Despite my lack of updates, I’ve actually been quite busy here since living in Beijing China.
I’ve been working on some cool projects, one of the most interesting being Mikey Dee and Miss Melody’s fusion of western downtempo electronic with poetic traditional Chinese folk music.
The two shouldn’t work well together, yet under the moniker ‘Mobidextrous’ they’ve somehow create something very cool and unique and are breaking new ground here in Beijing and worldwide.
The first track I produced, mixed, and did a lot of the sound design for is called ‘Huan’ which is a poetic account of being lost in the big city, where ‘even the wine glasses are drunk with excess’
They’ve also done a video for it below which has some great footage of Beijing:

You can find more about Huan and their other tracks on the Mobidextrous Soundcloud page, including 2 other songs I’ve produced, Wang Ming Yue, which features the latest and most groundbreaking effects I have used yet, and Woo Yan.

More tracks and videos coming soon, so keep an eye out.

Over the last few years, I’ve been extremely busy with many productions in various genres with different artists. Most of them haven’t been released and are just starting to get out this year, so you’ll see a lot more postings about them here!

I’m excited to share with you my latest production. it’s a song I started many years ago with the talented Laura Harley and it’s just now been completed.

We started with the music bed tracks which I composed and then Laura added vocals and guitar to.
Vocals were recorded in Vancouver, where I also produced and engineered it, except for some mixing I did in China.

To describe the feel of this song, imagine yourself in the year 2020 deep in the heart of India where on a path of spiritual awareness you find yourself in a struggle with the insistence self, trying to escape the grasp of your own ego.

Laura talks about the meaning behind the words on her website…

I think it really turned out well and it’s a very unique from all my other productions including previous songs I’ve worked on with Laura.

You can download it free on Laura’s website now!

Let me know what you think.

Over the last year I’ve been working on some very exciting new music with Elika Mahony that I have co-written, produced and engineered.
I’ve always felt the music Elika has done in the past has not shown all of her musical potential and talent, it only represented one aspect of her musical influences and interests. So we’ve been on a musical journey to more completely represent and express Elika’s creativity and interests through the music. That journey is ongoing but we have the fruits of our initial efforts in three new songs, Edge of Forever, Missing You, and Listen.
(click on the song links to read more about each song on Elika’s blog)

Each explores different musical styles combining progressive electronic elements with Latin, Persian & Middle Eastern, New Age and pop styles. I think they all merge together very well with Elika’s beautiful voice and pleasing melodies. These songs will also be enjoyable to new listeners who may not connect with Elika’s previous music.

Another goal of these new songs was to convey more of Elika’s feeling and emotion in the vocal performance with more nuances and latent facets of her voice and I think through great effort and striving she has accomplished fantastic results.

We decided to release the songs in batches as an ‘EP’ CD rather than have you wait for the full album to be completed.
Get the full details and links to download the songs online here: www.elikamahony.com/music/edge-of-forever

Let me know what you think.

I’ve been checking out some of the music apps out there for the iPhone, and my first thought was wouldn’t it be cool if someone could create something to emulate amazing but expensive music hardware like the innovative Tenori-On, and the Roland TR series machines. Well I searched, and there they were!

For Tenori-On like music making, there is TonePad, and SoundGrid.

For you classic techno music kids out there – If you liked the Roland TR series machines, or ReBirth on the computer from Propellerhead, check out the impressive TechnoBox from Audiorealism: 808, 909, 303 machine emulation and a cool new graphic interface.

I just think it’s amazing that for $5, you can get the sound and abilities of 3 hardware devices that would cost thousands of dollars to buy used on a phone.

I love technology!

I’ve added my latest favorite song to the player on the right sidebar of my blog.

This song just send shivers down my spine, the ultimate sign of a great track for me.
Something about the chord progression and dreamy vocals…

For those who may not know, Canadian producer/composer Deadmau5 (‘Deadmouse’) released a song with a similar melody years ago called ‘I Forget’, possibly the inspiration for this song…

I’ve been working on a new trance track for songwriter Deborah Caldwell over the last few months called ‘I Know I Should Run’. It’s about when your madly in love with someone who is totally wrong for you to be involved with and you know it.

Deborah wrote and recorded the song some time ago but wasn’t happy with the style and feel of the song. I redid all the music as a more trance pop dance style at her request, but so that didn’t distract from the well written song, while trying also to enhance the emotional impact of not only the music, but the vocals. Hopefully you’ll feel we achieved that. My role for the track was basically arranging, programming bed tracks, music production, audio engineering and mixing/mastering. I assisted with some minor melody changes as well in some key parts of the song for more emotional impact.

We auditioned a lot of singers to get the right performance and feel for this song, and decided on the talented Isreali singer, Noya. She did a great job of conveying the emotion and was a total pro to work with.
We had a specific sound in mind for the vocals and despite this being different to her typical jazzy style, she gave us exactly what we wanted.

The song isn’t really written specifically to sell to a ‘trance music’ audience, but is more to license in Film, TV, and Ads, or to be covered by another artist.
We’re also working on a slower acoustic version.

You can listen here.

Let me know what you think!