New Endeavors

I'm moving on, as they say, although no major milestone has yet to be turned over.  I actually took the last week more or less off from musical adventures since I think I needed a break.  We're also finishing up some of our house updates and I allowed myself to focus on that solely rather than polluting my brain with mixes.  I also recently got a semi-promotion at work and I'm onboarding two new contractors.  The task of onboarding is fine but I was given very little direction so there's tons of note taking, emailing, meetings, escalating, and all the while trying to do the job I used to do.  In short, it's exhausting so I'm near collapsing at the end of my shift and the idea of trying to be creative seems completely ludicrous.

I did have my second Skype meeting with MWP (Marty Willson-Piper) today and it went extremely well.  I think we have a plan, which is fantastic, and a very workable plan it is.  I'm terribly excited about the possibilities.  I also reached out to two other pro level musicians from bands that I grew up listening to and have huge respect for in hopes of collaborating on some level.  I'm feeling good about the direction overall and I think it'll kick things up a notch or two for me in general.

I'm also intending to start posting band ads locally to see if I can get something started.  I've been toying with a couple of band ideas for quite some time and I think now might be the right moment to start dabbling.  More to come on this in the future.  I can only imagine that finding the right members will take quite a bit of work but fingers crossed.

Lastly, I think the time might soon be approaching to consider starting an actual website once again, this time done "correctly", and if so, this blog will most likely be moving to that site.  I don't want to jump the gun but I do foresee that happening in the next 6 months or so.  Merch may also be on the near horizon shortly.

I'm Moving in Stereo

I'm sort of watching the US Open Men's Final as I type this but only slightly.  I'm interested; I just can't seem to keep my focus this US Open period.  I guess I just have too much on my mind in general.

Yesterday ended up being quite a fluke for me.  I did manage to finish up my redo's on "Interstate Blind" which came out nicely, I think, but in the process I managed to hurt my ears and had to stop all work because of it.  It's taken almost 24 hours for my ears to calm down.  Dumb me for forgetting to put in my ear plugs when I was testing out my larger amps.  Just plain dumb and not advisable.  I simply must be more careful in the future.

It's been a decent week off and I did make some rewarding progress but it didn't really come in the form of actual recording, unfortunately.  I spent the beginning of the week mainly focused on mixes and particularly the issues I've been having with my mixes.  I do believe I made some breakthroughs but it's not quite all the way to my satisfaction, as of yet.

Also, I found that the internet database info for the "...Miss You Most..." CD is a bit messed up and I had to send an email to find out how to correct it.  It seems whomever entered the info online both misspelled my name as well as called the album "I Miss You...", literally with the '...', like they were too lazy to type it all in.  Nice, huh?  Yeah, don't get me started.  I believe it's a simple fix but I'll have to wait to hear what the deal is.

And so, on to speaker-land...  As previously stated, I purchased a Denon DRA-800H receiver so that I could have the USB input on it which is what I was after so I could easily try out mixes without burning them always to CD.  I made the mistake (or good fortune) to also purchase new speakers, the first set being Polk R500's.  They felt really small sounding to me, and even after buying a subwoofer (which I'm pretty much deeply against having), the overall sound just wasn't what I was looking for.  They did, however, show a ton of the blemishes in my mixes surprisingly.  Wow!  And so, I then purchased Klipsch RP 8000-F's which are flat out enormous and heavier than you could ever imagine and returned the Polk's.  The Klipsch sound big, full, and are the most critical sounding speakers I've ever experienced, meaning not only do my mixes sound harsh and exposed of every issue but so do all actual professional CD's.  I mean, it's completely bizarre!  It made me wonder why anyone would want speakers to sound like this.  Are we trying to ruin music in general?  However, I also learned that if I can make my mixes sound good on these critical speakers they'll probably sound good anywhere, no?  They are huge, though, and I must say that I don't really enjoy listening to music on them so they're not exactly ideal.  Hmm.

Thus, speaker set #3 enters the picture.  I know, this is getting absurd, right?  I am now trying out Polk R600's which are the bigger brother to the previous Polk's that I tried.  These actually sound pretty good to me but my problem with them is that they don't actually accentuate mix issues like the Klipsch.  I would much prefer to listen to music on these, however, so I have a bit of a dilemma here that I'm not entirely sure yet on what I'm going to do.

To make things even more complex, I just happened to stumble upon a  receiver by a brand called Outlaw Audio that seemed right up my alley since I'm rather old school in my thinking.  This is on its way now and I'll have to reevaluate everything once it arrives.  It's just about the only receiver I have found that will allow you to run an outboard EQ through it (I guess this is considered taboo these days) and it also doesn't require the USB port to be searching for a WIFI connection, of which this 'feature' actually caused the Denon to need a complete reset just last week which frankly scared me.  It also wasted 30 minutes of my time that day, trying to diagnose the problem.

Now, I am proudly not a so called "audiophile".  In fact, I think the whole thing is a bit on the silly side and meant for people with simply way too much money.  It does seem, though, that the audiophile logic is that they want mixes to sound critical and a bit harsh, supposedly exactly like they originally sounded (which I do question that thinking, to be honest).  Older speakers ala the 80's and 90's were designed to smooth things out and accentuate certain aspects of mixes, thus making them sound better on particular systems.  It's just another example of how I don't understand modern thinking and/or technology, and why anyone would want to make albums deliberately sound worse is simply beyond my thinking.  Albeit, it may help me in mixing, so...

Coupled with all of this, it dawned on me that I really need to investigate just getting better studio monitors, of which I did actually do.  I purchased the Focal Trio6's at a decent price but unfortunately the person who I bought them from didn't package them well, and so one of the speaker cabs has a few issues in terms of scratching, etc.  I have found the monitors to be a major step upward, though, and coupled with some of the work I've done on bass and drums in general over the past 2 weeks, I do attribute them to bringing my mixing skills hopefully to a new and better level.  The whole goal, after all, is to get music done, from start to finish, in a much quicker and more reasonable fashion.  Hopefully, I'm starting to go down the right path.

