Thinking about my options right now

Now that I'm flying home I can write that I was at the Game Development Conference in SFO for most of the week. It's the usual stuff - booth duty and talking to a ton of students from schools across the region and nationally. Our samples showed well, we shipped three samples supporting a press release announcing Intel's Rendering Extensions, and got to show off the 4th Gen Core processor with future graphics. Not too bad!

Where I had my moment of Satori was during a demo given showing Ultrabook running VSTs and acting like a great DAW environment. I've been doing this now for more than a year - there is a great deal of professional jealousy happening right now.

When I get back into the office I will need to look up the presenter...

I'm being a total slug and staying in tonight

After a great weekend with Juris, Christina, Niko and Luca - seems Thomas and Luca have become fast friends during this visit with what seems to be so much in common. Great times and always excellent to reconnect. Juris played some drums albeit very little, and Niko got to take the Howard Roberts Fusion for a ride with the Boogie Nomad a little as well. Looking forward to our next visit - next time we will have to make it up to B.C. and enjoy what Vernon has to offer.

I'm on a work event, although there's plenty of opportunity to socialize and all that presents. I'm just burnt out though, and anticipating a very tiring time the next three days manning a kiosk and answering questions/queries for 8 hrs. a day, and then the mandatory team dinners, etc... I'm going to stay in and just enjoy listening to a lot of classic Genesis on YouTube. My Facebook friends have been posting a ton of Genesis material today - particularly Kristine Fleckenstein who has a strong affection for Tony Banks. I'm going to simply get some pizza I think, then kick back and do a whitepaper review in preparation for some website publications for my day job that are synchronized to a big press conference geared towards game graphics libraries being released late tomorrow. (Suitably vague and non-informative, but curiosity inducing, no?)

Sometime in the last few weeks when I was putting mixes together for JohnH's review, I took a newer version of the Lady in a Cage sessions and dug out the very original midi drum programs I used to record all the bed tracks to, and then pulled the Cubase virtual drum module in and loaded the Phil Collins sample set in. These are the sounds taken from the drum machine Phil used on Duke, Face Value and even later - but the sounds are now so iconic and funky, so I have the original drum programs triggering them. Of course there's rampant overplaying there as I tried programming fills originally, but during the quieter sections the sounds work extremely well and give the song a more modern (ironically) feel that now has me thinking more about actually incorporating them into the song. This naturally will need to be massaged, and there will be real drums overplaying like crazy still, but the chance inclusion was really neat and so I think I'll do it :) It will likely mean I'll also rewrite some sections that I'm not totally happy with - another opportunity for updating :)

Finally, when I get home I'll be putting the Muse back together and bringing it back to the studio to use. I'll really buckle down now that the guest room is completed, the dining room chairs are mostly done, the table painted, the touchups done... I can finally get the vocal booth insulated and look at a touch screen monitor for the booth as a remote control. I will also get the flocaci rug off my bench somehow, and get the rack box up and all my sound modules in there. Moving drums forward 6" will give the china more room to breathe, and bring the other keyboard stand closer to the controls. Then figure out what to do with the big ass Yamaha KX88 piano controller that's leaning against the wall.

Weekend has arrived - preparing for visitors

My old friend Juris and his family are arriving later tomorrow afternoon, so we're doing some clean up/painting and setting up of beds to account for everyone. It's been probably five years since we last spent time together so this will be a cool reunion for all. His son Luca is also a budding and capable guitarist now - he and his dad will have fun in the garage studio I'm sure :)

I've built my little bell tree out - two levels with 6 splash/bell cymbals and room for one more. Picture of this and two new crash cymbals as well as the 2box module below.

Numa organ rocks! Very impressed with it - the keyboard feels stiffer than a typical controller, but the sound of the emulation is amazing. I'm now totally done with keyboards as the Muse filled in all gaps.

Lunch with Paul on Tuesday was great - it will be a challenge to get together to write but we both have empathy for each other as parents of young children. New material will happen at its own pace.

Finally - conflicting schedules kept John and I from meeting this week. That is now pushed out to the first week of April with my schedule hosed this week. Hope to get started recording soon!

Quick follow up - I fixed the Muse File System!!!

Ok, I ran through the instructions - fixing the one partition ended up doing the trick and it's booted and ready to go. I'm cruising through the menus, and what do I find? Foreigner's set list with the synth patches selected and loaded - this really was part of Foreigner's touring rig!!

