The Next Episode

Long time no talk. Lots going on with Staggered in recent days, especially on the tech side. If you're reading this you probably know that tempo changes have been implemented in production. Whew that was something. We also switched streaming data centers - we were initially set up in the EU since that's the default location with our host. The result of that is much less latency, meaning that if we are doing anything on the production server we can hear the live impact a lot more quickly.

One great thing that happened is iTunes Radio has picked up Facets...crazy right? Proof:

We exist

Announced with all of our deserved fanfare.

So the next thing that will happen is that our production server will be migrated to new data center. This is going to result in a significant outage tomorrow night (3/30/14) into Monday afternoon. We will provide additional fallback files before the outage so if you happen to visit during that time you may not notice a change, but that audio will be prerecorded.

Most important of all, we have begun writing for our next stream. There's a lot to consider there...a lot of aspects to musical composition that we didn't have the time or resources to cover for Facets. A big one is the notion of commonality between different passages in a movement. When a (good) songwriter crafts a song, it isn't just a bunch of parts arbitrarily crammed together. The various sections of the song are related to each other in some sort of musical sense - same keys, complementary melodic patterns, rhythmic phrases supporting or countering one another...maybe a combination of different things. As a result, Facets can feel somewhat jerky at times. It's fine if that is the desired effect, but one thing we will definitely address before we go to production with another stream is making our compositions more cohesive, unless the goal for a particular one is a more fragmented feel. We will get into of more of this stuff in the coming  weeks, but just know that we definitely want to take what we are doing to another level in terms of quality (a higher one to be specific).

Ok everybody enjoy the weekend -  catch me on Titanfall. 1!

-K