, I am sorry, but when these changes occur to me I feel the need to implement them. This song is just a lot more complicated than the previous ones and I learn better to understand it as time passes.

Requiem for Batman

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:44:15 +0000

Requiem for Batman is a hommage to Batman (March 6 2000 – April 21 2006).

I’ve made a habit out of alternating songs with drums and pop vocals with songs that are based on Vocaloid and result in a mix of classical music and jazz. The classical angle is due to listening to classical music a lot and the jazz to studying jazz on guitar.
As it turns out, when I use Vocaloid (Prima, I can’t get the hang of Miriam yet), the ideal instruments to combine with Prima are a bass guitar multi-sample and a keyboard synthesizer sound. That’s what Tell Me is all about, and much of Batman’s Requiem. The keyboard synth sound is warmer and more direct and compelling than a piano.

Tell Me was inspired by Satie, who showed how to mix old European music with modern styles, and by Bach, the arch-counterpointillist. The way I use vocals is inspired by Wagner, and also some general composition issues, so I was beginning to wonder where Mahler had gone. These days I’ve become a little disenchanted with Mahler, because he lacks a certain authenticity and the raw musical talent that folks like Bach and Satie have. However, his First Symphony is still a marvel of originality (not to be confused with authenticity) and fresh innovation.
It would be wrong to assume that this Requiem for Batman or Tell Me are exclusively European music. I’ve heard Pygmees in the African rain forrests play melodies quite similar to mine, but very short, one or two bars. The difference is not one of cultural refinement, but of technological advancement.

On Oct 16th a new version of Requiem for Batman was uploaded, which has some minor changes.