Josiah Tobin’s Projects

I really should update this thing more often! I’ve been playing with chiptunes for awhile now, but only recently got around to forming a proper name and releasing anything…  Here’s some assorted tunes I’ve done under the Bit_Rat name!

Bait Thief

Worlds Away

Lemons (utilizes only one channel of audio for all instruments!)

Honeydew

Got a full-length album on the way with various instrumentation mixed in there. You can also check out the Bit_Rat website here.

~Josiah

As of yesterday, Castle Conflict, the little iPhone game I mentioned previously, is complete. The last few days were pretty much just polish, so we’re really proud of what we were able to do. Some screenshots and a more complete summary by Stephen can be found here.

~Josiah

Well, that’s not true. Some sleep.

I’ve been hired by an old friend of mine to do pixel art and audio for a small iPhone game he’s working on. He has a working prototype on his end, but we’ve given ourselves eight days to turn that into a fully-fledged end product, with all mecahnics/graphics/audio/etc in place.

Here’s the blog where you can read more about it and follow our progress:

http://unobservedmusings.blogspot.com/

~Josiah

Swimfail.com is now online, with every Swimfail release up for free download and/or purchase!

Terry: Guess this means I can quit leeching off your generosity, huh? Although this blog is a quite a bit easier to update than editing and re-uploading a new news page every time, hehe…

~Josiah

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things is the debut album-length shriek of aural discontent from California-based industrial metal project Because I Hate Your Ears. Catchy, eh?
This isn’t my project, but I was in charge of mixing and mastering it. Consisting of nine songs clocking in at roughly 45 minutes, the album could be described as Skinny Puppy playing Fear Factory with Devin Townsend attacking a room full of samplers with a ball-peen hammer, but really, that’s kind of stupid. Just let the music (and the title) do the talking.

Unrelenting industrial metal with some of the coolest/creepiest screams and death metal roars I’ve heard. Buy it Here. Myspace page Here. You can also buy a t-shirt Here if you feel like sporting a snazzy logo or wonderfully tasteful coathanger graphic (your choice) to upset the right-minded folk in your area.

~Josiah

“All Signs Point to On Fire” is the debut album from Canadian rock/hip-hop group Phoenix Voice, comprised of brothers Brian and Josiah Tobin. Blending acoustic percussion with pounding electronics and driving rock guitar courtesy of producer/multi-instrumentalist Josiah Tobin, the music is carried by Brian’s vocals– combining his speedy, precise and technical rap delivery with drifting melodic lines to create a truly diverse experience.

In other words, download our music. It is rockin’.

Download here

Medley of clips from the album

~Josiah

Hung out at XMark’s place this past weekend, and on Sunday we decided to throw some musical ideas together… we ended up with this fun little VG music medley:

link

We’re both really proud of this one, it turned out really well for being made in 8 hours straight. I think Terry especially will appreciate some parts of this one.

~Josiah

So I’ve been meaning to record a little acoustic EP for awhile, sort of a nice change from the industrial rock I usually make… Just the other day I got the drumkit set up in the room next to mine, so I can have the mixer out in the hall and just run all the cabling between the two rooms– way easier to record drums now. So this morning I woke up, started messing around with them, and… now I’ve got a four-song EP recorded. I spent all day working on this with almost no breaks.

It’s called Invisible Stray (still using my usual project name of Swimfail), and you can download it here:

Click

I played/recorded all the instruments and sung everything, and also mixed and mastered it myself. It’s about 13 minutes and consists of four songs.

1. Stray (Lost)
2. Day-Old Phantoms
3. A Flooded Memory
4. Stray (Found)

I’m very proud of this; these are very personal songs I’ve been playing for people for awhile now. Please listen if you have the time and let me know what you think.

~Josiah

INDUSTRIAL RAWK. C’MON GIMME MY IMPACT FONT

THAT’S BETTER

Track list:
01 - Kid
02 - Meme
03 - Bunny
04 - Letter
05 - Fauxpas
06 - Frontman
07 - Protector
08 - What Gives
09 - Adumbration
10 - Hollow Pages
11 - Another Angel
12 - Wilkinson Road
13 - Turquoise Shift

Standard version

Special version with no compression or limiting applied during mastering. Better sound quality at the sacrifice of volume for all the audiophiles.

Buy the album here:

Standard edition sales page
Uncompressed edition sales page

~Josiah

I just bought my dream guitar on Tuesday. Yes, another purchase this soon after that new bass– this is the last, though. I swear. No really, stop laughing.

Awhile ago I was hanging around Parksville with Seth (my main musical co-conspirator), and he mentioned that there was this white Telecaster knockoff (Peavey Reactor, U.S-made) sitting in a local pawn shop, in so-so cosmetic shape and modded out with a Hot Rails mini humbucker in the bridge– turned out to actually be a SD Little ‘59 mini humbucker, but that’s even better as far as I’m concerned. So we went in there, I took a look at it, and decided I simply could not risk playing it for fear of becoming completely captivated and making an extremely unwise impulse buy.

…Yeah, that didn’t hold for long, and some time later I had to go in there again and play it… LOVE. That was it. So began the age-old tale of a young guitarist fawning over a beat-up old Tele in a pawn shop– you know, that one hanging in the corner that no one ever buys. The clichés of my actions actually didn’t hit me until after the fact. I swear, I felt exactly like Koyuki from Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad. (Wait, I don’t watch much anime. How’d I let that one slip out? Slip Out– Get it? Steeerike TWO)

So after another week or two of staring, obsessing, and feverish debating with myself, I ended up taking it home. It was priced at $299, but I convinced him to let it go for $270– he wouldn’t take 250, even though these guitars apparently go for about $150 nowadays, stock. Oh well. I would’ve gladly paid full price for it if it came to that. Anyway, I tweaked the guitar’s intonation (was pretty off on a couple strings) and threw on a new set of 10s… Right then I knew it was *my* instrument. That was it. This guitar’s going to be with me for a long time…

It’s kind of funny, cause I generally don’t care much for Strats and other ‘classic’ guitars, so I thought Tele-style guitars would fall into the same category. I’m so glad I was wrong, though.

There’s some clips of the different sounds I’ve got out of it here:

http://www.distractionware.com/josiahtobin/reactor_clips.mp3

The neck pickup is kinda scratchy when distorted (as heard in the clip just after the clean segment), but sounds wonderful run clean (the first bit). The Little ‘59 in the bridge sounds huge despite being a tiny little thing, I love it (used on the ultra-metal part at the end)

I’m sorry, I just keep going on and on and on, but I just adore this guitar.
I’m such a hopeless sap.

(pics to come!)

~Josiah