I just recorded a Michael Jackson tribute

by mike ~ June 26, 2009

I just put together this Michael Jackson tribute. It’s an acoustic cover of Thriller, with some self-recorded backing vocals:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyA-80k9lAQ&fmt=18

Check it out and let me know what you think! RIP, MJ!

Update

by mike ~ June 25, 2009

Quick update.  I’ve found myself using Twitter (which in turn updates my Facebook page) a whole lot lately, as it’s easier to write a 140-character “what I’m working on now” update than to write a full blog entry.  And more people tend to read Twitter and Facebook than my blog here.  But to recap, for those not on Twitter or whatever, I’m still working on this solo album!  I’ve got guitars recorded for just about 10 of the 12 songs now, and then it’s on to vocals from there. Still hoping to get this thing done and released before the end of ‘09.

For the computer/recording geeks, I wound up setting up a dual-boot system on my PC, since Pro Tools is just not stable enough yet on 64-bit Windows 7.  I couldn’t handle the instability and the pops and clicks.  So I’m now using 32-bit XP for Pro Tools again and 64-bit Win7 for everything else, and it’s working out pretty good for me.  Only issue I’m having with XP is that it doesn’t seem to recognize more than 2.99GB of the 9GB of RAM installed now, and I use that up pretty quickly in some of these sessions with lots of plug-ins.  But for tracking, I just disable some of them and get by.  I haven’t even come close to maxing out the processing power, which is great. Official 64-bit PT support can’t come soon enough!

Guitars, guitars, and more guitars. And computers.

by mike ~ May 16, 2009

Over the last two weeks, I’ve recorded the guitars for just about half the songs for the new album.  It’s quite the process.  I’d done fairly fully-fleshed out demos for most of these songs, and so started out the “real” versions by importing the demo parts as a road map once the drums were tracked.  So all I needed to do was to re-record each part in place, like color-by-number for some of them.  But as I’m going, I’m coming up with some new ideas and changing things around, so it’s still quite the creative process.

That is, when my computer is working right…  I’d have a lot more done by now if I wasn’t spending half my time troubleshooting computer issues.  Pro Tools ran great on Windows Vista 32-bit, but I needed more than 3.2GB of ram for some of these sessions.  (32-bit operating systems only let you access between 3 and 4GB of ram…)  So, I’ve been running Windows 7 64-bit.   Win7 is running awesome for the most part, and I quite like the way it works, but Pro Tools doesn’t officially support 64-bit operating systems, so it’s been an experiment, to say the least.

For example, a few times now I’ve recorded a guitar part and gotten it just right, but then on listening back, I found pops and clicks in the audio, so I had to redo it.  Or I’d be adjusting an edit, and PT would just stop responding, forcing me to restart it and wait several minutes as it re-loads the session.  Or I’d change the hardware buffer size and PT would just crash and take down Windows with a BSOD in the process.  That’s always fun.

Somehow though, through it all, I’m still making progress.  I recorded 6 electric guitar tracks and 11 acoustic guitar tracks for a song called “The Words” tonight and yesterday.  I used two mics on the acoustic for each part (a 414 and a 57), so there are actually 28 guitar tracks in this song currently.  I’m gonna have to figure out a way to whittle those down, though; I think I might have done too much this time around.  But it is much easier to remove tracks than to record more later, so away I went!

I’m still optimistic, and listening to the new mixes as I get more and more parts recorded is still a thrill.  And yes, part of me is wondering if getting a Mac would make this go much more smoothly…  I feel dirty.

Back in the saddle

by mike ~ April 22, 2009

I finally got my Pro Tools setup stable on the new computer and got some work done on the solo album over the last couple of days.  I decided to start with the guitars in “Everything’s Fine”.  I re-recorded over the imported demo tracks (which were time-shifted as I imported them to fit the song’s new tempo) and added another track to beef it up a bit.

Multitasking as ever, between takes I watched an interview with Butch Vig where he showed some of the techniques that went into recording Nirvana’s Nevermind.  I’d been meaning to find that stuff for a long time and it was awesome to hear some of the tracks from that album soloed to hear the pieces that came together to make that amazing album.  I’d also love to find out more details like how they mic’d up the guitars, what settings they used, etc., but who knows if that’s available…

(As a side note, it’s really hard to explain the feeling I get when I hear that stuff from Nevermind…  “Amazing ” doesn’t even come close.  I think this tweet was well-phrased:

this must be what it feels like to go to church for some people: http://tinyurl.com/c65jpx

It’s definitely a natural high that’s hard to reproduce otherwise.  Nearly 20 years later, that music hasn’t lost any of its effect on me.)

Anyway, after watching that, I listened again to the guitars I’d recorded so far for Everything’s Fine (even though the song is nothing like Drain You, but still), and decided I needed to add some more guitar tracks.  So I might add one or two more to see how that sounds.  The more the merrier!

After that, next up is to redo the lead slide guitar stuff I did. That’ll be a bit harder as I haven’t touched my slide since I recorded these demos and I’ll have to re-learn the parts as I go.  But it’s coming together finally and it’s a real relief to be making progress again.  Maybe I’ll shoot some video of me doing the slide stuff so you guys can hear a little bit of this tune I’m talking about.

New twitter name

by mike ~ April 17, 2009

Just in case anyone was following me, I decided to change my twitter name.  It’s now mgrosshandler.  That’s all.

This is not good.

by mike ~ March 26, 2009

For those of you wondering why I haven’t posted about my progress on the new album lately…  I decided to get a new computer recently.  The one I had was pretty fast, but not quite powerful enough to do everything I wanted to do on my songs.  So I got a newer, faster one.

