Hi, I'm Ed Hickey. As you'll discover below, I'm passionate about music, software development and many of the ways the two intersect.
My interests have taken me to professional recording studios, to basement project spaces, to web startups and, currently,
to one of the world's largest technology companies.
I've tried to distill this varied career and set of interests within this website.
If anything here interests you, feel free to reach out.
Command-line Album Credits
We've gained portability and ubiquity with digital music but what we've lost is the physical album which was the best way of giving credit to the people involved in creating the music you love. This little app aims at helping the curious discover who produced, recorded, mixed & mastered any album. It's still a WIP but can prove quite handy.Playlist creation based on music metadata
I've had little luck with playlist generation tools which only require overly-general inputs like genre or decade. I'm more interested in the details, e.g., generating a playlist that starts at 100 BPM and climbs to 150 BPM over the course of 90 minutes and includes music with high energy level and preferably in a minor key. Mr. Eko lets you do that.
I leverage the Echonest API to obtain the music metadata and some simple cost analysis (plus some SQL for good measure) to generate the best playlist.Control Google's Play Music website from within Vim
As you might imagine, I listen to music when I code. One of the major annoyances is having to switch context in order to interact with the music (pause, skip, rewind, etc.). To stay in the zone and still have complete control over listening to music, I brought the control into my text editor of choice, Vim.
It's installed as a Chrome plugin which uses the Native Messaging protocol.Graphical Playlist Generator
A spin on Mr. Eko that uses your local iTunes Echonest to create highly customizable playlists. It was born at Music Hack Day SF 2012 in order to expose the concepts within Mr. Eko in a more user-friendly fashion. My goal is to someday integrate this project with Mr. Eko to provide in-depth playlist creation as well as user-friendliness.
Bringing the album experience to the desktop
A major drawback to the digital distribution channel most consumers use for music is the lack of rich information that was once provided via album packaging. This project's goal was to leverage music APIs in order to recreate some of that experience.
Liner Notes integrates with iTunes to display album artwork, engineering and performance credits as well as lyrics for the current track. It's my hope that this will help revitalize the digital listening experience by bringing the data lost with digital distribution back to the fore.Needle-dropping record shopping online
One of the best things the web brings to the world of music is sheer availability -- almost every song is online in some form. Tomahawk is an app which leverages this by "resolving" your music queries by searching myriad online sources (e.g., YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud).
My app allows you to provide a list of RSS feeds from your favorite record review site, music blog or label and have Tomahawk resolve the songs in order to provide audio samples of all the releases. An experience akin to needle-dropping a stack of records from your favorite record store.Terra EP
Apocalypse EP
Crunch 2
Colonized 01
The track is sample-heavy and has a strong dose of funk which was a nice departure from our more serious, somber releases. We experimented in this tempo and genre further, but this was the only tune (so far) that has seen a release.
Get a high-res copy here from Bandcamp for free!Ultra Love Ninja
LA vs. NY
Hummer H3
Motorola Razr
After obtaining my degree at FullSail, I worked with several recording studios -- primarily Black Lodge and Neighborhood Studios. These days, my mastering work is done at my home studio where I can spend more time digging into specific sonic issues in a room I know well. I've worked on every stage of the recording process: tracking, mixing and mastering. Through the unique requirements and restraints of the various genres I've worked with, I've learned much about music. I feel lucky to have had so many different types of engineering experiences as it's made me a much more versatile and creative engineer.
Me on Discogs.comTracking, Mixing & Additional Production
Mastering