I'd kinda hit a personal frustration limit with myself - knocking my head against the wall with LiaC for two months now, with interruptions and delays that meant I come back and then get hypercritical of the details - well I needed to move to something else for a little while to gain a fresh perspective plus get some more playing time in to continue regaining my chops. The choice I made to go back and pull out "That Day" from Nov/Dec 1998 was really to get my piano chops back, as well as do something a bit simpler musically with more arrangement and production involvement. Because of the really simple chord voicings being used on the piano, it's also got interesting opportunities to inject more interesting chord inversions for variation - I've learned a lot about song arrangement in the 15 years since this was written and the song will definitely benefit from some changes in chord voicings, vocal arrangements, and just instrumental changes. Some of the "outside" soloing I did back on the original also doesn't fit well - weird for the sake of being weird... that will be fixed.
I opened a new project file for the song on Saturday, and then imported the original mp3 as a guide track. Spending time relearning the song and then starting recording of parts, it's taken a few nights to get to a usable piano take (I'm using Ivory II for my piano samples, so the track is being recorded as a MIDI track) with the timings and the playing being acceptable enough for editing and some adjusting / quantizing. I also got a basic drum MIDI track triggering Steven Slade Drums VST from the keyboard - I was mostly following the original programmed drum track but I'm finding that where the kick sits doesn't fit well with the song and needs adjustment as it seems to be pushing the song more aggressively than it should. What will help with this will be getting the bass guitar down - where in the past I would be running away from doing a traditional ballad style rhythm section, in this case I can see it being a big benefit to make it more of a Nashville style backbeat to anchor the tune. It can get a bit more rock(tm) for the electric guitar solo and the ending chorus, but thru the nylon string guitar solo it needs to stay back in the pocket.
Another thing I noticed in redoing this - the piano is literally a Beatles'y type 1/8th note 4/4 straight progression, no swing or syncopation at all. But I wanted to make it a bit more involved in the 2nd verse with playing that is more arpeggiated and flowing - more romantic I guess. But playing this arpeggiated, I want to jump from the F sus2 to the G Maj inversion starting on D on the "and" of beat 3 in the bar, which throws off the straight rhythm. My tendency to push things will change the song too much - I'll need to capture and fix this quickly.
All the keyboard sounds from the original recording were from the Korg X3 I had back then - decent enough 16-bit multisamples, but limited for pianos, organs, etc... Today's version of the song will take advantage of the richer palate of sounds I have now, but I need to be careful not to make the palate the focus and keep it on the song. I also have better guitars, real amps, etc... and a bass guitar. Sticking with my "Keep it Simpler" mantra I'm adopting, making appropriate choices will be important.
Anyways, I believe that even though I have a workable piano track right now I will still revisit the piano again towards the end of the time allocated, and if I can talk him into it I'll get PaulH to come in and play the piano for me. I'll still do B3 and the pads since I can do this and save time overall, but the piano is the feature instrument and it needs to be done well.
Final thoughts now with respect to my purging of instruments:
- the Krome 73 sold on eBay, it will be leaving home shortly. I'm down to the Muse Receptor v2.0 as the workstation, lets see how it holds up going forward. I am also in possession of Paul's Korg Triton Rack so there's no worries w.r.t. workstation for playing live.
- a Vox AC100 guitar head I got in trade for the Nomad, but it's just another extra amp I don't need. Too powerful to hang onto so I'm going to try to swing a trade in at Guitar Center for a Les Paul Jr if possible.
- I'm very torn on what to do with the Carvin Legacy - the THD Flexi50 is a wonderful head, but the Legacy is a tone monster.
- I might hang onto the ESP LTD EC256 relic - I can pull out the MIDI Ghost system and sell separately and maybe get more for it, then the guitar can be one I hand to one of my kids when they get proficient enough. I bought a Washburn Nuno Bettencourt N1 for my son Thomas to replace the First Act guitar he has - he's taken more interest in learning, so getting him a much better instrument is key and the N1 was on sale for $99 on Black Friday. Win/Win. When he gets good at playing, I'll give him the ESP as a 2nd good guitar - if he wants or needs it.
- there's a few other odds/ends that can be purged - some pedals and stuff that are kicking around. I'm also considering selling the Godin 5th Ave just because it's very much a niche item. The more I play it, the more I feel it's not something that fits well with what I want to achieve. The strings feel a bit tinny to me, so I'm going to change them out and see if that changes anything for me before moving it out. I got it for a very good price so I wont lose anything selling it.
- I'm also still trying to sell the Brix Pro PC - it will go up on eBay today as a fully loaded and functional package so it should sell quickly.
- final gear porn post - I'll be digging into rewiring the Svilpacaster very soon. Looking seriously at replacing the LRBaggs power trem with a Wilkinson trem equipped with Ghost saddles. Also still on the fence about Sustainiac as it hasn't worked out to date. I could simply plop in the Fender Lace Sensor I have in the neck spot and get more value out of the guitar than with the Sustainiac - I hesitate because of the amazing results Steve Hackett and others get using the driver, but it drains my 9V battery too quickly in combination with the Power Trem preamp and that's frustrating. Also the array of micro-toggles on the guitar to date is ridiculous and gets in the way - I have a blade superswitch from Fender that I'm installing as a part of this effort, so that should help with this complaint. The rewiring will take me a few days likely, since my soldering skills aren't great - hope to have this done by the saturday before xmas though.
Ok done - have a great holiday if I don't get back anytime soon.
Music for Good
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
bye bye SpaceMuffins... sure loved ya while you were around...
Incredible frustration with both myself for not ever getting to a point of really using them, and also our home budgetmeister for not getting a grip on things budget... I've found myself a very eager and suitable buyer for the huge SpaceMuffins drumkit. It was the last great experiment and flirting (I think) I'll do with the drumming side, since none of the drummers I knew really wanted to play on someone else's kit, nor could I find the time and means to really get my chops up to do my own drumming for my recordings. Alas fine young Blake from Everett gets the kit and is very excited at the prospect of them. Congratulations to you Blake - you will now be the next owner of Seattle history.
Being that this is the next in the series called "thinning the herd" - also gone out the door are the Kat KT3m module, and today the Egnater Rebel 20 sold (for far less than what it's worth, dammit...) on eBay, with the Hughes & Kettner Tubemeister 5 and the Mesa Nomad 100 combo still up for auction. I am seriously considering selling the Korg Krome 73 since the Muse Receptor covers much of the same ground - only concern is the brittle nature of the Receptor and how Michael (previous owner) was so down about the product due to it being so fragile. At this point though, I don't think I'll be anyone's primary keyboardist much less my own band's so I can easily live with the Receptor and the Nektar Panorama P6 controller in conjunction with the Numa Organ and Roland Gaia as my keyboard rig. I have Paul's Triton rack as backup, and the V-Synth XT rack as well - and any keyboardist I am working with going forward will have their rig to work with in rehearsal and live anyways.
Recording sessions for the redux songs is still on "Lady in a Cage" - much improvements have come along from the guitar redos, and using the Numa Organ and Gaia has added new life to many of the keyboard parts. I have two more guitar solos to record/replace, and then I think I'm onto vocals and effects - the new segues are very cool but maybe a tad long in spots so I'll be pulling out some more theatrical f/x type things to make that less apparent. Then the big decisions for the mixdowns - I've got a lot of mix issues sorted but when into the final mixing work I'll thin down some of the layering and make the important parts stand out better. This is after all the objective of the project, and there may yet be some additional changes to implement in the main song depending on mixing takeaways.
Finally, I've got a date for the The Sound of Thoughts reboot release show - Saturday March 14th @ Finaghty's on the Ridge. The band lineup is mostly new blood - Keegan Musser on bass, Michael Quigley on guitar, John Hernandez on drums, and one chair for keyboards still to be determined. We'll be playing some of the key tracks from The Sound of Thoughts, a few tracks from Fine Line, some covers, and hope to have two or three new pieces of music written as collaboration from the unit listed above. The aim is to do all the really proggy pieces - Lady in a Cage, This Mortal Coil, Pentelho Vermelho, Heartbeat Failing, Atonement, First Piece in the Puzzle, Mirror Mirror, In the Shadows, Mesmerize - definitely picking the more challenging pieces for this gig. It promises to be really great - the guys all know how to play extremely well, I would say this is the best most talented band top to bottom I've been in so the material will be done very well. I'm excited!!
Thats it for tonight. I'm up late since I had a 3 hr nap earlier this evening so now I'm a night owl... I'll run through one of the solos now and then call it a night, Cheers!!
Being that this is the next in the series called "thinning the herd" - also gone out the door are the Kat KT3m module, and today the Egnater Rebel 20 sold (for far less than what it's worth, dammit...) on eBay, with the Hughes & Kettner Tubemeister 5 and the Mesa Nomad 100 combo still up for auction. I am seriously considering selling the Korg Krome 73 since the Muse Receptor covers much of the same ground - only concern is the brittle nature of the Receptor and how Michael (previous owner) was so down about the product due to it being so fragile. At this point though, I don't think I'll be anyone's primary keyboardist much less my own band's so I can easily live with the Receptor and the Nektar Panorama P6 controller in conjunction with the Numa Organ and Roland Gaia as my keyboard rig. I have Paul's Triton rack as backup, and the V-Synth XT rack as well - and any keyboardist I am working with going forward will have their rig to work with in rehearsal and live anyways.
Recording sessions for the redux songs is still on "Lady in a Cage" - much improvements have come along from the guitar redos, and using the Numa Organ and Gaia has added new life to many of the keyboard parts. I have two more guitar solos to record/replace, and then I think I'm onto vocals and effects - the new segues are very cool but maybe a tad long in spots so I'll be pulling out some more theatrical f/x type things to make that less apparent. Then the big decisions for the mixdowns - I've got a lot of mix issues sorted but when into the final mixing work I'll thin down some of the layering and make the important parts stand out better. This is after all the objective of the project, and there may yet be some additional changes to implement in the main song depending on mixing takeaways.
