I can't believe it's been almost two months...

... since I last posted. Oddly enough, there's been quite a bit of activity on both the Portland and Midwest front, as well as on the day job side of things.

On the day job, my old product has gone into extended hiatus. However, I am now software development manager for the company's second largest revenue producing product (second only to the consumer offering of this same product). This product is running on literally tens of millions of machines in the US and around the world. As such, it's a big deal, higher visibility, and slightly longer hours. Luckily, I can do most of that work hour extension in the morning, so I can still (if I have the energy) work on music at night.

On the Portland front, we worked with a couple of guitar players from Vancouver last month. In the end, one of them quit and Dave and I thought better of hiring the other guy, so we were again looking for a guitarist. I brought in a guy from my day job (who actually writes pretty good instrumental material) and Dave's talking to this ex-pro from the eighties. Actually, we're in pretty good shape for a May or June re-launch, though we need a new name. I like "Cannibal Cow", but I think I'll get overruled.

I've gotten my travelling gear back together for the Shiver gig in Kalamazoo, MI in April. Everything is neatly situated in a nice rack-mount case waiting for the other three pedals and a tuner to go in. I'll also toss in the percussion tray that I use to hold my tuner along with my microphones and their holders. With that all packed away and ready to go, I'll just need to pack my amp head (I'm picking up a speaker cab in Troy, MI the day after I fly into Detroit) and my guitars and I'll be ready. Most of the equipment will be staying with Jay, waiting for the June gig in Abingdon, IL.

That's really about it. I'm writing some new songs (especially to the new guitarist's tunes), needing to finish my own when I have a moment. Busy, busy, busy...

Uploaded some MP3s to my website

Go to the "Listen Up" section to listen to them. I haven't had time to set up a streaming service yet, so you'll have to download them for now. "Perfect Day" is my favorite, but probably the least "radio-friendly". However, the other two are good, too, and Daydreams is the one I'm flogging to radio stations (unlikely, but we'll see).

BTW, the main guy at the studio forgot to tell his assistant that I was going to be there today, so the MP3s I've put out there I've made myself. I guess I'll go in tomorrow and get my files. But I'll be happy to have it all done.

Although when you get right down to it, when is it ever all done, this side of the grave? Hell, now that I have the CD, I still need to flog the CD to NW radio stations and indie record stores, set up e-distro and audio streaming via CD Baby, and the biggest part of all, getting a band together and booking dates.

The good news is that I'm getting really good at making lists. I have the names and contacts of all college and alt radio station in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington where there is a chance in hell of getting the CD played, as well as all venues that book acts in Portland. If I can do this for me, I might be able to do this for others, as well. And to think, at one time, I was looking forward to a quiet retirement (not that I'm anywhere near that, anyhow).

Anyway, the funny thing is that I usually get melancholic and depressed in Autumn. This year, with everything that's going on, I really haven't noticed it at all. I'm actually happy in Autumn. Of course, some of my best songs come when I'm melancholic and depressed, so that's a trade-off. Maybe one day I'll be able to tell which was more useful.

CDs to be delivered next week!

I got the duplication order put in today. The CDs should be back next week in time for me to cart a dozen or so back to Illinois for the various folks there. I should be relieved. However, I'll actually be worried until I get them all back. Anyhow, it was good getting all that taken care of.

Tomorrow I pick up MP3 and project files from the studio and my dealings with them are finished.

I'll spend a couple of days cleaning up the hard drive and backing up all of the data, getting ready for the next magnum opus and updating the website with the graphics and downloads.

So, I can now start to feel a bit of post partum depression...

An Interesting New Band

OK, so I read music blogs. They tend to range the gamut from gear to geeky (OK, so it's not much of a gamut, but...). Anyway, the other day a blog that I read linked to an article on music theory analysis of pop songs - in this case, All the Single Ladies by Beyonc(e') (sorry, B, I ain't gonna look up the HTML for an accent grav(e')). OK, the article was good - this song is a lot more complicated than a superficial glance would indicate. However, the real gem in the blog post was a You Tube video of a version of the song done by the north SF Bay band Pomplamoose.

