Ready to Move On

 I had yet another fairly productive weekend and I'm happy to report that I'm pretty much down to only 6 tasks left on my agenda for updates/fixes/additions to the "jazz machine" album.  Admittedly, one of those tasks is fairly large (redoing the drums on "Tonight...") but on the flipside another of those tasks is extremely small.  I'm thinking I'll have the album completely wrapped up next weekend but I can say, as of this moment, the album is "together", meaning that all the main melodies, lines, riffs, etc., have now been placed.  I'm basically now in repair and fix mode and quickly moving towards mixing mode.  I guess you could say the album is already finished since it now sounds like an actual album and it's what I'd call listenable.

I'm giving myself one month to mix it and then I'll hand it over to someone for mastering.  At the same time, I need to sit down and comb through who knows how many photos and try to piece together some sort of album artwork.  I usually do that long before this step but I just haven't stumbled upon anything up until now that really bowled me over or seemed appropriate.

Once the "jazz machine" fixes are complete, my next task is to finish/fix the last couple of items for the "Mirror Land" EP which has been greatly neglected once again for many months.  I pretty much know exactly what I need to do so it's just a matter of carving out the time.  Everything else for that EP is ready to go.

Here's my guess at what will be happening for the remainder of the year:  "Mirror Land" will actually be released first, probably only by a few weeks, and then "Jazz Machine" will be released.  I'm immediately going to start working on finishing up the "Wrecking Ball" album (my more or less Neil Young and Crazy Horse sounding album) and then trying to tinker once again with the "Elvis Fish Redux" album which also needs a bit more work here and there.  If life treats me well, all four of these products should be completed in 2021 and may even be released by EOY.  If I can somehow push myself and/or get really fortunate, I also need to get back to the long abandoned Defrost Nixon album which really needs to be completed and released within the next year as well.  I guess in short I have my work cut out for me but I'll do what I can.

In the meantime, if anyone has any photos that they've taken that speak to the words "evening" or "I miss you", please contact me!

In the Trenches

 Wrapping up an album is always a weird feeling.  You kind of get so attached to the work that it's sometimes hard to imagine NOT working on it anymore, and yet on the other hand it can also be a relief to not have to tinker with it any more.  I guess it depends upon the project, and for me specifically it tends to be about how long the project has been sitting in the computer, waiting for completion.

I will say up front that the "jazz machine" album has been the most satisfying and fun album that I've ever worked on.  This is partly due to some of the albums that I've recorded being complete disasters, though.  For example, the still officially unreleased "...Opsimath" album nearly killed me and even though I need to get back to doing more tinkering on that one, I shudder at the mere thought.  The recording of TFTO versus "jazz machine" have been pretty much night and day.  It occurred to me this weekend that recording didn't really become anywhere near "fun" until about 2012 when things started making more sense, I felt more confident about what I was doing, and so on.  Recording is a lot trickier than one would initially think.  It seems from afar that it would be all about the technical aspects; in reality, it's much more about the practical, although the technical certainly weighs in there as well.  It's more about HOW to put an album together versus the act of physically doing it.  You can physically record all you want and in the most perfect manner possible but if you don't know how to put the songs together on an album, you're still left with something not that great that barely resembles what we think of as "songs".  That's just one of the lessons I had to learn the hard way and very few articles about recording ever seem to address.  I believe it's basically putting your music producer's hat on...or finding one for yourself.

I'd say I'm about 2 weeks out from an official first listen of the album straight through.  I got a ton of odds and ends done this weekend which left me feeling very confident about meeting my August 8th deadline.  Then, upon re-listening to "Tonight, You Reached Me", I finally realized that the drum just isn't working and needs to be scrapped/redone.  This isn't a total shock to me but I guess I've been slightly in denial of it.  It's one of those weird things that each time I hear the track, initially I can't get my ear to follow the drum correctly with the rest of the music.  Then, if I listen to it a second or third time, it sounds more normal and so I blow it off, thinking it was just me the first time around.  Last night, though, it hit me that I simply need to fix it.  It's not the end of the world and I spent about an hour investigating it late last night but any time I'm working with drum patterns I get a little nervous since they tend to be the most resource intensive parts.