Finally, I've got a date for the The Sound of Thoughts reboot release show - Saturday March 14th @ Finaghty's on the Ridge. The band lineup is mostly new blood - Keegan Musser on bass, Michael Quigley on guitar, John Hernandez on drums, and one chair for keyboards still to be determined. We'll be playing some of the key tracks from The Sound of Thoughts, a few tracks from Fine Line, some covers, and hope to have two or three new pieces of music written as collaboration from the unit listed above. The aim is to do all the really proggy pieces - Lady in a Cage, This Mortal Coil, Pentelho Vermelho, Heartbeat Failing, Atonement, First Piece in the Puzzle, Mirror Mirror, In the Shadows, Mesmerize - definitely picking the more challenging pieces for this gig. It promises to be really great - the guys all know how to play extremely well, I would say this is the best most talented band top to bottom I've been in so the material will be done very well. I'm excited!!
Thats it for tonight. I'm up late since I had a 3 hr nap earlier this evening so now I'm a night owl... I'll run through one of the solos now and then call it a night, Cheers!!
Friday, November 14, 2014
Latest from the Lair
It's been a very busy few weeks - day job, personal life and musical life perspectives have been overrunning the clock leaving me under the weather and oftentimes sleepwalking through my days.
For those who know me personally, I left my role with Intel back at the end of August this year and it was a similar experience to how I started there - disheartening would be an understatement as just like when I started, there was no one to usher me in or out, and no guidance on what was expected. I can't explicitly fault my direct manager since he is located in Colorado and there were expectations that local senior folk would be available to do the exit processes. But there was no one around and so I had to rely on memory and honor/ethics to hand off all the loaner hardware to the Admin a few rows down for safe keeping. Over the three and a half years I was there I received a lot of demo and pre-release hardware, plus a company provided iPhone 4 - and the hand off and locking up took 2 large drawers of a filing cabinet to accomplish. With respect to not having some of my colleagues around to either handle the handoff or just simply see me off as is normally the custom - I know there were a lot of hard feelings about my decision to move along, but at some point you simply have to put your own feelings aside and then wish the other person well in their career and life. I am going through a similar thing here in my new job as a very valued colleague is moving to another role within the larger organization - and regardless of how I feel about this, I know this is a better situation for her with more opportunities for unimpeded growth, so I'm happy for her as a result. As Queen Elsa sings "Let it go"...
The new job has a huge degree of unknowns with needing to identify the valid paths of investigation and implementation from the ratholes that just bury progress. My job is to take huge projects that have very large and varied dependencies and break them down into smaller ones that can be accomplished more easily and often for less cost - but the pressure on upper management to meet original commitments that were overly optimistic means there's a lot of pressure passed down to do things more quickly without proper scope being determined and set. So I've been having to ramp up more quickly than normal in order to digest the information in a domain I haven't got a lot of experience in to begin with. Late nights reading and then a lot of discussions with colleagues within and outside of my organization to parse and arrange structures in my head - I'm enjoying the rate of assimilation of information but I don't feel I have context yet to generate plans that are ready to act on. This is standard though for new jobs as it does take time to ramp up and hit top speed.
Personal life - this is simply the vagaries and joys of being a dad and husband. Birthday parties, renovation and repair work on the home, reconnecting and entertaining each other and guests... nothing new here, but with the encroaching winter turning the weather nasty, and the ever shortening daylight there comes the lowering energy levels of us adults, and the crankiness that results. The kids don't really slow down at all - but it seems like their energy increases because ours as adults gets less - so it's a battle to keep them occupied and find things to wear them out so they get to sleep at reasonable hours. Holiday season approaching also is a threatening and certain drain on the wallet - just like the black wall of cumulonimbus clouds on the northwest horizon and the accompanying rumble of thunder, we all see Thanksgiving and Christmas on the horizon and know what that means. I certainly portray it to be more ominous than it really is - its just my habit of looking at the darker side and ignoring the brighter side. Everyone else is so attentive to the brighter side that I feel like its my duty to attend to the darker side to ensure a balance in the universe :)
And so that brings me to the musical life.
The remix effort has slowed down quite a bit. The above items, especially the work and the renovation stuff have taken the lion's share of the time and as such the remix work has taken the hit. Doesn't mean nothing got done - I have new gear that will significantly improve the results, but getting specific parts done and the rewrite efforts have taken a back seat to everything else. I posted a release schedule on FB - if interested go there, or comment here asking for it and I'll put it up here on the blog.
I need to save and go - my IT has let me know I have 8 minutes to save work and then they'll force a reboot of my system. I'll give more specific info about the music side this evening in a new post. Thx!!
For those who know me personally, I left my role with Intel back at the end of August this year and it was a similar experience to how I started there - disheartening would be an understatement as just like when I started, there was no one to usher me in or out, and no guidance on what was expected. I can't explicitly fault my direct manager since he is located in Colorado and there were expectations that local senior folk would be available to do the exit processes. But there was no one around and so I had to rely on memory and honor/ethics to hand off all the loaner hardware to the Admin a few rows down for safe keeping. Over the three and a half years I was there I received a lot of demo and pre-release hardware, plus a company provided iPhone 4 - and the hand off and locking up took 2 large drawers of a filing cabinet to accomplish. With respect to not having some of my colleagues around to either handle the handoff or just simply see me off as is normally the custom - I know there were a lot of hard feelings about my decision to move along, but at some point you simply have to put your own feelings aside and then wish the other person well in their career and life. I am going through a similar thing here in my new job as a very valued colleague is moving to another role within the larger organization - and regardless of how I feel about this, I know this is a better situation for her with more opportunities for unimpeded growth, so I'm happy for her as a result. As Queen Elsa sings "Let it go"...
The new job has a huge degree of unknowns with needing to identify the valid paths of investigation and implementation from the ratholes that just bury progress. My job is to take huge projects that have very large and varied dependencies and break them down into smaller ones that can be accomplished more easily and often for less cost - but the pressure on upper management to meet original commitments that were overly optimistic means there's a lot of pressure passed down to do things more quickly without proper scope being determined and set. So I've been having to ramp up more quickly than normal in order to digest the information in a domain I haven't got a lot of experience in to begin with. Late nights reading and then a lot of discussions with colleagues within and outside of my organization to parse and arrange structures in my head - I'm enjoying the rate of assimilation of information but I don't feel I have context yet to generate plans that are ready to act on. This is standard though for new jobs as it does take time to ramp up and hit top speed.
Personal life - this is simply the vagaries and joys of being a dad and husband. Birthday parties, renovation and repair work on the home, reconnecting and entertaining each other and guests... nothing new here, but with the encroaching winter turning the weather nasty, and the ever shortening daylight there comes the lowering energy levels of us adults, and the crankiness that results. The kids don't really slow down at all - but it seems like their energy increases because ours as adults gets less - so it's a battle to keep them occupied and find things to wear them out so they get to sleep at reasonable hours. Holiday season approaching also is a threatening and certain drain on the wallet - just like the black wall of cumulonimbus clouds on the northwest horizon and the accompanying rumble of thunder, we all see Thanksgiving and Christmas on the horizon and know what that means. I certainly portray it to be more ominous than it really is - its just my habit of looking at the darker side and ignoring the brighter side. Everyone else is so attentive to the brighter side that I feel like its my duty to attend to the darker side to ensure a balance in the universe :)
And so that brings me to the musical life.
The remix effort has slowed down quite a bit. The above items, especially the work and the renovation stuff have taken the lion's share of the time and as such the remix work has taken the hit. Doesn't mean nothing got done - I have new gear that will significantly improve the results, but getting specific parts done and the rewrite efforts have taken a back seat to everything else. I posted a release schedule on FB - if interested go there, or comment here asking for it and I'll put it up here on the blog.
I need to save and go - my IT has let me know I have 8 minutes to save work and then they'll force a reboot of my system. I'll give more specific info about the music side this evening in a new post. Thx!!
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
a true quickie update for today...
I've been very busy with home related work this past week or so - my wife is starting to refinish the clear maple cabinets, bookshelves and mantlepiece in our great room/kitchen area. Not the floors, just the cabinets, bookshelves, integrated desk, butlers pantry, mantle over the fireplace and bookshelves/entertainment center. This is a significant quantity of work, but she's taken it on herself (with some minor help from me - I know if something gets screwed up and I'm the one who was doing the job, then my ass is grass...) to sand, clean and then primer and finish paint the items. I convinced her to do one piece at a time starting with the mantle - and that was a strategy designed for success. She's done the mantle and it looks really good! AND it also identified some best practices for her to apply to the next items - which I think will be the case throughout the job. At the rate that it's going, I believe that the project will take us through the rest of this calendar year and into the next, since it took a week to get the mantle done, and there are roughly 13 more items of varying sizes to get done. My consolation for the ongoing work is that concentrating on a bit at a time will ensure that patience will endure and make the job that much better - it already looks very professional and except for needing to learn how to do the between coat sanding better to make it smoother, the finish is very nice.
Ok, enough of the cabinets... The Theater Room project is winding down as the screen has been hung on the wall with care, and the wiring of the power and HDMI cabling is completed to the ceiling, as is the ceiling portion of the projector mount. What's left is getting the proper screws and washers for the projector to attach to the bottom section of the mount and then hang the thing up and complete everything. We've talked about how we'll replace the 1080p projector after a while with a 4k projector (once they've dropped in price - holey cow they're expensive!) but after this is done I'll be looking into a larger screen since the 92" could be larger considering the distance the sofa is from the screen.
The Theater Room still hosts the SpaceMuffins drumkit - they sit all nice and pretty in the alcove to the right of the screen. I'll bring out the BRIX unit and hook it all up to an A/V receiver once the furniture for the a/v center arrives, with a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo to drive the system. The BRIX will double as a Media system that is implicitly attached to a Media NAS hosting movies, tv, music, etc - so that we can use some of the external media services or do DVR through hosted application instead of renting the Comcast equipment. This is our "dream"...
