The Stuff

The RPM Challenge Jukebox is online. Listen to my songs (search for Milk Shake Daddy) and 16535 other songs by other RPM Challengers.

16546 new songs to listen to and love.

I made a video for the song Hubble from the Secret Lives of Probes, Satellites and Rovers. Enjoy.

It’s been 10 days since the RMP challenge ended and The Secret Lives of Probes, Satellites and Rovers was released. So far we’ve had the following comments:

Pat Lambe said: “I never knew satellites led such useful lives, I’m digging the album great job for 24 hours.”

Mr Gav said: “good life is my favourite, you’re an awesome vocalist. satcom1 is smashing too.”

Alexis said: “And the vocals are awesome in Good life. Im impressed you did that within a month Dan. ;)”

Baggsy said: “Good life is my fave.”

And Flaming Fire declared: “Spacecore IS NOW!”

There were others, but MySpace seems to destroy these things from time to time. Good Life seems to be the favorite. If you haven’t heard it, here’s the MP3. Remember the song is about the Opportunity and Spirit Mars Rovers, and their happiness with their job and lifestyle.

Now for the bonus tracks:

Here’s a mix of Sojourner Attacks with the music mixed low so you can enjoy the poetry of the lyrics.

And this a an instrumental mix of Good Life!.

After 8 nights of strumming, plucking, tapping, twisting, clicking, typing and sliding, the new Milkshake Daddy album is complete. The album is titled Secret Lives of Probes, Satellites and Rovers and it is a concept album. The album was created as part of the RPM Challenge; the challenge was to create an album in the month of February — I accepted the challenge and completed on time.

Tracks:
1. Launch!
2. Voyager 1
3. Voyager 2
4. America, I Love You (USA 193)
5. SKYLAB
6. Kaguya
7. Communication (Satcom 1)
8. Hubble
9. Good Life! (Opportunity and Spirit Rovers)
10. Sojourner Rover
11. Sputnik 2

Listening:

You can listen to select songs on the Milkshake Daddy MySpace page or the Milkshake Daddy RPM page.

Getting the album:

The album is free to download, share, burn, remix, etc, but not to resell. Here is a link to a zip of the album. Listen to the songs in order — it is a concept album.

Why record an album?

Why not?

In spite of having no musical talent, I do enjoy making music. It might take me 10 years between recordings, but the interest is always there, but not the passion or drive. This time around, the RPM Challenge provided me with a reason to record something. My long time friend Leif had joined the challenge, and that was another reason.

What is the Milkshake Daddy?

Back in the mid-1990’s my life revolved around partying, and enjoying music and B movies, in particular Funkadelic and blaxspoitation films. I’m a huge fan of Dolemite, and the Milkshake Daddy was more or less a “pimp name”. Around 1995 I was unemployed for a while and started to experiment with guitars and drum machines. I recorded about 2 hours of material — in retrospect, I came up with 3 good songs: My Ass is In Good Shape, and two versions of a Funkadelic-inspired song called Ephedrine ( trucker speed ). They’re on the MySpace page.

Back in the future, 12 years later, I needed a band name for the RPM Challenge. My standard aliases — Dan Century, Last King of Seabright, Dan the Fan, Lord Sesshomaru, P. Destruction, That Bastard! — they weren’t as good as The Milkshake Daddy, so I used that.

What kind of music is it? What does it sound like?

It’s happy and positive love songs in the vein of the Beatles or Beyonce. Just kidding. The music is experimental. The closest genre to it would be ambient electronic music, but there is definitely noise, jazz, hip-hop and 80’s rock in the mix. You won’t hear music like this on the radio, unless the station is WFMU, a college station or maybe an obscure satellite station, but it does exist.

I designed the album to sound like what all the information and experience coursing through the circuits of the satellites and probes might sound like if it was transformed into music. I think of the Mars rovers as having more human personalities, so those songs are low-fidelity pop songs. Some songs you might find uplifting (Hubble) or cheerful (Good Life), while others are intentionally sad (America I Love You and Sputnik 2).

Moments might remind you of Nova or Carl Sagan specials, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Black Flag, or Devo.

