Thoughts

I'm tracking vocals for a song tentatively titled "Less Than", one of my few songs with vocals. Can't wait to be done so I can share it with you; it's a major departure from my usual ambient, laid-back experimentation. More aggressive and industrial thanks to the analog sizzle of the JX-3P I picked up last year. I've been screwing around with the song for over a year, and this glacial pace bothers me. Hopefully things will speed up now that my music gear has been moved from the bedroom to the living room -- since I see it, it's in my mind instead of being an afterthought before bed. Read more about Reconfiguration and Less Than Vox

The most aggravating part of mastering a song can be summed up thusly:

"Which sounds better? Mix A or (tweak tweak) Mix B? Mix A? Or Mix B?"

I find a final, mastered mix that I like, and almost settle on it, but in fixing one final thing I notice that something, technically, is incorrect. So I start fixing that, and in doing so the mix deteriorates into something that, although technically correct with no overloading or clipping, sounds crappy.

Tonight was one of those nights. All I needed to do was pull down the vocals, raise the bassline and call it done. But I noticed my final EQ plugin was getting overloaded on its input, and although I can't hear any clipping or buzzing, it's the knowledge that somewhere there's something incorrect. My solution was to add a limiter before the EQ, and that made it all worse. Booooo. Read more about Best Mixed Plans

Currently reworking a track I wrote in 2002 called "Best Laid Plans". It's a song I absolutely adore in its lush nakedness. Like "Solace", it was written completely on the fly with no attention paid to meter or metronome. At the time I recorded it, I was using a borrowed MIDI controller and a software synth, the Yamaha S-YXG50 (free with my sound card), to make sound, and some freeware sequencer to capture the MIDI data as I played. The problem with the S-YXG50, a problem which still exists to this day even on fast machines, is the unbelievably high 500ms latency between MIDI note-on events and actual sound output. This makes playing fast melodies practically impossible -- but it's OK for long chords. Read more about Re-Laid Plans

So, yes. Finally I have a functioning website for Glass Door. I've screwed around and wasted so much of my life trying to build this damn site. First, several attempts at my own CMS in Perl, Ruby, HTML, whatever. Then, after admitting defeat, trying to munge Wordpress into this mold of being a musician's website; it had promise, but fell short on some things. Finally, thankfully, after several months' frustration with Wordpress, I had a serendipitous encounter with a beautiful stranger at a coffeeshop, and with a brief discussion, she convinced me to try Drupal. I later took a look, and realized that my path had been wrong the whole time. Read more about A New Thing