The BRIX will have a third use for me - a remote recording system for when I want to track drums up in the Theater Room. The Media NAS will host the projects that get sucked into the downstairs DAW station in my office, and then I can just work away happily doing guitars, keyboards, drums and then pick and choose to do vocals up or down stairs. Given my ever accelerating difficulties seeing up close due to declining eyesight, it might get to a point where editing and such will be performed upstairs on the projector, and mixdowns/mastering in the office downstairs. I'm already starting to look at 30"-32" LED monitors to replace the twin 27"s I have now. Mounting the 29" Panoramic ultrawide monitor on the wall will definitely free up desk space again, and the new DAW and it's onboard Intel HD Graphics will extend my desktop space on the computer nicely.
Finally - for something that was supposed to be a quick update - heading over to JH's for a jam session. Details to be reported later...
Ok, enough of the cabinets... The Theater Room project is winding down as the screen has been hung on the wall with care, and the wiring of the power and HDMI cabling is completed to the ceiling, as is the ceiling portion of the projector mount. What's left is getting the proper screws and washers for the projector to attach to the bottom section of the mount and then hang the thing up and complete everything. We've talked about how we'll replace the 1080p projector after a while with a 4k projector (once they've dropped in price - holey cow they're expensive!) but after this is done I'll be looking into a larger screen since the 92" could be larger considering the distance the sofa is from the screen.
The Theater Room still hosts the SpaceMuffins drumkit - they sit all nice and pretty in the alcove to the right of the screen. I'll bring out the BRIX unit and hook it all up to an A/V receiver once the furniture for the a/v center arrives, with a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo to drive the system. The BRIX will double as a Media system that is implicitly attached to a Media NAS hosting movies, tv, music, etc - so that we can use some of the external media services or do DVR through hosted application instead of renting the Comcast equipment. This is our "dream"...
The BRIX will have a third use for me - a remote recording system for when I want to track drums up in the Theater Room. The Media NAS will host the projects that get sucked into the downstairs DAW station in my office, and then I can just work away happily doing guitars, keyboards, drums and then pick and choose to do vocals up or down stairs. Given my ever accelerating difficulties seeing up close due to declining eyesight, it might get to a point where editing and such will be performed upstairs on the projector, and mixdowns/mastering in the office downstairs. I'm already starting to look at 30"-32" LED monitors to replace the twin 27"s I have now. Mounting the 29" Panoramic ultrawide monitor on the wall will definitely free up desk space again, and the new DAW and it's onboard Intel HD Graphics will extend my desktop space on the computer nicely.
Finally - for something that was supposed to be a quick update - heading over to JH's for a jam session. Details to be reported later...
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Early October update - new project, new potential band, ongoing rewrites/remixes
Pictured above is my "new to me" Gibson Les Paul Axcess in Iced Tea Sunburst. Another of my Craigslist scores, this came to me profoundly cheaper than the going price on eBay - suffice it to say profoundly means "less than half". This is a Gibson Custom Shop model - implying some Gibson craftsman here in the USA at least touched it in some way. Came with a beautiful hardshell case. Pickups are the 496R and 498T - I just replaced the strings which I think were 11-46s down to 9-42s, for me they made this guitar so much easier to play, and except for needing to tweak the truss rod and adjust the bridge pins the guitar still has decent output with good sustain. Needless to say, I find this to be a dream come true guitar for me - something I've aspired to owning for a very long long time.
New project: a Pink Floyd Fan Tribute project spun up by Ed Unitsky and Alex Grata - I was invited to participate and contribute guitar solos to the project. I've since sent some early improvised takes based on a stem sent along to me - I also thought to insert some additional material into the stem to lengthen the song somewhat. The song I heard is a mashup of material from Wish You Were Here and The Wall - it's a very nice piece of music with opportunity for great things. More info to come as we dig into this deeper.
New potential band: I've met up with MichaelQ (guitars) and will be meeting with KeenanM (bass) over the next few days to get a feel for chemistry and such. Michael is a really good guy, recently relocated from the east coast of the US to Seattle for work. He has a nice portfolio of songs he's demoed, and has great skills as a player. Keenan is a very versatile and AWESOME bassist with jazz training in performance, composition and theory. John and I are very eager to meet with these guys and jam - I'll be reaching out to Paul this next week and look to schedule something for the following week.
Ongoing Remixes: I've been working on Lady in a Cage for over a month now - getting drums and bass to sound their best and in sync took a while, but that's done now and I'm onto the guitars/keyboards tracks. I will need to make some adjustments to the timing and bring the keyboards in particular into the groove of the rhythm section. Locked into the work here - acoustic guitars have been redone, electric guitar rhythm tracks are 90% complete as well. Electric guitar solos are about 75% done - I have rewritten three of the four solos completely, with the one that's in Part 3 just paraphrased in places to accent different note choices. The solos will be reamped shortly or just essentially replayed through the guitar amps since the writing of them required printing the effect from the TC Electronics Nova guitar processor to get the performance I wanted to assist in writing. Part 6 is the dreaded Dream Theater section of the song - that needs a new keyboard melody for the lead line, and rerecord the drop D Electric guitars as well. By the time I finish, I don't think this section will be very recognizable anymore - which is more than fine with me. Vocals will be the final process with the song getting a complete facelift as a result.
Next up after Lady will be Tahoma and The Sound of Thoughts - I'm going to try my hand at playing drums on these since they're very standard 4/4 and I'm very capable of playing them. I'll continue the rewriting efforts for these songs giving them a face lift, which actually could become profound face lifts for both.
A Fine Line Between will get more remix than any instrumental recording effort. Vocals would potentially get attention but all the instruments are more than fine IMHO. As mentioned before, I'll be mostly thinning out the mixes and getting more focus on the primary instruments in the songs. Drums will get more attention - they already have with Zsolt's and Andy's drum mixes being fixed up in earlier previews. NDV's tracks will get their turn as we approach the end of this effort and by then I'll have a release date for both projects.
Finally, I'll get back to the Onion release - this will require brand new session work since the original projects are long gone missing. The material is relatively simple though and should be a quick effort to recreate. I plan on making modest changes to the songs, but nothing so profound as what's been happening with the Sound of Thoughts tracks.
Final thoughts: The time spent on the old projects and relearning material/rewriting solos/etc... have been eye opening for me in many ways. I foolishly believed that I still had a good portion of my skills and dexterity even though I hadn't really spent any time or effort playing guitar or keyboards. What a shock when it came down to crunch time and I was failing badly... I've since put in some extra effort doing some essential woodshedding, and also trying to incorporate styles and skills I wasn't familiar with into my solos, and as a result I've actually caught back up and surpassed in many ways where I was at back in 2009. It was pretty frustrating, but the end result is a renewed passion for learning which has also influenced my day vocation greatly. I'm continuing to learn new skills and proving that the human brain is indeed a very plastic thing - there is no such thing as a time when we are no longer capable of learning and improving, and so long as you continue to demand more from yourself you will continue to grow and achieve more the longer time goes on. This is one of the great fears I have in life - that we have absolute limitations and once you hit that boundary you have nowhere to go. Nonsense! The moment that you stop learning is the moment following your final breath on this plane of existence - and who's to say that we don't continue learning after we pass out of this plane into the next one?
To you the reader - thanks for visiting and checking out my activities and thoughts. Having this venue as a sounding board has been incredibly valuable to me in many ways - I hope that you gained some value at least in entertainment value if not more. Cheers until the next post!
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
A few weeks and several remixes later - some thoughts...
I've been spending the last several weeks (since the end of July update I last posted) working on updating and remixing songs from the two most recent CDs. Current results can be heard here:
Rob's Soundcloud Page
And of course I have thoughts to relate regarding these songs and both the original versions and my most recent remixes. What else could you truly expect??
First I'll start by talking about the original versions of the songs. What the hell was I on when I mixed these back then?? I don't really remember a lot EXCEPT that I was in a hurry to get everything done - Luciana was pregnant with Lucas, who was due in August, and by the time we hit June of 2009 she was in a really horrific mood suffering with sciatica and all sorts of fun stuff. Of course, even though I had planned on being done the mixes by the end of April or early May with the mastering done end of May - there was a lot of stuff that came up which needed fixing. Plus, around the April timeframe I'd asked Alan Morse if he could contribute a guitar solo to Mesmerize since I was experiencing burnout and stumped about how to approach it and even down to what countermelody would be suitable for the piece. Alan was very busy, and being a patient sort I sat and waited for a long time for Alan's contribution. At some point around June 20 I just said "ok, can't wait any longer..." and spent an evening with my guitar noodling around with an acceptable tone just throwing down some lazy loose bluesy stuff eventually resulting in the solo that made it on the CD. I had my friend Trevor Sadler waiting on getting to mastering this project - so I really got down to mixing already way way behind schedule and got these together as best as I could. I cheated a lot - NDV had sent the drum tracks as separate mike files and then included a raw drums mix that was intended as a reference file for how he heard his drums in the context of the songs. I was behind, so I flew in the stereo raw mix, did some really minor compression and EQ (mostly for punch on the kick and crack on the snare) and that's how they stayed. I then did submixes for Andy's drums and by the time I got to Zsolt's work, my ears were toast. I really wasn't fond of the cymbal tones so I tried EQ'ing them and with the mike bleed I experienced some phase cancellation which made it even worse. Completely frustrated at this point as well with some timing & meter issues on his tracks, I rendered the submix and then chopped up and aligned all the downbeats with the click track, resulting in a very mechanical feel to those tracks. Being pressured to just get this done now by my very unhappy and very pregnant wife (and to be fair, I should have been done long before this point) I got all my mixes done and reviewed by Paul and Mark, and then sent them to Trev.
One day after sending the mixes to Trev, in comes the solo work from Alan. Multitrack and multitake, Alan was wonderful, except I wasn't in the frame of mind to go through and comp his work into one solid take... I tried a few things, but never got anything that he or I liked as a final version. I had published the assertion that Alan was playing on the track as well, so being behind and not wanting to cause a kerfuffle I didn't change this on the website and other pages or even the CD cover (which was completed by Ed Unitsky at this point). Therefore, the CD credits Alan with the solo even though it's yours' truly.
