UM.....I forgot how to type?

So, the pages on my calendar kept flying and i kept thinking of posting and now it is months since my last post. [i don't have a calendar] In this post, I will try the impossible: condensing 3 months of action and inaction into a few paragraphs.

First of all, I did head up to West West Side Music and had the album mastered by one Alan Douches. He's a great mastering engineer with quite a vision of the future. If it was possible for the album to sound more analog, he did it. Really couldn't be happier with the results. Right, right. You might want to judge for yourself. Now you can; hop over to a recent development:

I also put the studio quartet back together for a show at CBGB's 313 Gallery. It was fun and gave me the kick in the pants to finally finish my arrangement of a David Bowie song I had started and avoided. The premier went well, as did the rest of the show. Things are looking good for 06' to see a monthly majnun show. Probably mainly acoustic sets at first.

You would know some of this if you checked my website, which is completely "redid." That was another major project since completing the album, as the original version of the website was, well, quite frankly it was embarrassing. i borrowed a camera and brushed up on my photoshop skills. check it out

wrapping this up: i am making a commitment to post at least once a week. scout's honor. that may mean a few political rants for filler, but at least you'll have something to read.

music hear while typing: NIN-Last.
[a special February cover song project to commemorate Valentine's Day]

it is finished

well, mixed anyway. now on to the final step, mastering. i've picked out the place, just a short train ride upstate. in the meantime, i'm not sure i'm going to be playing any of it until it's completely done. but, i may put together a "greatest hits" clip and post it on the website. give everyone a glimpse into what is surely to become the best rock and roll album of my career to date.

on the last song we did, for 4 bars i drew a comparison to jon bonham. for what it's worth to anyone.....

supremacy concrete

Yesterday was quite a full day. I must have played the same Playstation game for at least 3 or 4 hours throughout the day. Meanwhile, John did some really cool things to the c major songs. To me, they are my meal ticket as they are unabashedly radio friendly. We're super pleased with the drum sounds on them. John feels the snare sound is one of his favorite he has ever done, in the top ten. And he's worked on quite a few albums.

I definitely have some songs to put first on cd's headed for record labels.

Today we have 3 songs left, so we should be in fine shape. The saddest thing is the realization that i will return to work in 2 days. i will try really hard not to quit prematurely. but the minute i get a good offer to play this music...well, they won't even see me leave.

the waiting game

tracking officially ended yesterday. without a second to spare. my voice was tapped. this is definitely a rock album. you'll know it when you hear it.

so today we are mixing. actually, john is mixing. in the meantime, i'm killing a lot of time in deep ellum in dallas. this is becoming the most anxious part of all as i'm just patiently waiting to go in to the booth and listen to the mix with fresh ears. i still have creative control, but it's hard to not have my hands on a knob or something. in the meantime i guess i'll just have to al bundy it on the couch and watch some movies.

john has already had some really nice ideas and did some nice production things on the first track, so i'll calm down soon. to bad the Cubs aren't on TV anywhere.

i'm not going to lose my voice.

it's just going to be raspy for a while. drinking lots of nice hot tea has helped, along with some sage advice from john. first thing i do when i get back to NY is buy "the rock and roll singer's survival guide."

yesterday was a long day. we did 4 songs, including 2 of the c major songs. so not only are we right on schedule, but things are feeling good too. i let some things out of mouth yesterday that probably should have been kept in it. well, for the health of my vocal chords anyway. i'm not sure how john could critically listen for pitch and performance for that long, but the results will speak for themselves. today we are trying to get done early so that john can rehearse with the pAper chAse, and I can go get some tattoos....

i'm going to lose my voice

probably some time thursday night after we are finished. yesterday had its share of annoyances that delayed are start. had to wait for a gospel session to leave the pAperhouse, then had to run back to Nomad because the original firewire drive thought it was a PC drive, so all of the files wouldn't open on a Mac. weird. once we did get started, we did good work. did vocals for 3 songs. i intentionally chose the third song because i knew i would be raspy after doing the 2nd song. i was finally able to track through a Neve pre, well, a Vintech repro to be exact, but it was still cool. just like john lennon used to use.....

capes at full flap

yesterday was a nice leisurely day at the studio. it didn't start off that way. once we got to the studio, it took some time for the dvd's to be copied over to the G5 at the studio. so after a while, i decided i would start dialing in the distorted guitar sounds i needed for the days work. i didn't get very far. seemed like a preamp tube in the house marshall amp, the only guitar amp there, was going bad. i was instantly a little worried because i had a lot of clean guitar to do as well. we decided to hook up the bass amp and see what kind of unique guitar tone we could get through that, but it had some major problems too. no sound at all. not even a bad one. so at this point, i'm thinking the entire day is wasted. john made some calls to the studio owner and he was nice enough to rush us over a mesa boogie trem-o-verb. which was pretty fortunate because there were a few things i wanted to do with tremolo.
while waiting for the amp to show up, we decided to get started on the acoustic guitar. at the beginning, i was only planning to use it on the normal parts of the one song i always use acoustic on. but when i started playing it, we instantly realized its potential for creating some nice textures blended with the distorted guitars. it also added a lot of gypsy flavor to a few of the arabesque songs. it was a late 50's Gibson, and it really made me want to go shopping for acoustic guitars. it had a pretty small scale for an acoustic so making the transition from the mustang to it was pretty seamless.
once the amp arrived, we got to work. it had its problems too. the person it belonged to seemed to never ever ever ever use the clean channel, so the gain knob on that channel was pretty noisy. good thing the dirty channel had a "blues" setting and i was able to get a nice sound out of it. we layed down a lot of textural things that will give the album a whole lot of cape flap.