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I used to send demos to record companies, but after the birth of mp3 files I really haven’t bothered much trying to get someone to release my music. I guess my ambitions have stayed in the studio and not on the stage, and that suits my personality best. Though it is still an ambition to let people hear and hopefully enjoy the songs I make.

Me noodling over my synth in my studio apartment in Brisbane, sometime in 2000. The foam behind my hand is a makeshift popfilter for my mic. The guitar cost me $30 at a pawn shop. Not exactly Abbey Road!

So after I finished my latest project, Marabakke (available on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify – please have a listen and buy the EP if you like it!) I decided to take a look back and go through the songs that came out of the first decade of the millenium. Here are my personal favourites and I hope you enjoy them as well!

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/08-briefencounter.mp3
Sven – Brief Encounter (Renaissance Man, 2000). When studying for my bachelor of Animation in Brisbane, Australia, I spent a lot of nights recording tracks on a really crappy Toshiba laptop. It was able to play back four audio tracks, and with careful use of my miniDisc recorder, a pawn shop acoustic, my Epiphone SG and my synth I recorded more than 50 songs in 2000. Brief Encounter is a simple, sweet pop song (“Passed you by, bye”) and the original drum track is sampled from all the 50′s kitchenware in my apartment. The singing is not great, but it gets better in the end where I did a second vocal track. The sound in the beginning and the end is sampled from the train station at Norman Park. I used to take the train to the city every friday to get drunk with my friends. Good times. This song is from an album called Renaissance Man that actually got digital distribution on some UK internet label (peoplesound.com). I stuck with the simple, boring artist name Sven for a few years.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/02-slingshot.mp3
Sven – Slingshot (Third One, 2000). It might just come off as cheesy, but I like the hell-bentness of this song. It also has some pretty cool chord progressions and a nice guitar solo thrown in. The crappy drums came from my rave synth (CS2X) which has some awful midi drum sounds. But it was all I had. The microphone used was a shure instrument mic which was very sensitive. I had to be careful when singing not to overload it, which meant some natural compression (I didn’t know what compression was at the time).

Some of the covers for the musical projects in the 00's

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/01-outthewindow.mp3
Sven – Out the window (Third One, 2000). This is a bitter-sweet pop song that I really like. The production is as usual marred by crappy drums, but the layered guitar and string parts make it quite airy. I doubled my vocals to fatten up my voice, which is a great trick when your voice is not fantastic.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/01-black.mp3
Sven – Black (Beautiful Handful 2000). This song is from the third musical project from Australia and the last recorded on the old, battered laptop. I tend to forget my own songs completely after they’re recorded, but the folk-like riff from Black is one I’ll always be able to play. By then I knew the limitations of my gear and myself, and this song is the best sounding from the Australia sessions. The guitar bridge and solo two minutes in is my personal favourite composition, especially the off-beat change in the slow part, then speeding up for the guitar solo.

A cornerstone in my studio. All my electric and bass sounds go through this bean.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/03-Summerdays.mp3
Sven – Summerdays (Saving Daylight EP 2002). During my civil service in Trondheim I continued writing and recording songs, but in a much upgraded home studio. I believe Summerdays was in part written in Australia, but wasn’t recorded until 2002. It’s a fast paced, catchy power-pop song.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/01-Daysaver.mp3
Sven – Daysaver (Saving Daylight EP 2002). From the same session, Daysaver has a similar feel to Summerdays. Catchy, guitar driven falsetto powerpop. This song was played a couple of times on national radio. Magazine Natt&Dag interviewed me and invited me to play at the magazine release party, which I did. With a miniDisc backing track and my brother stepping in on bass, it went okay. I remember a friend describing this song “the best song a-ha never wrote”, I can somewhat see what he meant.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/02-sleepforaweek.mp3
Sven – Sleep for a week (2003). I don’t remember if this was part of a specific EP or just from some sessions. It’s a cute song with pretty interesting chord progressions. Finding melodic hooks and combining them with original chords has long been a song writing method for me. The intro riff is pretty cool as well. Ingebjørg Aadland backed up the vocals on the chorus.