Now, earlier in 2009 or maybe even late 2008, I'd been thrown for a loop by the ever opinionated Shawn Gordon, owner of ProgRock Records, who'd replied to my inquiries about getting a distribution deal by giving a very negative critique of the 5 song EP I shipped off to him containing Mesmerize and 4 other tracks from the Fine Line project. Regardless of having prequalified the EP with him saying these were very early versions of the songs, he slaughtered them and I was pretty bitter about it to the point that I became even more determined to show him and presumably everyone else they were wrong. The songs were neither "boring" nor "repetitive" - where there was repetition it was fully intentional to build tension, and being a dark moody album it couldn't have happier songs. The EP was also missing some of the instrumental stuff like Atonement or First Piece - definitely songs that cranked up the excitement level. The cover songs that filled in the end of the CD were intended to raise the mood a bit but failed in that regard.
So yes, the really well recorded parts ended up getting slaughtered in the mixing room. Definitely my bad. Funny enough, no one called out the drums as sounding not great EXCEPT for Zsolt, and a resounding silence from both Andy and Nick spoke volumes - but what got called out was a weak vocal performance that was my attempt at being moody and reflecting the darkness of the CD, and all the guitar geeks out there called out the piezo pickups on the acoustic guitars - the pingy nature being annoying for them. Trev had made the best of the mixes during mastering but no way to cover for some of the failings.
This brings me to the efforts of today, and what has been accomplished, and what is yet to be done.
First and foremost - I'm making up for not doing real mixes of the drums originally. I've imported the group of tracks being the drums for each song, and then because I've invested in new legal versions of software processing I finally got around to doing a lot to clean up the mess I'd made. Some of the timing/meter issues weren't as obvious as I'd originally thought as well - there are some, but not nearly as much as I believed. Cymbal tones are still not my favorite part of the tracks Zsolt did, but they're workable. Judicious gating and then using iZotope Alloy 2 presets got me 95% of the way to good drum tones, and I continue to work the remaining 5% to tweak.
Thinning out keyboard and guitar layering through judicious panning and reduction/removal cleaned up a lot as well. Using iZotope's Nectar 2 on vocals really paid off as well - I still need to record new vocal takes for most tracks, but as functional working remixes they actually sound a lot better.
The first three songs that I remixed I had not done the drum track imports though - I was feeling my way around the new hardware and software, so I kept it simple. Mesmerize was focused only on getting a nice comp'd Alan solo into the mix, so there's still the issue of NDV tracks to be imported. But all 3 of the Andy tracks and two of the Zsolt tracks are posted on the link above in their fully reworked form, and if you have the CD or the original mp3s then you will hear the difference.
Next up for the remix treatment, and it's pretty far along but I have meter issues to tidy up is Adagio in A minor - hope to have this ready for posting by end of next week. Which leaves Temple of Lost Souls as the last of the Zsolt tracks to work on, and then I'm onto NDV's. Temple is HUGE - lots of everything in there, plus I think this is where a lot of meter issues will arise given the length of the composite track itself. It will need a serious trimming of keyboard and guitar parts especially in the metal tinged section where I will need to find a female vocalist to take on the vengeful wife section. I'll be working on the drums the first pass and balancing out the remaining parts - logic dictates I should remove all the filler tracks (double tracked guitars, etc) from the first mix, but while I have good intentions I never seem to achieve this. I will need to try harder :)
There are still a large number of tracks remaining to be remixed - I've been concentrating on Fine Line songs recently because they're very current and don't cause problems with Cubase 7.5. But there's still some serious tracks remaining to do from Sound of Thoughts, and of course reproducing all the songs from Onion as well. It's been almost a month of effort, 11 total songs have gotten some form of revisioning - at this rate I don't think we'll be ready to get to vocals and guitars until the end of September or mid-October. And then that effort will drag into December likely with final mixes at the end of the month.
Wow, that's a bit of a bummer... at least I have a timeframe to work against. That also means the new year will start work on new material - two different projects I have in mind right now.
Ok all done. Have a great day everyone!
Rob's Soundcloud Page
And of course I have thoughts to relate regarding these songs and both the original versions and my most recent remixes. What else could you truly expect??
First I'll start by talking about the original versions of the songs. What the hell was I on when I mixed these back then?? I don't really remember a lot EXCEPT that I was in a hurry to get everything done - Luciana was pregnant with Lucas, who was due in August, and by the time we hit June of 2009 she was in a really horrific mood suffering with sciatica and all sorts of fun stuff. Of course, even though I had planned on being done the mixes by the end of April or early May with the mastering done end of May - there was a lot of stuff that came up which needed fixing. Plus, around the April timeframe I'd asked Alan Morse if he could contribute a guitar solo to Mesmerize since I was experiencing burnout and stumped about how to approach it and even down to what countermelody would be suitable for the piece. Alan was very busy, and being a patient sort I sat and waited for a long time for Alan's contribution. At some point around June 20 I just said "ok, can't wait any longer..." and spent an evening with my guitar noodling around with an acceptable tone just throwing down some lazy loose bluesy stuff eventually resulting in the solo that made it on the CD. I had my friend Trevor Sadler waiting on getting to mastering this project - so I really got down to mixing already way way behind schedule and got these together as best as I could. I cheated a lot - NDV had sent the drum tracks as separate mike files and then included a raw drums mix that was intended as a reference file for how he heard his drums in the context of the songs. I was behind, so I flew in the stereo raw mix, did some really minor compression and EQ (mostly for punch on the kick and crack on the snare) and that's how they stayed. I then did submixes for Andy's drums and by the time I got to Zsolt's work, my ears were toast. I really wasn't fond of the cymbal tones so I tried EQ'ing them and with the mike bleed I experienced some phase cancellation which made it even worse. Completely frustrated at this point as well with some timing & meter issues on his tracks, I rendered the submix and then chopped up and aligned all the downbeats with the click track, resulting in a very mechanical feel to those tracks. Being pressured to just get this done now by my very unhappy and very pregnant wife (and to be fair, I should have been done long before this point) I got all my mixes done and reviewed by Paul and Mark, and then sent them to Trev.
One day after sending the mixes to Trev, in comes the solo work from Alan. Multitrack and multitake, Alan was wonderful, except I wasn't in the frame of mind to go through and comp his work into one solid take... I tried a few things, but never got anything that he or I liked as a final version. I had published the assertion that Alan was playing on the track as well, so being behind and not wanting to cause a kerfuffle I didn't change this on the website and other pages or even the CD cover (which was completed by Ed Unitsky at this point). Therefore, the CD credits Alan with the solo even though it's yours' truly.
Now, earlier in 2009 or maybe even late 2008, I'd been thrown for a loop by the ever opinionated Shawn Gordon, owner of ProgRock Records, who'd replied to my inquiries about getting a distribution deal by giving a very negative critique of the 5 song EP I shipped off to him containing Mesmerize and 4 other tracks from the Fine Line project. Regardless of having prequalified the EP with him saying these were very early versions of the songs, he slaughtered them and I was pretty bitter about it to the point that I became even more determined to show him and presumably everyone else they were wrong. The songs were neither "boring" nor "repetitive" - where there was repetition it was fully intentional to build tension, and being a dark moody album it couldn't have happier songs. The EP was also missing some of the instrumental stuff like Atonement or First Piece - definitely songs that cranked up the excitement level. The cover songs that filled in the end of the CD were intended to raise the mood a bit but failed in that regard.
So yes, the really well recorded parts ended up getting slaughtered in the mixing room. Definitely my bad. Funny enough, no one called out the drums as sounding not great EXCEPT for Zsolt, and a resounding silence from both Andy and Nick spoke volumes - but what got called out was a weak vocal performance that was my attempt at being moody and reflecting the darkness of the CD, and all the guitar geeks out there called out the piezo pickups on the acoustic guitars - the pingy nature being annoying for them. Trev had made the best of the mixes during mastering but no way to cover for some of the failings.
This brings me to the efforts of today, and what has been accomplished, and what is yet to be done.
First and foremost - I'm making up for not doing real mixes of the drums originally. I've imported the group of tracks being the drums for each song, and then because I've invested in new legal versions of software processing I finally got around to doing a lot to clean up the mess I'd made. Some of the timing/meter issues weren't as obvious as I'd originally thought as well - there are some, but not nearly as much as I believed. Cymbal tones are still not my favorite part of the tracks Zsolt did, but they're workable. Judicious gating and then using iZotope Alloy 2 presets got me 95% of the way to good drum tones, and I continue to work the remaining 5% to tweak.
Thinning out keyboard and guitar layering through judicious panning and reduction/removal cleaned up a lot as well. Using iZotope's Nectar 2 on vocals really paid off as well - I still need to record new vocal takes for most tracks, but as functional working remixes they actually sound a lot better.
The first three songs that I remixed I had not done the drum track imports though - I was feeling my way around the new hardware and software, so I kept it simple. Mesmerize was focused only on getting a nice comp'd Alan solo into the mix, so there's still the issue of NDV tracks to be imported. But all 3 of the Andy tracks and two of the Zsolt tracks are posted on the link above in their fully reworked form, and if you have the CD or the original mp3s then you will hear the difference.
Next up for the remix treatment, and it's pretty far along but I have meter issues to tidy up is Adagio in A minor - hope to have this ready for posting by end of next week. Which leaves Temple of Lost Souls as the last of the Zsolt tracks to work on, and then I'm onto NDV's. Temple is HUGE - lots of everything in there, plus I think this is where a lot of meter issues will arise given the length of the composite track itself. It will need a serious trimming of keyboard and guitar parts especially in the metal tinged section where I will need to find a female vocalist to take on the vengeful wife section. I'll be working on the drums the first pass and balancing out the remaining parts - logic dictates I should remove all the filler tracks (double tracked guitars, etc) from the first mix, but while I have good intentions I never seem to achieve this. I will need to try harder :)
There are still a large number of tracks remaining to be remixed - I've been concentrating on Fine Line songs recently because they're very current and don't cause problems with Cubase 7.5. But there's still some serious tracks remaining to do from Sound of Thoughts, and of course reproducing all the songs from Onion as well. It's been almost a month of effort, 11 total songs have gotten some form of revisioning - at this rate I don't think we'll be ready to get to vocals and guitars until the end of September or mid-October. And then that effort will drag into December likely with final mixes at the end of the month.
Wow, that's a bit of a bummer... at least I have a timeframe to work against. That also means the new year will start work on new material - two different projects I have in mind right now.