Other than that, I'm really liking what I've got on this record and once completely done, it'll be a bit sad to say goodbye to it.  The good news, though, is that the next one is already in progress in my head.  Funny how that is.

Getting Close

 I had a pretty productive weekend despite the distraction of Wimbledon.  It did help a bit that it was Djokovic in the Men's Final, someone that I don't have quite as much interest in watching win yet another major title, so I certainly wasn't glued to the television.

I dare say that the "jazz machine" album is getting really close at this point.  You'll notice I'm still putting that name in quotes and it's basically because I'm still toying with other names (I've got about 10 of them at this point).  My biggest task between last weekend and this weekend was to get the drums nailed down for the song "I Can't Bear to Look In Your Eyes", the last track I really have to work on, and I clocked in at least 8+ hours on that very task last weekend.  I did a bit more tweaking this weekend but probably only clocked another hour or so specifically on the drums.  9 hours on getting an EZDrummer track nailed down is anything but, well, "easy", as they say.

"...Can't Bear..." remained my focus this weekend, though, and I finally got around to flushing out the bridge portion which is basically a completely different minute and half of music wedged in between the two main parts of the track.  I'm pretty pleased with the result, and I even got to add acoustic guitar to it using the new Breedlove C25/W which is slowly but surely sounding a bit better after hanging out in a humidified room for 2+ weeks.  The song is really starting to take shape and it's clocking in right around 7 minutes total.

My official/unofficial personal "deadline", or 'year of working on it' marker for the "jazz machine" album, is August 7th.  At this point, I actually think I may make it and be done with the album since it leaves me about 4 more weekends total.  If I don't make it, it'll be extremely close either way and I guess it's not really something to kill myself over.  My real point was that I wanted to prove to myself that I COULD actually get an entire album written/recorded, etc., within one year's worth of time.  I've said it a thousand times but I'm pretty sure that, if I didn't have to work full time for a living, I could get most of my albums done within 1 month...but alas that's not my reality.

I'm entertaining the idea of revisiting my "Foreshadowing" instrumental album post this work being done.  "Foreshadowing" was the album that I started working on in 2000 right after "Lost Weekend" and simply abandoned because, like most things that I started back then, it was just a tad too ambitious at the time.  I definitely have the technology to work on it now so that may just become my next target project.  It would be great for that one to finally see the light of day since I think there's some really interesting experimental pieces on there.

I also listened to an episode of WTF with Danny Elfman about a week ago and was shocked to hear that he and I have more in common than I knew.  He mentioned how the worst thing in the world to him was playing the same song every night in his band Oingo Boingo, and that he basically can't even play the same songs over and over.  I've been saying this forever myself and it would drive me nuts when the band's I was in would want to rehearse the same song over and over.  It never failed but I would almost always play it worse and worse every time and it was never intentional.  I don't have ADD or anything like that but I just can't do things in this manner and it just bores my beyond words.  I can't even imagine being someone like Tom Petty who was basically forced to play the same 12 hits night after night, year after year.  It just sounds like pure torture me.

I'm slowly but surely getting closer to that "first listen" of the "jazz machine" album all the way through, from start to finish, burned onto a CD and played on my stereo system.  I can't deny that I'm incredibly curious to hear it and quite excited to share it with others.  I'm hoping it's my best work to date but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Them "Fuses..."

 I'm happy to report that I've been relatively productive thus far this weekend.  I have a long list of small tasks to accomplish on the "jazz machine" recording and I'm simply making my way down the list little by little.  The list entails tasks such as trying out small guitar parts, keyboard bits, momentary effects, drum beats, and so on.

