Been attempting to gear up for recording, which (if you'll recall) is a big part of this year's creative agenda. That is, the agenda is to actually be creative, which can sometimes fall by the wayside when you're focusing on other things. One of the things about recording, though - while I've done plenty of the 'one man band' types of things that multitrack recording allows, I find these days I much prefer producing music as a collaborative activity.
And there's the rub: all of my collaborators have schedules that I - and they - could only describe as 'insane.' One of the predictable byproducts of the recession is how much more companies are trying to get out of their current stable of employees, and with Edz, the drummer for both the Tappan Sea and Dave solo stuff (same person, of course) currently working nights and Saturdays, the actual creative agenda for the year hasn't quite been able to get off the ground.*
I've been able to use the time to get my own stuff in order - polishing off songs that have sat with unwritten lyrics; sussing out the pool of musicians to get some nice instrumental overdubs when the time comes; etc. But at some point, you need the energy that comes from actually starting work, and I'm itchy. No doubt about it.
Anyway, Edz will become available in a couple of weeks, and I'm also going to track a few of the solo songs with Sean on drums shortly, so that's sorting itself out. Oddly, I've always found strong drummers easy to come by. It's the lack of available guitar players that's always been my achilles' carpal tunnel syndrome. What's that about?
D.
*A note of explanation, if you need: drums generally come first in multitrack recording.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Well Day
Took the day off from work this morning - was not feeling well, and figured that one of the benefits of being a full-timer is that I now don't have to risk getting other people sick. Corporations like freelancers for the obvious reason that they save them money on benefits and the like, but a way that freelancers cost companies money is in the fact that since a freelancer gets paid hourly and doesn't get paid if they don't work - no paid sick days, in other words - a freelancer is way more likely to show up to work if they're sick, and then get all of their co-workers sick.
It's all about man-hours, people.
Back in 2010, there was a freelancer who came in complaining that her husband had some viral infection that wouldn't go away and doctors couldn't quite identify it. Then she proceeded to come in for the next few days with an increasingly alarming cough that gradually evolved into a full-on hacking one. And she was in the cube next to mine, which put me in a dilemma - if I got as sick as she was, would I also insist on coming in, seeing as how Yesenia and I were both working through spotty part-time work at that point? The answer is a resounding yes.
Thankfully, I didn't catch it, and I didn't have to make that choice. Today I can make the more ethical choice, which, if you extrapolate out to a silly degree, probably proves the idea that moral standards are a luxury of the rich, and everyone else just has to play along.
D.
It's all about man-hours, people.
Back in 2010, there was a freelancer who came in complaining that her husband had some viral infection that wouldn't go away and doctors couldn't quite identify it. Then she proceeded to come in for the next few days with an increasingly alarming cough that gradually evolved into a full-on hacking one. And she was in the cube next to mine, which put me in a dilemma - if I got as sick as she was, would I also insist on coming in, seeing as how Yesenia and I were both working through spotty part-time work at that point? The answer is a resounding yes.
Thankfully, I didn't catch it, and I didn't have to make that choice. Today I can make the more ethical choice, which, if you extrapolate out to a silly degree, probably proves the idea that moral standards are a luxury of the rich, and everyone else just has to play along.
D.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Obama Over the Rainbow
If this isn't an historical day, I'm not sure what would constitute as such: the President of the United States expressing support for gay marriage. Yes, you can say that it's a long way from doing anything about it, and yes, it comes a day after North Carolina has amended their constitution to explicitly ban it. But it's pretty impressive nonetheless.
D.
D.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Suckfest '95
Your Weekend Listening
"Empty House"
ca. 1995
A few entries back, I mentioned that I came across a treasure trove (well, some kind of trove) of old four-tracks, from 2000-thereabouts. Sadly, this isn't from that. I haven't yet gotten the energy together to spin up the old Tascam Porta-One and the Alesis Multimix Firewire 16-channel. Also, I haven't gotten drunk enough yet.
Those recordings were pretty good - some interesting, quirky songs that showed the mix of influences I'd had on my writing in the last half of the 90's, decent enough playing and engineering that at least showed a minimal awareness of what EQ ranges might not curdle one's tympanic membrane.