Ok all done. Have a great day everyone!
Thursday, July 24, 2014
July 24th 2014 update - remix progress, hardware and software headaches, and other distractions...
It's been two weeks since the last post, and although I've had a big increase in my music productivity it's not up to optimal. I've been mostly spending time on the Muse Receptor issues as I got the SSD back from Muse Research and it's functional, but now it's getting the software licenses transferred from the original owner (Michael Bluestein, keyboardist extraordinaire) to me. Michael has been an excellent person in this regard - the Receptor was sold by the band through a 3rd party on eBay to me, and after I found his name and email address I just cold called him (email) and asked how we could manage this? He's since gone onto iLok website and transferred the licenses on the system to me, plus is working on getting the s/n and registration info for the version of NI Komplete that was preloaded on the unit to me. He's been excellent in making sure I'm up to date on progress towards getting everything done, and I'm hanging on to the original iLok key that was in the Receptor - can you believe that iLok charges $100 to transfer ownership of the key to a new owner, while a brand new iLok only costs $30?? Anyways, you can guess how I'm dealing with that :)
I'm writing this a bit out of order now since the Receptor item is first and foremost on my mind (in the music space at least). Once that's resolved, and I figure out how to use the Uniwire feature that links PC to Receptor (to offload VST workloads and bandwidth onto the Receptor system), then there should be a marked increase in the output on this side.
Next up - Remix status. I've done some early work on two tunes from The Sound of Thoughts: Lady in a Cage and This Mortal Coil. Both have some rework to do - vocals and guitars to be redone, some bass parts as well, maybe touch on some keyboards as required. With the new VST plug-ins I have from iZotope, Universal Audio, Waves, IK Multimedia and others, being able to really turn the drums into stellar sounding instruments is a big plus, and each of the tracks above have had enormous benefit by it. The iZotope plugs in particular have been fabulous as I can really have a all in one solution for gating, eq, compression, etc... that is tailored to each piece of the drumkit, and in fact for each instrument and vocal part in the projects. They're also very efficient in terms of CPU and memory resources such that I have multiple instances of plug-ins loaded and processing, but my CPU and memory load never exceeds roughly 50% of available. This is especially awesome considering the sheer number of tracks and VSTs loaded for Lady in a Cage - I'm guessing 32 tracks total with 18 tracks both mono and stereo audio, plus 14 MIDI tracks, and then each of the VST card slots representing instruments, effects, etc... which is a considerable load on the system. Back in 2004/05 I had to do a lot of stuff like freezing or pre-rendering individual tracks to get around the bandwidth throttling issues on the PC I had at the time, so to be able to have everything functioning real time and not being a load on the CPU or memory - a godsend.
I have a version of an early remix for "This Mortal Coil" - you can check it out here
SO here's my critical side letting loose:
This song badly needs a new vocal - I tried with the radio voice setting to reclaim the original vocal, but there are so many things that feel wrong about it, mostly in the performance itself. They always say hindsight is 20:20 - the entire delivery and how the phonetic rhythm interplays with the music just doesn't work for me.
There are good things about the track - drums are now really sounding great. I have a very nice Chapman Stick on Sample Tank 2 that is a big improvement from the live track, and I'm processing using my favorite VST and preset for all bass - the T-Racks Compressor with Bass Tube Compressor. I've got Amplitube 3 on the clean guitars through a Vox AC30 on one channel, and a Boutique amp on the other - both have some analog chorus on them to make them sound a bit richer. The lead guitar was originally tracked through a POD Pro rack unit and printed to tape - I've changed up the delays and reverbs for all f/x channel strips and the lead now has a bit more richness to it. Keyboards are all pretty standard fare - when I first tried to work on this track in 2010 I had Paul's Korg Triton rack synth and so printed some of the MIDI tracks to audio from the Triton. This resulted in a lot of thickness of pads that really muddied the 2010 mixes, and so I've been going through and automating and arranging the various tracks to enter and exit at key points in the song. As I said before, this is still an early remix, but it's a significant portion of the way down the road towards a final with the ideas and efforts being tried out continually.
Right now I've got Pentelho Vermelho in Cubase 7.5 and ready to work on. The last remix I did in 2010 was just drenched with reverb and delay - way too much. Also, given that I'd just come out of the Fine Line project and the "more is better" sensibility with respect to keyboards and guitars, it's just got too much stuff in it. My procedure will be to bring the song back to the essential instruments that highlight the melodies and rhythms, then add enough to sweeten and enhance the song without burying the essentials. The TSOT songs tend to be far easier to do this with since PC imposed limitations, but even with new hardware the key to success on the remixes will be to Keep It Simple.
I had started doing some work on The Sound of Thoughts (the track itself) - this was predominantly a MIDI track that used my old JX-8P and Wavestation extensively, along with NI Battery and a bunch of freeware VSTs that I still keep as a part of my arsenal. Crazy Diamonds is a great VST that you can still find online - the amazing strings from Shine On You Crazy Diamond are reproduced spot on, plus there's a Jean Michel Jarre patch from Oxygene that is also a perfect recreation - which is the patch I used on this track. As with Pentelho and many of the other tracks I tried to redo four years ago, I tried recording the Triton audio for several parts, and now I'm going to need to decide to thin things out. The interesting thing I'm thinking about with this track though is for me to actually play the drums myself instead of using the programmed drums. I have the electronic drums and the KAT module which streams MIDI through the USB cable for the kick/snare/toms, and then the microphones to capture the hihat, ride and overhead cymbals. At the least, since the tune is in a 4/4 signature and has a consistent tempo, I should be able to do this fairly easily and get some practice playing the drums as well.
There are 12 total tracks on the CD, so there's plenty of work to do. Given the rate at which I get to stuff, it might be end of year or early next year before the material gets to mastering - I'm hoping that with the Receptor situation being resolved, and then starting to call up my mates to get together to jam, maybe I can get this particular effort done earlier...
Finally - the "other distractions" segment. Day job has me working on doing "presence" for our group and company at Siggraph in Vancouver, I have another event in just under two weeks - Seattle Buzz Workshop has me arranging hardware with Android demos to a developer audience. Other complications have also been taking time away from me - I promise to let people know if any change imposes itself on life.
There's another part of my day job that's been interesting - I have been reaching out to hardware and VST developers on behalf of Intel to discuss partnering up with them for future products. I can't say much more about this except it is a great path for me to go down for my day job as long as I can execute on the switch. Being able to influence the ecosystem in that fashion has always been a hope and a goal for me, so lets see how this will turn out...
I'm writing this a bit out of order now since the Receptor item is first and foremost on my mind (in the music space at least). Once that's resolved, and I figure out how to use the Uniwire feature that links PC to Receptor (to offload VST workloads and bandwidth onto the Receptor system), then there should be a marked increase in the output on this side.
Next up - Remix status. I've done some early work on two tunes from The Sound of Thoughts: Lady in a Cage and This Mortal Coil. Both have some rework to do - vocals and guitars to be redone, some bass parts as well, maybe touch on some keyboards as required. With the new VST plug-ins I have from iZotope, Universal Audio, Waves, IK Multimedia and others, being able to really turn the drums into stellar sounding instruments is a big plus, and each of the tracks above have had enormous benefit by it. The iZotope plugs in particular have been fabulous as I can really have a all in one solution for gating, eq, compression, etc... that is tailored to each piece of the drumkit, and in fact for each instrument and vocal part in the projects. They're also very efficient in terms of CPU and memory resources such that I have multiple instances of plug-ins loaded and processing, but my CPU and memory load never exceeds roughly 50% of available. This is especially awesome considering the sheer number of tracks and VSTs loaded for Lady in a Cage - I'm guessing 32 tracks total with 18 tracks both mono and stereo audio, plus 14 MIDI tracks, and then each of the VST card slots representing instruments, effects, etc... which is a considerable load on the system. Back in 2004/05 I had to do a lot of stuff like freezing or pre-rendering individual tracks to get around the bandwidth throttling issues on the PC I had at the time, so to be able to have everything functioning real time and not being a load on the CPU or memory - a godsend.
I have a version of an early remix for "This Mortal Coil" - you can check it out here
SO here's my critical side letting loose:
This song badly needs a new vocal - I tried with the radio voice setting to reclaim the original vocal, but there are so many things that feel wrong about it, mostly in the performance itself. They always say hindsight is 20:20 - the entire delivery and how the phonetic rhythm interplays with the music just doesn't work for me.
There are good things about the track - drums are now really sounding great. I have a very nice Chapman Stick on Sample Tank 2 that is a big improvement from the live track, and I'm processing using my favorite VST and preset for all bass - the T-Racks Compressor with Bass Tube Compressor. I've got Amplitube 3 on the clean guitars through a Vox AC30 on one channel, and a Boutique amp on the other - both have some analog chorus on them to make them sound a bit richer. The lead guitar was originally tracked through a POD Pro rack unit and printed to tape - I've changed up the delays and reverbs for all f/x channel strips and the lead now has a bit more richness to it. Keyboards are all pretty standard fare - when I first tried to work on this track in 2010 I had Paul's Korg Triton rack synth and so printed some of the MIDI tracks to audio from the Triton. This resulted in a lot of thickness of pads that really muddied the 2010 mixes, and so I've been going through and automating and arranging the various tracks to enter and exit at key points in the song. As I said before, this is still an early remix, but it's a significant portion of the way down the road towards a final with the ideas and efforts being tried out continually.
Right now I've got Pentelho Vermelho in Cubase 7.5 and ready to work on. The last remix I did in 2010 was just drenched with reverb and delay - way too much. Also, given that I'd just come out of the Fine Line project and the "more is better" sensibility with respect to keyboards and guitars, it's just got too much stuff in it. My procedure will be to bring the song back to the essential instruments that highlight the melodies and rhythms, then add enough to sweeten and enhance the song without burying the essentials. The TSOT songs tend to be far easier to do this with since PC imposed limitations, but even with new hardware the key to success on the remixes will be to Keep It Simple.