Pomplamoose's members are Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte (look up your own damn MySpace links in Google). Their music is best described as quirky (which I like). Maybe it's that, being a part-time bass player, I gravitate towards bands that prominently feature the same or maybe it's just that they look like they're having so much fun when they do their video songs. In any case, their music is fun, light,and pretty easy on the ears. Give them a listen and, if you happen to be in SF on November 13, pop in to the Brainwash Cafe and give them a listen. I'm pretty sure the harmonies that Nataly sings on the videos won't be there, but the music itself is worth listening to, harmonies or not.

No CD Yet

As of Thursday AM, the CD mastering isn't finished yet. Again, I hesitate to ask the guys at the studio to rush, but I'm anxious to get things finished so I can send the CD for duplication. I'd really like to have completed disks by the time I get back to Illinois during Halloween weekend and we're coming close to where that will no longer be possible. And so... we wait.

I purchased a copy of Renoise and I'm learning how to use it. I will soon be the master of the techno beats (which I'm sure scares the hell out of everyone out there reading this). Perhaps the next album will be electronica! OK, just kidding. However, the program does seem to be easier to use to trigger drum samples than with Sonar. As for the UI, well... it sucks.

But now - a rant. To be honest, I haven't seen a single DAW/music editing program that didn't have a UI that sucked rocks. This is problem with most niche markets - the geeks that initially build the stuff organically grow a UI that makes sense to them and ultimately the usability converges to a sub-optimal point that everyone gets used to. Since there is not enough money to fund real usability research, the UI just accretes over time around this low point. Throw in the fact that most of the companies producing this software want to lock in their users with proprietary data formats (and better yet, knowledge about the key strokes and commands that drive the software) and it's no wonder that things don't get better. I've seen this in electronic design systems, in medical record systems, and now in music software. In short, software sucks and it's not going to get much better anytime soon.

Ending the rant and getting back to the main topic again, yes, Renoise's UI sucks, but it sucks less than doing the same thing in Sonar. I like the vertical tracks and the simplicity of adding samples. If you're slicing beats and samples, it's really good. Of course working with the final tracks in the context of a completed song means exporting the rhythm tracks from Renoise and importing them as audio tracks into one's DAW, making the process of modifying them after the fact somewhat clumsy. Oh well, it's fun learning something new and playing with a new system.

I didn't re-catch my cold. That's a plus. However, stress at my day job has my neck acting up a bit. I called the doctor and got a few Vicodin tabs, but by the time I went in to see him (actually, the gal who was subbing for him while he was out) my neck was feeling better after a day or two of rest. So if it doesn't get better over the next few days with Aleve as an anti-inflamatory, we'll get a prescription for Feldene or Voltarin, and if that doesn't help, on to physical therapy. I'm hoping that it doesn't go that far though, since when I get to that point, PT doesn't work and so it's on to surgery for another ruptured disk. So I'm taking it easy this week, watching my ergonomics, and not pushing around heavy weights. I need to be in good shape by the end of next week when AMA practices on Thursday and plays on Friday. Two weeks after that, I'm back in Illinois, with another three-day marathon practice with Shiver (our last before our performances in April and June of next year).

In the meantime, I'm trying to rustle up a band locally to play the songs on my CD (and some that are too new to be on the CD). SO, yet again, I find myself busy, busy, busy...

Almost Over the Cold

This is the first day I've felt human since last Sunday. The cold is almost over - I still have a bit of a runny nose and chest congestion, but at least my head doesn't feel like it's wrapped in cotton and I don't have to take decongestants to be able to breathe.

Work this week has been dreadful, not because of the work part, but because of having to work through a cold. Other than that, things are going well. We have started working on iteration 3 of MNAC 3.5 and all seems well with the world. Actually, since it's the end of the quarter, everyone's working on getting their MBOs done (myself included). I have one more thing to finish by next Wednesday (preferably, by 2:30pm Monday, when my weekly one-on-one with my manager happens) and I'll have completed everything. This will be the first MBO I have gotten 100% on in the past three quarters. Amazing...

