One Blog Becomes Two!!

For a long time now this blog has had a bit of an identity crisis. I have mixed posts about my audio endeavors and my personal life in one place and was, to be honest, a little too lazy to do anything about it. Now Amanda is pregnant and due in May this blog, as you can imagine, will start to fill up with baby pictures for our families to keep up to date on the babies progress.

Therefore I have created a new blog called The Creaturephonic Workshop where I will write about music production. This new blog will replace the old News page on the Haunted House Records site. I will write articles on music production, write gear and music reviews and also keep you up to date on Haunted House Records News.

So!, if you come to this blog to read about my music related stuff, please go to this address. If you like reading your blogs via an RSS feed then point your feed reader here.

If you are not interested in the music stuff and want to just see what Me and Amanda have been getting up too then you can stay on this blog.

Continuum now available

The new album, Continuum, is now available to stream and buy from my bandcamp page here. It will shortly follow on all the other download stores like iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic, Lala, Shock hound, Groupie tunes etc. Then it will be out on CD. Enjoy...

New album very very soon.

The new creature album, continuum, is really really close to being released now. All the mastering is pretty much completed I just need to listen to the final tracks a few more times to make sure I am happy with it all. So hopefully over the next week or 2 I will get the album first up on to the creature bandcamp page.

The track listing is as follows:

1. Music Machine
2. Glide
3. Robots
4. Evil Genius
5. Ronin
6. Time Machine
7. The Number
8. Strange Days
9. Continuum
10. Penguin
11. Codex
12. Strange Ways
13. Blue Sky Dub

The album is sounding great if I do say so myself and continues my usual dark sounding adventures, but beats wise this album is quite a lot more lively than my last album Distant Horizon. I hope you like it when I release it.

Remember the first single, Strange Days and Strange Ways, is available to download FREE of charge. I recommend getting it as it is a great introduction to the latest sound of creature. I have been told it sounds very Berlin, what ever that means :-) lol

There Was This One Time at BandCamp...

One of the things I really like about running a small record label and sound design business is the fact that I am not shackled to any larger companies telling me what to do. This leaves me free to try out emerging technologies for launching music projects.

One of these such projects is a Web 2.0 site called Bandcamp. Bandcamp is a site that helps you promote and sell your music to new audiences. They have a few features that I am really keen on trying out.

Firstly they allow a listener to stream an entire album for free. This means I can finally get rid of those dodgy 30 second snippets from the Haunted House Records site. For certain releases I can say whether a listener can download the album for free or pay for it. When downloading an album you have a choice of different formats to choose from like mp3 through to FLAC and Apple lossless formats. This in it self is a great thing as I have had loads of people ask when my albums will be available in FLAC format.

The interesting aspect of the site is that you can allow a listener to pay what they like for an album over a set limit. I have set the limit to $5 min. So you can say what to pay over that. This should be an interesting experiment.

Since I set up the creature bandcamp page I have had loads of people download music from there all of which I can track through bandcamps stats system. This is really good considering I havn't even promoted the site to anyone yet.

For the next album (which is pretty much ready except for final CD artwork) I am going to take a 3 stage approach to its release an an experiment. First I will release it on bandcamp. Then the following month it will go onto the main paid for digital download stores like iTunes and Amazon. Then following that I will release the pysical CD version.

Anyway, check out the creature bandcamp page here.

Electronic Critters : Drum Hits Collection Now Available

The Electronic Critters Bite Size : Drum Hits Collection is now available as a digital download from Sounds/To/Sample. The collection costs £9.99 and contains the following:

• 80 x Kicks
• 102 x Snares
• 109 x Hats
• 95 x Toms
• 54 x Crashes and Cymbals
• 16 x Cow Bells
• 16 x Claps
• 23 x Shaker and Claves
• 12 x Vintage Fruit Machine Sounds
• 250 x Circuit Bent One Shots
• 76 x Bleeps Bloops and Glitches
• 32 x Pre-Assembled Kits

As well as categories of drum hits, there are 32 pre selected drum kits for you to use straight away.

