LOTR Fans Outraged at New Character in The Return of the King

Heh heh.

Interesting week:

(1) Upgraded to Acid 4.0 - mixed feelings about it. Same price for an upgrade as for retail new box. I finally went for it (new box) - soft synth support was key, as were the 7 free loop disks it came with. Loop disks are a bit dated, but useable, some soft synths don't work well in Acid - notably Steinberg's Model-E (a virtual mini-moog). But, along with item (2) below, I got enough inspiration from the new features to move 3 songs forward - "Ps. 63", "Beloved", and "Praise the Lord, Sons and Daughters";

(2) Bought some deep discount loop disks, notably a Celtic loop disk from USB Soundscan, but a few more, too. The deal with these old loops though is that they're in audio format, and/or not timed to an even beat - this latter throws Acid for a "loop" (haha) - it can't calculate the tempo. Tempo is usually documented, though, and some editing will fix it. Still, not seamless the way the newer loops are;

(3) Met with Fred Friday night to go over stuff - he hasn't been happy with the band's progress and direction, though he says he likes MY stuff. I talked up the group a bit, went into some of my theories involving interpersonal vector dynamics (if I'm pulling northwest and you're pulling northeast, then the thing we're pulling will move north - something like what we were each pulling for, but just different enough to have a group "flavor" to it). We went over some musical ideas, he seemed okay by the end;

(4) Rehearsed Saturday (rescheduled due to Super Bowl), Dan was out sick, but we went over some stuff anyhow - I was the "bass player". Got a demo of mountain/forest/home (or Time is Time, as originally named - m/f/h is my set of lyrics for it) recorded for Fred, and Fred did Ps. 130 with us for the first time - really nice feel. then we started messing around - found out Luke does a dead-on Joe Cocker impression. So we tried digging up a Beatles song Cocker hadn't already done, tried "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey" first, then "Come Together" - pretty cool. Come Together segues right into "The Letter", too, so we bounced back and forth awhile doing that. Luke says he can't really play and sing at the same time though. Fred and Dan both play a bit of drums, so maybe Luke could go out front for a few? Also talked over "Bipolar" with Carl - Fred liked parts, and didn't like parts - so we're streamlining the song a bit and pulling out the rhythm punches (ripped from the Who's version of "Summertime Blues") and working them into their own piece - see #5. Lotsa beer down the gullet, too;

(5) Worked this week on "Bad Girls Found Out" lyrics - still rough, but coming together. This is based on Carl's lick (but no longer matches the Who riff), and lyrically based on the old Mae West quote: There's no such thing as good girls gone bad, only bad girls found out." Should be fun!

Five Faves of the Day

This is tough, cos I like ALL of them, just about. But here it is:

Five Favorite Music Movies
5. Round Midnight
4. Mr. Holland's Opus
3. Stop Making Sense
2. The Last Waltz
1. This Is Spinal Tap

Five Faves of the Day

I posted about dark happy beat songs before, but the happy happy songs need equal time, I think:

Happy-Beat Happy Songs
5. Suffragette City - Bowie
4. Stand - R.E.M.
3. Back in Love Again - LTD
2. Funky Nassau - Beginning of the End*
1. Walking on Sunshine - Katrina and the Waves

* - Had to look this one up for the artist. Had NO IDEA it was in Blues Brothers 2000 - almost makes me want to watch it, despite what I've heard. I DID know about the French techno cover of it, though. Jury's still out on techno, for me...

Finally got to put my Zero-G Development - Brutal Beats samples to work on Ps. 130 - nice feel to them, though I kept in some of the techno stuff too. Essentially, there will be two drummers on this song. I like the feel.

Sadly, some of the more interesting sonic mayhem on Brutal is not available in all the permutations of a given beat. So the headbangers' ball setting, and the jet-airplane's-about-to-run-you-over setting of the loop group I was using were pretty much unusable - different enough from the stock mix and the overcompressed mix to not mix well with them, and not interesting enough to be used as the only source(s) for the whole tune.

There's also this thing with mistuned cymbals - or maybe they're two different cymbals, but the second only exists in one pattern. I decided to ignore the diff and use both anyway.