 

The UI screen is nice and neat - reminds me of a mixing board or even an older version of Cubase!!

 

The first time I ran it the unit spontaneously shut down after 10 minutes - error on reboot said "CPU thermal overheat". If this happened repeatedly, then the file system corruption is totally explained as it would leave a ton of garbage on the hard drive in the OS partition (swap files, etc) that would be left as unresolved allocated drive space. The bottom line - I need to remove the CPU fan and plaster this bad boy with cooling paste.

 

 

Gotta go - having lunch with PaulH.

Muse provided me with instructions to fix the file system!!!

Yay! Now comes the hard part - actually executing...

I had pulled the drive, plugged into a USB harness and into my laptop to try to scan (no go) but the drive registered so the SSD is functional. Then plugged in another SATA cable into a different SATA port on the Muse motherboard and it actually started initialization and loaded the OS. Error message came up saying there were file system inconsistencies - but at least we're somewhat functional and I have more info to work with...

Sent the info to my man Gary @ Muse - he replied later with instructions that should theoretically fix the file system, or at least give an indication of total damage...

So today I'll be running the instructions and seeing if we have lift off. If this works, this will be a huge score in my Craigslist/eBay dumpster diving career. :)

Here's a picture of the Muse's screen - just for fun :) Also some photos of where I live, up in the foothills above Puget Sound...

Another weekend gone by - no serious progress

Well, between changing priorities w.r.t. home tasks to be done, intestinal virus that was bloody awful, and too many things needing to be done in the next 8 days - I didnt get to a lot of what I wanted to do. But they do say "Happy wife, happy life..." so in that regard life is still peachy.

Still left to be done:

1. Let JohnH on the Spacemuffins / 2box Drumit kit to get a feel for them prior to any recording.
2. Get new minusDrums mixes to JohnH with a synchronized click track - to start these would be simple mp3s with lyric sheet/tempo track mappings, especially important for songs such as "Lady in a Cage" and "Temple of Lost Souls"
3. Finish the soundproofing of my vocal/instrumental recording booth
4. Use the excess foam panels to build lightweight suspended baffles - to go in between the furnace and my workstation desk
5. Start thinking about similar baffling for the area above the Spacemuffins - the cymbals will be recorded as normal cymbals, so doing some sound treatment above and maybe using the acrylic shielding or more suspended baffling around to shield any outside noise and also less noise going out.

Of course I'm still playing around with the Muse Receptor. Talked some more with their support guy - this was an updated Receptor 2 (a Receptor C that was upgraded) and w.r.t. the SSD, even though I can plug it into my laptop and in Disk Manager see that a disk exists with various partitions, it's in it's proprietary formatting I cant do any repair work on it - at least not in Windows. I would still need to have another drive with the primary OS on it to ghost image to a new SSD - so Muse will do this for me and only charge me $100 for the effort. I'm going to make sure it's preloaded with all the software the original had - Komplete 7 is an expensive package and I'm not going to want to buy it when it's already licensed for this system.

Thoughts on my amp / cabinet arrangement - right now I have my amps sitting stored in an alcove in front of the Sienna and under some shelving. This isn't optimal for anyone as they stand at risk of damage and also not very convenient to where I'd need to use them. So I'll be moving them into another area shortly - likely in the alcove under the new "workbench" between the two Ikea cabinets to the right of my workstation. The isocab is on the shelf just above so it makes for an easy wiring arrangement as well as convenient for both playing live and reamping guitar tracks. Once I can get rid of that shitty Flocaci rug that's on top of everything on the bench, then the studio rack can go up and I can arrange everything much more logically.

Finally - last week I took my Gibson Les Paul Goldtop and my acoustic Garrison to Darren Ross of Ross Precision Guitars for a top to bottom setup (the LP) and some minor repair work of a cracked top with setup (Garrison). Once those are done, I have the Howard Roberts Fusion III to be done, as well as maybe a quick bridge intonation on the Black Strat. From a guitar maintenance perspective that should take care of those preparations for recording.

I know from a music appreciation perspective this blog is kinda dull - no new music or discussion of the process of writing yet. But getting the whole environment set up is extremely important to being able to capture the moment - saving the time it would take to get things set up to pull out the idea from your head. Oftentimes in the other manner, you rush like hell to get something set up only to have forgotten the gem of the idea, or lose the feel of the hook in the riff or melodic line you have in your head. Or even just get disheartened by the effort that you just abandon it altogether...

