Of course, it would figure that now would be when Avid/Digidesign finally releases a version of Pro Tools (8.0.4)  that officially supports 64-bit Windows 7!  I’d been dual-booting back and forth, depending on the song, between the version (3.0.1) that was stable in 32-bit XP (which worked quite well, save for the songs with so many plugins that I would run out of RAM and Windows would crash), and the version (3.0.3 with beta 3.0.4 hardware drivers) that “mostly” worked okay in Win7x64, but would randomly freeze up on me, requiring a reboot.  Either option was a compromise at some level: limited RAM vs. instability. I’ve only done a couple of hours of work so far in the new version, but I’ve had no problems with it yet!  That’s a very good sign. It looks like Windows is still an important platform to Avid after all.

But the good news is that it’s looking more and more like this album is approaching “done”, and whatever changes I have left to make, I’ll be able to do them with far less drama (read: crashes) than before. This album would probably have been done months ago if the 64-bit Win7 support were out much sooner.

I got a chance to meet Pete and the guys several years ago at Saratoga Winners when a friend of mine brought me along when he was working as a roadie.  I think it was for the World Coming Down tour, maybe 1999.  I remember Pete carrying in some pumpkins for the stage, 2 large ones, one in each hand, in front of his chest.  As he walked in, he said something to the effect of “Ya like my new implants?”

A few years ago, I recorded an acoustic version of one of my favorite Type O Negative songs, “Die With Me”.  Give it a listen:

http://tinyurl.com/y6w67fc

RIP, Pete. And thanks for all the music.

Now I just need to come up with a name.  Two actually – one for the album and maybe even one for the “band”…  Any ideas?

In other news, I’m looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of Pro Tools that includes actual support for Windows 7 (maybe it’ll run without crashing every 20 minutes!), but that’s gonna have to wait ’til I finish this album since it also drops support for my MBox!  Not cool.  The preamps in that thing sound pretty good and I’m not happy about the prospect of an otherwise perfectly good piece of hardware becoming obsolete just like that.  But I suppose that’s how things work in this world, unfortunately.

I looked at this as a setback for a few days, wallowing in self-pity about how I’ll never finish this album at this rate, blah blah blah, but then I realized this was a good opportunity. Since I started in earnest on this album of mine just about a year ago (eek), I’ve been neglecting writing and working on new songs for the most part. (I wrote a few tunes on vacations, but that’s not as much as I’d like.) So I started working on some demos for songs I wrote over the summer, and on Sunday I even wrote a new one. With my computer out of commission from some driver issues (again), I busted out my trusty iPhone and the 4-Track app and laid down some ideas.  That’s one of the most useful apps I’ve ever downloaded (if only the metronome would work from anywhere but the beginning of the song…), and with an iTunes gift card I had lying around, I still haven’t paid a single cent for an app for my phone.  I imported the tracks into Pro Tools and whipped up a quick drum part in BFD and added some bass and electric guitar and now I’ve got a shiny new demo to listen to and try to come up with lyrics for.  Good times.

I also came to the decision that, while the samples I’m using for a few horn parts in some of the songs (Garritan Personal Orchestra) sound decent, they’re not as good as I’d like.  So I set out to find a good horn player to play them for me.  I’ve got a few leads, but if anyone out there knows someone who can play trumpet, and maybe trombone and french horn as well, hit me up.  If you’re gonna do something, do it right, right?

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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)!