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?
Now THIS app is very cool: Air Sharing. With it, you can now access (add, delete, open) files on your iPhone from your computer, over the air. It’s free for the next 2 weeks or so, so get it now, or pay for it later.
I just tested it out from my Vista pc and it works really well. I dragged some mp3s, a pdf, a quicktime .mov, and a .wmv file from windows to the shared folder on the phone using windows explorer and they copied very quickly (I’m online on the phone via wifi). The mp3s and the pdf opened and/or played (as appropriate) from the phone. The .mov file curiously played back the audio with a stutter and didn’t show the video. Maybe it was the file? The .wmv didn’t play, so the phone is only good for storing and transporting those, not playing them. The app supports a folder structure, which is nice for organizing stuff. You can also access the files on the phone from a web browser, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to add/remove them that way, just to view them.
You can’t touch or see the iPhone’s internal file structure, mind you, this just creates a shared folder on your phone, a little sandbox. But that sandbox will be very handy for transporting files. If only Apple allowed you to delete music files directly from the phone to make space when you needed it…
You can only access the files on your phone from your PC when you are actively running the app on the phone, which makes sense as per Apple’s “nothing runs in the background” rule.
There is a neat use of this which I could see being very helpful. Here’s a possible scenario:
Say you’re out on the road and a friend wants to send you an MP3 of a cool new song (or a spreadsheet or word doc or whatever) he’s working on. Sure, he could email the file to you, and you could play/open it over the air via gmail or something, but now, you open the app, he could just use the “Public” folder that the app lets you use (you can also disable it), and he can drag and drop the file right onto your phone from his computer. Windows or Mac.
There’s a better write-up here on lifehacker if you want to see pictures and stuff.
This little phone keeps getting more and more useful. Hopefully Apple won’t break this with the next update.
On Sunday, I was down in Manhattan at Threshold Studios tracking drums with Mike Maenza and Tom Sposato. Between them, we got 5 more songs’ drum parts recorded. So that takes the tally up to 6 songs done now on drums: half way there!
Threshold is the studio where The X’s (Maenza’s old band) recorded their (awesome) album a couple years back. Random tangent: For what it’s worth, I always dug Fuel and Brett’s voice singing with them, but I think the stuff he did with the X’s tops it in a lot of ways. I was pretty surprised they didn’t take off more than they did. Part of the draw was John Law’s songwriting (I think he was the main writer), but each of those guys definitely contributed in a big way to their sound. It’s too bad they didn’t stick around longer. Luckily, John’s new project Statues of Liberty is still rockin’ out (when he’s not on Fuse TV)! And Brett got a really sweet gig singing with the freaking Doors, so he’s still doing real well, too. So anyway, on Sunday, we worked with Alan at Threshold (who, it turns out, is a fellow Five Towns College alum) and the tracks sound great.
It was really cool jamming with Tom again, too. It’d been a long time since we recorded together; I think the last time was like 12 years ago or so! He’s still got a great feel. One of the songs he played on was that old State of Nowhere tune “Too Many Reasons”. SON released a pretty rough acoustic demo I did of the song at Five Towns as a student in some spare time, but this is the first time the song will sound close to the way we used to play it live, since we never did it in the studio.
One of the other drummers I was hoping to have on the record has unfortunately dropped off due to scheduling conflicts. So I’ll have to pick someone else (or more likely two someone elses) to cover those songs. Back to the drawing board there!
Oh, and no trip to NYC would be complete without getting at least a little bit lost. I’m not sure how, but after the session, I wound up getting on the A train going north instead of south when I was trying to get from the studio back to Penn Station to then go back up to Albany on Amtrak! I had a LOT of trouble finding the stupid subway entrance that would bring me back south, so I just wound up walking back to 42nd from 50th and trying again! Talk about frustrating. And people on the sidewalks in NYC walk way too slowly. They’re buildings, people; stop gawking and keep walking!!
I’m not exactly sure what this Google Gears thing is yet, but I do know that I can now “search” through my MySpace inbox thanks to it, and that is VERY awesome. Would’ve been nice if MySpace built that in, but hey. That’ll save a LOT of time next time I go look for “that email from that band who wanted to set up that show”…
In related news, I also installed the new browser “Google Chrome” today. So far, I like it, though I noticed a few problems already:
Since it’s still in Beta, I’m hopeful those bugs and others will be fixed soon. But, some things I do like about it:
Overall, it’s no Firefox 3 yet (which I quite like), but it’s definitely a contender. I’d choose it over IE7 any day already, and probably IE8, from what little I’ve seen of that so far. (I also just downloaded that today.) Though, that being said, I do wish there was an “IE Tab” type plugin for it, as some sites do still “require” IE, unfortunately.
A couple months ago, Valerie Webb (from the band Venomentality) contacted us (The Velmas) with an idea. She’s putting together a portfolio for college (she’s only 16!) next year, and in general is trying new things and experimenting with her music. She had this song called “All While Laughing” that she had recorded a quick acoustic demo for, and she wanted us to arrange it as we saw fit. Then we’d record it in the studio as her backing band. She sent us the tune, and we quite liked what we heard.
So, a rehearsal and a month or so later, this past Saturday we headed down to Coxsackie, NY (what a great name for a town, eh?) and laid down some tracks at Easter Island Studios with Chris Fisher. Bruce and Fig rocked out their parts in no time, and then left the rest of the session to me and Val to finish up with Chris (who, incidentally, used to be in Conehead Buddha). I did my guitar part, and Val did her guitar part. She sang the lead vocals and I sang the harmonies I came up with. We left with a really good-sounding rough mix. Can’t wait to hear the final mix Chris comes up with. The guy’s got a great ear and is super-fast in the studio (and I mean that in a good way).
Token photo:
The Velmas with Valerie Webb outside Easter Island Studios