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...

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!