My new project for the summer: learning to count to 10 in (at least) 10 languages. I’m up to 5 so far. English Spanish German French American Sign Language I thought it would be cool, if not useful, to be able to speak even a little bit in more than one or two languages. I took six (seis) years of Spanish in school, so that one was a no-brainer. My cousin and his wife have…
So, the album is coming together nicely. All of the vocals are sung, and I’ve been working on comping them and picking out the best parts. I found a great horn player, Bill Scholl, and we got together a while ago and recorded some ideas for the song “Drive Me”. After listening to the parts we laid down, we decided they might work a little better played less staccato than they were, so we’re getting…
I was making good progress, recording at a (relatively) good pace through the end of the summer. Vocals are done for 7 of the 12 songs, and that’s more than half. But then it went and got cooler outside and I went and caught a cold. I don’t think it was the pig flu or anything, but it knocked me for a loop for a few days and I’m still coughing now, almost two weeks…
I took a couple photos of a beautiful summer sky over a field the other day on my iPhone. I couldn’t quite get the exposure right, though. If I focused on the ground, the sky got blown out, and if I focused on the sky, the ground was very dark. I remembered reading about bracketing though, so I took one of each and followed the instructions here: http://ioncreativity.com/wordpress2/?cat=7 And here’s what I wound up with:…
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…
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…
I’ve been getting these calls a couple times a day. “This is your second and final notice that your automobile warranty is about to expire…” Or some variation on that theme, anyway. I ignored it for a few weeks, but it didn’t stop or even slow down the calls. So yesterday, when I got the call again, I dutifully pressed 1 to speak to an operator. As she started into her fast-paced scripted sales pitch,…
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…
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…
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…
