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New song: Summer chillin’

June 23rd, 2010

A new song has arrived

Westis - Summer chillin’

You can download and listen to the song at my mikseri.net page. All your comments are very welcome!

Westis - Summer Chillin’ by Westis

Posted in ENG My music | No Comments »

Ever since my brother made huge investments on his professional home studio last year, i’ve been thinking of also buying some real new hardware with music creation in mind. I’ve been doing music with what i’ve had.. old PC computers and some miscellaneus software with VSTi instruments. They’ve been working fairly well but i’ve been thinking of getting something totally new for a while. The only thing that kept me from updating my hardware for so long was the fact that i’m doing music mainly just for fun - as a hobby - unlike my brother who makes a living with his music. But recently i started to realize that there are people who use huge amounts of money in many different kinds of hobbies. So why wouldn’t i? I realized that for me, the hobby of music composing has always been a good opposite for my job which can sometimes be more or less stressful. So if i buy new hardware and software, wouldn’t it be a direct investment on my mental health? Bingo! And the result of this is that i bought an iMac last week!
iMac

It’s a standard 21,5″ iMac with 4 GB of RAM, 500 GB hard disk and the basic stuff. And as a music creation software, i bought a Logic Express 9, which is more than enough for me. At first i was thinking of buying the complete Logic Pro 9, but after studying the differences between the express and the pro, i decided to go express. There’s nothing in pro which i’d absolutely need right now.

This week has been very interesting. I’ve never had a Mac before and it seems to take a while to get used to it’s operating system OS X. It’s all those little differences which take their time to get used to. I’ve used Logic 5 (the last version ever released for Windows) for a long time and i immediately felt “at home” with Logic Express 9. Many things are more intuitive and simpler than in the ancient version i had before. And what comes to performance, it really was worth the money to make the transition from PC to Mac.

Alongside the iMac with Logic, i have an old (and cheap) midikeyboard (MK-4903) from Thomann working as the input device. I use it for pretty much everything when composing. I make the main melodies, pads, drum patterns and basslines by playing them in with it. I’ve been thinking of buying an external audio interface and a new input device, such as the Korg Padkontrol, for drumming. The speakers at my computer are Wharfedale Diamond 9.0’s driven by an old Technics SU-V500 stereo amplifier. The speakers are not originally meant for close monitoring but i find them working quite well in my situation. I also use Grado SR80 headphones a lot when composing.

I might be releasing new music very soon so stay tuned! There’s some nice ambient stuff coming in the spirit of my previously released song ‘Strange paths’.

Posted in ENG Music, ENG My music | 1 Comment »

New song: Spring Chill

April 24th, 2010

A new chillout tune has been released!

All your comments are very welcome.

Westis - Spring Chill by Westis

Posted in ENG My music | No Comments »

New Song: Deep Inside (feat. Ciggi Burns)

March 20th, 2010

I recently found out about a great site called ccmixter.org which gives artists a channel to release their own stuff for other artists to remix and make their own versions of the songs based on Creative Commons license. I found this nice vocal sample by CiggiBurns and decided to create a new song based on it. I’ve never created a song with vocals before.. And this is the result.

Westis - deep inside (feat. ciggi burns) by Westis

Ccmixter.org

Posted in ENG My music | No Comments »

Google Street View in Finland

February 13th, 2010

Last summer i saw Google’s Opel Astra with street view cameras driving past me when i was standing in traffic lights in Vaasa. And now after six months they released their Street View service in Finland. And here i am sitting in my blue Renault Mégane:

Näytä suurempi kartta

Posted in ENG Uncategorized | No Comments »

New song: Strange Paths

January 4th, 2010

A new song and this time a bit different in style than the previous ones:
Strange Paths on Mikseri.net.

Eli uutta biisiä pukkaa ja vähän erikoisemmalla tyylillä tällä kertaa:
Strange Paths Mikseri.netissä.

Posted in ENG My music | No Comments »

New song The Journey released with video!

October 25th, 2009

Today i released a new deep house song called The Journey.

The song can be downloaded at Mikseri.net.

And what is so special with this release is that i released an experimental “music video” at the same time. I had an ide for this when i just happened to record about 60 kilometers of driving between Tampere and Vaasa and was playing with windows movie maker. I decided to speed up the video up to 8x and then started composing a song based on the video. And this is the result in youtube: