stevereaver.com

A Mix for John

Steve Reaver — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:17:52 +0000

I have now promised myself that I will start blogging again everyday, It shouldn’t be hard. I just need to be less lazy! This is the first of a long run I’m sure….. I have something very special here today, a mix that I have done for a friend of mine. Sadly he passed away recently and my last conversation with him was about how he had enjoyed my music and I promised him a mix, this is the mix I promised him. I have posted it here for you all to enjoy. If you would like an mp3 version for you iPod then get it HERE

What a party!

Steve Reaver — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:54:24 +0000

Well what can I say, it’s been hell busy! I’ve got so many things to blog about but very little time to say them all. I need to tell you how ‘Happy 2 be Hard’ went, and I need to tell you about a job I did a the Roxy in Parramatta as the FOH sound guy, my new vocation ! But for now I will keep it brief, there’s an awesome party and you should go to it! There enough said….. get down to the Imperial Hotel on Saturday night to see Nik Fish, Jumping Jack, Abel, Paul Holden and Shade cut it up on the decks, and a special live set from Vic… It’s gonna go off !!!

How happy are you ?

Steve Reaver — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 04:13:10 +0000

Hare you Happy To Be Hard ? Well if you are not and you want to be, then you should show up tomorrow night…. I’ll be spinning tunes at Happy To Be Hard a Paul Holden party…. You should come…. Nothing but the best happy hardcore tunes from the mid to late 90′s. I’m on early , 11p-12a, and will be spinning tunes with a very happy vibe to get things warmed up. Then we can hang out…..

The devil made me do it

Steve Reaver — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 06:09:01 +0000

As you may or may not be aware, I have gone back to school, doing an audio engineering course. To say the least, it’s a trip, being in class with people that are about half your age and already having the understanding of most of the stuff so far. I say ‘so far’ because I am expecting it to get a lot tougher when I get into the Diploma level stuff next year. Recording and live sound are things which I have little experience and will be expected to master, no worries, that’s why I’m there! Anyway, amongst other things they expect me to do assignments which generally involve either listening to music or sitting in the studio for hours on end writing music, both of which I am very comfortable with. One of these ‘assignments’ involved listening to a piece of music and analyzing it, you know, number of bars, key, that sort of thing. I decided to take it a little bit further and actually try to reprogram the entire track! I’ve done this before, but this track was probably the most difficult one that I have done to date, crazy 303′s and FX sounds. The original track is Devil by Infected Mushroom. Now if you know this track at all then you will notice that this is not the entire thing, that’s because we where only give the first 5 minutes to analyze and the track gets really nasty after that point and I didn’t want to make things to difficult for myself. Anyway this is my cover version, which I did over two sessions in about 8 hours… enjoy….

Mixes for you

Steve Reaver — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:17:37 +0000

I have some fantasitc goodies for you all today. Finally I have found a decent place (and way) of storing all my DJ sets, Mixcloud. What great thing this is, free to use, unlimited storage, zero restrictions it seems. One problem, it’s not possible to download any of the sets… B-( However I think that is almost irrelevent now given the connected nature of all our devices, and besides there are ways of working around things like that, I’m sure you are clever enough….. anyway my profile is HERE, and below is what you will see if you click the MIXES link at the top of the page.

Steve Reaver’s Cloudcasts on Mixcloud

Is this the real life ?

Steve Reaver — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 08:32:35 +0000

I only recently heard that at some time in the past Queen released the 24 track masters of Bohemian Rhapsody. I really don’t think they where ‘released’ more like leaked, probably at a time when a re-mastered version of their tracks was being done. So, I went hunting and found it on the interwebs… ahhhh fantastic interwebs! and I could not resist the chance to take a listen and mix the track for myself. All I can say is that this must have been a feat of engineering prowess, nearly every second of all 24 tracks was used up, the engineer would have been working overtime on the faders to get this down, it would have been a fantastic performance in it’s own right.

