14 June 2008
Exciting things happening...but top secret for now.
Meanwhile, the song of the week is now "Fol de Rol 2008". In listening to this track (from the "Canciones..." CD) I decided I didn't like the way it was mixed and mastered. So the version in the play bars is a better one.
Also, cleaning up some old writings in this section which have been superseded/eliminated/etc.

1 June 2008
While trying to decide what next to do about the new batch of songs...I've uploaded an older tune called "T.H.Y.R.I.O." (The Horse You Rode In On)

4 May 2008
New album imminent!
Since 2006 I have written just about a album's worth of new pieces that I"m more or less happy with. But this time I don't think I'm going to go traditional and release them in a CD format like the previous 6--or at least, not at first. It will be an online release, and I'll send the tracks to iTunes and other online services.
Eventually I would still like to assemble artwork and a nice package to possess (and play away from computers and iPods)--but at first it will just be online.

February 2008
My favorite quote from the Oscars telecast
Glen Hansard (in his acceptance speech for best song from the wonderful film "Once"):
"MAKE ART."
Goethe said something similar a few hundred years ago along the lines of:
"Artist! Don't talk! Create!

12 February 2008
Up and running...
As Gurdjieff wrote "If you're going to go on a spree you might as well go the whole way, including the postage."
I made a major change to my studio by having a behemoth music production PC built for me. Wow man! The CPU is an Intel Core 2 Quad. It was expensive but I decided to go with a company that specializes in such things. The power I now have--and the quiet in my studio now--are blissful. I'm just planning to enjoy it until I have to file for bankruptcy or win the lottey, whichever comes first.
17 December 2007
A moment of silence...
..for the hundreds of LPs I let go. A guy in Orange County whose livelihood it is to sell LPs on ebay made me a good offer on everything I had left. 30 years of carefully collected records. There's a nostalgic tang there but one must move on and not be too attached to the past. Maybe I'll use the expensivelps blog (see URL below) to bellyache about that.
Meanwhile the other excitement is that I plunged myself deeper in debt to buy a new music production computer. This time I didn't pull any punches, had it built by professionals for silence, etc. More on that at the csound blog...

1 October 2007
Current projects and interesting stuff
Lots of other stuff besides writing songs. As part of my vow to decrease the volume of Stuff, I'm cataloging all my LPs in order to start making them available for sale. I started a new blog about this and, incidentally, for writing about all my old favorite records going back to the 1970s. The blog URL is expensiveLPs.wordpress.com
This project is really taking a ton of time as I have several hundred LPs to list. Some of them are as common as dirt (e.g. Steely Dan Aja) and some are extremely rare (like the Session II LP I talk about at that blog.
Also looking forward to seeing the NWEAMO electro-acoustic concert that is scheduled for the end of next week at San Diego State University.
Finally, after a quite a long time I'm putting up a new Song of the Month called "Zygoma" from a previous CD.

8 September 2007
Marketing experiment didn't work so well!
My bright idea of contacting previous buyers of TPS CDs didn't work out so well (see 5 August blog entry). Maybe I shouldn't have used the US Mail. I did that since I felt uneasy about sending out yet another unsolicited email. I hate email spam and since the people who bought my CD didn't explicitly say that I could email them, I didn't.
Well, this doesn't stop me from forging on. Still working on new projects, the Csound blog and trying to enjoy life generally.

5 August 2007
Customer Appreciation Month
I've been thinking about how to thank the people who've purchased my CDs from CDbaby. I've decided to send them all a piece in the mail offering them a copy of The Circle of Art which I'm not selling on CDBaby free for the asking. So if you've bought one, you should expect something in the mail in the next few weeks. (Email if you're not in the US.)

Thanks to fantastic support from Cakewalk, I was able to buy an upgrade to Sonar for my Windows 2000 system. Officially, Sonar versions 5 and 6 son't support pre-Windows XP systems, but v5 works like an absolute charm. Of all the excellent new features, my favorite is the "piano roll view" feature that allows me so see MIDI data in multiple aligned tracks. I really missed that feature in earlier versions. (Not to get too nostalgic, but Opcode's Vision sequencer line had that 10 years ago!)

By the way, I've been adding a fair amount to the Wordpress Csound blog (mentioned in the 15 June item)If you're bored, surf on over there and you might find something of interest.