I had started doing some work on The Sound of Thoughts (the track itself) - this was predominantly a MIDI track that used my old JX-8P and Wavestation extensively, along with NI Battery and a bunch of freeware VSTs that I still keep as a part of my arsenal. Crazy Diamonds is a great VST that you can still find online - the amazing strings from Shine On You Crazy Diamond are reproduced spot on, plus there's a Jean Michel Jarre patch from Oxygene that is also a perfect recreation - which is the patch I used on this track. As with Pentelho and many of the other tracks I tried to redo four years ago, I tried recording the Triton audio for several parts, and now I'm going to need to decide to thin things out. The interesting thing I'm thinking about with this track though is for me to actually play the drums myself instead of using the programmed drums. I have the electronic drums and the KAT module which streams MIDI through the USB cable for the kick/snare/toms, and then the microphones to capture the hihat, ride and overhead cymbals. At the least, since the tune is in a 4/4 signature and has a consistent tempo, I should be able to do this fairly easily and get some practice playing the drums as well.
There are 12 total tracks on the CD, so there's plenty of work to do. Given the rate at which I get to stuff, it might be end of year or early next year before the material gets to mastering - I'm hoping that with the Receptor situation being resolved, and then starting to call up my mates to get together to jam, maybe I can get this particular effort done earlier...
Finally - the "other distractions" segment. Day job has me working on doing "presence" for our group and company at Siggraph in Vancouver, I have another event in just under two weeks - Seattle Buzz Workshop has me arranging hardware with Android demos to a developer audience. Other complications have also been taking time away from me - I promise to let people know if any change imposes itself on life.
There's another part of my day job that's been interesting - I have been reaching out to hardware and VST developers on behalf of Intel to discuss partnering up with them for future products. I can't say much more about this except it is a great path for me to go down for my day job as long as I can execute on the switch. Being able to influence the ecosystem in that fashion has always been a hope and a goal for me, so lets see how this will turn out...
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Solving Big Issues - revisiting past recordings and setting up new projects for the remixes, and the problems they present.
Sometimes I start to write about a given topic with the intent of doing a simple issue/answer and final summary point posting, only to find that I've essentially written an entire chapter of a book as a result. This is one of those postings - born of the work I've been doing lately in my studio focusing on older tracks I have in archive with the intent to remix and remaster them. As a result though...
Here's some background about the production of certain tracks including the song "This Mortal Coil" from 2005 release The Sound of Thoughts...
Heinz Schuller was the drummer on most of the songs on Sound of Thoughts, and he provided great tracks in terms of sound quality. What we did with them back in 2005 though during mixdown sessions was less than stellar (which to be fair the mixdowns were pretty rushed, wanting to get the CD mixed and mastered the night before the release party, and I still ran over to my workplace and used their bulk CD burner to burn off 100 copies the afternoon before the show). I guess trying to mix down an album until 5 am the morning of a publicized show releasing the CD might not have been such a great idea...
There were three tunes on the CD which were really tough from a playing perspective - "Lady in a Cage" which had a ton of meter and tempo changes over a 19 minute running time; "Pentelho Vermelho" again had really tricky tempo/meter changes all over the place (I wrote in a ton of polyrhythms with places where accent notes played in 4 under a motif riff that was a compound time signature and a section where the guitars played offbeats in stereo against each other); and then there was "This Mortal Coil" with it's 13/16 verse and 7/8 chorus using the arpeggiated guitar as the metronome driving the song. All the contributors on the CD had to play their parts against the heavily sequenced demo songs which I had essentially sequestered myself away and wrote in their entirety during the month my wife and son Thomas had gone to visit family in Brasil (Jan 2005). Not having a band or any collaborators to bounce ideas off of was tough - I have a tendency towards ADHD, meaning I get bored quickly and abandon things easily (or used to anyways). Lady took months of effort to write and put together the 7-8 sections that were mostly individual ideas or audio sketches that were sitting around and then Kragle'ing them together in a fashion that wouldn't sound like they were Kragle'd - the original piece of music was 8:10 long and written in 1987 but I always felt it was incomplete. Pentelho a similar thing - a ridiculous riff that was put into different band contexts to lend dynamic to the tune, with a ridiculous piano bit to open (written with a B3 sound originally trying to be a knock off of Keith Emerson's Karn Evil 9 opening bit). Mortal Coil though - a mood piece intended to have a feeling of dread. Lyrics were (as always) over the top dark - and very awkward to sing. Nothing about the three songs was very forgiving to anyone who would play on them.
Lady and Pentelho both had issues with drum tracks w.r.t. meter - it drifted around a lot, and at the time when we flew the tracks into the projects, instead of trying to adjust the project meters to fit the drums, we performed a submix and render of the drums with eq's and stereo placements, then flew the stereo submix into the project and performed the "morphing" of the time scale of the drums to fit within the projects' rigid meter structure. This meant the drums got gate and compression processed per piece before the submix - any changes in the drum processing would require the entire process of submix, fly in and edit to be repeated if we were to keep the other aspects of the projects the same. For those particular songs (maybe one or two others as well) I have some pretty serious things to consider and choose from the following options:
Here's some background about the production of certain tracks including the song "This Mortal Coil" from 2005 release The Sound of Thoughts...
Heinz Schuller was the drummer on most of the songs on Sound of Thoughts, and he provided great tracks in terms of sound quality. What we did with them back in 2005 though during mixdown sessions was less than stellar (which to be fair the mixdowns were pretty rushed, wanting to get the CD mixed and mastered the night before the release party, and I still ran over to my workplace and used their bulk CD burner to burn off 100 copies the afternoon before the show). I guess trying to mix down an album until 5 am the morning of a publicized show releasing the CD might not have been such a great idea...
There were three tunes on the CD which were really tough from a playing perspective - "Lady in a Cage" which had a ton of meter and tempo changes over a 19 minute running time; "Pentelho Vermelho" again had really tricky tempo/meter changes all over the place (I wrote in a ton of polyrhythms with places where accent notes played in 4 under a motif riff that was a compound time signature and a section where the guitars played offbeats in stereo against each other); and then there was "This Mortal Coil" with it's 13/16 verse and 7/8 chorus using the arpeggiated guitar as the metronome driving the song. All the contributors on the CD had to play their parts against the heavily sequenced demo songs which I had essentially sequestered myself away and wrote in their entirety during the month my wife and son Thomas had gone to visit family in Brasil (Jan 2005). Not having a band or any collaborators to bounce ideas off of was tough - I have a tendency towards ADHD, meaning I get bored quickly and abandon things easily (or used to anyways). Lady took months of effort to write and put together the 7-8 sections that were mostly individual ideas or audio sketches that were sitting around and then Kragle'ing them together in a fashion that wouldn't sound like they were Kragle'd - the original piece of music was 8:10 long and written in 1987 but I always felt it was incomplete. Pentelho a similar thing - a ridiculous riff that was put into different band contexts to lend dynamic to the tune, with a ridiculous piano bit to open (written with a B3 sound originally trying to be a knock off of Keith Emerson's Karn Evil 9 opening bit). Mortal Coil though - a mood piece intended to have a feeling of dread. Lyrics were (as always) over the top dark - and very awkward to sing. Nothing about the three songs was very forgiving to anyone who would play on them.
Lady and Pentelho both had issues with drum tracks w.r.t. meter - it drifted around a lot, and at the time when we flew the tracks into the projects, instead of trying to adjust the project meters to fit the drums, we performed a submix and render of the drums with eq's and stereo placements, then flew the stereo submix into the project and performed the "morphing" of the time scale of the drums to fit within the projects' rigid meter structure. This meant the drums got gate and compression processed per piece before the submix - any changes in the drum processing would require the entire process of submix, fly in and edit to be repeated if we were to keep the other aspects of the projects the same. For those particular songs (maybe one or two others as well) I have some pretty serious things to consider and choose from the following options:
- do the same process with submix, import and edit as was done originally?
- process the original tracks in the project, and edit the tempo track to match the drums?
- get my friend John H to record new drum tracks for all affected songs using the original tempo map?
- take the original MIDI drum programming and do some deeper programming to add dynamics and feel?
- Just grab John, Paul and find a bassist (maybe the original bassist Brian T) to do full on recordings of new bed tracks - needs rehearsals and then studio time?
Option 1 would keep the final song with the same essential arrangements and instrumentation. There is enough goodness with the original keyboards to do this - although I'd like to redo guitars and vocals regardless of what option is done. Editing the drums to fit the tempo sucks because we lose some of the cymbal sustains in the cuts, but (and this will be an issue with #2 below) the drums drift around a lot between being late or early on the downbeat depending on measure... very tough to counter that.
Option 2 - as mentioned the drums drift tempo wise, so moving tempo track to fit means that either the other audio tracks get edited to fit the new tempo track, or we redo all other audio tracks. I can be selective about what will be edited and what is redone, but it's potentially 10x more work than #1.
Option 3 - John has excellent meter, and has a lot of experience playing to click tracked material. He also has his own home studio with some excellent soundproofed space and good microphones. I also have great mikes so between the two of us we can get this done. Two concerns though are #1 he has a proprietary recording system in a Zoom console - 2 actually. The files get recorded as WAVs and would require an import, but for the most part the process is doable. #2 He does have a HUGE kit and it will mean flying in 14 tracks into the project and any deviations in tempo would require revisiting Option 1 or Option 2 again. I don't think that's so much of a problem as with the original drum tracks though - we'll have to see how that goes.
Option 4 - this gives me excellent sounding drums by default as I can choose between any sample kits I have on hand. Being a gear pig and a progressive rock guy - the kit I programmed with was the 9 piece kit that is standard on most GM MIDI keyboard workstations, and some of the step edited parts are relatively impossible for any drummer to play verbatim which would make it obvious that it's a programmed drum track. Again, there can be a compromise solution where sections can be the programmed drums and others the Heinz tracks triggering the samples using Drumagog - that's a reasonable option right now.
Option 5 - rehearsing and recording the song bed tracks live and then picking and choosing keyboard/guitar/vocal parts to fly in or redo. If we were doing this thing as a full time gig, or we'd been playing the material out for months or years as a part time thing, then its a feasible option. None of us individually has the time to dedicate to this as a "band" - wife & kids, work, family... any individual or collective responsibility precludes that. I'd like to put a group together to play out, and that's my midterm plan since it's a ton of fun, but to be able to solve the remix problem with this is not feasible given how I want to use this exercise to kickstart new music work.
