Category: Music

Recording an LP!

Today Josiah and I started recording for Deliver Me Seven‘s first LP!

It’s a lot of fun. We’re recording at Summit View Studios, which has a very state-of-the-art setup and knowledgable engineers that make it easier to just do yo’ thang.

I haven’t done much studio work before, and I am realizing that I have to adjust a lot in both my playing style and my approach to performing a song. Most of my experience is in either playing live or playing along to a track that already has a drum part. Now I need to get used to playing to a click and not making ANY mistakes.

We’re doing this totally independently right now, from recording to production to distribution. It’s going to be an interesting journey from start to finish… Let’s see where it goes!

iAm aSucker.

Last week, Apple announced the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the phone. It still has Wi-Fi internet, so as long as you’re in a hotspot, you can browse and stuff.

I ordered it the day it was announced – $399 for 16GB (I sold my fifth-gen one on eBay, so don’t think that I just waste tons on iPods nonstop). They kept it with flash instead of the hard drive that I was hoping for. At first I was worried about it and considered going for the comparatively lame hard-drive model, but then I sorted my iTunes library by date last played, and found out that I’ve listened to like 10GB worth of music since about….May. So I went ahead and made the order thinking that I could keep the rest of my ~50GB collection on my laptop.

In the week after I pre-ordered the iPod Touch, I realized that there was little difference between the $399 iPod Touch and the $399 iPhone. (the Touch has 8GB more storage, the iPhone…. um, has a phone.)  I’d been planning on picking up a smartphone from Verizon in six months or so when they give me a discount, but I got down to thinking about saving more in the long run by just going with the iPhone.

So I did that. I bought myself an 8GB iPhone yesterday.  It lives up to all of the hype – it’s friggin’ awesome.

Most of all, I got it for the mobile internet- both WiFi (without having to lug my laptop) and over CingularAT&T’s painfully slow EDGE network. The $50 a month I was paying just for voice simply wasn’t worth it to me – and now I pay $60, and it includes unlimited data usage (Verizon is about $80 for the same thing).

So overall, it’s awesome, except for a couple of tiny details:

  • E-mail not instant- it aggregates every 15 minutes. Yahoo does “push” e-mail to iPhone, so I might set up a dummy forwarder to the iPhone from my other e-mail accounts
  • 8 gigs is 10% of my last iPod’s capacity. It is already full. And it’s painful.
  • AT&T’s network coverage in Colorado isn’t as good as Verizon’s. This will make or break it for me as to whether or not I keep the iPhone or get a Treo or something through Verizon. I don’t talk a ton, but if it becomes too much of a hassle anytime in the next month, I’ll return the iPhone and get the phoneless Touch instead.

Chances are 80% that I’ll keep it. We’ll see.

Fall 07

So I’m almost done with the first week of school. I’m taking some good classes (Networks/Operating Systems, Database Management Systems, Business Management) and some not so fun ones (Accounting, Statistics). Not a bad combination overall.

One thing I’m liking is my schedule – last year, I had class all day for two or three days a week from 8 to 4 or so. On the days I didn’t have class, I had work all day. It wasn’t pretty. This year, My classes are spread out to a few each day, and I work the lunch shift six days a week (including Saturday). This means that on most days, I can be home by 2:30 or 3:00 if I want to be.

I have run into a few friends from the dorms. It’s nice seeing them – everyone leaves town for the summer – but I still miss my friends in Arizona most, despite the fact that I’ve been here for over a year now. I have learned that I am very good at wearing both the introvert and extrovert hats, but that I am happier when I’m around people that I can be myself around. Up here, aside from my folks, I don’t really have that.

In other news, I passed my audition into the music minor program at CSU. I can’t take anything this semester, but it means that I’ll be able to take the piano and theory classes I’ve been wanting to take. I am very rusty on some things (namely marimba) but this isn’t a super-serious thing, just something I want to do on the side.

Ratdog at Red Rocks

I’m back stateside!

Last night I saw Ratdog at Red Rocks. It was a great show! Their lead guitarist has throat cancer, which is unfortunate, but Steve Kimock is taking his place for a little while on the tour, which is great for a Kimock nerd like myself.

I also got to break in my new(ish) Canon. Part of the reason I got it was to improve my photos at dark concerts, which usually are so bad that I don’t even bother taking a camera along. This one has a lot more manual control, which is helpful since the automatic point-and-shoot stuff tries to take pictures with super-low shutter speeds that don’t work in a low-light venue. I could definitely get better pictures with a DSLR with an expensive lens, but for the money and time put into learning some settings, I’m pretty happy with what I got here – I fired off 455 shots and got 115 or so that I liked.

You can view the Picasa Web Album of the very best ones here. Or, if you want to see all 108 that I like, click here. They’re still noisy and a bit blurry, but I’m happy just to have the ability to take decent photos at a great show!

Studio Fun

A few weeks ago, I went to a Dave Weckl drumming clinic. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say, but one thing I noticed was how he does almost all of his session work by playing along to pre-made tracks. Usually the recording workflow works the other way around, laying down drums first or second, but since this guy is one of the most in-demand studio drummers in the country, they record the rest of the track and e-mail the files to his home studio, where he records his part.