Thursday evening, we made tweaks to six songs. This is the end. The changes are now so minor that even those changes didn't take more than an hour and a half (most of which was listening to songs before and after the change to make sure that I wanted to make the change and that the change was OK). Of course, we spent another hour after that trying to figure out why the final song kept trying to be output in PCM, rather than in straight bits, but we finally got that sorted out, I got my CD and got out of there.

After listening at home, one song needed two more tweaks (which I told the engineer about via email, trusting him to make those changes). As far as I'm concerned, the tracks are ready for mastering. The last session should be next week, where I'll hear the final mastered versions and get the tracks. I'm working with the graphic artist now, giving her the go ahead to do everything on the insert, tray card, and CD except for track sequence and final liner notes. She's going to clean up the ADRIAN logo, too, and give it to me in final layout. So, with any luck, by the end of this coming week, I should be ready for duplication.

That's about it for this week. Just waiting for folks to get back to me. I'll restart my jazz guitar lessons this week. I have a couple songs in my head that need to get into the box. I want to beta test the latest version of Melodyne. Other than that, I'm still looking for a good five-string. While I was looking for one on Craigslist, I saw an ad for a house for sale in SW that has a recording studio on the property that I'll probably go look at.

A Very Busy Week...

I didn't make it into the studio on Sunday evening, but I'll be there making tweaks to the final five tracks Thursday evening. If that goes well, we can also do the final tweaks to five of the six we've we got to the pseudo-final state last time. The sixth song we tweaked last time (Perfect Day) seemed to have had the drum track omitted on my take-home mix and, as such, I won't be able to finalize that until next time. So the goals for the next few days are to do the final mix on the last five songs and get take-home copies of Perfect Day and these songs. I'll listen to them over the weekend and then one more set of tweaks and on to mastering. With any luck, we'll have this thing in the can and ready for dupe by the end of next week. I've narrowed down the duplicators to two choices. One is local, but the other one costs less. I'll need to pick by the middle of the next week because I need to get the design templates to...

... the graphic artist who is going to help me with the artwork for the CD. I worked with Maren from Linea Forma Design while I was at UxComm. There's not a lot left to do - mainly clean-up/formatting work based on concept art/liner notes that I've already done and getting it into the form that the duplicator will accept. Even for small jobs, though, working with someone you know and trust is important. I was also planning on making tee shirts and baseball caps, but having 250 CDs in your closet is enough storage without also taking space for additional clothing.

In the meantime, I'm working on the website for the band (Adrian) and my label (Hancock Street Records). Everything but the online shopping portion is ready. Most of you have probably gotten here through the Adrian website already and it's not going to change much (I'll be adding lyrics and a page for the new CD). The label site is going to be more extensive. I hope to also flog AMA's music through it and perhaps one or two other local bands. We'll see how that goes...

I also practiced with AMA last night in preparation for our performance Saturday night at the Sellwood Public House. We've added about a dozen new songs, including a half dozen of our own, four of which are debut performances (the other two AMA had performed previously, but they're new to me). The only drawback to this job is that we have to drag the equipment up to the second floor (of course, there is no elevator). So, anyhow, come on in and see us on Saturday night - 9pm.

Final Mixes Half Done

The week before last, we completed rough mixes of the new CD, The Nuclear Family. After listening to them, there were substantial changes for most of them (including cutting new/re-comping vocals for about five of the eleven tracks). We made changes to six of the tracks Thursday evening. I took home the "final" mixes for these tracks and now I only have a (very few) tweaks for them. There is even one song for which I have no more changes. We are converging to completion.

If I get confirmation of availability, I'll go into the studio tomorrow evening and we'll finish the main changes for the other five tracks and put the minor tweaks into the six we've got at a "final" state for a "final final" state. All of these mixes will come home with me, I'll listen, get minor tweaks into the remaining ones and then we'll go to mastering (which should not take more than one more (albeit long) session.