Having stuff set up and ready to go in every regard is so important now - I'll spend the time making sure that the space is just right so that I can walk in and bang out stuff as it happens. I also want the space to allow jamming with everyone as well - the Bothell media room initially had that layout with the drums and everything set up facing the middle, but the group fell apart shortly after we moved and financial difficulties had me selling drums and a few of the keyboards to make ends meet. This time around I want to make the studio and technical aspects of the thing the least of everyone's concerns. Which is why I'm spending the time and money investing in the microphones, keyboards and drums right now. Guitars are covered w.r.t. instruments and amps - that was all worked out on the last CD and shortly after. Replacing the drums and keyboards to make live recording feasible was the priority.

Next on the wish list though - excavating the crawlspace and building a real studio area in there. Excavation and construction would give a potential 10' x 45' more useable area - 10' x 8' would be reserved for fruit cellar/cold room, and another 10' x 8' for general storage, but the remaining 10' x 29' would easily facilitate a 10'x10' control room and a 10'x19' studio floor/media room.That would be my dream studio at that point.

Opening up the Muse Receptor...

As mentioned, the issue with the Muse was identified as a hard drive failure - plugging in a monitor into the DVI output showed me the boot/post screen and provided the output string I sent to Muse Research, which then resulted in the answer as I understand it.

So given that this is just a PC - the post screen was the standard Intel logo of the motherboards from the past 4-5 years - I opened this machine up to take a peek.

First thing I saw - a SATA SSD mounted above the power supply, a white label
"06-22-2010
Michael Bluestein / John P.
Foreigner
Trillian"
so this machine used to belong to Michael Bluestein - keyboardist for Foreigner and an endorsee of Muse Research. Very nice!

Next - of course a confirmation that this is indeed Intel processor and motherboard, I'll be checking the spec out online to see which proc/mb pair it is. It's got to be something fairly recent since it's taking advantage of the integrated graphics components on the chip... hmmm I wonder if I can simply replace the processor/mb with a similar sized pair from the IVB or next gen line...

All the audio input/output components are using the PCI bus - a standup card plugs into the PCI slot and then the remainder of the audio signal chain is a separate pcb hung and attached to the back of the rack shell. This seems to be the only custom piece of hw in the box, along with the control and LCD display board & the dongle for the NI (and other) VSTs authentication. Its on a USB cable hot glued and tied down inside the case.

As soon as I can identify the mb and proc, I'll look into upgrading the RAM. Two of the four slots are filled - I'm guessing 2 GB RAM right now, and I can upgrade assuming BIOS & OS will allow that. There's a distinct possibility that the OS is 32 bit and upgrading to 4GB would render almost 1 GB useless. Another thing to investigate...

Which leads me to think "what's to stop me from doing something similar?" I mean, this is a VST host with an optimized custom OS intended to minimize latency from all sorts of other drivers and what not occupying cycles and memory (see: not Windows). With what is available today both on the Core side and Atom side, it would be pretty easy to put together a real keyboard in a box with one of the SoC/mb pairings, a SSD, sufficient RAM and with a small kernel Linux implementation containing audio signal generation/processing end up with something significantly more powerful than what any of the big brand name manufacturers are doing today or even the next few years.

Interesting... very interesting...

(btw - I wont post any pics from the inside of this unit. I dont want to contravene any potential restricted secret info as far as hw, and I dont really know yet the detail of the OS so cant comment)

Starting the "Onion" redux sessions

Of course, these sessions cover material spanning Onion to today, but the Onion and earlier timeframe material will stand to be the most positively impacted.

John's studio is very nicely set up - soft material on walls and ceiling plus shag carpet make the studio suitably dead acoustically. Audix drum mics are good, and the Zoom recording console gives great results. I'm looking into picking up old broken bookshelf monitors to cannibalized for the woofers - I'm going to build sub kick mikes to supplement the Audix set. John's huge 12 pc kit will take all tracks of the 16 available so I'll have to create mono mix waves with click for him to play with. Mike list as follows: Audix plus subkick per kick drum, sm57 top with Audix bottom on snare, then 1 Audix per mounted Tom pair with each floor Tom getting a mike. Rotos get two mics, hihat 1 sm57, ride 1 mike, and a pair of condensers in x pattern hung above drummer's head. This makes up all available room on the Zoom.

Now, for my studio, I have only the sm57 on hihat, ride and the condensers above in x pattern. The 2box covers off all drums. An Alesis control pad handles special f/x instruments.