Personally, I learned to play drums by listening to and playing along with CDs. It’s definitely a good way to get up and going, since a pre-recorded band isn’t going to be mad that you’re a bad drummer, but as you get better, it does less for you; there is little room for creative expression, no interaction with other musicians, and no potential for disaster if you don’t keep good tempo.

So I decided to start messing around with some backing tracks of my own, sans-drums. That would open the possibility to work my creative muscles, which are honestly several steps behind my technical abilities.

fl-studio.jpg

So I bought FL Studio 7 Producer Edition, a professional digital audio workstation. It has everything I should need to record, notate, synthesize, or generate any kind of music. It’s very powerful and expandable, so if I later decide to build a more complete home studio with mics and stuff, I will have that ability.

I chose FL Studio (previously known as Fruity Loops) over some much more expensive competitors, like Cakewalk SONAR and Sony ACID Pro. The truth is, FL Studio is just as robust, but at a fraction of the price, and the developer actually seems human. For example, my purchase entitles me to free updates for life. It’s a per-user license as well, so if I want to install it on another computer of mine (gasp!) it’s fine. There’s an active forum community, flash video tutorials, and over 2GB of audio samples available for download.

There is a steep learning curve with any of this software – I have a lot of work cut out for me before I can even complete my first real song. It’s slow, but interesting, so I enjoy it. Once I figure it out, I might share some of it here.

Ubuntu Studio

If you use a computer for audio, image, or video editing tasks, you might want to take a look at a new Operating System distribution called Ubuntu Studio.

Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio - Ardour
Ubuntu Studio is based on Ubuntu, a great new Linux operating system designed to be usable by people who don’t speak in computer code or live in their mothers’ basements. It includes powerful open source alternatives to many industry standard programs like Photoshop, Pro Tools, and Adobe Premiere.

Oh, and the best part is that it’s free. Free as in beer, and free as in freedom.

I’m downloading it now, and I’ll write up a review if I find it particularly interesting.

Finally Acoustic

I got my acoustic Ludwigs set up today. I haven’t had an acoustic kit available at home in almost four years, so I’m pretty darned excited. I got a lot more drumming done in the last two years that I’ve had the electric V-Drums, which were just awesome to have in the dorms. But I’ve been learning jazz like crazy recently, and electric drums just don’t cut it for the articulation I need.

I’ve forgotten how loud the buggers are, but at the end of the summer I’ll have a room that I can insulate. It’s also good that I’m in a freestanding house, something my drums haven’t had since early 2002.

I need new cymbals and a good snare, but I have more pertinent expenses (like food and school) so they will have to wait.

Playing double bass drum is way easier on my acoustic drums. I started learning double bass on my electric kit, which had almost zero rebound. Now it’s bouncier, so I have a lot more consistency with my left foot. I have some practice to go, but I think that I’m about ten practice hours from some mean Rodney Holmes drum licks.

Turns out that Dave Weckl is doing a drum workshop in Fort Collins next week. A couple of months ago I went to one with John Riley, another jazz great. I don’t have the faintest idea why they come to Fort Collins – there is literally no major music scene up here – but I’ll take what I can get!

A Pleasant Surprise

So a little while back, EMI and Apple announced the rollout of DRM-free songs on the iTunes Store. This means complete customer freedom to actually use their music in the way that they want- choose their music playback software, MP3 player, back it up, play it on another device, without any restrictions treating the customer like a criminal.

EMI is one of the “big four” music labels – it owns a large percentage of the record labels out there. This means that a major percentage of songs on the iTunes Store (and, presumably, others) will be DRM Free. Some of the major artists signed to the EMI label include The Beatles, James Brown, Elvis Presley, Pink Floyd, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, and Garth Brooks.

But the really exciting thing I just remembered is the labels owned by EMI Christian Music Group:

  • Forefront Records (dc Talk, tobyMac, Audio Adrenalinie)
  • Gotee Records (4th Avenue Jones, John Reuben, Relient K)
  • Sparrow Records (David Crowder Band, Newsboys, Switchfoot pre-Columbia)
  • Tooth & Nail Records (Emery, MxPx, Showbread) includes sub-labels:
    • BEC Recordings (O.C. Supertones, KJ-52)
    • Solid State Records (Haste the Day, He Is Legend, Norma Jean)

So basically almost all of the good, progressive and actually creative Christian artists will now be sold DRM-free. EMI Christian CDs for a while came with a really paranoid message:

This recording and artwork are protected by copyright law. Using Internet services to distribute copyrighted music, giving away illegal copies of discs or lending discs to others for them to copy is illegal and does not support those involved in making this piece of music – especially the artist. By carrying out any of these actions it has the same effect as stealing music.

This message really turned me off. I had just gone to a store, plopped down upwards of $20 for an album that I wanted – instead of getting it on any number of illegal filesharing networks where it is easily available – taken off the shrink wrap, put the CD in, and felt good about supporting creative music. Then I get confronted with a message that guilts me for something I didn’t do.

So I decided not to support those labels as long as they treated their customers like criminals. But now that their parent company is going DRM-free, I can now support them again.

My wallet is in trouble.