Bottom line : there is no simple solution. Right now I'm looking at Option 3 as the most feasible to get this done quickly and with highest quality. I can go to John's home and engineer/co-produce the sessions, we can discuss new arrangements for the material and get that printed to disk. We can also discuss taking the songs out to play live - once John internalizes the songs it will be easier to rehearse a band having him act as musical director. Everything lives and dies by the rhythm section after all...
After this long winded discussion, I now get to "This Mortal Coil".
Why "Mortal Coil" is being called out separately is because this song doesn't have the same issues as the others - the tempo stays the same throughout the song, the meter change actually feels pretty natural and only the most astute person actually identifies the change - usually the musician playing on the piece because of the stumble they experience when the change happens. Heinz played a part that was pretty close to the one programmed with accent variations and fills as appropriate, but the key was he was on top of the click the entire track. No submix export needed - we processed with the available VSTs to the best of our abilities, and with it being relatively easy to mix, it was one of the last tracks to get mixed down and mastered - aural and physical fatigue were the reasons why it didn't come out well in the final mix.
Vocals were just awful - no time to iterate on editing the lyric to fit the song and being stubborn about it, I just sang what I had and only did 5 or 6 takes from which we edited a comp vocal track out of. Instead of choosing the pieces of each take that had the best pitch, we chose the one which best fit the rhythm - then processed the vocal as if the pitch really didn't matter to the final product. There are songs out there which have done this and it works (for reference: "Hey Man, Nice Shot" by Filter) - but in our case (Jay C and I) it didn't.
Why I am looking at this track right now? It's not the glamour track of the CD - hell, it's in the kinda shitty 2nd half of the CD that followed "Lady in a Cage", lost in the middle of a bunch of filler tracks that were written in haste and recorded with even more haste. "Peace, my Brother" is the only other track which could be called an honest effort in that sad collection of filler tunes. But "Mortal Coil" has more effort thrown into the writing than the production, and it's a very different piece than anything that came before. I can say really that "Mortal Coil" contributed to the skills that made it possible for me to write "Frantic" & "Mesmerize" from Fine Line. There's a lot left on the table with this one - fixing the tone of the drums, doing some arrangement magic by reducing the clutter, redoing vocals and potentially bass parts. Mastering the final mix preserving the limited dynamics but balancing the levels - not using a brickwall limiter for one thing...
This will be the track that will tell the most about how big an improvement is possible from this exercise overall. Learnings here will transfer to all subsequent songs and CD projects, general issues identified and remedied, and a determination that will help set how long this entire back catalog effort will take. I will get to really learn the new software packages and the new hardware that constitute my studio environment. Playing and singing chops will get dusted off and polished up - make no mistake, this is not simply killing time waiting for inspiration for the next project. The next project will require serious chops to execute on and woodshedding is not an option - there's too much to do at the day job, with the new home, the family, etc...
Paul and I have discussed on occasion how the mixes for Fine Line tend toward the cluttered side - lots of tracks forming big blobs of information where many keyboard timbres layer with multiple guitar parts to form an indiscernible wall of sound in a wide stereo field. In the last two CD projects I fell into that eyes wide open and oblivious to it because I didn't want to throw away work - it took time to record that keyboard or guitar part, all the takes and what not to get it right... "cant not use it now and waste the effort". This is the wrong way to mix audio material. To this day, I find I prefer the rock recordings from the 60's and 70's because you could hear what everyone is doing and there was space and power in the songs. Rush CDs from the last 3 releases most notably had too many overdubs sweetened with too much reverb and echo - the original "Vapor Trails" CD was vilified by audiophiles for being ridiculously cluttered and LOUD because of poor mixing and mastering decisions. The remix by David Bottrill is phenomenal though - he removed the clutter, mixed it with an eye to what's best for presentation and then mastered to enhance.
I'm looking to reduce or in some instances remove the clutter from the original CDs. I anticipate it will be a hugely improved set of material that will result and am both excited and anxious for this. More to come in the future including some working versions I'll post to show progress and set the table for the final versions that will come out in the future. Cheers and have a great day!!
Friday, June 13, 2014
Rearranging the two road racks...
Short and sweet update from the caves of Hyperboreal Studios - it's a story of consolidating gear and reducing redundancy...
With some of the purchases of the last couple years I'm finding that I have stuff that covers off similar territory - older rack synths that the new Muse host covers off and does better. Guitars that have similar sonic territory, amplifiers - same. A drumkit that is not getting used at all...
So, as a part of normal life for me, I'm actively selling some of the stuff. EMu XL-1 Extreme Lead rack, Yamaha TX-81Z rack, the aforementioned electronic drumkit...
To make this be easier, I'm now going to have to move some of the rack synths and the two interfaces around - I want to get the keeper stuff into one box and then use the other to hold safely the items for sale. I also have Paul's Triton Rack which is a great instrument, but it's been rendered redundant now with the Muse and the V-Synth XT as well so it will live in Rack #2...
Rearranging the pieces will also make more room for the sum total as well - I have a 19" LCD monitor in the top of Rack #1 and I'd like to get the MIDI 8x8 USB interface on the same top surface with the monitor & the line mixer. Then I'd have plenty of room for the Muse, V-Synth and Saffire Pro40 in the front facing portion of the rack.
So that's my task for the weekend. I'm also going to be posting the individual items from the drumkit - cymbals mostly, in Craigslist. I've already been successful in selling the hihat stand, drum module and my Yamaha AEX502 guitar, hoping I get on a roll and sell the remaining items quickly. Then - 4k TV!!!
cheers & have a great weekend!
With some of the purchases of the last couple years I'm finding that I have stuff that covers off similar territory - older rack synths that the new Muse host covers off and does better. Guitars that have similar sonic territory, amplifiers - same. A drumkit that is not getting used at all...
So, as a part of normal life for me, I'm actively selling some of the stuff. EMu XL-1 Extreme Lead rack, Yamaha TX-81Z rack, the aforementioned electronic drumkit...
To make this be easier, I'm now going to have to move some of the rack synths and the two interfaces around - I want to get the keeper stuff into one box and then use the other to hold safely the items for sale. I also have Paul's Triton Rack which is a great instrument, but it's been rendered redundant now with the Muse and the V-Synth XT as well so it will live in Rack #2...
Rearranging the pieces will also make more room for the sum total as well - I have a 19" LCD monitor in the top of Rack #1 and I'd like to get the MIDI 8x8 USB interface on the same top surface with the monitor & the line mixer. Then I'd have plenty of room for the Muse, V-Synth and Saffire Pro40 in the front facing portion of the rack.
So that's my task for the weekend. I'm also going to be posting the individual items from the drumkit - cymbals mostly, in Craigslist. I've already been successful in selling the hihat stand, drum module and my Yamaha AEX502 guitar, hoping I get on a roll and sell the remaining items quickly. Then - 4k TV!!!
cheers & have a great weekend!
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Time to "thin out the herd"...
It's an expression musicians I know use when they take a look at their equipment and realize that much of it is either redundant or unused, so they decide it's time to sell some of it off. The justification is that you reduce the amount of instrument clutter in your practise room or storage closet - but more often than not the money gets plowed into new gear anyways...
I'm finding myself in this situation right now - especially after talking with my new friend Neil Durant, keyboardist for UK bands IQ and Sphere3. Given the equipment I have in the two racks right now, there is a lot of redundancy especially considering the immensely powerful Muse Receptor and the V-Synth XT that are the mainstays of the rack. This means I've got some few hundred dollars in extra unnecessary rack synths I can put up on eBay (the Yamaha TX81z and the EMu XL-1 being the two of mine, with Paul getting his Triton back) and reclaim some funds, as well as re-purpose the extra road rack case into a rack for my various amp heads.
Speaking of amp heads, I now have 4 amp heads which cover a lot of ground, but also have significant overlap tonally. All my amps list out below:
I'm finding myself in this situation right now - especially after talking with my new friend Neil Durant, keyboardist for UK bands IQ and Sphere3. Given the equipment I have in the two racks right now, there is a lot of redundancy especially considering the immensely powerful Muse Receptor and the V-Synth XT that are the mainstays of the rack. This means I've got some few hundred dollars in extra unnecessary rack synths I can put up on eBay (the Yamaha TX81z and the EMu XL-1 being the two of mine, with Paul getting his Triton back) and reclaim some funds, as well as re-purpose the extra road rack case into a rack for my various amp heads.
Speaking of amp heads, I now have 4 amp heads which cover a lot of ground, but also have significant overlap tonally. All my amps list out below:
- Hughes & Kettner Tubemeister 5 head (5W)
- Jet City JCA20hv head (20W)
- Egnator Tweaker 20 head (20W)
- Carvin Legacy 100W head
- Mesa Boogie Nomad 100 combo
There is a significant range of tones to be gotten from the amps above. The Egnator gets me Fender and boutique cleans through British Marshall grunt, the Tubemeister has modern rock down with brutally crystal cleans, Jet City has British and Metal down, while the Carvin and Boogie amps do it all with the power to cover off mid to big mid sized clubs/venues.
I have some decisions to be made...
At this moment, I'd likely let go of the Jet City head because it stands as the least unique of the 5. Next on the list would be the Tubemeister 5 - I'm torn on this since it's a very nice little amp great for just having in the office to plug into quickly. But I can take the money from both the heads and turn them into a Tubemeister 18 or 36 which would do the office but also be great for small to mid sized gigs paired with a 2x12 cabinet. Either of those choices would also be two channel units as opposed to the single channel 5 watt head I have. I bought it knowing it would be a one trick pony - but it's fine since I can move up the model level now that I know it's a great sounding amp.
So I think I just talked myself into that plan. I do also want to sell the Nomad and then grab a Mark V combo - that would seal my deal for amps and tones and likely would never need another amp again. But you never know...
Now - next up is the guitar collection. This is an especially painful review since (with only the exception of one or two) every instrument is unique and I am reticent to selling even one of them. So I will need to do a net value appraisal of each one and then resolve to sell three total. I haven't started the thought process or appraisal - I guess I can do that now but as I said it's a painful one for me.