Also had some fun with freebie bass patterns - dig deep enough, you'll always find something! In this case, it was two patterns - one of which played D-E-A-B in just the right rhythm. So I split it in half, put the last half first (A-B-D-E, if you're following along), then cut the first note, put it on a separate track, and dropped it a minor 3rd (F#-B-D-E) - sounds like it was made for it. And for the opening part I actually found exactly what I was looking for - bassist playing an mid-A and a high E together.

Guitar loops were fun too - I didn't expect to get this far last night. But the Magix $5 loop disk saves the day again, with its building block style loops. Had to re-EQ the annoyingly trebly Telecaster loop, but the the crunch power rhythm loop was perfect just as it was. Played a bit with the dynamics, and voila - ready for porting to Cubase!

I was so geeked at getting the work done that fast, I went and added a bass guitar part to my "Praise the Lord, Sons and Daughters" piece. It already had a sub-bass part, but I thought it needed a real bass, too. Spend some time with 5-string bass hits (Magix, too? I forget), kinda cool how they came out. Sort of a rubber-band thing, where the sub-bass notes are cut real short, and the higher bass guitar note extends a bit. I was going to cut the bass guitar notes shorter, but I think I like this effect. Hope to listen again tonight or tomorrow to make sure.

Rehearsal was pretty good. Went over some of the same stuff, but added a new (well, 1998, but new to US) one of mine, based on Ps. 130. Luke brought his family by, that was nice.

Rehearsal was okay last week, and we finally got a practice CD out of it. Pretty rough, but some shining moments. Carl played with the endings a little in post-production (it's just a practice thing, so that's a misleading term, I suppose), some cool ideas there. Rehearsal again tomorrow! I'm ready!

Computer Music is just the coolest mag! Best part of it is the CD full of software that comes with it - yoiu can build a whole PC studio with the software.

The mag is not well known in the US - Border's Books imports it and sells it at a pretty hefty markup (not a slam on Border's - I'm sure it's expensive to sell it this way). I bought about 5 issues in a row, then decided to subscribe. Never once regretted it, but now they've stopped their Cubase 5.x tutorials in favor of Cubase SX, which requires an XP upgrade in addition to the Cubase upgrade. And an XP upgrade would cause my version of Encore to stop working, which would require an Encore upgrade...

Five Faves of the Day

Five favorite CDs of 2002

5. Natalia King - Milagro
4. Joshua Redman - Elastic
3. Delbert McClinton - Room to Breathe
2. Angelique Kidjou - Black Ivory Soul
1. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Honorable Mention
Medeski, Martin, and Wood - Uninvisible
Beck - Sea Change
Les McCann - Pump It Up
Shelby Lynne - Love, Shelby
Joshua Redman - Yaya3
Moby - 18

Here's a more or less finished product of Song Eighteen. It's a 7.2mb file, so if you don't have the bandwidth try the lo-fi version instead. It's about 2.4 mb.

We've already established that it's got too much bass and the vocals are too low (thanks to the guys and the occasional gal at the Home Recording BBS). But I'd love it if you'd drop me a note and let me know what you think. Links will go away in a week or two - only so much space at blogspot plus...

Update, eff. 1/31 or so - Hifi link is still there, but points to an improved mix (watch this space for another update - we've retracked the vocal, much more feeling!!!). Lofi link is gone.

Updating my listened-to-list to the right, but nothing much to say here - two canceled band rehearsals in a row.

Finished up my first pass through the studio work on "Song Eighteen". Band is uninvolved in this recording. Singer, my pal Caroline, has great voice, but phrasing was a litle too "square" (am I showing my age or what?). And my background vocs sound lousy. I hope to give Caroline another stab at the song, but overall, I'm pleased with it as it is - just gotta fix my vocs. Sennheiser 421 was brighter than I expected, I may try a 57 instead.

Also installed a second hard drive, an 80gb Western Digital Ultra-ATA 100. Then I moved my audio files and docs. That really hoses up Cubase!!! Learned more about the Audio Pool than I ever wanted to know. Things were worse because my part files all had the same names, they were just kept in different subfolders. Got through it without any permanent damage, though.

My Acid files weren't as fortunate, but the backup versions were retained, so we're okay, I think...