Classifying my music

Last year I have been working on publishing my music on sites like ReverbNation, MySpace, TheSixtyOne and CherryPeel. I encountered the most problems when I had to classify my music: is it alternative, jazz, electronica, ska, latin or what? Well, I have listened to a great bunch of musicians from The Stone Age up till now and I'm still not sure which musical style my songs belong to... If I wasn't asked every time to classify the songs I upload, I wouldn't bother. But on many sites I just have to choose a musical style to tag my creations. So some thoughts about them...

They have that sweet upbeat, melodic ska feeling that Rico Rodriguez and Vin Gordon have. But still, the melodies tend to be Eastern European, which is not a big surprise, me being Hungarian. However, I cannot call my music "ska", because that is played by a band, not by a computer. So from the instrumentation point of view, these songs are electronic (electronica) songs. So is it electronic ska, some sort of dub, instrumental dubstep like Skream? Well, my songs are more like music for listening, not for dancing. Some songs of Plaid, RJD2 and Lemon Jelly might sound like my songs, too. So, is it nu jazz ska, or something like that?

Some ideas:

• nu latin ska jazz
• electronic latin ska jazz
• ...

Comments are welcome.

So Long, Unclefucker!

Has anybody realized how similar these two songs are?

South Park - Uncle Fucka, from 0:37:



ABBA - So Long, from 0:40:

First steps towards live-coding

As you might know (e. g. hearing the notes the player on the left-hand side plays), I make music. I mainly use ChucK for this purpose, which is a quite simple but functional and well-designed programming language. However, there has been a big limitation in efficiency: I actually had to write down every single note and volume change, filter frequency sweep by my own hands as nasty old numbers in Java-like code. I hope that time has finally ended.

Today I succeeded to connect a very simple Java UI to ChucK via OSC messages (thanks to this post). Now I plan to write my own UI's ("instruments") in Java, generate OSC events with them and record them using the accurate timing built into ChucK. Then I'll use Ruby to generate ChucK code again from the events I recorded. So there goes feedback, too. I'll feel like a real pro... and it all cost nothing, only a little coding experience...

ReverbNation song statistics revealed

OK, I have some songs at ReverbNation. You might as well listen to them using the player on the left. ReverbNation offers me the possibility to see how many people listened to my songs and what percent of each song they heard. Knowing this and the length of my songs, I can provide a "hall of fame" of Hillaby's songs:

1. Let Me Live - 8,63 points
2. Dubbancha - 8,43
3. Seven Lives - 7,16
4. Aka Cat - 6,85
   
5. Moonshine Reggae - 6,81
6. Xmas Dux Ska - 6,55
7. At The Edge Of Hope - 5,52
8. Skwabisk - 5,5

It's quite interesting that the most popular song title is 'Skwabisk', which means that's the title which attracted the most people, however, it couldn't grab people's attention: they switched away quite early.

The list above shows that my guitar solos were quite attractive: the first three have solos in them, while the other five haven't. I should practice more...