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.