So, there you have it.  A lot of useless info, no less, but these have been my recent adventures in so called "Hi-Fi".  Now, back to the match...

Back to the "Old"

It's an interesting activity to do, going over your old half done recordings and such.  I always play this guessing game where I try desperately to remember approximately what year I started a recording and which iteration of gear it was done on.  Some of these tracks have been transferred from system to system a couple of times. Due to my memory not being what it was, I usually can't really pinpoint the origination of a particular track anymore.

I will say this...  It's about 100x easier to record electronic music versus mic'ing guitar cabinets and such.  I mean, it's night and day.  I spent a good couple of hours this week going over my electronic based "album" and/or fake band name "The Caution Children" material and was shocked by how good the quality is.  Why?  Well, it's all simply a keyboard plugged directly into a recording device.  Even with it being transferred over multiple times from system to system, it really does hold quite well.  If I was to listen to an old guitar based recording, which I often do, mind you, I usually cry slightly into my drink and write down in my notes something like "re-record all the guitars for they sound beyond belief awful."  What's the moral to the story?  Electronic music is fairly simple to put together in comparison.

Now, having said that, I must say that there's a fun to electronic based music that you just don't get in guitar based work.  I view the two different styles in completely separate veins, and things that I get from guitar based work I don't really get it from crafting electronic based tracks, and vice versa.  They more or less fill two different holes within me.  I think the quiet decision to finally reopen the vault on the Caution Children album is perhaps a good one since it seems to warrant some immediate rewards, especially since it does in fact cater to a completely different part of me.  It also kick starts me back into actually putting music together again versus just mixing and other technical BS.

Getting back to the actual tracks that I listened to, I was amazed by how little seems to fall into the "re-record" category, even vocal-wise.  Now, having said that, most of these tracks are not complete by any means but the core of the song is there so I can make a fairly good judgement on it.  I only have half an album right now, though, with two more songs that I originally wrote back in the dark ages that may or may not actually see the light of day.  I simply need to play around with them and see how I feel today.  I did come up with the basis for a brand new song just last week so I probably now have 6 out of 10 total.  Oh, and did I mention that I wrote the original group of songs for this back in 1993-94?  Yes, no joke.  That's how old we're talking on this one.

A bit to my surprise, it's now September and time that I have a serious talk with myself since the year is slowly slipping away.  What do I want to get accomplished before the year ends?  Well, the "Mirror Land" EP needs to be released, no debating that one.  I'm also working daily right now on the "Lost Weekend" remixes which are coming along but have a ways to go.  I'm still arguing over how much I should consider actually rerecording on that one, that's a bit of an internal struggle for me, to be honest.  I have a feeling I'm going to lean towards the rerecording of certain tracks but it probably depends how they sound overall after I tinker with them.

And so, I still anticipate the EP coming out, hopefully fairly soon, and then the "Lost Weekend" remix before the end of the year.  Can anything else get done?  I think I can make some decent headway on the Caution Children album but then there's the "Wrecking Ball" album which also should get completed really no later than within the next 6-8 months.  And, let's not forget "Defrost Nixon" and the new Jazz Machine.  Like I said, I have some decisions to make clearly for I'll be lucky if only one of these can also get squeezed in.

That's my rambling for this morning.  I'll be posting about my adventures in speaker and monitor land over the next few days.  That's been a trip unto itself.

Crazy Done

And so, the 'deed' is done...  I now have my first real live officially printed CD in hand.  I received them a little over a week ago and, much to my surprise, the packaging inside and out looked pretty spot on.  Apparently, I had a lot of worries for nothing about the packaging, although I'll still say openly that the proofs looked a bit off but evidently that's just how they process the files.  My only complaint, if any, is that the cellophane overwrap is a bit strange feeling and not the usual that you'd expect on a CD but that's a pretty minor and nearly irrelevant thing, at least in my case.

The bad news is that no sooner did I receive the CD's but I noticed yet another strange anomaly in the mix itself.  Sigh.  I've also been working fairly hard over the past 2-3 weeks trying to learn more about mixing bass, definitely my weakest point in my mixes, and I've already moved on far from the "...Miss You Most..." mix, knowing that it's fairly flawed in those areas.  It is what it is, at this point, and there's no going back now.

Now, I knew all of this going into it for it's just part of the 'process'.  That was partially the idea of even doing the "...Miss You Most..." album, to literally go through the entire process, start to finish, from writing songs to recording to arranging to mixing to designing the artwork, etc., and know full well going into it that at times you're going to fall flat on your face.  I guess this is what we call learning.  I knew there would be issues so I'm not exactly shocked by it but I won't deny that it does annoy me that I learned of this latest mix issue at this point, even when I had an additional 7 months of listening to the CD to find it.  It's just funny how that kind of thing happens.

And so, now, I have literally a few hundred CD's lying in my bedroom with no home for them to go to.  It's okay for all I'll probably just hand them out at random to people, again, partially my intent from the beginning.  Meanwhile, I'm still working on the "Mirror Land" mixes and trying to apply some of these new techniques that I've been reading about.  So far it's going well, actually, and most of the EP is sounding pretty good at this point although a few more minor tweaks still need to be applied.  I absolutely DO need to get this wrapped up fairly soon or else I'll probably go completely mad.  It's just not normal to take this long to mix 3 songs.

More adventures in hi-fi coming soon.  I'm off all this week so I'll probably be making a few updates in order to share various details, such as all that I'm learning about speakers.  Who knew speakers were so complicated?!