Mr. Bill’s Tunes Monthly Roundup – June 2018
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.
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.
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…
Much love, glad to hear that you’re well <3!
You both are nailing it! I’m interested in these wavetables man it sounds cool.
I got diabeties and I wish I could use my carbs data in ableton but they ain’t smooth enough. Shitty sample rate ?
Thanks for your support!
There might be a whole new genre born of music made of bio feedback 😛
Waoh! best of luck with your noodle Bill! take some time for yourself and rest up 🙂
I got some too but they show an unoperable brain tumor :(((
Hey maybe that’s the secret behind Avicii’s music *too soon?)
Oh wow, sorry to hear!
It’s never too early for comedy 😉
Somewhere in the full episode of this video, they talk about when is it too early for a joke. This clip is also fitting though.
Super stoked on those Wavetables
Same here! We might even do a collab because I have a bunch of MRI’s as well 😉