As such, I now have to put the tracks in some order for the CD. I have a couple of choices... I can go with a thematic order - I noticed that the songs I've recorded have an order based on the arc of a relationship, from new to broken. This has a certain artistic appeal, but it ends up having too many slow songs together and has some of the less good songs go towards the front, while some of the better songs get buried towards the back. As such, I'm probably going to stick with the second option, which is a standard ordering having a good intermixing of fast/slow songs with the very best songs going towards the front and less good ones trailing back.

I understand that this raises the question of "good song"/"less good song". Let me state that I don't think there is a real stinker in the bunch. I like all of these songs well enough to have spent a good amount of time on each of them and, in the final analysis, all are listenable, all are well performed (or at least as well as I can), and all are good songs. However, to paraphrase Orwell, "All songs are equally good, but some songs are more equally good than others." So, in placing the tracks on the CD, the "more equally good" stuff will go at the front, while the merely "equally good" stuff will be towards the end. However, note that this ordering is produced by taking into account what I think folks will like and discerning listeners might find songs that they actually like better towards the end. In short, listen to the whole CD and you decide.

Anyhow, we're in the home stretch with the CD. I plan to engage a Photoshop jockey this week to compose the final layout of the CD artwork (with track ordering). With any luck we should be ready for duplication sometime around the end of September. Woot!

P.S. I already have three new songs in the works. Come to the AMA performance at Sellwood Public House on September 19 to hear one of them.

Trying out Melodyne

As many of you know, my vocal skills are somewhat lacking. I would characterize my skill level as "backing vocal" quality. Although I am working to improve and I do sing lead for one or two songs with whomever I'm performing, for the CD, I needed to use pitch correction technology.

Right now, I have Auto-Tune Evo, which is the industry leader in this technology. I realize that I'm still a novice at using the program (basically just moving notes up and down and removing correction on tones that were overly corrected because I still don't understand correction curve editing very well), but the results still don't thrill me. I find there's a subtle distortion in the processed vocals, even when no correction is being done. As such, I'm going to give Melodyne a try. I'll keep all of you posted...

Change of Venue

The September 19 performance at Macadam's Bar & Grill has been canceled. The owner decided he could make more money showing a PPV WWE cage match instead. According to the other guys in AMA, this is not the first time something like this has happened. As such, we'll be at the Sellwood Public House that night, same time - 9pm.

Of course, this means we get to haul equipment up the stairs again. Ahhh! The joys of being in a band...

Getting Ready for the CD

Since we're getting to the end of the line as far as mixing goes, it's time to start working on the promotional stuff. I plan to get t-shirts made while having the CD's pressed and start selling them at gigs and on the new website, which I have initially set up on Google today. I'm probably also going to have to set up a Myspace music page (something that I have been avoiding because I don't care much for Myspace, but it seems to be the lingua franca of the music world - sighhh).

Other than that, it's just back to work...

What a Weekend

... capping off what a week. Let's start with the week, OK?

At work, a crisis with Volkswagen in Shanghai. Essentially what we needed to do to localize results from our scans slowed down the processing afterward to a crawl. We were able to put in a simple fix that improved the performance of this processing step by a factor of 60. That we were able to do this tells me that we didn't do a great job of performance testing before the last version of the product was shipped. We need to (and will) do better in the future. In addition, we found a synchronization issue in our logic (and produced a fix) and fixed two other defects. With any luck, the "patch that never ends" will finally get shipped out within the next two weeks and I can breathe again.

On top of all of this, I spent two nights in the studio this week mixing the CD (eight songs down, three to go) and I re-started my jazz guitar lesson. So, come Friday afternoon, I was really looking forward to the weekend, and all I had on my plate (beside the regular household stuff of getting ready for the week) was to listen to a song that one of the guys in AMA wrote (and give feedback) and listen with a somewhat critical ear to the rough mixes for the CD and make notes about minor tweaks. Plus, I also wanted to get a haircut. A weekend of happiness and bliss (not to mention an opportunity to sleep in on Saturday morning) lay before me.

