Was Incase reading my mind, or perhaps my blog?  I just caught this in my iGoogle Engadget feed:  http://goincase.com/products/detail/EC20003/5

All four corners protected?  Check.

Extends battery life more than double?  Check.

Isn’t completely fugly?  Check.

Lets you charge and sync via standard mini-USB port?  Check.

Next Friday, I’ma be all over this, barring any terrible reviews or completely ridiculous pricing.  It does look a little thick in some of the photos, but maybe that’ll be ok…

Or, more precisely, what its case didn’t prevent the ground from doing to my phone:

It didn’t get destroyed or anything, and is still perfectly functional, but it’s now got some more personality.  So maybe the case did protect it a little. Still looking for a good leather or neoprene replacement that covers all 4 corners of this thing…

(This is a followup to this post.)

Over the last few days, I’ve been putting together some more of the final drum comps so I can get to work on the bass guitar, and then the rest of the instruments for those songs.  Since we kept 3 or 4 full runs through each song, I had a lot of options, which is good, but also a bit overwhelming.

A few of the songs had one complete take that was just what I wanted, while a few others had parts of different takes that I liked.  So I’ve been going through those songs section by section (and sometimes fill by fill), picking and choosing my favorite parts and building the “final” drum arrangements.

“Too Many Reasons” was pretty much good as is, so I laid down the bass guitar for that on Saturday.  That was the other song (besides “Florida”) for which I hadn’t done a “full” demo beforehand, so I spent some time playing around trying to come up with a good bass line for it.  That’s the fun stuff for me, coming up with the arrangement and working out guitar parts and all that.  For the other songs, it’s gonna be more of a paint-by-numbers, since I did a lot of the exploration already in the demos along the way.  But maybe I’ll change up some things as I go, too.

So this morning is cold and rainy.  I was running in from my car, and out from my hoodie pocket tumbles… yep, my iPhone.

Now, when I got my phone back in July, I made sure to pick up a good case for it, since I’m prone to dropping my phones.  I had an Incase case for my last phone (a vx8300), and it was great.  It did its job of protecting the phone when it fell from my hands, off my desk, out of my car, wherever.

However, this time around, the story is different.  When I got the case, I was a bit wary that it left the top corners of the phone exposed, but figured that most of the phone is still protected at least. What were the odds that of all the ways a phone can fall, it’d fall on its two Achilles Heels?  Every time.

I don’t yet have a photo of the damage done to my phone, but I’ll get that up later today.  Suffice it to say for now that there are two relatively large gouges on each exposed section.  Perhaps that end of the phone is slightly heavier, minutely toying with the likelihoods. The phone still works just fine, but looks worse for the wear.  Luckily, the camera area wasn’t affected.  The funny thing is that the bottom corners of the case don’t seem to have even touched the ground.  It’s not that the case protected it, it’s just that the phone doesn’t even seem to ever fall on that side!  (Though I guess it did protect a little, since the phone also skidded across the wet concrete after the fall, and the back would have been torn up quite a bit from that.  But still.)

I’m now in the market for a new case.  I otherwise like the form and materials in the Incase case, but there’s no good reason why they couldn’t have extended the material another centimeter or so.  Any suggestions?

*Edit*  I posted photos of the damage here.

This has been happening the last few days or week maybe that I’ve noticed.  When I open the App Store on my phone, I immediately get prompted for my iTunes password.  I used to only have to enter it when I wanted to download a new app or update.  Does that happen for everyone now?

On another note, I miss the “Install all updates” thing.  It’s sort of a pain to have to manually install each update one at a time.

So, I’ve been trying to figure out how I’m gonna do the guitars for this here thing.  Ideally, I’d record a mic’d up amp for all the guitars.  Unfortunately, that also means having space for an amp and a mic stand to be set up for an extended period of time for consistent sounds between takes (which might be days or weeks apart at this rate!).  I don’t really have all that much space here in my little home studio, sadly.