Electronic Critters Multi Buy Special Offer

Over on the Sounds/To/Sample site we have a great multi pack discount on both Electronic Critters sample libraries. Instead of paying £39.98 we have reduced the price by 25% to £29.99.




Here is the sales info from Sounds/To/Sample:

Credit-crunch busting multisaver pack featuring the esteemed Electronic Critters and its new sequel Critters 2: Airwaves, boasting 1,500+ sounds and 3.5+GB worth of fx, glitches, radio slutmospherics, manipulations, bit-crushed reductions and ghostly spectral frequencies - all for just £30!

Picking up a 9/10 Computer Music review and gushing REMIX magazine accolades, these circuit-bent titles, offer dark soundscapes, atomic crackles, space-gongs, alien choirs and ethereal voxmospherics.

Sounds come courtesy of re-wired 1980s classic toys, including the legendary Speak&Spell, Major Morgan, Talk'n'Lights, Musical Insects and My Little Talking Computer, with all sounds on EC2: Airwaves coming from sampled radiophonic ambiences.

Ideal for all electronic genres, especially where there is a need to add ambience, fx or just inspiring source material to make into new loops, the Electronic Critters products also make an ideal collection for foley edits in TV and film.

Electronic Critters : Bite Size

For a while now I have been putting together a new sample collection under the electronic critters brand. The brand has been extended to be called 'Electronic Critters Bite Size'. These collections are designed to be high value, low cost sample collections that will be available as a digital only collection via Sounds/To/Sample.

The first sample library in the bite size line is called the 'Drum Hits Collection'. This disc features over a 1000 samples of electronic drum kit sounds and noises split into lots of groups like, Kicks, Toms, Crashes, Hats, Bells, Bleeps and Bloops, and Circuit Bent one shots.

The drum samples were created using the following machines, Korg Electribe ER, Elektron Machine Drum, Kawai R-50, TR-808 and 909, Yamaha DD10 and more. This will be an excellent value collection available for £9.99. I am nearly finished creating the library and it should be available very soon :-)

Strange Days and Strange Ways Single

Work on my next full-length album, Continuum, is nearly complete and I am set to release it in the new year. In the mean time the marketing and promotional engine is getting fired up :-)

Today I have released the first single from the album, called Strange Days and Strange Ways. This is a double A-side single and I am offering it for download FREE of charge. You can't get better value than that :-)

The new album progresses my usual dark, cinematic, beat laden style and I think this single really represents the style of the new album. I hope you like it...

You can download the new single from this link.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes Extended

Earlier on in the year I said one of my plans for this year was to re-release all the EP's I put out before Mechanical. The first re-release was the Mechanical : EP Collection, which I released a few months ago.


Next on the agenda is the re-release of Nightmares and Dreamscapes. This EP was quite popular when I released it, but I kept on getting a similar request from people. That request was to make some longer extended edits of the tracks. Well, here you go :-) The re-release will contain the original edits, plus a set of extended edits of the tracks. All the tracks have been mixed from scratch from the old multi-tracks and they have all been remastered. I finished most of the edits a while ago, but I wanted to sit on them and have 1 final mixing session with fresh ears. For all intents and purposes these mix and masters are now completed. I just need to listen to them for a little longer to make sure I am totally happy with them.



As you can see in this post, I have got the artwork completed. The more alert amongst you and those who are a fan of music from Warp Records will see where I got my influence for the front cover. The cover artwork was inspired by Warps early Artificial Intelligence compilations from the early 1990's and also an early Black Dog record.




For the geeks amongst us, the landscapes were rendered in a program called Terragen. I spent ages trying to get the look and feel I was after, and I think all the hard work paid off. They have a Erie and retro feel to them :-)

I am hoping for this release to be fully out by the end of the year. The digital download version will come first and the CD version will follow shortly afterwards. Stay tuned..

Free Radio Frequency Samples

As a Free gift to celebrate the launch of Electronic Critters 2 : Airwaves I have made a selection of my raw source material available to you for FREE.

When working on Electronic Critters 2 I recorded lots of raw radio frequency sounds using a high end radio frequency scanner (shown above). I then used these raw sounds as a basis for the sound programming for the sample collection. In the file below you can download some of these raw sounds to play with. They make a great starting point for some crazy programming.