15 June 2007
...something completely different...
As much fun as I have been having with Ableton Live over the last few years, I seem to be repeating myself over and over (and over and over) so I have returned to the idea of music generating software systems.
I started a blog over at wordpress.com, basically about Csound but it's fair game for anything else that enters my brain...check it out at csound.wordpress.com
18 May 2007
Time for a mini - makeover..
This blog-ish window is sort of cumbersome, especially if you don't want to read the whole thing...so I may link it to wordpress.com or something. That way you can get an exciting RSS feed as well!
I do have some new tunes to upload and hope to do that within the next two weeks.
21 March 2007
Happy Vernal Equinox...
It's been sort of too long since I uploaded something new to the site....I have a happy bouncy little electro clash piece called "Invasion 09" (explanation to come some other time) which is now the "New Song of the Month."
Already starting on ideas for the next release...
I experimented with the music program Max/MSP some time ago,and although I never got too far along with it, the concept intrigued me. So I've downloaded the open source CSound software and am exploring it. It's like being parachuted into a jungle with nothing but a machete and some old maps drawn at different times, by different people, to different degrees of accuracy. Maybe to people learning it in the academic world it's easier to figure out all the millions of pieces, but it is taking a little time for me. But the light is beginning to dawn...
10 January 2007
Our 6th CD, "Canciones de mi hermano electrónico" has arrived from the plant and is ready for sale! You can hear 2:00 samples of all the tunes and read more about it at the CDbaby page for it.
25 December 2006
CDman is done with the artwork and the project is at the pressing and printing plants. I hope to have the final CDs by the first week of 2007.
7 October 2006
I originally planned to use DiscMakers for this project, especially since they have a great graphics department. But they weren't flexible enough to do the production the way I wanted, with bulk disks and printing separate. So I went with cdman again and I'm glad I did.
28 August 2006
The new project is in the mastering phase. I tried doing it myself but gave up after I found Iwas unable to prefer one or a different version of any mastered track. It's really true that you need to bring different ears to this kind of work. Particularly if you're so unobjective after mixing and arranging the pieces for two years.
The other problem I have is deciding which tracks to leave off. I have a total of 16 finished pieces which amount to almost 80 minutes. I might be able to fit them all on a CD but even I wouldn't be interested in listening to that all the way through!My current thought is to provide a secret URL or ftp location with CDs that people buy to allow them to log in and download the 20 or 30 minutes worth of music that's not on the CD itself.
I have also uploaded a lot of new versions, mixes and tracks of stuff on this site which I haven't done since March 2006...so browse around and you should find some new tracks and mixes.
2 July 2006
A couple months ago I offered to do a live recording of a friend's band, Al Samoud. They do Middle Eastern tunes and some others and perform all over the Southwestern US. This is a fun and educational process since I haven't done live recording for years. I also started a new piece in Live that I think is cool--that program is addictive!
We saw a hilarious and unique movie called Bubba Ho-tep--part of what made it great is the wonderful atmospheric soundtrack by brilliant young composer Brian Tyler...Joe Bob says "Check it out!"
Meanwhile I changed the free song of the month to "Wanderer in the Waste" which I based on a track written by George Gousis.
20 May 2006
After reading so much praise for it, I actually spent the $$ to get the book Mastering Audio by Bob Katz. It was expensive (about USD40.00) but well worth it. I think it;s the best single thing I've ever read about the production steps between multitrack mixdown and the music you hear from your CD player, home theater or even the radio. In particular, the section on how radio compression processors work ought to be required reading for every musician, agent, or producer who thinks the only important thing is that their track be as continuously loud as possible.
I hope having studied this book will make my next production better.
5 May 2006
OK, the treat of the month is a song from way back in my archives: this is from a CD I wrote in June of 1997 with pieces more or less finished as an archive. It's called Ashieta Shiemash (from a character in Gurdjieff's Beelezebub's Tales...)
I have been spending most of my time trying to get good mixes of my existing songs rather than write a bunch of new ones. This was impeded somewhat by the implosion of my JBL LSR25P speakers. I know a lot of people like these, but after having them in repair twice within a few months, and as little and as quietly as I run them, I think it is time to retire that brand out of my studio.
15 Apr 2006
OK: back on line after a slight technical problem with my internet service.
I have a new song attached to the download bar. It doesn't have a name yet but I originally wrote it for the NWEAMO festival (see www.nweamo.org). It isn't actually done yet but you might find it interesting anyway. It's probably the only song ever written with lyrics in Babm.
I also uploaded a much newer mix of Metropolis, although this really has a long ways to go as well...
07 March 2006
You know what this site was missing? A privacy policy. As much as I hate spam, junk faxes, etc., I realized it might be a good idea to me to lay out what Crow Caw Music Works privacy policy.
Partners and pals
This site contains various excerpts and full length tracks from tim p scott CDs. I used to have tracks on acidplanet, garageband and some other sites but I finally got overwhelmed. Maybe some day in the future when I have time I'll revisit the free upload sites...

To get the best quality and cool artwork though, you should get the CDs from the great folks at CDBaby. Just think: once I'm dead they'll be very collectible! And there are 2:00 minute excerpts of all the tunes to be heard there.

Although I don't really promote through it, if you're interested in creating or hearing electronic music I recommend the site em411.com. They can get a little propellerhead on you but it's always entertaining...