I’ve been using Amplitube for my demos, and the sounds I’ve been getting are actually pretty decent.  I really love the flexibility that using an amp emulator gives.  You can record the guitar part now, and deal with the tone/sound later.  And no worrying that someone (or some cat, in my case) will move the mic between takes and change the sound on you.  But I’m still not 100% convinced that the tones possible through software are quite as good/believable as a nice tube amp and a 57.

I did recently see that Motley Crue’s whole new album was recorded with Eleven, a new guitar emulator from Digi, so that makes me think I could go that route…  I’d like to avoid having to re-re-record the guitars (having already recorded them once for the demos), but I might have to try it out on a song or two and see how it works with the real drums.

Anyone have any thoughts/recommendations?  Amplitube?  Amp Farm?  Eleven?  Guitar Rig?  Something else?

This is quite exciting.  I’ve now got all but two songs’ drum tracks recorded for the new album.  I went back down to Easter Island Studios in Coxsackie, NY (what a great town name!) on Sunday.  Rick Little (the drummer for Split 2nd Alibi) played on “Drive Me”, “Status Quo”, and “Without You”.  Chris Fisher (from Conehead Buddha and Brian Kaplan Band) pulled double duty, both engineering the session and also playing drums on “Sometimes”.  They both laid down some really great takes, and we got some really great sounds.  (Really.)

With Chris’ help, even though we kept 3-5 takes per song, I did leave the studio with one “good” take already established for each song.  Once we were sure a take was most likely gonna be the “keeper”, we concentrated on punching in when needed on that take right there on the spot.  That’ll save me a lot of time (and sanity) as I start mixing and working with these sessions down the road.

One drummer and two songs to go!  Still haven’t been able to get our schedules to line up to rehearse, but that’ll happen soon I hope.

Over the weekend I was able to get a bass guitar part tracked for “Fish in the Sea”.  I also spent a little more time setting up mixes for each song I have begun so far, so the drums sound decent now, at least for working with them as I continue on this mad journey.

I’ve been trying to decide what sort of drum sound I want on this album, so I’ve been listening to a few things as references for when it’s time for the “final” mix (which is quite far away at this point!). It’s a little premature at this point, but I do like the drum sound on the new Death Cab album.  Live-sounding, yet produced at the same time.

I finally got a chance last night to go through the drum sessions from NYC the other week and give them a listen.  When we were at the studio, we kept between 3 and 6 takes for each song.  For some songs, we tried a couple different tempos, and for others, Mike or Tom played a section here or there slightly differently, and I didn’t want to spend the time figuring out which version was better (studio time ain’t cheap!), so we just kept them all.  Now I’m starting to really wish I’d made some notes that day.  It’s pretty daunting to work through each song to try to find the “best” takes or sections of takes.  So I decided to just pick a song and start with that one.  Gotta break the big problem down into parts to get through it, right?  So I began on “Fish in the Sea” first. I also started mixing the drums and got a decent-sounding drum mix to start out with.

Of course, before I went to bed, I decided to schedule a chkdsk on each of my computer’s hard drives, just since I haven’t done that in a while and I’ve been moving a lot of files around.  There are 3 drives that I’m using, all said, and they total about 2TB combined.  That’s about 2000GB, for the uninitiated.  It’s been running about 20 hours, and it’s still not done yet.  That’s insane.  I wanted to work on the song more tonight, but it’s not looking good at this point…  And I just read that it’s bad to stop the chkdsk while it’s running, lest data corruption occur.  So it looks like there won’t be much done tonight after all!

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*EDIT* - The chkdsk took about 30 hours, all said.  I think the problem was that I had my 1TB drive hooked up via USB2.0 instead of eSATA.  Too bad you can’t “remove hardware” on eSATA!

So, I just upgraded to iTunes 8, and when I plugged in my iPhone afterward, the normal “AutoPlay” popup popped up…  Except with a bunch of crazy Asian characters in the device name that I’m assuming are Japanese, but who knows?  What’s up with that?