The Digital Audio Deep End

Podcasting using Apple Logic ProYou'd think a guy like me who had a history in audio would just take to this like a duck to quacking, but I'm not so sure about that. It is hard to overstate what a love affair I had with my VS-880, making it do stuff that people don't expect of 8-track recorders. In some ways I feel that that is plenty of technology for me. It was, after all, the machine on which I did my most creative work, and certainly the most complete sounding stuff. I didn't buy it knowing an awful lot about audio, so it was right-scaled for me, and though there was a learning curve, it helped me produce results for the odd sort of music I recorded.

A long time ago, back in 1995 when I was doing my first all solo project, a thing done on cassettes with just a couple stereo machines and a mic that was mixed in as a new input, Marty Eldridge of Rockola told me I should really be using ProTools to do what I was doing. Of course at the time, PT was waaaay prohibitively expensive for a guy who used probably all of about $1000 worth of recording gear (and that is stretching it). I knew nothing about computers then and didn't care to. Finally a few years later, Tom Griesgraber got himself into a ProTools Digi001 system which, after my glory days of VS-880 use and the attempted upscaling to a VS-2480 for about a year, I decided to get, having finally been on the computer long enough to think I could go for it.

But that story has been dribbled out over these pages for nearly a decade now; not having real knobs or switches is odd for a guy who came into this stuff enjoying that tactile approach as a major part of playing parts and recording them with those effects and processing characteristics printed to the recording on the way in. But I have wanted to streamline and get closer to a natural sound so the stripped front end of a digital workstation was appealing. But life was changing and little time did I have to give to master the stuff like I did on the VS-880. Some of my ProTools era stuff has a dose of the old Hog Heaven sound, and actually a lot of it is captured better. But I always liked a rich mix, calling freely on effects to create an atmosphere. I totally admire guys who can get dry tracks and make them kick, but that isn't quite my style. Interestingly, I've read one criticism of Peter Gabriel's second record that took issue with Robert Fripp's over-adherence to dry tracks, totally missing the richness that characterizes PG's sonic landscape; like, PG uses the quality of sound to convey a musical atmosphere as much as any lyric or tempo or harmony.

And so it is with me.

ProTools has been a big disappointment for me. I've produced just a handful of demos that even hint at what I would like to have accomplished on that rig. But the pitfalls of life had as much to do with that as the frustrations with the gear itself. Losing my studio has sort of put the nail in the coffin for my recording life. Being married with a partner who wants to get some sleep and have a relationship is also one big reason for letting it all fade. Not having a dedicated space to wail has something to do with it.

But humming along in the background for some years has been various digital audio editing work—for several years I edited sermons and church service audio, and have over four years of that material to cite as what I've been doing in audio. Lately I've been recording podcast material, requiring a pretty simple rig, but one that even ProTools couldn't seem to hack, which leaves me dumbfounded considering the hours and hours of jam sessions I recorded back in Hog Heaven in 2002-3.

So I am about to embark on digital audio studio mk3 (Roland VS; ProTools on G4s; iMac and Logic). I just now bought a Focusrite Saffire Pro so that I can get stuff into the computer by FireWire. It is a whole new paradigm for me on this computer. The Saffire is a good solid front end, and it also allows me a versatile combination of a number of channels from my Mackie mixer, and an 8 channel DigiMax ADAT preamp. That is to say, a range of channels that have some EQ or limiting on the way in. It even has SPDIF in so I can finally copy my DAT tapes into the computer and have a whole store of material that has gone unheard for years, simply because the DAT has not been set up since oh, 2006 or so.

The immediate task before me is to learn how to route Skype calls/chat connections into a recording program so we can draw upon distant voices for our JEM podcast, occasionally interviewing people out of the area. For the podcast audio, I find that both Peak and Garage Band output podcast XML data, so that helps.

So here I am, all dressed up and ready to go. Anyone want to record some stuff?

Magnificent Meatsticks

Meltzer's review of the MagMeat song bearing his nameGoodness me. It was a decade ago when me and some fellow beer and burrito loving friends convened in Hog Heaven Studio and wrought havoc on the instruments there. The Magnificent Meatsticks were intentionally horrible, in part because of the facts of the matter: Ezekiel Bonham (Brandon Arnieri) was not particularly a bass player (though he was a technically proficient guitar player but one lacking in musical sense of his own); Ham Rockett (Mike Thaxton, who drove to San Diego each week from Dana Point just to hang out and do this stuff) was not particularly a drummer—in fact, he pretty much hit his first drum hits with us; and Leviticus Mitchell (me) was not particularly a guitar player. That was the point: to be equally handicapped so the worst possible result would follow! The other reason was that as my CD project was approaching a year or pretty regular recording and development, I was frankly burning out on the methodical approach, with some tracks happening delightfully quickly in the early days of the project, and later ones taking some prolonged period to get players and track as best as possible considering no one was getting paid! So the all-improvisatory MagMeat was a breath of fresh air for me, giving me a chance to rattle the musical tree but without sweating details like tuning, rhythmic precision, harmonic or melodic standards, or dare I say, foresight and control of any sort! We were doing our best to scrape the bottom of the barrel, and sometimes we succeeded. Occasionally we actually nearly broke out into something nearly like music, and that was simply not allowable.

