journal

"Problems are the price you pay for progress" - Branch Rickey

I tracked the bass and guitar parts on Know Again last week but have spent the evenings this week re-tracking (and re-tracking and re-tracking) a few sections with different variations -- switching guitars, pickup selection, amp settings and performance nuances to try to get things sounding just right. Sometimes when I start being fussy like this it is hard to tell if I'm doing more harm than good but in this case I'm fairly certain it is paying off.

Hope to have that off to Ian for the electric violin work by the start of next week. At that point there will be 4 musicians (including me) working on 4 different pieces on 2 different continents. Which makes my mono-tasking brain sort of hurt a little.

Bass is done on Skating on Europa so I'll start tracking guitars on that as soon as Know Again is complete.

Still not sure about a title for the record or an artwork concept but I've got a couple of ideas kicking around in my head.

Also been taking some time to see some old friends perform with their bands. High School band mate Brian Litchfield is now performing with a terrific trio, The George Brown Band. And a guy I used to work with about 10 years ago is playing in town with his band on Saturday so I'm looking forward to checking that out as well.

The months of July and August got a bit bogged down in a home remodel that is now winding down. I'm hoping that September will be productive. I made good use of the long weekend, so, so far so good on that front.

At this stage I have all the drum tracks for the 30 minute piece (now called "Talespin" - more on that in another post) and two other songs from Frank. Friday and Saturday I finished tracking the bass guitar parts for "Talespin". Then Sunday and Monday I relearned and tracked most of the piano parts. Wow was I out of playing shape on piano.... my left thumb is killing me.

Tonight I practiced the last couple of piano parts, so I should be able to track those tomorrow and get started on guitars. With any luck next week I can send "Talespin" off to the vocalist so she can start working on that while I begin tracking the other songs.

Should have some new music soon as I'm wrapping up a final composition for the record. In the meantime here are some photos Mocha and I took today on a quick walk to the park.

The original cast of Mystery Science Theater is back with a new Direct to DVD series called Cinematic Titanic. I downloaded the first episode "The Oozing Skull" a couple of weeks ago and it is terrific. The new show is unfortunately puppet free but in addition to the original three they added Mary Jo and TV's Frank. The trailer for the latest episode "The Doomsday Machine" is up now and if you are fan of MST3K the clip is well worth watching for the joke from Josh right at the end.

Also you may have noticed I haven't written in awhile. That is because I was having some rather frightening computer problems. I think the issuse was on the motherboard but the symptom was harddisks not being recognized and the machine not booting up. This is not one of the things I like per se. However, I now have a shiny new machine. My old one was powered by a relatively fast (considering it was 5 years old) AMD Processor. The downside was it had a really really loud CPU fan. So when mixing it was a bit like having a jet engine under the desk. This was a little distracting. The new machine is from a company called EndPCNoise.com. This particular machine was designed as a partnership between EndPCNoise.com and silentpcreview.com It is very very quiet and very very fast. Duo Core Processor, 4 Gig of Ram and almost half a terrabite of hard drives space between the 3 drives I have in there. I moved the new Echo audio card over. So for the next 10 minutes or so this thing should be "state of the art". More importantly it actually runs my recording programs much smoother than the old machine. No more dropouts and errors on processor intensive arrangements.

If you are going to NEARfest X this weekend, maybe I'll see you there!

Spent the entire afternoon, evening, and well this morning now upgrading to the latest version of b2Evolution. b2Evolution is the open source content management system that "powers" this site.

I miss the old days where we hand coded everything.

Mind you there is no shortage of coding involved in a system like this - it is just that you have to hunt down where it is you want your code to go. In my case here there were a lot of modifications I made to the system to get it to work the way I wanted. Once I upgraded the new system there were about 15 fatal errors to resolve and a number of nasty things to clean up. And after all that - the site looks pretty much identical to what it looked like when I started. Well, I do have some new smiles I suppose.

Actually the administrative end of the site did get a nice upgrade... its just you can't see that part.