However, it is now Friday evening. Let's examine the note on the message board via which my midwestern band communicates. It states that our next planned rehearsal is scheduled for the weekend of October 17. Now watch me recoil in horror as I have (two days ago) confirmed with AMA (the Portland band) that I would be available for a gig on October 16. Also watch as I mention this to my other band and watch me cringe with shame because the practice date had always been October 17 and not later in October as I had remembered. Now to be fair, the October date was set in June at a practice that I was unable to attend and, after a few brief messages flitting across the message board (which I was unable to read in real-time because my email relay from the board had gone down), the practice was always referred to as "the October practice" with no mention of actual date, so it was completely understandable... OK, the reality of the situation was that I fucked up. This is why a portion of my weekend time (soon to be limited as the reader will shortly see) was used to set up a Google calendar having all of my musically-related commitments (and any other large chunks-of-time commitments) listed. The reader may now follow along with my hectic musical life here.

So while my bliss is rapidly disappearing in a sea of panic, unbeknownst to me, my daughter (who is staying overnight at a friends house) is jumping on a trampoline and manages to sprain her ankle. Of course, she does not want to cut short her visit, but I am informed at ~9pm about not only the sprained ankle, but also that, due to a commitment that her friend has, I must pick her up at 9am Saturday morning. So much for sleeping in. I go to bed in a rather dark frame of mind around 12:30am.

I am awakened by my alarm clock at 7:30 am, get up, shower, and feed and walk the dog. I call my daughter at 8:30am and she tells me that her friend really doesn't need to do what she thought she had to do and that I should pick her up at 10am. Of course, the fact that I have been deprived of a potential hour of additional sleep does not register in my daughter's fifteen-year-old mind, as the universe (which revolves around her, of course) was unimpacted. So at 10am I pick up my daughter and am alarmed that her ankle has become rather swollen. I take her home, put a couple of ice packs on her ankle and call the doctor. An hour later I am called back by the doctor who says to bring her in (yet) another hour later. An examination and an x-ray later, my daughter is in a compression bandage and air cast and I have purchased a $42 pair of crutches (something that I am unlikely ever to get any additional use of, as no other member of the family regularly jumps on friends' trampolines). Of course, it is now also 2:30 pm and I have done nothing that I had planned to do this weekend. I go get my hair cut in a bitter frame of mind.

Now to spare the reader the boring details of the reminder of the weekend, let me simply state that I listened to my AMA co-members song and made a couple of suggestions, the midwestern band has regrouped and we will now practice Halloween weekend (understandable, as we are monsters of rock), the Google calendar is now set up, I have dropped my wife and daughter at a play, and I have a few moments to breathe (or more precisely, to blog). I have not listened to any of the rough mixes and I have had no additional time to practice.

So I'm still a bit behind and I am certainly not sure what next week will bring. I know that on Tuesday, I'm back in the studio mixing again. If we have a long night on Tuesday, we will have another night or two of tweaking the roughs and then mastering. After that, I need to start working on getting the cover art and CD images ready for duplication. With any luck, by the end of September, the CD will be ready to go. Of course, I still have to deal with all of the stuff from work. Some folks are being recalcitrant about particular server changes and I'll have to hold the line. Iteration 2 (of 3) of the next release continues. Iteration 3 will be re-planned based on customer feedback. The patch that never ends will (hopefully) bet put to bed (and out the door next week). I'm in the last month to finish my MBOs. So it's never-ending fun at the office. We'll see how it goes...

Music and My Life...

Another issue that has come up since I stopped posting on my original blog has been my re-insertion into the music scene.