We've decided to pick n choose what kit per song - use what's appropriate depending on the material. John will be coming out to The Grotto next weekend and give the Spacemuffins a test drive.

Finally - got the Muse Receptor today. I need to read postings more closely - there is a hard drive failure on the unit that needs replacement. Not to worry - I'm in contact with support @ Muse Tech and looking at options to fix this baby. I have high hopes for the system and this doesn't dampen them.

In the meantime I have my work cut out rewriting lyrics for a couple tunes... I also built a cymbal bell rig - it's above the 6 & 8 inch toms to the right of the kick. I also also am selling the Novation for those interested. $300 takes it away.

Talking about the Redux project(s) - Green light to go forward

Had a quick 20 minute phone call with John Hernandez yesterday afternoon - discussed how we plan to attack the material from "Onion" and "The Sound of Thoughts", as well as the very old demo material that pre-dated 2000.

We've agreed that for the most part we prefer a "start from scratch" approach to recording - there are lots of places where the meter can be adjusted to get a better result, especially in the material that was recorded using programmed/sequenced drums, bass and keyboards. Also, we both feel like there are opportunities to update the material to a more modern sound and feel - as I mentioned before, I felt that in many cases I had stopped developing the music and lyrics either in the interest of being more accessible or simply because I had something else in the queue that was more interesting at that time than the song that was being worked on. Anyways, with the passage of time I'm coming back to revisit and rework the material - much like "Mirror Mirror" and "In the shadows..." got serious facelifts, the other stuff left on the shelf will also enjoy a rebirth as well.

We also dug into the technicalities of the recording process - John has his home studio with mic placements and recording gear, and I have mine as well. We've established that we can use either studio, depending on the song and the sound/tone needed. John's kit is also pretty large, so having the kit set up and miked already to his liking is very cool. This should go very well and relatively easily as well.

Last item - we're talking about doing some more interesting Rush cover songs. We'll work on a list of favorites and I'm sure that list will end up here in one form or another.

"Mesmerize" - studio story for this track

Look to the immediate right, in the streaming player there is a tune called "Mesmerize" from the "a fine line between..." CD. Click on the title, and then hit the triangle (the play button)...

I had this Mike Oldfield'y piano thing in 7/8 that repeated - Mike's Tubular Bells was a compound meter with alternating bars in 7/8 and 6/8 that really was hypnotic but unsettling. This was based around that type of motif but I kept it simpler throughout the writing of this song and relied explicitly on building layers and mood. This was a part of the set of music written for the original CD (but as mentioned most of the material was thrown away as being inferior) back in the spring of 2007. I had been jamming with Paul, Mark Tomko, Sean Gephardt and John Hernandez on some of the material (notably "First Piece of the Puzzle" and "Voices in my Head") but this one was totally done up in my office and as mentioned over the space of four nights I'd been inspired to just go with it.

The opening section was the 7/8 electric piano motif with a LOT of keyboard pad and bell layering to make it just huge and spacey. Key modulation was the order of the day for me as I went through several modulations to build tension and anticipation getting to the "drop" - Paul had informed me of this electronic dance music prop that would have the tune just going along, hitting a peak, and then an abrupt drop to one or two single instruments which would continue the beat and motif, but the focus and dynamic shift would (in addition to whatever light show accompanied the music) would just get the crowd superenergized when the full mix returned and ended the song. I've always liked dynamic shifts - and for this song even though it wasn't quite as extreme as a dance tune, I incorporated it leading into an atmospheric bed for a bass solo. 12 string guitar strums with stereo delay just builds the psychedelic feel of the tune beautifully. At this time I only had the instrumental tracks in mind - the voice samples would come much later...

So, the drop gets into the bass solo, which leads into a big drum/bass thing a la Pink Floyd - thinking a much slower groovier "Echoes" or "Shine on part ##" with screaming organ, string pad, and a EBowed guitar / monosynth lead line with tons of delay/reverb that dominates. The original programmed drums were very simple with a kick drum pattern that matched the bass line for the most part - but Nick D'Virgilio (from Spock's Beard who was the drummer on this song) completely picked this up and almost played lead drums with the groove and variations he put in! I wanted to have songs (and still want to in fact) which were progressive and technically complex but also heavy groovy and sexy at the same time. Definitely the effect of having Nick's drums pushing this hard accomplished at least for this part of the tune.