Technical information

Instruments:
A Korg Electribe MX was used as a keyboard, noise generator, and drum machine.
A Boss DR 550 was used as a drum machine and bass.
A Gibson SG was used for the guitar parts, either filtered through the Boss or a POD. Both the Guitar and Bass PODs were disappointing in their inability to produce a loud enough signal to produce a nice recording.
A Schecter bass was used for bass and to make the sound of the rocket launching.
The Women Take Back the Noise bent circuit boxed set was used to generate noise.
Other: a Polaroid camera, various sounds off the Nasa site (public domain) and various speech synthesizers were used.

I used a PC to record some of the speech synthesis, but 99.9% of the recording was done on an 2005 iMac using Garage Band. Garage Band is good for stuff like podcasts, but I was disappointed by it’s lack of features (I was unable to do fades and panning during the mixdowns), and it makes these awful ear-shattering popping noises every now and then. Steve Jobs owes me damages for hearing loss. I used a PreSonus Firefox to get all the sounds from the machines and in the Mac.

What next?

No immediate plans for recording music, but I am inspired to do more.

Sorry about the blob — Word Press does not play nice with the Safari web browser!

It’s Day 24 of the RPM Challenge — just 5 to go. 6 out of 10 tracks are partially recorded, and 4 are just concepts so far. 4 long nights ahead. :-<24 days ago I planned on recording 10 semi-idiotic pop songs, but after a 2 week gout attack, about 60 hours of OT at work, writers block and winter blues all I had by the third week were song titles and some lyrics. I started to panic — but I hate to fail. Around day 21 I was ready to drop kick my DR 880 — I used to be pretty good building loops with BOSS drum machines, but something wasn’t clicking. I lost the funk. I put the 880 aside and plugged in the Electribe and started fooling around. Fairly quickly, I came up with some really strange sounds, and I thought: I can use this; forget pop-songs, I’m going to make an epic ten-part space Opus — Neil de Grasse Tyson Drops Acid and Buys a Casio. There’s been plenty of challenges. First, I don’t have anything like Pro-Tools, just Garage Band. I have a Cubase disk that came with by PreSonus Firebox, but that wouldn’t install. My PC is kind of old, and lacks firewire ports, otherwise, I would have used that instead of my Mac. The Mac is a real bear to work with — every now and then either the OS or Garage Band throws a hearing-shatter POP sound and the speakers go dead. Lots of reboots. Quicktime let me resample wav files, which was nice, because I couldn’t find a way to do that with Garage Band or Audacity (boy do I miss Sound Forge). My KORG Electribe MX (the blue one) is incredible — it sounds great, and I can make great sounds with it, and its pre amp is powerful, so no problems recording with it. My Bass Pod — oi vey — I couldn’t get loud enough volumes out of it to record, probably due to my own ignorance. No matter, the Guitar Pod works fine, and I am a fan of MCA and Dave Ween’s distorted bass sound, so I’m okay with that. My BOSS DR 880 — again problems — this time, probably my own ignorance or oversight, but I couldn’t get the volumes out of it that I could get from my KORG — two different machines, with different purposes, but a real pain in the neck when using both on the same track. The biggest obstacle is trying to record the text to speech reader on the Mac (which is really sweet, btw, so I want to use it) — I get the horrible feeling that I’m going to have to record the Mac with my PC and then copy the resulting files over. A sense a trip to Radio Shack for some cables. I also need to use the Women Take Back the Noise boxes set as an instrument — don’t ask if you don’t know. This will be a Milkshake Daddy album, but no funk, talk show samples or me trying to sing like George Clinton. That said, the music is still stoner-friendly, and I’d like to thank Funkadelic, Hawkwind, Coil, NASA, John Zorn, JAXA, Soulburn and Laika for inspiration. The lineup is on my RPM page, but obviously: the Milkshake Daddy programming and guitar, me Dan Century programming and production and Platinum Destruction on bass (the KLF is right — don’t use live bass; program instead).Anyway, here’s what you have to look forward to on the 29th:Tentative album title: Secret Lives of Probes and Satellites1) Track 1: 0-30.3 (To Serve Man)2) Track 2: 30.3 - 87.2 (Voyager 1 & 2)3) Track 3: 122.3 - 235.2 (USA 193)4) Track 4: 242 - 283.4 (Skylab)5) Track 5: 283.4 - 400 (Kaguya)6) Track 6: 401 - 452 (Satcom 1)7) Track 7: X-X (Aura)8) Track 8: X-X (Hubble)9) Track 9: X-X (Sputnik 1)10) Track 10: X-X (Sputnik 2)