This youtube clip is the end result of my attempt at it, with all the advantages of a modern DAW. I had fun with it, I did not reference the original because I figured there was not point in just doing the original over again, I wanted to put my own spin on it. I wanted to beef things up a bit and bring the vocals and harmonies out more, they are so epic! I took a little creative license with some panning, especially on the vocals to make the mix move around a bit more and I also went through and cut out a lot of noise and applied noise cancelling where required to get rid of that dirty 1970′s grunge. Anyway, it is what it is, I could play with this for days, but it’s always good to call it over and move on to the next thing. Oh, and you can download a high quality version here.

I’m in the clouds

Steve Reaver — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:05:51 +0000

Finally I have sorted out how I am going to get my music to the masses. On my old website I had this dodgy setup using a tool called Zina, it wasn’t perfect, but it allowed me to list my tracks in albums and track what downloads where occuring. But now we have soundcloud and its way better, However as with most things these days, to make it any good I had to pay them some money… well that’s the way things are now I guess. It’s all there, old/new/bad & good, I only get 12 hours of storage however so I will only be keeping the last 5 DJ mixes on there. I expect that I will eventually have to delete some tracks aswell once I get around to writting some more…..

Latest tracks by Steve Reaver

Yes ! It had to exist….

Steve Reaver — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 02:17:42 +0000

After scowering the youtubes for hours, looking at old skool rave videos I finally found a clip of me playing a rave ! Watch the video below and flick forward to 3:00 minutes. I can’t quite remember the setup because things would change every gig, but on the left is an Amiga and I think I am playing with the sampler and mixer in the middle…. good old times. I should also add that the backing music isnot mine, and if you skip forward to the credits at the end you will see a cheesy photo of me…. that’s me on the left…. lol !

I’ve gone back to school….

Steve Reaver — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:13:23 +0000

Today I started at my first day on a new path, day one of completing my Audio Engineering Diploma, why ? I hear you ask, I must already know so much about music and audio….
Well truth be known that when it comes to things like movie sound, TV Audio, and recording bands, I know very little…. so for the next 12 months I plan to eat, live and breath this stuff.
And at the end of it come out a much better electronic musician. My comments on today is to say that it very refreshing, at the least! It’s strange sitting in a classroom full of computers and not actually
talking about some latest wiz-bang IT/Networking thing, IT was my previous vocation and I was completely sick and tired of it. Sitting down at a computer and starting ProTools to work on something is all the more
satisfying when you are there to ‘get a job done’. And that’s the other thing, Mac and Protools…errrr… that is something that I will have to get used to! Coming from PC/Cubase world I have found things
a little off-putting, not the least of is the missing right mouse button! That damn button..! Fortunately I was carrying a Logitech mouse for my PC Laptop and I quickly worked out that it worked on the Mac….
arrrr much better thank you.

Psycho Green remake

Steve Reaver — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 03:42:19 +0000

So I threw myself a challenge, to remake Labworks techno slammer ‘Psycho Green‘. The idea came about because of a thread on facebook. Firstly it was suggested that a track like this could be done on an iPhone these days, then I threw it out there for someone to try and re-program it in Rebirth….. well I can’t stand re-birth, the sound of it is great but the interface sucks beyond all belief and dealing with pre-programmed patterns is a workload that my memory cortex cannot handle these days, so I did it in my weapon of choice, Cubase 6. Now I know it’s not perfect… far from it… the 303 does not sound right and the hats are not programmed right in a few spots, but after spending ages trying to get it to sound perfect I realised that the track I was referencing from was firstly recorded off record, then compressed into a video, then converted to youtube FLV (ie: rubbish!), then ripped down as an mp3 by me…. ummm… yeah, so much for sonic quality….. but I’ve spent all the time I’m prepared to on this. To be honest I think it sounds better but not as dirty, which was exactly the problem I was faced with….. the sounds where far too bright and clear, more like 2011 sounds and less like 1993 sounds…… I found myself knocking the top off a lot of the sounds to get it right, thus the not-so-dirty 303, but I did use a bit-crusher and tube to overdirve it a bit. Anyway take a listen and you can download the high quality version HERE