Music for Good
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!!
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