So I've gone through a quick check and have a short list of instruments I am considering:
- 6 string Garrison acoustic guitar (model G40-E) - a very nice guitar, very Martin-y acoustic and very heavy due to the fiberglass infrastructure construction. That would really be the only reason I'm considering selling since its about 30% heavier than a comparable Takamine or Martin. Comes with the original heavy duty hard-shell case, and has a lot of very nice reviews online for those who are looking for info.
- Yamaha AEX502 semi-acoustic - this is along the lines of the Epiphone Wildkat or Alley Kat guitars, it's got some rockabilly styling in a nice orange stain finish. P-90 pickups on bridge and neck, and perfectly straight maple neck with rosewood fretboard make this thing incredible to play. But now that I have the Godin 5th Ave Kingpin arriving, this is something that needs to go.
- ESP LTD EC256 road worn singlecut - oh this one I'm on the fence over. Its an amazing guitar and I did a ton of modifications that make it beyond special - Seymour Duncan JB and 59 humbuckers with the split coil switching pickup rings, GraphTech Ghost Acoustiphonic AND MIDI guitar systems. Gibson fine tuning stop tailpiece is the final touch. Super light guitar, rocks like hell! I've also done a mod to the instrument that I worried about (and still do) which was to strip the finish off the back of the neck and then tung oil to get a faster playing instrument. It works very well, but the grain is a bit open on the mahogany and I get concerned since it's a bit ugly and also needs the continual oiling once a year or so. But it plays like a dream and sounds wicked - the MIDI system tracks amazingly well also. Piezo tones don't have the pingy-ness of the older systems either. Its a hard one to give up - but I really want the Alex Lifeson Axxess by Gibson, so its on the list to go...
So that's it - if you have any interest in the above named instruments or amps then drop me a line and we can work out the price and shipping details. Otherwise they're all going up on Craigslist, or as in the case with the Boom Theory drumkit - up on eBay for auction. Some of the stuff will go pretty quick so let me know asap if you're interested.
And - no, Sean, the G&L Tele is still doomed to stay in the collection ;)
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
May 2014 update
I missed my April update - too much happening, as both life and career took most of my time away from me. But I have made progress in setting up my office as I was able to find a very decent desk (modern and slightly industrial looking) for a very reasonable price. I've also set up pretty much everything now - just had an issue with my main PC's motherboard which Asus is remedying by supplying a replacement. Other than that, I'm now sitting in my office and executing on tasks for my day job and simply taking a few minutes for this update.
It may not be the neatest or most organized looking right now, but everything is set up and will be fully functional shortly. As you can see, most everything is within arms reach - now as spacious as the Bothell house media room, but very comfy cozy and simply needs to have some repainting to make it less of a cave.
I've gone through another round of gear swapping recently - in the process of swapping my recently acquired Yamaha AEX 502 in exchange for a Godin 5th Avenue singlecut with P-90 pickups. I also acquired a really nice La Patrie Etude (made by Godin) classical guitar in exchange for my Yamaha classical with someone at work. Both changes will get me a much better playing instrument, with a slightly different tonality that I think will work better for what I plan on doing.
One of the big challenges in the new office/studio is the echo from bare walls and high ceiling. I've got some instructions on building "decorative" sound absorption panels that will hang on the walls like artwork, and up in the cathedral sloped ceiling on the front and back side of the room. That will make the room less obvious for sure when recording, or in the case of executing on my day job - taking conference calls over the hands free feature. The high ceiling also has a dome type light which is very difficult to change bulbs out as well as even with 3 60W equivalent LED bulbs, the color of the room is so dark and not terribly pleasant color either, that the light just gets sucked up like a black body object. I get pretty fatigued working in the room as a result, so a new paint will be needed soon.
To close off the post, I'm getting more chance to play around with guitars and keyboards these days - the proximity of the instruments helps with that. I've been getting some interesting ideas, progressions, & riffs happening. Such that I think now that the new mobo is due to arrive today, once that's swapped out I can start doing some recording and lay the ideas down before they disappear. Don't expect anything to appear terribly quickly - this is still embryonic stage, but in a month or two I'll be able to call up the other guys and have something as a starting point to jam on.
Have a great month and I'll post next when I have anything to report. Hope to have audio tracks to demo here for you.
It may not be the neatest or most organized looking right now, but everything is set up and will be fully functional shortly. As you can see, most everything is within arms reach - now as spacious as the Bothell house media room, but very comfy cozy and simply needs to have some repainting to make it less of a cave.
I've gone through another round of gear swapping recently - in the process of swapping my recently acquired Yamaha AEX 502 in exchange for a Godin 5th Avenue singlecut with P-90 pickups. I also acquired a really nice La Patrie Etude (made by Godin) classical guitar in exchange for my Yamaha classical with someone at work. Both changes will get me a much better playing instrument, with a slightly different tonality that I think will work better for what I plan on doing.
One of the big challenges in the new office/studio is the echo from bare walls and high ceiling. I've got some instructions on building "decorative" sound absorption panels that will hang on the walls like artwork, and up in the cathedral sloped ceiling on the front and back side of the room. That will make the room less obvious for sure when recording, or in the case of executing on my day job - taking conference calls over the hands free feature. The high ceiling also has a dome type light which is very difficult to change bulbs out as well as even with 3 60W equivalent LED bulbs, the color of the room is so dark and not terribly pleasant color either, that the light just gets sucked up like a black body object. I get pretty fatigued working in the room as a result, so a new paint will be needed soon.
To close off the post, I'm getting more chance to play around with guitars and keyboards these days - the proximity of the instruments helps with that. I've been getting some interesting ideas, progressions, & riffs happening. Such that I think now that the new mobo is due to arrive today, once that's swapped out I can start doing some recording and lay the ideas down before they disappear. Don't expect anything to appear terribly quickly - this is still embryonic stage, but in a month or two I'll be able to call up the other guys and have something as a starting point to jam on.
Have a great month and I'll post next when I have anything to report. Hope to have audio tracks to demo here for you.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
New Home, new Android phone... what else could possibly change?
As mentioned, we've moved to another home - we sold our home early January and then closed on our new home in February. Which meant we had to live in an apartment for about two months as we got through all the trials & tribulations of the financing and then closing on our new home. Now that we've survived that, and we've been in our new home for just over a week now, we've been unpacking and setting up all our stuff - including getting my stuff up in my new 12x12 office/studio :)
I divested myself of some gear that wasn't working out well for me - MOx6, Novation K-Station 49, Boca 12 string electric guitar, the 60's Tribute Gibson Les Paul Studio goldtop... there's other instruments and equipment as well, but those were the major casualties of some turnover even though they hadn't been used on any recordings at all (the instruments listed above).
Setting up everything in the 144 sq ft room is challenging, as the drumkit by itself takes up almost 1/4 of the room. I don't have my desk of preference, nor a credenza that I'll convert to hosting all the rack units - but the cheap Ikea desk will do for the time being as I set it up for my home office, working remotely 2.5 days/week. My employer has decided to increase my commute by about 8 miles forcing me to drive or bus to Seattle - and that last 8 miles will add another 20-25 minutes to my commute. Which has led me to decide on working from home part of the time to save on miles, time and gas. While its nice to be allowed to work from home, I was very comfortable commuting to Bellevue daily. But such is the ways of life - I can't do anything about it at this point.
So anyways, it's 6:30 pm on Saturday night, and I'm looking out my family room window down into the Snoqualmie River Valley and north along the Cascade Mountains to see Mt Baker and the top of Glacier Peak. Its an amazing and tranquil view that helps to settle the stress of daily life, and even though the cherry blossoms will soon obscure our view, I'm very happy in our new abode.
Music News - nothing specific or at least more than what has been stated her and on FB. I'm planning on some remixing and revisiting of songs on the first three CDs, doing some cover tunes that strike me as interesting to do, and then looking to write the Dream Suite. I'm awaiting the new Gazpacho release "Demon" as it's both fascinating on its own, but also for the business model the band follows. They keep full time jobs to support families and such, but write, record and release projects on a 18-24 month cadence. That is a working example of what model I'm trying to follow - I have my full time job to support us as needed, and not being dependent on music means I can follow my muse and create the music I enjoy myself, in effect writing for myself.
I divested myself of some gear that wasn't working out well for me - MOx6, Novation K-Station 49, Boca 12 string electric guitar, the 60's Tribute Gibson Les Paul Studio goldtop... there's other instruments and equipment as well, but those were the major casualties of some turnover even though they hadn't been used on any recordings at all (the instruments listed above).
Setting up everything in the 144 sq ft room is challenging, as the drumkit by itself takes up almost 1/4 of the room. I don't have my desk of preference, nor a credenza that I'll convert to hosting all the rack units - but the cheap Ikea desk will do for the time being as I set it up for my home office, working remotely 2.5 days/week. My employer has decided to increase my commute by about 8 miles forcing me to drive or bus to Seattle - and that last 8 miles will add another 20-25 minutes to my commute. Which has led me to decide on working from home part of the time to save on miles, time and gas. While its nice to be allowed to work from home, I was very comfortable commuting to Bellevue daily. But such is the ways of life - I can't do anything about it at this point.
So anyways, it's 6:30 pm on Saturday night, and I'm looking out my family room window down into the Snoqualmie River Valley and north along the Cascade Mountains to see Mt Baker and the top of Glacier Peak. Its an amazing and tranquil view that helps to settle the stress of daily life, and even though the cherry blossoms will soon obscure our view, I'm very happy in our new abode.
Music News - nothing specific or at least more than what has been stated her and on FB. I'm planning on some remixing and revisiting of songs on the first three CDs, doing some cover tunes that strike me as interesting to do, and then looking to write the Dream Suite. I'm awaiting the new Gazpacho release "Demon" as it's both fascinating on its own, but also for the business model the band follows. They keep full time jobs to support families and such, but write, record and release projects on a 18-24 month cadence. That is a working example of what model I'm trying to follow - I have my full time job to support us as needed, and not being dependent on music means I can follow my muse and create the music I enjoy myself, in effect writing for myself.
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