I’m not sure what happened exactly, but at some point the other day, it died.  I was installing photoshop, and it died. Something about the MBR.  Not only did Windows crap the bed, but it somehow took out my data drive.  What’s that mean?   It means that the work I’ve been doing on my album since early February is apparently *gone*.  Early Feb. was the last time I made a backup of my files, like an idiot.

Luckily, I hadn’t done any new recording the last few weeks; I’d just been consolidating my demo guitar/vocal/keyboard tracks and adding those to the “real” sessions so I’d have a roadmap to finish it more quickly.   But now it looks like I’ll have to do all of that over again, unless one of these data recovery programs I’m finding online can help me fix this.  I really hope I’d finished all the bass guitar tracks before that last backup… Oh boy.

I also lost 2 new Hairband Fistfight episodes that I hadn’t yet edited or backed up.  And I just formatted my camera’s memory card like 3 days ago, so there goes that thought.

Current mood: morose

*edited to add*

Ok, so a lot can happen in 4 hours.  In the most recent 4 hours since I posted this depressing entry, I found a few data recovery programs online, and one in particular (the 3rd one I tried) seems to actually be working and is recovering everything I needed!  This is absolutely amazing.  “GetDataBack for NTFS” saved my sanity.

Thanks, Metroland Readers!

by mike ~ March 5, 2009

http://metroland.net/features.html

The readers of Metroland, the venerable arts paper of the Capital Region, have voted:

Best Local Solo Musician:  Mike Grosshandler
Best Local Rock Band:  The Velmas (second place)

Thanks to everyone who voted!  Hope to see lots of you out at Sage College on 3/27 4/24 (new date)!

Experiencing technical problems

by mike ~ March 3, 2009

On Friday, I thought it was a good time to finally upgrade Pro Tools from 7.4 to 8.0.  8 has some cool new plug-ins and it seemed like as good a time as any to go for it.  Or so I thought.  I haven’t been able to get any work done since Friday.

Upgrading PT broke my amp emulator plug-ins  (Amplitube2, Ampeg SVX Uno) and a synth that I might use (Analog Factory).  It also forced me to upgrade Auto Tune (not free…) since the version I was using (4) was finally not supported any more by PT.  Gotta love forced paid upgrades.  It still isn’t working, but at least Digi’s tech support is trying to help me figure it out.

And no, Seth, I’m not going Mac to fix this. 

Finally have the drums all recorded

by mike ~ January 19, 2009

Went back down to Chris Fisher’s studio in Coxsackie on Sunday, this time to track drums with John Brodeur for the last two songs for this album.  I always enjoyed John’s songwriting and singing with his various bands (The Suggestions, Maggie Mayday, Hector On Stilts, Five Alpha Beatdown, etc.), but then I found out he plays drums too, and quite well at that!  Somehow with his playing in about 900 bands, he was up for helping me out with a couple tunes on drums.  We had one quick rehearsal this fall to go over the two songs he played on – “The Words” and “Everything’s Fine”.  After finally getting our schedules to line up again, all of the drum tracks for my CD are now recorded.

We were a little bit late to start the session.  Who wants to get up early on a Sunday, right?  But just as we finished setting up the mics and getting sounds, the power went out.  Just like that.  I guess a transformer down the street blew.  Luckily, Chris had just saved the settings before we lost juice.  We waited around a little bit, hoping it would come back on soon.  A while later, he went out to the garage and came back with a generator.  The session was saved!  Or so we thought.  All that gear draws a lot of power, and apparently 5000 watts wasn’t quite enough.  So we tried shutting off all the unessential pieces, but it still wasn’t quite cutting it.  Chris had another backup plan though; he had another generator he could borrow.  He set that one up, and we were good to go.  I forget the exact timeline, but it seemed like just as we got settled in with that, the power came back on.  Gotta love it.

This is a big landmark in recording this solo project.  Now the only person I’m waiting on is myself.  The pressure is on!  I’ve got to comp these 2 new songs of drums, then record 3 more songs on bass, and then I begin guitars.

And I still haven’t decided whether or not to throw in a cover tune to complicate matters more…

Phil Taylor guest vocals and a couple new songs

by mike ~ January 12, 2009

This past weekend was a whirlwind of productivity!  My buddy Phil Taylor (from Future Leaders of the World/Machina) was going to be around upstate NY for a few weeks.  I asked if he’d be up for lending his vocals to a song for my upcoming CD.  I thought he’d sound great on “Status Quo”, so I sent him the tune and he dug it.  We spent the weekend recording and working on a couple new songs, too.  The guy’s got a really powerful voice, and I’m psyched about how great these tracks came out.  He sang the harmonies on Status Quo and came up with a few new parts of his own.  We worked pretty late into the night Saturday night and called it quits around 3 or so.

At around 11 Sunday I got up and listened back to the tracks we did the night before.  Stuff sounded great.  I picked up my guitar and was working out parts for a new song.  I had a verse and a chorus written and was trying out an idea for a bridge.  Phil woke up and came into the room and said “What was that you’re playing?  Play that again.”  I told him it was a bridge for a new song I was working on.  He told me he thought it’d make a good verse instead.  He then proceeded to sing a real cool vocal line over that, and a new song was born!  He picked up a guitar and came up with a prechorus and chorus pretty much on the spot.  He even had some of the first verse lyrics written within a few minutes.  We spent the afternoon finishing the lyrics together and arranging it, and then got to recording it.  We didn’t finish until just about 5:15am.  Phil’s vocals are done, and he wrote a guitar solo, too.  Now I’ve got to write a bass part, sing the harmonies, and add a few more guitar tracks to finish it up.