Today's entry shows none of that. It's a shitty song with lousy playing and engineering that checks every single box on the 'How Not to Engineer a Home Recording' list. But I present it here as a reminder of how you can delude yourself into feeling that the work that you're producing at this moment - any moment - is worth your time.
The best weapon against not sucking for posterity is to find a way to apply some kind of objective criteria. Measure yourself against it. Is the beat iffy? Is the guitar out of tune? Are the lyrics insipid? Is the mic, as they say, 'hot'? You've got ears and a brain - use them, and don't be afraid to give yourself a hard time.
I don't really have anything of interest to say about the song itself. I had completely forgotten or purged the memory of its existence until a couple of years ago, when I was importing a bunch of old four-tracks from Ansley and Bran from 1995 or so, and this turned up in-between a couple of their songs, buried deep in a decaying cassette master.
The only real shame is that whatever minor listenability the song might have had is completely hampered by the godawful engineering. The reason that piercing electric guitar drowns out the mildly inoffensive acoustic is that they had been bounced onto the same track, and the effects were live to tape, so there's no un-crapping it. Ditto the overdriven vocal. Just basic issues of setting levels, not even dealt with. I suspect that even when it was fresh, I didn't think much of it, given the half-assedness of it and the fact that I never mixed it down.
So, that's now rectified - but as a warning to myself, not a presentation for you. Feel free to listen. I challenge you to enjoy.
D.
P.S.: Christ, but that bridge is awful.
"Empty House"
ca. 1995
A few entries back, I mentioned that I came across a treasure trove (well, some kind of trove) of old four-tracks, from 2000-thereabouts. Sadly, this isn't from that. I haven't yet gotten the energy together to spin up the old Tascam Porta-One and the Alesis Multimix Firewire 16-channel. Also, I haven't gotten drunk enough yet.
Those recordings were pretty good - some interesting, quirky songs that showed the mix of influences I'd had on my writing in the last half of the 90's, decent enough playing and engineering that at least showed a minimal awareness of what EQ ranges might not curdle one's tympanic membrane.
Today's entry shows none of that. It's a shitty song with lousy playing and engineering that checks every single box on the 'How Not to Engineer a Home Recording' list. But I present it here as a reminder of how you can delude yourself into feeling that the work that you're producing at this moment - any moment - is worth your time.
The best weapon against not sucking for posterity is to find a way to apply some kind of objective criteria. Measure yourself against it. Is the beat iffy? Is the guitar out of tune? Are the lyrics insipid? Is the mic, as they say, 'hot'? You've got ears and a brain - use them, and don't be afraid to give yourself a hard time.
I don't really have anything of interest to say about the song itself. I had completely forgotten or purged the memory of its existence until a couple of years ago, when I was importing a bunch of old four-tracks from Ansley and Bran from 1995 or so, and this turned up in-between a couple of their songs, buried deep in a decaying cassette master.
The only real shame is that whatever minor listenability the song might have had is completely hampered by the godawful engineering. The reason that piercing electric guitar drowns out the mildly inoffensive acoustic is that they had been bounced onto the same track, and the effects were live to tape, so there's no un-crapping it. Ditto the overdriven vocal. Just basic issues of setting levels, not even dealt with. I suspect that even when it was fresh, I didn't think much of it, given the half-assedness of it and the fact that I never mixed it down.
So, that's now rectified - but as a warning to myself, not a presentation for you. Feel free to listen. I challenge you to enjoy.
D.
P.S.: Christ, but that bridge is awful.
Monday, April 30, 2012
The Thoughts of Monday
Really don't have much on the brain today - Yesenia had drinks in the city with a friend, and when she got home, we had a late dinner of pancakes and sausage. Pancakes and sausage at 8:30 PM on a Monday - it's the type of thing you only do if you're an adult or if you're a kid in a John Hughes movie.
Right now, we're tangled on the couch, with me blogging (obviously) and Yesenia crocheting yet another in her insanely good baby blankets. When she does so, she occasionally sings and hums little snippets of Spanish music. Add that in with the digesting breakfast/dinner, and it's all very good for feeling completely content, but probably not so good for spurring the mind into thoughts worth recording.