One of the tasks was to record a sound sample from a film for a small bridge segment in the track "(He Was) Some Kind of a Man".  This is the only song on this album that has film samples on it, and it both begins and ends with one.  I knew I wanted to add something during a short break around the bridge section and I'd been putting it off since I wasn't exactly sure what sample I would actually want to use.

So, here's a great example how recording can become a whole different art form.  The first thing I did was grab the DVD of "Touch of Evil", plug in some speakers to my laptop, and then fast forward the film to the portion where Dennis Weaver is the Mirador Motel Night Manager.  Now, the first time I saw this film, these scenes completely boggled my mind for they are so completely outrageous that you simply don't know what the hell to make of them the first time 'round.  Then, after seeing the film a few times, these scenes quickly became for me the most classic comedic film scenes, all while not necessarily trying to be funny.  If you've seen the film, I think you know what I mean.

I narrowed the segments that I intended to use down to one short segment with Janet Leigh talking through the wall to some unknown person and then one rather long part that lasted nearly 8 minutes between Heston and Weaver.  I chose this latter one because it had some great lines from Weaver but also didn't have any background music in it, which I was saddened to see that most of Weaver's lines did have some supposed motel music going on in the background which would have been rather distracting, I think, hence I avoided those.  Next, I put my AT 4050 next to my computer speakers, pressed play and record, and simply recorded the whole segment into Pro Tools without having a clue of what I would use.  Then, I literally spent over 2 hours filtering through the dialog.  I basically cut the segments up in multiple ways, moved them around, pasted them together, and so on, and in the end created a simple Weaver/Leigh short no more than 10 second conversation for the bridge.  Yes, that's right - over 2 hours worth of work for merely 10 seconds of audio.  And, that's recording for ya, folks.  I will say, though, that every time I hear it, it simply makes me laugh out loud so hopefully it's worth it.

I also received the Breedlove C25.  The action is not what I was expecting so I'm a bit disappointed initially.  The guitar looks stunning but the top is rather dark, sometimes suggesting that it's been dried out (which is bad), and so I'm not sure what my intentions are with it as of yet.  I need to restring it and such and see what I think.  I have a feeling I'll be taking it in for a complete setup before I really know what state its in.  One never knows what they're getting when buying used acoustics.

Keep Your Mouth Shut

 I should apparently never make a comment like "...provided disaster doesn't happen...".  Besides the first week of June, the rest of the month became a complete wash due to some personal things that came up that wiped out all productivity.  I actually didn't even pick up a guitar for 3 weeks.  If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I've apparently gotten much better at the instrument for I can attest that 10 years ago, had I not played for 3 weeks, I pretty much wouldn't be able to play at all and it would have taken me more than a month to get back to sounding semi-decent.  These days I still sound pretty good overall even after not touching the instrument for 3 whole weeks.  I mean, wow.

I'm hoping to once again have a productive next couple of days.  It's a bit challenging with Wimbledon going on but I'll do my best to balance it.  Few people know this but I actually got into tennis due to recording since I used to always record over long holiday weekends, and most televised tennis tournaments take place on those weekends.  I'd take a break from recording, put the TV on, and then get sucked into 30 minutes of a match.  It was always a great distraction.

I also just pulled the trigger on yet another Breedlove C25, circa 2005-ish?  The person selling it was wanting to get rid of it asap and offered it to me at a price I simply couldn't refuse.  I have absolutely no need, room, etc. for this instrument, and it's not even the model I was looking for.  Sigh.  I get the feeling that I'm going to be doing a lot of buying and selling over the next couple of years, all in search of the perfect acoustic arsenal.

Speaking of, the guitar market is absolutely insane.  I mean, I thought with COVID hitting last year that everybody would be selling amazing instruments at rock bottom prices.  It's been the polar opposite overall with people jacking up prices to unbelievable amounts.  It used to be very rare that I'd see a guitar for sale for $4995; these days, I frequently see guitars for sale for $12995, and even weirder they sell right away.

Well, that's enough rambling for now.  Here's to a pleasant holiday weekend!