Click this link to get the samples. The download is 28meg in size and all samples are recorded in 24bit.

Electronic Critters Multi Buy Special Offer

Now Electronic Critters 2 is going through the manufacturing process, I have put up a special offer on the Haunted House Records site. If you buy both Critters 1 and 2 on DVD you will get a 20% discount, so the price is £31.99 instead of £39.98. That's £7.99 off the full retail price. Pretty good Credit Crunch beating offer I think :-)

Your £31.99 gets you nearly 4.5 gigabytes of crazy yet intricate sound programming for use in your own music compositions or film and TV project.

Electronic Critters 2 Now Finished

Electronic Critters is now completed. The final DVD image is currently uploading to the manufacturers FTP server ready for manufacturing. I have included some renderings from the case artwork below. The first batch of DVD's should be here in a couple of weeks. Thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered their copy. I will get your disc out to you as soon as I have them.

Electronic Critters Demo and Pre-Orders

The image above is the new DVD case for Electronic Critters. The sounds on this new version of critters are based around noise recordings from a high end radio scanner. The noises consist of random speech, to static, pulses, data transmisisons, radar beacons etc. These noises have then been processed through lots of DSP effects to create sounds that are completely out of this world.

If you go to the Electronic Critters site, you can download a free demo pack from the new critters disk. Also on the shop you can pre-order a DVD copy. The DVD version costs £19.99 instead of £24.99. Any discs pre ordered will be shipped out around mid November.

I am just making the final tweaks to the collection and the finished DVD image will go off to be manufactured. You will also be able to buy Electronic Critters digitally from Sounds/To/Sample within the next few weeks.

Theramin Fun

A colleague of mine and fellow musician, Jake, of the band Izzy The Push was good enough to lend me his portable Theramin for a week or two between gigs so I could have a go at recording it. I do not know why they call them Theramins. I think portable sine wave emitting hell beast would be a better name.

After a few minutes of tinkering with this thing I can honestly say, Theramins rock!!!! Even Amanda had a go and she looked like she was enjoying herself trying to replicate R2D2 :-) I have recorded about 10 minutes of weird noises so far and had a go with some additional processing.

For a laugh I have uploaded a simple warbling example. The first section is the raw Theramin straight into the computer with no processing. The next 2 examples use some gated modulation effects and a grain delay. You can download the mp3 here.

Great Electronic Critters Review in RemixMag

I just found out that Electronic Critters has received a great review in Remix Mag. It is available on their online addition, but is due in next months printed version.

They don't give scores, but they do write quite descriptive reviews. Review text is below...

WHERE CIRCUITS GO TO GET BENT

In preparation for his latest album, Distant Horizon, Derby, UK-based Stephen Haunts—aka Creature—spent several months circuit bending and sampling electronic children’s toys. He enjoyed the process so much that he continued developing the sounds, soon collecting enough tweaked-out specimens to release them as a sample library. Electronic Critters contains 750 raw samples of circuit flows being interrupted and Stephen using his body as a giant resister (prodding custom-installed body contact points on the toys) to further twist the sounds in real time. A second folder contains more than 250 complex textures and atmospheres, created using heavy processing and stretching of the raw material. All samples are provided in both 16 and 24-bit, at 44.1 kHz.

Every ounce of the raw material sounds incredibly cool: A toy phone is made to sound like C-3PO swallowed Tweety Bird. A re-wired Furby spouts off incoherent phrases as if scrambled in digital transmission. A glitched Major Morgan produces dissonant tones across several octaves and then distorts into siren-like effects, while My Little Talking Computer serenades you with crunchy, flipped-and-chopped 8-bit renditions of “Old MacDonald Had A Farm,” spoken numbers and phrases such as “choose a game.” Of course, there’s the venerable circuit-bending favorite, Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell—to the tune of 330 raw samples. Quite often it’s difficult to recognize the source of these raw sounds, the way that syllables hold ad infinitum, tones abruptly loop and release and Stephen’s body contacts produce all sorts of cool ring-mod and legato/glide pitch like effects. With DSP processing, these sounds turn into unnerving dark drones, space-gongs, alien-choirs, suspenseful elements, animated rhythmic sequences and more. This brilliant and unique collection also comes at an unbeatable price.

