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Mr. Bill’s Tunes Monthly Roundup – July 2018

by | Aug 7, 2018 | | 5 Comments

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Today we bring you the second edition of The Mr. Bill Monthly Roundup!

If you haven’t already, go check out our very first monthly roundup.

Get yourself up to speed with what we’ve been up to in the vast lands of Mr. Bill’s Tunes.

July saw a lot of travel, infrastructure upgrades, business structuring, and plans for the future discussed.

I have to say, it’s super exciting times for us with Bill’s new studio and our new website server hardware.

On top of that, we’ve both moved house and our website anniversary is coming up on the 9th of August!

First, let’s look at the new content released in July.

Latest Releases

ill-esha – Lighthouse (Mr. Bill Remix) Project File

July saw the release of the newly standardised project file for a remix Bill did for ill-esha in 2014.

It’s believed that he originally did this remix of ill-esha’s track right after he finished writing IRL.

We also released a brand new drum sample pack which is the 3rd instalment in The Drums Collection.

Check out the new and updated sample packs below:

The Drums Collection – Vol. 3
Experimental Drums
The Drums Collection
3 in 1 Sample Pack Bundle
Sample Pack Mega Bundle
ALL Sample Packs in 1

What’s the team been up to?

Bill

July was quite a busy month for me.

On the 6th & 7th of July I ran a workshop in Singapore with Earthsync Academy.

It was an intensive 2 day thing where I did 2 x 2hr lectures a day (so 8 hours total). I talked about all sorts of stuff from sound design to mixing & mastering to how to survive as a touring musician and also just how to not get stuck in the writing process.

Moment of truth. The new studio is finally done & it sounds ridiculous!

Above: Completed studio – Below: An almost complete studio

Proceeding the workshop, I flew back to America and had to rebuild my studio.

I lost my old one before I left to reasons I can’t really be bothered to explain or give anymore energy to.

But silver lining: It has honestly been such an exciting and awesome process!

I kinda love watching a new studio come together.

I had Matt Davis from bold bird creative (an acoustics company out of Orlando) come to my studio & do what’s called “dsp linearization”.

This is where he takes a bunch of data through a test microphone into room eq wizard and see’s how the room is reacting, then generationally builds a filter to combat the issues in the room.

I’ve gotta say, it sounds fucking incredible!

All of my old mixdowns sound like shit, which is a good thing!

I’m hearing things I never could before.

Below: Some progress shots from during the build

I highly suggest if you’re building a studio in North America to contact Matt.

There’s more information on Facebook about all of this from Matt himself (in the comments section) – feel free to hit him up, he’s very approachable and loves doing this stuff.

Hopefully next month this blog post will go something along the lines of “check out all these awesome new mixdowns I’ve done!”, but I already know that won’t be the case, because I’ve got a bunch of fkn shows to play this month… speaking of which, check out the dates here, maybe I’ll be coming through your city!

Ben

I’ve been working almost full time on infrastructure upgrades, along with releasing the new content and managing tech support as usual.

If you’ve read our first monthly roundup, you’d know I just moved to Mexico. After a month in the first place which was great, we moved from Tulum to Isla Mujeres.

While it seemed like a great idea to move near the beach and live more of an island lifestyle, it turns out the internet and power on the island is very bad. I get 1Mbps for the majority of the time. That’s DOWNLOAD speed. Uploads, essentially non-existent.

The power even goes out for entire days at a time. It’s crazy and absolutely not ideal for my line of work.

The sunsets, azul water and delicious local eateries can make up for it in the meantime!

While it seemed like a great idea to move near the beach and live more of an island lifestyle, it turns out the internet and power on the island is very bad. I get 1Mbps for the majority of the time. That’s DOWNLOAD speed. Uploads, essentially non-existent.

The power even goes out for entire days at a time. It’s crazy and absolutely not ideal for my line of work.

The sunsets, azul water and delicious local eateries can make up for it in the meantime!

Website News

July saw even more foundational upgrades to our infrastructure. We migrated the website to entirely new server hardware and upgraded just about every thing you could possibly upgrade under the hood. There’s been a lot of tweaking and testing to say the least.

We’ve been tweaking, prodding and testing all month, making sure that the website and it’s environment is robust and ready for all the new features in the works.

We’ve nailed down our caching software almost 100%, with very little issues coming from that any more, so that’s great! Now we need to test some CDN’s and decide on the best one for our site.

I also got my Illustrator software working again, so I could update some of the sample pack covers that weren’t digitized yet.

Now we can start to focus on some of the new features we have planned which include:

  • A Hardcore Abletoneer Perks section
  • User interface tweaks for easier subscription management
  • Better customer communication
  • A new way of consuming video content
  • A new content notification system

If there’s anything you’d like to see, let me know through the support page. I appreciate and listen to all feedback.

Wrapping Up

I was hoping to introduce you to some other people on the Mr. Bill team this month, but it seems they’ve been a bit busy (shy maybe). I’ll be sure to get them to share some info soon.

As always, I love your feedback about what we’re doing, so don’t be shy, hit us up in the comments or on Discord.

Until next time…

Mr. Bill’s Tunes Monthly Roundup – June 2018

by | Jul 6, 2018 | | 8 Comments

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Today we bring you the first edition of The Mr. Bill Monthly Roundup!