I dont remember how many bars the groove thing goes on for - 32, 40... but it's a good while. When we finally hit the end, the 7/8 part returns as an acoustic piano, the GR-33 monosynth and EBowed guitar are sustaining with the monosynth portamentoing up and down and then fade out to leave the acoustic piano in a long 24 bar crossfade to a Hammond B3 playing the same 7/8 pattern. Then another abrupt dynamic shift...

Guitar, bass and drums playing triplet lines in a huge bit - the big transition, leading to the crashing chords and drums fills that end/drops after 24 bars - this is where the first of the sampled voices appeared and became a part of the song with the phone recording doing time sync (I cant remember the name of the service, but it's a national thing used to synchronize clocks). "At the tone, the time will be..." and when the tone is supposed to come - the band kicks back in with a slow groove and Nick's again brilliant improvisational playing/fills carrying the action. I inserted a "guide lead guitar" track that was a placeholder, but it was ok enough to use until I got motivated to work on something better or get my real target to play - one Alan Morse of Spock's Beard (and bandmate of NDV). When I wrote Alan in 2009 he responded very positively - but his schedule was such that he didn't get his tracks to me until very late in our production schedule, after we had essentially mastered the CD and were shipping... so my guitar solo remained, but I am going back and will get the Alan Morse solo into the piece for the remaster...

Here's some confessional time now - in 2008 I was probably 1/2 way done writing and recording the newer CD which became "a fine line between..." - 5 of the songs were complete with Nick's drums, "Mesmerize" being one of them. I tried to do an EP release to gather financing to allow contracting Nick or others (as it turns out, Andy Edwards) to record the remaining material. The EP marketing was a dismal failure, and Shawn Gordon of Prog Rock Records totally ripped me a new one with a rotten review of the stuff. I was very disappointed - the primary comment was that much of the songs I had sent were not progressive, and "Mesmerize" was interesting but too long and boring in the end... Given the feedback, and being both hurt by it and also very motivated to improve what I could - I started getting very obsessive about all the material. We were in what ended up for us being a rental house (it's complicated...) and as we got into fall 2008 and competing individual goals at home - I spent an ever increasing time in my studio just bashing out material and throwing it away/archiving if it didn't fit the character of the album as it was starting to flesh out. Meeting with Paul and Mark, I set an aggressive schedule to finish the CD off entirely - February 2009 for recording, with 2 months for mixing/mastering with a ship date of May 2009.

Job shifts, various uncertainties, and more - they all cropped up in the material in some atmospheric form or another. Nothing about the storyline that held the songs together was real - it's a complete fiction, but even this song turned into another dark number especially as we got into mixing and I was determined to raise the bar and make the song compelling in some fashion.

Thus comes the Professor Stephen Hawking lecture - this was very effective in filling the drop in, with the spoken word filling in space between solo bass phrases. I didnt take any particular line out of context, but pulled out individual lines and inserted as motivational phrases. Together they dont fill out a lecture but piece together questions of existence - which is what I wanted for the CD.

The last thing I added, which is a bit self indulgent but not so much that I am embarassed by it - I inserted a whispered mantra (which I spoke phonetically in some Indian dialect) in three vocal tracks not synchronized with each other and heavily effected/panned across the stereo spectrum. It's low enough that it sounds like mumbling and with the cross-pans sounds like Tibetan murmuring. With the electric Rhodes, the Pink Floyd like rhythm section, my pseudo-David Gilmour lead lines... it's all pretty cool. This goes to a fade out ending with Prof. Hawking repeating the phrase that stuck with me the most : "transform our view of the universe and of life itself, whatever that might be..."

At this point, as with a lot of the material and doing critiques of the mixes etc... I think some of the beauty of it is lost in the mix. I'm also planning on doing real production work on Nick's drums - Nick had forwarded stereo mixes of his kit with how he felt it would sound best - and me realizing at the time that I wouldn't be able to replicate that quality, I just flew them in and did some limiting on them for the final mix. I want to go back now and get more presence from the kick drum and toms - I think with what I have now, and better ears, I'll get a better overall product in the end.

New pics of The Lair

Ok yea - I'm a bit gear obsessed, but you can't do your best work without the instruments that inspire and replicate what you hear in your head.
Here's today's version of The Batcave ( I feel I need a cute name for the space, otherwise it's just called "The spot in the garage that has all Rob's crap". Trust me, from there it would degenerate to "That area of the garage we need to do something constructive with..."
Coming this week - The Numa tone wheel organ!