And, yes - the sausage was vegetarian, of course. Even when I did eat meat, I never did like sausage, so I can honestly say that this stuff is way better than the real thing. Mostly, meat substitutes fail when they try to be like meat, but let's face it - the stuff that's in real sausage is far enough away from actual meat for the most part that going that extra step and leaving meat behind altogether is a plus.
If you try it, I strongly recommend the chipotle.
D.
Right now, we're tangled on the couch, with me blogging (obviously) and Yesenia crocheting yet another in her insanely good baby blankets. When she does so, she occasionally sings and hums little snippets of Spanish music. Add that in with the digesting breakfast/dinner, and it's all very good for feeling completely content, but probably not so good for spurring the mind into thoughts worth recording.
And, yes - the sausage was vegetarian, of course. Even when I did eat meat, I never did like sausage, so I can honestly say that this stuff is way better than the real thing. Mostly, meat substitutes fail when they try to be like meat, but let's face it - the stuff that's in real sausage is far enough away from actual meat for the most part that going that extra step and leaving meat behind altogether is a plus.
If you try it, I strongly recommend the chipotle.
D.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Sunday, Muddy Sunday
One of the things I like about life in the suburbs is the rhythm (or rut) that you fall into when you've managed to tamp down a lot of the bigger problems. Yes, it's always nice to have a schedule, sometimes to distract from aggravation, sometimes to give form to aimlessness, sometimes to allow you to prioritize time when time itself is a rare commodity. But there's a special kind of pattern that emerges when you don't have too much to do and you don't have to bury yourself in freelance work to make ends meet, or anything else that adds negative energy to your life.
Yesterday was a good case in point. The master bedroom is certainly a major project that needs to be finished (for the record, initial demolition on the room started around this time last year, so it's been officially too long). We're at the plastering stage, and it's obviously the kind of work that's more tedious and time-consuming than it is difficult. But tedious and time-consuming aren't a real problem for me - it's experiencing them solo. Standing on a ladder for hours ladling goop on the ceiling with only the radio for company is a drag.
So I finally thought to ask people to come and help me complete it. Sean Scorsone was the first of invitees to donate his time, and there are currently two more lined up (Jim and Karl) - not quite enough to finish it, but enough people and man-hours to get over a big hump of crap. And it was actually fun, in that whitewash the fence kind of way.
Afterwards, Bran came by and Yesenia cooked pizza and the four of us ate, and drank and kibitzed and then the three musicians jammed for a little while. And it was just a good evening. Homemade pizza is the new Saturday tradition, and I always enjoy eating, drinking and jamming, in no particular order. And today is the laundry and housecleaning day - housecleaning and laundry float from Friday to Sunday, depending on what else needs to be done.
And everything is nice and relaxed and fun. Soon, we're heading out to buy (among other things) new cushions for the porch chairs so that the Summerporch can begin. Which is niceness and relaxedness and fun given physical form.
Summer breeze makes me feel fine, don't you know. With two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard - now, everything is easy because of, etc.
D.
Yesterday was a good case in point. The master bedroom is certainly a major project that needs to be finished (for the record, initial demolition on the room started around this time last year, so it's been officially too long). We're at the plastering stage, and it's obviously the kind of work that's more tedious and time-consuming than it is difficult. But tedious and time-consuming aren't a real problem for me - it's experiencing them solo. Standing on a ladder for hours ladling goop on the ceiling with only the radio for company is a drag.
So I finally thought to ask people to come and help me complete it. Sean Scorsone was the first of invitees to donate his time, and there are currently two more lined up (Jim and Karl) - not quite enough to finish it, but enough people and man-hours to get over a big hump of crap. And it was actually fun, in that whitewash the fence kind of way.
Afterwards, Bran came by and Yesenia cooked pizza and the four of us ate, and drank and kibitzed and then the three musicians jammed for a little while. And it was just a good evening. Homemade pizza is the new Saturday tradition, and I always enjoy eating, drinking and jamming, in no particular order. And today is the laundry and housecleaning day - housecleaning and laundry float from Friday to Sunday, depending on what else needs to be done.
And everything is nice and relaxed and fun. Soon, we're heading out to buy (among other things) new cushions for the porch chairs so that the Summerporch can begin. Which is niceness and relaxedness and fun given physical form.