We thought about a weekly round up, but that might be a little overkill. We don’t want to hit you up too often and be annoying.

The format of these monthly roundups will start out with latest releases, what’s happening with the website, and some personal info about Bill and Ben (not the flower pot men… but the Mr. Bill men).

We want to share a little behind the scenes action to help you understand more about who we are and give us an opportunity to get to know each other better!

You’ll get news on both the cool and uncool stuff going on… we don’t want to filter our experience to make it sound like it’s only fun and games. Truth be told, we’re grinding pretty hard over here to keep rolling out quality content!

If you have any suggestions or feedback about this new monthly roundup, please do let us know! We’re super grateful for any and all criticism and take it on board whole heartedly.

So, let’s get into it!

Meet PREMO

This month we welcomed a new member to the team, PREMO.

Check out PREMO’s Soundcloud!

He’s here to help standardise project files, which means more projects, more regularly!

If you haven’t already, go check out the Project File Standardisation Process.

Latest Releases

Cerebellum Serenade Project File

An oldie but a goodie!

This project is a good example of my older, glitch-hop production style.

I still felt like there were some interesting things to look at in this project file.

Mostly because a lot of the stuff is done in ways I would never do these days.

Aleph Null Project File

This is a more current track I released on the Powered By Inspected #2 compilation. I made this entirely from my own samples!

It’s a good example of how you can use nothing but field recordings and your own synthesised sounds, layering them in ways to create thick, interesting textures.

All without resorting to the cookie cutter packs you may be seeing running rampant out there right now 😀

What’s the team been up to?

Bill

From the outside looking in, June may have looked like a pretty quiet month for me. But from my perspective, it’s been quite the opposite. Most insane actually.

For starters, I had a housemate flip out on me whilst I was trying to relax in Hawaii. I was forced to move out of my own house, losing my studio in the process. Long story short, the police couldn’t remove her due to Colorado renters laws.

I then flew to Australia to play two shows. One with Spoonbill in Melbourne, then another with Circuit Bent in Sydney. Both turned out great!

Somewhere in all that mess, I had a seizure. I spent a bunch of time in hospital dealing with that and trying to figure it out.

But some good news is:

I don’t have epilepsy! Doctors tell me that I need to work less hard and manage my stress a bit better. So that’s what I’m planning to do for the rest of the year.

I recently found an EPIC new studio space in Colorado and put a bond down on that. So Mr. Bill HQ is about to go through a bit of an epic upgrade. I should have that sorted by mid-late July.

I got a bunch of crazy data from EEG’s, MRI’s and other brain-scans I’ve been having. I plan on turning these into wavetables and giving them to you guys for free. I’ll get started on this once I get setup in my new studio space.

Check out this neat rainbow spaghetti they glued to my skull to extract said data.

Ben

For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been working on the web side of the Mr. Bill project since the very beginning in 2008. I actually remember the first time he ever used Ableton! I don’t think either of us knew right then what we were starting. We should probably put together an “origins” post!

Here’s a pic from right before all this started!

I’ve pretty much stayed behind the scenes for the most part, so it’s usually only when tech support issues come up that I’m in touch with anyone.

On top of the usual tasks and support, June saw a lot of performance and tweaking enhancements… but I’ll get into that in the next section.

I’ve been long term travelling and working on the road for almost 3 years now with my amazing girlfriend. We’ve mostly been living in Canada and the US. But in late June, we moved to Mexico!

From the great depths of Canadian snow and the amazing blue lakes of the Canadian Rockies, to the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula among Mayan ruins and epic coastlines (and where a bottle of Captain Morgan costs just $5 and a box of 12 La Croix costs $8+).

We’re learning Español and eating more amazing food than I even thought possible. While this sounds like a dreamy Instagram model lifestyle, I assure you, it’s not. Travelling like this does not come without its challenges!

Website News

Sometimes, the simplest of websites are the most complex under the hood. Our site is no exception. We’ve been battling some caching issues for quite some time and we’ve been through 3 different caching software solutions. A considerable amount of time has been put into each one, tweaking and getting the settings correct so the site runs quickly and smoothly. This month we’ve completely converted to another caching setup AGAIN. So far so good! We’ve reduced page load times by at least 60% in some cases. Next step, a solid CDN.

I’m also working on a new notification system for the site. Not an invasive and annoying one, but one that only shows up in the corner of the site itself. The aim is to let you know what’s new or featured on the site when you visit. In the future, I might add options such as browser, email or SMS notifications. However, I don’t use these features myself because they can be super annoying! I’m not in a hurry to implement something potentially irritating. It will simply be a little notification icon that you can click to see the latest notifications IF YOU WANT TO.

Ok, so here’s the news I’m most excited about in terms of the website: I’m building an entirely new way of consuming video content! That’s live streams, tutorials, courses, production footage and any other video content Bill creates. This new feature will be akin to something like Netflix for familiarity and ease of navigation. There’s no ETA exactly on this because it’s quite an extensive job and I’m just one man. But rest assured, I’m working on it.

Wrapping Up

We actually have more legends on our team, but we’ll introduce them next month.

So that’s the very first monthly roundup. I hope you enjoyed getting to know us a bit better.

I’d love to know what you think! Let me know in the comments.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, you can also leave them here or on Discord!

Until next time…