Entries Tagged 'News' ↓

I had signed up to do the RPM Challenge, which is essentially the NaNoWriMo of songwriting, during the month of February. However, due to my February starting off with some very weird, busy times, I ended up starting really late. The goal is to do 10 songs or 35 minutes in 28 days, and I just started yesterday.

Anyway, I’m not gonna hold myself to finishing, but I’m going to try, because working on music always makes me feel better, and I’ve needed some “feel better” activities this month. So I’m just going to post all my finished songs up here, in addition to at the RPM Challenge site.

The next post will be the first song I finished today, “In the Cellar”… I’m trying to do these fast, so I’ve done minimal mixing/editing, so it’s rough draft/demo quality, which is sort of fun sometimes. However many I finish by the end of the month, I’ll package them up as an EP ZIP file and put it up on the Music page.

Last night I finished my contribution to the Suburban Sprawl Holiday Compilation for 2009, which should be out in a week or so, I’m told.

The recording started off pretty strong, as we laid down drums and bass on the same day, and it was sounding pretty nice. Then I discovered the snare drum was clipping when I got home. Not having the time (or desire) to reorganize the recording session, I “solved” the issue by snipping out the bits of the snare wave that were clipping. They were tiny tiny amounts, and it’s almost imperceptible that I did anything. Sort of saved the track too.

Overall, I think it’s a solid tune, but my recording and mixing could’ve been better. At my current sound engineering skill level, I’d probably have needed to start re-recording stuff in order to get the sound I had in my head, but at a certain point I figured, hey, it’s a Christmas song for fun… why should I stress over every last detail? So I called it “done” at around 8pm last night.

It was a fun project, though it was somewhat difficult to come up with something appropriately holiday themed. The song ended up being called “I Want Christmas All Year Long (Not Six Months Only)”, and is sort of a sarcastic statement about wanting Christmas to start earlier in the year than it already does. Check it out at the Suburban Sprawl Holiday Compilation website next week!

Just a quick note to those paying attention — I’ve been working on an EP called “How Does It Know?” with my friend John Krohn up in Lansing since 12/29/07. We record like once a quarter (or so it seems), and my progress on finishing has been incredibly slow. In between sessions, there was a lot of writing and figuring and arranging. This is the longest I’ve worked on a project, and now that it’s so far into it, I want to make sure it’s really good so as to warrant the amount of time I spent on it.

Anyway, at this point, we’ve got all drums, bass, organ, piano, saxophone, guitar (though there might a bit more of that) done, and we’ve got lead vocal done on 5 out of 6 songs… The sixth song is missing lyrics still, and it’s been stumping me for a long time. Love the song, don’t know what to sing. These days I’m trying to finish writing all the vocal harmonies so I can get those recorded when John gets back from tour with his band, Frontier Ruckus.

I did declare at first session this year that this was the year I’d finish this record. Better get to work. But it will be finished, if not released this year. It’s going to be awesome.

I have no idea what I need or want. Anyone have any insight on this? Anyone listen to enough of my stuff and know enough about distortion pedals to do a quickie set-up of me with a distortion pedal? Let me know!* I don’t have a ton of time to try out a ton of them. I wish I could just have a bunch of them in my home to try at my leisure, sort of a pedal buffet where after I try some of the food, I regurgitate the stuff I didn’t like and get my money back. Something like that.

*Perhaps what I’m looking for really is an overdrive pedal? Again, I have no idea.

Ok. So I did some stuff. Totally boring stuff, but I think it’s good now. I changed up the Links at the top to make them make more sense (I think). I took away the link to How Does It Know? because I haven’t written there in several months. Not sure what to do with that blog, but I might just use that URL now to promote my upcoming EP, How Does It Know?.

Also, I’m pretty sure I’m done screwing around with colors. I just made everything the same color as the big text and lines and think that was a good choice. I’m not sure why I chose pink originally, but I did, and I’ve been wanting to get rid of the pink for a while. Mission accomplished.

The Music page is reorganized, and you can actually just get the songs directly from there.

In the sidebar, I added some more links I like, and got rid of the Blip.fm widget. I kind of stopped using Blip, and it kept showing my last listened to song as “Owner of a Lonely Heart”.

Ok. Come back soon for a new song (it’s sounding pretty awesome so far). I’m off to enjoy the rest of this beautiful day.

I just learned how to make a grid pattern (to emulate graph paper, which I actually drew my last header on) in Photoshop. I think it looks pretty good. Anyway, I’m done with that for now. Just as a reminder, if it’s not obvious that this is an improvement, here’s the old header.

OK! That’s all for now. Hope to have a new song up within a week, if I can get over to Dan’s sometime and record the drums.

I’ll be messing with the header in the next few days… The wonderful Angela Duncan drew up a new header that is way better than anything I did prior to now. I’ll be messing with the colors. Also considering a slight facelift in terms colors all over the site. Not sure yet!

That’s all. Carry on.

This week, as I work on code for my job throughout the evenings, I’ve also been using Blip.fm to listen to music. It’s a pretty cool little service in the vein of Twitter, only for music. You can have your “blips” (i.e. songs you listen to/add to a running playlist you’re creating, which other people can see and give you “props” on if they enjoy your selection) fed directly into your Twitter too, but I didn’t feel like cluttering up my Twitter feed with blips. Anyway, check out my playlist so far if you want to listen to some music, and if you like what I’m spinning, add me as a favorite.

EDIT: in an effort to totally overwhelm viewers of this site with information in the right hand side column, I added a little Blip.fm feed widget that looks like this:

Click any of the songs and you can listen to it via Blip.fm.