Summer breeze makes me feel fine, don't you know. With two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard - now, everything is easy because of, etc.
D.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
I Wuz Here
So, I got this in the inbox, yesterday:
You are receiving this message because your email address is associated with an unmigrated legacy Blogger account. As we announced in April of last year, legacy accounts will no longer be accessible after May 30th, 2012 unless they are updated to the Google Account system. Any blog content associated with this account will also be unmodifiable after that date.
Etc. Which is fine. It's Google's free blogging software, and Google is primarily in the business of data-farming, and it's obviously much harder for them to farm data from email addresses that aren't provided by them - at least harder legally, if not technically. They're Google, they can do pretty much anything on the internet that's possible to do. They built the place, after all.
Thing is, the account the Rambler is currently tied to is my account from the old Copper Man website, which has since become my own website, for reasons having more to do with legacy and laziness than anything tangible and practical. So when Google comes and says 'you can't login as Copper Man, anymore,' it seems like much more of a personal statement, if not an outright affront.
Is it silly to be more iffy about the idea of having my login change to a Google account for personal reasons than for issues of privacy? Maybe. There was a time when it would have been the other way around, but I guess I've started to adopt the millennial mindset about the new notion of privacy and online identity.
If you need that spelled out for you, it's that people my age and older are generally more suspicious (and quite rightly) about both the blatant and subtle loss of privacy that comes with the age of digital/social networking. People who are younger are more interested in finding ways to somehow stand out in the stream, and for people who are even younger, the idea of privacy, and increasingly, ownership of content, is falling into the past.
One of the new tools that Google is offering - Drive, an online file-sharing/cloud service similar to Dropbox - has as one of its agreement points wording that implies that whatever you upload there, Google has the right to use. Wording and discussion here. It reads more like a Creative Commons copyright line than anything else.
This is the world we're in, now, rather than the world where everybody busts a blood vessel when John Lennon is used to advertise Nikes. It's all grist for the mill, and I suppose Blogger, like Facebook and every other social networking site in which I participate can claim some sort of ownership of the content I've created over the years. I've never not known this. So why should I care if the name and the little creative avatar I've defined for myself digitally is no longer the literal key to this door through which I communicate with the world?
D.
You are receiving this message because your email address is associated with an unmigrated legacy Blogger account. As we announced in April of last year, legacy accounts will no longer be accessible after May 30th, 2012 unless they are updated to the Google Account system. Any blog content associated with this account will also be unmodifiable after that date.
Etc. Which is fine. It's Google's free blogging software, and Google is primarily in the business of data-farming, and it's obviously much harder for them to farm data from email addresses that aren't provided by them - at least harder legally, if not technically. They're Google, they can do pretty much anything on the internet that's possible to do. They built the place, after all.
Thing is, the account the Rambler is currently tied to is my account from the old Copper Man website, which has since become my own website, for reasons having more to do with legacy and laziness than anything tangible and practical. So when Google comes and says 'you can't login as Copper Man, anymore,' it seems like much more of a personal statement, if not an outright affront.
Is it silly to be more iffy about the idea of having my login change to a Google account for personal reasons than for issues of privacy? Maybe. There was a time when it would have been the other way around, but I guess I've started to adopt the millennial mindset about the new notion of privacy and online identity.
If you need that spelled out for you, it's that people my age and older are generally more suspicious (and quite rightly) about both the blatant and subtle loss of privacy that comes with the age of digital/social networking. People who are younger are more interested in finding ways to somehow stand out in the stream, and for people who are even younger, the idea of privacy, and increasingly, ownership of content, is falling into the past.
One of the new tools that Google is offering - Drive, an online file-sharing/cloud service similar to Dropbox - has as one of its agreement points wording that implies that whatever you upload there, Google has the right to use. Wording and discussion here. It reads more like a Creative Commons copyright line than anything else.
This is the world we're in, now, rather than the world where everybody busts a blood vessel when John Lennon is used to advertise Nikes. It's all grist for the mill, and I suppose Blogger, like Facebook and every other social networking site in which I participate can claim some sort of ownership of the content I've created over the years. I've never not known this. So why should I care if the name and the little creative avatar I've defined for myself digitally is no longer the literal key to this door through which I communicate with the world?
D.
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