It’s very easy to hide where it’s comfortable. And there, absorbing the familiar, you will lose yourself. What wonderful medicine it is. It can make you creative in ways you never thought possible. You can now easily excuse inaction. You transform yourself into a thesaurus for the cowardly. Your imagination and memory can perform impressive gymnastics. Your perception is contorted into that of a victim, shy one villain. It takes courage to use this one life to follow your heart. Some of us could have used a dress rehearsal. I’ll do it later, when I have time. I’m not in the right place, financially. Once I get all this paperwork off my desk. Once my social and love lives are in order. It’s my resolution for the New Year. Soon enough, the milestones turn into gibberish. I’ll do it when I get my new piece of software. I can’t live without that. Once I’ve paid the vet bill. When I finish with this DVD box set. I’ll get to it. It’ll be my resolution next year. Eventually it will become “I had a dream once.” And questioned, I cringe at the thought of the dance that will follow. Clever (judgment-proof) misdirection as it may be to demonize someone or something, the aces have long since slipped out of your sleeve. There’s nothing to show and no one to blame. You’re left to your own reminiscence, embellishing and volunteering the tale to anyone who will listen. I had a bucket full of aces once. Those were the days. Expect much sympathy.

Those were not the days. Those days are now, and they are not them. It’s not that it doesn’t feel great to sit in an armchair and watch the world through a window, conjuring up card tricks. The trouble is, it feels great. Your hair is dry, your face and clothes are clean, your skin is smooth, your body is warm. You don’t ache. There are no scars, bumps, bruises, blemishes to speak of. In fact you’re devoid of texture, as if you came from somewhere without weather. Like the shrink wrap is still on and by now you’re much too terrified to remove it. This chair is so comfy.

Why continue in the second person? I imagine I’m not the only one, but there are days where I notice myself trying to shrink. Like a dark corner where nobody can see or hear me is paradise. Fuck that. When my natural instincts try to tell me to avoid the high dive. When my body is reminding me that even if I had the courage to jump, I’ll still land in the deep end. When my breathing gets shallow at the thought of climbing, jumping, landing, breaking, drowning. Of meeting a demise far less pitiful than the one described above, but every bit as horrifying. Hopefully then, paralyzed by fear, I’ll remember — I can swim.

With each conversion this video got darker and darker, so it’s near impossible to see. I’m also a horrible drummer … but the pads sound and feel pretty good. I tried Addictive and BFD2 today. I’ll compare to Ocean Way tomorrow. I also want to set it up for some of my Battery and Sampletank kits. The Twisted kit in EZDrummer might be fun to mess around with here too.

Alesis Trigger|iO Test

For a few Nural demos a couple years ago, I wanted to mess around with a set of V-Drums to trigger some of my sample libraries in Nuendo. We didn’t really have the time or patience to get it right. Also, a decent set of electronic drums has been pretty expensive. I found a trigger interface that is specifically for controlling external modules, so it ends up being way cheaper and (hopefully) cleaner.

For some upcoming demos of my own, I’m going to experiment getting this set to “play” as real as possible, and hopefully be able to make it part of my normal demo process. Though I love miking up an acoustic drum set, but for demos I don’t want to take the time for it — I end up losing the mood. I’m hoping this will give me a good middle ground where I can set up and get great drum sounds in way less time, and keep the expression of a real drummer that’s lost when programming or finger-drumming.

Everything in the box

A little bit of progress

Alesis Trigger|iO, drums pads, Surge Cymbals

Had a project on the back burner, a four-song mix project for Lansdowne.  They’re a straight up rock band from Boston, MA.  The band makes no excuses, and I’m not making any excuses for this mix.  It’s fucking loud and in your face.

Lansdowne

I finished the last two songs over the last couple of days.  One song in particular was a challenge because of how small and intimate it starts, only to end in a massive way.  Now I’m going back and fixing a few things, and the band and I will start to make sure each song is how we intended for it to sound.  Afterwards I’ll master the tracks and put a nice little bow on this project.

... almost

There are so many different elements and textures to this project, so it’s cool to see it coming together and feel like an album.  I’m doing a lot to make each song feel individual, and I’m also doing a lot to make sure this feels sort of like a live set.  I’ll likely finish early next week with the remaining two.  Leaving “Aspen” for last and I can’t wait to get to it.

In a good groove with the mix as of now.  One of the tracks was closer to jazz than rock, so I had to do a few things different.  Little more of the room made it into the mix, though it was compressed a little less.  The other track is up tempo, and I experimented with some subharmonics plugins on the kick and bass. It ended up being pretty cool.  Halfway done with the whole album now, will try and get through two more tomorrow.

Mixed a couple more songs today and yesterday.  Every song is proving challenging because of the number of elements involved in each section.  And each element needs to sound interesting, but also complement the song.  Usually I would just bury what’s not important, or even cut it.  I’m really loving everything I used the Royer on.  Very little EQing.  Also glad I used three room mics on the drums.  I’m slamming the center channel and I bring it into the mix slightly every once in awhile.  It helps the snare out a bunch.

Mixing au naturale and it’s been a long time. What you hear will be what the band played — how they played it.

Back at home base.

Album: tracked. We spent all of Sunday watching football and tying up every loose end we could find. Then creating more, then tying them. Other than a couple solo horn parts, we had to get down nearly all of the horns. We tracked all three live. Another high point of the day was tracking “Whiskey” start to finish. We started with the vocals and worked backwards. Jon, Brandon, Dave and Dusty tracked at the same time which was fun. There ended up being quite a few interesting textures in this song.

The rest is on me. I’m going to give my ears a day or two before I pull these up at home to start mixing.

Whiskey

Doo-wop

percussion party

Fin.