Again, let's go back a few years (thirty-five, to be precise). I am a Freshman in college at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Across the dorm hall from me are two guys named Alan and Lyle. They have a band in their home town, Abingdon, Illinois and they need a guitar player. I play guitar. I've been playing guitar since I was ten years old or so and I played in bands in my hometown. So I figure I'll do the hour-long drive to get to where they practice and, during the summer of between my Freshman and Sophomore year in college, I am in their band (Shiver) with Alan, Lyle, Jay, and Steve and we play a few gigs around Galesburg, Illinois. After that summer, everyone goes back to college and, since many of us are going to different schools, we don't get back together.

That autumn, I join a jazz-rock band called "All You Can Eat" and we play a few gigs during my Sophomore year. At the beginning of my Junior year, I meet up with Alan and Lyle again and we decide to start a new band. While heading up to Bloomington to buy our old PA system from the keyboard player from Shiver, we notice that there is a band playing that night named "All You Can Eat". I go there and am mightily irritated that, when the guys in that band came back for the school year, they didn't see me in the dorm (I having moved to an apartment) and that they didn't ask around for me. But, in the end, it sucks to be them, and Alan, Lyle, and I start interviewing for guitarists and vocalists. Before we find one, my sister Emmy decides to get married and wants us to play at her wedding. We drag the keyboard player back from Bloomington and enlist Lyle's brother as a second guitarist and play Shiver's last gig in Decatur that Spring.

Over the Summer, Lyle, Alan, and myself find a guitarist (Chris) and a singer (Joel) and we form a band (whose name I forget) that plays a few jobs around Champaign. This was a pretty good band. However, Chris had decided that he wanted a female singer and also decided that he didn't want Alan or Lyle, either. He also had the place where we practiced (making him the de facto leader) and immediately fired Joel and Alan (with much consternation from myself and Lyle) and brought in a friend of his to play bass (whose name I forget) and a female Singer, Jenny. In the Autumn of my Senior year, we played jobs as Sunsinger around the Champaign area. However, you must recall that Chris did not want Lyle. This was because he had another friend who had an incredible looking drum kit, but no rhythm whatsoever.

Chris finally kicked Lyle out and brought in this drummer, who as I noted, had no rhythm. As such, the next practices were disasters and I left this band in the early Spring of my Senior year. Sunsinger tried to go on, but had a monumentally bad performance at a charity event that was broadcast on radio. This cooked their goose as far as future hiring went and they disintegrated soon afterward. Because I was already working a full time job and was entering graduate school, I decided that my band life was over for the time being. And the "time being" stretched to about thirty years, during which I would pick up my guitar occasionally, but never seriously.

About two years ago, one of the guys from Shiver (Steve) locates me on LinkedIn and we reconnect via email with other members of the band. We decided to do a reunion on the 4 July weekend of 2008 in Bloomington. While waiting for that to happen, we all practiced and I seriously got back into music - seriously enough that I bought DAW software (Sonar - about which I'll talk in another post) and started recording songs that had been kicking around in my head for the past thirty years (and writing a few new ones, as well). Shiver got back together on that 4 July weekend and practiced for three days. We had planned to play at Alan, Lyle, and Steve's 35'th high school reunion which was to be held in June of this year. We practiced again for two and a half days this February in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The high school reunion gig fell through, but we're scheduled to play this coming April in Kalamazoo. So I'm going back to Bloomington this weekend to attend my 35'th high school reunion and to get in another practice session with the guys. We'll practice one more time in October and then for a couple days in Kalamazoo before the April gig. And that's what's happening with that band.

However, during this time, I still had the songs I'd been writing and recording at home. I decided that putting out a solo CD would be a good thing. I worked on the various instrumental and backing vocal parts in my home studio from May of last year through June of this year. I have gone into the studio to track the lead vocals and will shortly be in the studio to do the final mix and mastering. I expect the CD (titled "The Nuclear Family") to be out sometime in September or October.

In order to promote my music, I've joined a local band that plays about once a month, in which I play bass and do some singing. We also do a couple of my songs. Since one gig a month is not really enough for me, I am also planning to form a band that will do my material. I'll keep you all posted.

That's about it from the music side of things. I'll post more later as I have more information on this aspect of my life.