Tuesday, November 30, 2021

The Parade Goes On

It's been awhile since I've made a post, mainly because I simply took a much needed break from everything.  I was more or less planning on working on new music last week during my Thanksgiving break but it never really happened, partially due to exhaustion and also in part because I inadvertently messed up my EZDrummer 2 program on my Mac which required reaching out to tech support and what not.  I may write up a separate post just on remedying that, just in case anyone else ever has the same issue and somehow stumbles upon my blog.

I need to get my head back into mixing as well.  I've just more or less ducked out lately, trying to gather my thoughts and such.  The only thing I did manage last week was playing around with yet another jazz based cover tune that I had in my head.  I like what I have so we'll see where it goes from here.

In other news, it looks like I might be making a necessary change to "I Miss You Most at Nighttime" that's a bit out of my control.  It's rather unfortunate but it's my own naive idiocy that got me into this so, like most things, I simply need to dig my way out of it as quickly and efficiently as possible.  This is going to bump back the release date for the CD version, though, which is rather unfortunate.  The good news is that it is able to be fixed and it's just a matter of figuring out what to do and then ultimately take care of it.  It's really a drag, though, since I had just finished putting the artwork together and was ready to submit it.  I guess it's better to have it caught now versus later, though.

That's really all the news I've got.  I finally received my new Danelectro Back Talk pedal in the mail yesterday which has been on backorder for months.  I'll be plugging it in tonight to see what it can do.

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Peeking My Head Out Again

I'm finally peeking my head out again after releasing the "I Miss You Most at Nighttime" album on 10/26.  Let's just say that I'm a bit underwhelmed by the downloads and sales, enough so that it made me a bit on the depressed side.  It hurts a bit more considering that I think this is probably the best thing I've recorded yet.  The comments I have received have been very positive, though, so that's at least something.  It's just been rather hard to be motivated to start working on the next Jazz Machine album when this one's not exactly tearing up the charts and doesn't seem to be on most people's radar.

Nevertheless, I'm almost over it (keyword = "almost").  I have a week off coming up during Thanksgiving and I'm hoping to be over it enough to be fairly productive.  In short, I can't really afford to NOT be productive since I have so little time off to work on these things so I'm doing what I can to shake things off.

I've also begun playing around with the "Mirror Land" EP mixes.  Strangely, the new upgraded recording gear threw off 90% of my levels in the existing mixes so I'm kind of starting over now.  This was an unexpected side effect of the upgrade, mind you, but I'm dealing with it thus far.  The new system also changed the tone of vocals only, for some odd reason, and I can't quite get my head around that one as of yet or figure out why it occurred.  I hadn't really planned on anything of the sort.

I have my work cut out for me for the remainder of the year, though, with mixing, a bit of band-aid recording, and then staring to flesh out the new Jazz Machine tracks which are almost all written in rough form in my head already.  I also still need to complete the digipack layout for the "I Miss You Most at Nighttime" CD version which I've just not had the heart to work on over the past 2+ weeks.  Alas, it just needs to be done so...