Shopping Cart

There have been quite a few changes that I have wanted to make to the Haunted House Records website for a while now. I have now completed the first few.

Firstly the whole concept of running Haunted House Records as a label isn't really working. Having the time to find and develop new artists is something that I just don't have the time to do. With the previous line up, Creature has done really well, but anything else released just has not made any impact what so-ever. So the first change is that HHR now only has 1 artist and that is Creature. The website is going more in the direction of a personal website that will represent my music work and sound design business. This will help me align my work with more advertising and licensing agencies, which is something I am starting to steer towards. The first of these being some film trailer work.

The second change I have made is the online shop. Previously the site just directed you to online digital retailers to buy downloads of my music, and I had links to CDBaby for the CD versions. Also with Electronic Critters I had a single buy button which just let you buy that one product. This was fine and served me very well, but now Electronic Critters 2 is nearly finished I wanted the shop to be more flexible. So now I have incorporated a full shopping cart model. This shopping cart is provided by PayPal and is now live on the website at this link.

For each product you can add it to the shopping cart, and then on the left hand side of the screen is a view cart button where you can check out. Postage is calculated based on what you have in the cart. Customers have the option of paying with a credit card / debit card, or by using their existing PayPal balance.

So these are the first of many changes, I hope you like them....

Rough Rider - Vintage Style Compressor

Another credit crunch busting plugin in Rough Rider from Audio Damage. They have made this excellent compressor, FREE of charge and it sounds really nice. Of course, they have done this as a promotional thing so you hopefully buy some of their other products and this is fine :-)

I have been using some of the Audio Damage plugins for a while and I can honestly say they are excellent and priced very attractivly. So go on, download and install Rough Rider and start compressing the shit out of those drums loops and bass lines.

Great FREE VST Music Plugins

A while go I mentioned about an excellent free vst synths that models a Roland SH101. Well the people that provide that synth also have lots of other goodies available on their site. All FREE, which in our current credit crunch is a great thing.

A lot of free ware synths and effects normally tend to sound a bit pants, but I really like the sound of their stuff. All plugins are available for PC and MAC, so everyone can join in the fun. They have the following:

VST TAL-U-No-62
Virtual analogue bass synthesizer. Improved version of U-No-60.

VST TAL-BassLine
Virtual analogue bass synthesizer.

VST TAL-Tube
Tube and amplifier emulation plugin.

VST TAL-Flanger
Vintage flanger effect.

VST TAL-Phaser
Vintage phaser effect.

VST TAL-Dub
Vintage delay effect.

VST U-NO-60
Virtual analog synthesizer.

VST CHORUS-60
Juno-60 like chorus vst effect.

VST Vintager
Virtual analog synthesizer.

VST Real Synth
Kunz & Knobel Virtal Analog Mono Synth.

Firefox FTP Client

When updating the Haunted House Records website I normally use an FTP client called Smart FTP to send the files across to the server. This used to be a free program and it was quite good. But it has now changed over to a paid for program. I was going to buy it, but someone recommended me an FTP client called FireFTP that integrates in with the firefox browser. I gave it a try yesterday and it is excellent. Really easy to use and fast and more importantly, FREE.

You can download it from here. So sorry Smart FTP guys, your software is good, but this is better :-)

Electronic Critters 2 : Coming Soon

For more months than I care to remember I have been busily working on the 2nd edition of my Electronic Critters sample Library. The first edition was based on Circuit Bent children's toys. Electronic Critters 2 will be based on something different, which you can probably guess from the above image :-).

I will post with more details soon. I am nearly finished making the sound content. When that is done I need to get the demo and information up on the Haunted House Records site.

What I can tell you is it will have a lot of content on it. It will sound just as crazy as Electronic Critters 1, and will still only cost 19.99gbp. It will be available on DVD from Haunted House Records, CDBaby, direct from out distributor in the US, and also as a download from Sounds/To/Sample. Hopefully this new edition will be as popular as the first :-)