Sven – He’s OK, she’s OK (2003). This song is from the same session as “Sleep for a week” and has an unusual funky vibe coming from me. For the song I animated and filmed a music video on a super crappy home made green screen. The video was screened on Norwegian TV once, on some music video show on TV2.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/walkingandtalking.mp3
Arms – Walking and talking (Arms, 2003). When living in Trondheim, I formed a band with Geir Holmen (guitar/vocals), Alf Martin Eriksen (bass) and Torstein Paulsen (drums) called Arms. I had written a few pure fun rock songs and it was great playing them with a band for the first time in years. We did some local gigging and recorded an album, with Geir contributing on the writing side. The album was never quite finished, as I moved to Oslo before it was mastered properly. We were a bit all over the place genre-wise, but we used quite a lot of vocal harmonies and punk dynamics – and always with a melodic center. Walking and talking is one of my favourites.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/01-lovesthedevil.mp3
Sven – Love’s the devil (Punching the air, 2004). I set up my recording gear in a small apartment on Grünerløkka that I shared with a friend. This song just started out as a simple riff played on my acoustic guitar, and then evolved and took a life of its own. The synth line is inspired by The New Pornographers’ sound and I really like the break in the rhythm going from verse to chorus. This song was played on radio as “Ukas Urørt”. Short, catchy and energetic – it’s one of my best songs and I’m also happy with the production.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/04-theseopenplains.mp3
Sven – These open plains (Punching the air, 2004). I’m not sure, but I think this is one of my few re-recordings. A very simple production. Picked bass, acoustic, auto-swell electric guitar, mellotron synth and drums. Ingebjørg Aadland did backup vocals again, and the song have this mellow, melancolic jazzy vibe that I like.

http://machineboy.com/mp3spiller/mp3/jetpack_master.mp3
The yeah surplus – Jetpack (The yeah surplus, 2006). As regular work took more and more of my time, I didn’t record as regularly as I used to. But in 2006 I had a collection of songs strung together. I guess I went back to my rock band days, turning up the gain on my guitar and having some fun again. Jetpack is one of those simple rock tunes. Chunky riffs and vocal harmonies!

Home studio setup

Then I spent a lot of time away from song writing, the longest ever. Had children, worked, concentrated on other pursuits and what have you. But at the end of the decade I had started to write some songs again, but spent a long time recording them. I meticulously pieced the songs together, spending a lot of time searching for the right sounds and dynamics. After almost two years I finally got the best of the songs mastered and released them as Marabakke.

When I get the time I’ll go back another decade to bring you the really embarassing stuff.

That meant removing the glass and unmounting the LCD. Daunting. But after seeing some YouTube videos and reading every blogpost about it, I realised it shouldn’t be too hard. And I was right!

These are not meant as instructions, just explaining what I did so others might realise it’s not too much hassle to fix yourself. Check out the links at the bottom for better, step-by-step instructions for disassembly.

I bought some torx screwdrivers and used a pair of bathroom plastic suction hooks to remove the front glass. I just put them in the upper corners and pulled out, it came off easier than I thought.

I then removed all the torx screws (T8) around the frame, marking the different screw lengths with a pen. I carefully removed the frame from the bottom, taking care not to break the microphone/iSight cable on top. Then I unscrewed the 8 screws for the LCD, removed the LCD temp cable and unscrewing the large connector that is held down by two screws. This was my biggest hurdle, as the torx set I bought only had 5,7,8,9 torx sizes. You need T6 for these two. I ended up using a flat screwdriver and managed to get them out in the end.

Carefully lifting up the LCD, I peeled back the black tape on the left underside. There’s a black, flat cable that is fairly easy to remove when the tape is peeled back. I’ve read it’s easier to disconnect the cable from the LCD instead of on the logic board. I concur.

After the LCD was off, I yanked the whole HD out. The black plastic frame has a small lever/handle that can be pushed towards the HD and the whole thing can be pulled out. My SSD of choice was an OCZ Vertex SATA2 240GB SSD. It was among the cheaper drives with this capacity, and I’d read others using Vertex drives in their iMacs with success. I was not able to mount the SSD in the 3,5″ frame it came with. It was a useless design which I don’t think would have fit in the 3,5″ plastic frame anyway. So I just used two velcro strips and velcroed the bare SSD to the back of the iMac. I pinned it somewhat under the metal frame, so it’s not going anywhere. I taped the temperature sensor on the SSD and reassembled the iMac.

I booted up in disk utility, formatted the SSD and installed Lion (after having to first install Snow Leopard and then upgrading, I didn’t manage to clean install Lion).

The upgrade has been pretty awesome. Booting takes around 20 seconds, most programs open in a bounce or two. Lightroom is great on the SSD. Loading, previewing, skipping to other photos really benefits from the speedy access and read times. Logic also opens quickly, and everything just feels snappy and instant. I also put a 4GB stick in one slot, giving my iMac 6GB of RAM. This is 2 more than what Apple states is max, but it seems to have worked great. All in all a great upgrade for a beautiful computer that will keep me company for years. At least until the new macs with SSDs come down in price.

Better instructions here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfQx-kpbL7o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVkshB_BCWw
http://octomac.com/tech/iMacHD/iMacHDUpgrade.html