Our band name was originally borrowing a couple letters from each of our names: BR AX ED from BRandon/thAXton/ED, but of course the beers induced brainstorming (in the classic tradition of garage bands). Fabulous Fucksticks was a contender before the slightly more acceptable Magnificent Meatsticks was voted in. Our individual names were taken from a formula guided by a biblical first name of some sort and the last name drawn from that of a famous rock drummer (Led Zep, Poison, Hendrix respectively in the list above). We rattled off a few more than that and kept them in mind for when we needed to bestow a name upon another guest Meatstick. I seem to remember a sax player named Steve Young came and blew some horn for us. We dubbed him Deuteronomy Carr after Eric Carr of Kiss. I seem to remember calling Jukka Pietarinen (a Finnish Keneally fan who was here for the Nonkerstock that summer) by something like Methusela Moon or Nicodemus Peart!

The MagMeat was always accompanied by file sharing and other illicit computer based activity by young men. Actually, I was not particularly a part of that but in those early days of mp3s, I was like a kid in a candy store when I realized that Thax seemed to have the means to get damn near anything I wanted, and more. So he was always feeding me some CDs of new stuff, old stuff, odd pop songs I asked for, and so on. He was like a musical drug dealer. That summer was in the very early period of my online presence. Earlier in the year, Thax had started me up on email, gotten me an MP3.com account, and some other stuff like that. I had no computer of my own, so I used to go to Brandon's place a few miles away to check in and make updates. I was getting into Photoshop, starting to dabble with effects and was having fun making little images on Brandon's computer. He used to let me tinker on that thing all night even after he went to bed. I'd mess around and leave at 5 am and then call it a night! It was a far cry from my prior computer experiences, long before all these great programs and the web had been developed. It was like learning magic.

Over some stiff beers (Arrogant Bastard and Stone IPA were pretty common) and some wicked good carne asada burritos we used to joke about how dreadful we sounded and how we could be famous on MP3.com since the space was given away for free. So we set about creating our space there and put up a number of recordings from the first few jams in June or July. We recorded everything straight to two-track and therefore had no mixing recourse. Editing was not off the table though so I practiced some savage editing on the two track stuff and did some odd things like copying and pasting a sample of the left side, making one side stutter or echo separate from the other. Other things we allowed to have done in recording was one vocal performance to "enhance" the trio recording, but it had to be improvised and fucking rude, loud, distorted, or otherwise unacceptable to most listeners. You can hear the seven cuts that we called finished elsewhere on this site. The thing is, since we recorded most of our jams nearly every week, there was massive amounts of material. It was more than my VS-880 could hold so I routinely cut the stuff ruthlessly and then burned CDs. Even still, there are probably 15 CDs on a spindle somewhere that has some of the most er, avant-garde stuff you (n)ever heard. To make up for a lack of chops or compositional foresight or tasteful use of silence, we usually drenched things in massive amounts of long-tailed reverb. It was quite something. (I still occasionally tickle myself with the idea of making a CD of that stuff, cut up ala Miles Davis material with Teo Macero at the helm of the editing block, slash cuts with no real attempt to mask the edits.) For such bad music so intentionally mangled, the two track stuff sonically has way more finesse than it deserves. It's not like we just used a boombox with a built in mic. There are moments when I like certain sounds and mix levels better than some of the stuff I captured track by track and spent days or weeks working on. All this went down 8 channels of mixer (with added effects all the way through) and through a compressor across the whole thing, and there it was!

We put our worst foot forward when I wrote to the San Diego Reader to tell them to pass on word about a certain track called "Richard Meltzer is my Fucking Hero" to the rock critic who bears that name and for the time around then, was a writer who contributed to the Reader. We used to crack ourselves up reading his concert previews, which never really focused on any of the artists being discussed. It was always wild stream of consciousness stuff. Anyhow, we figured we could get his attention with this ditty that invites Richard to come and "fuck me up the ass." It worked. I mean, we got his attention in one of the few articles he ever wrote (that we saw) that actually made mention of the artist in question! Check out the "review" here.

But personally, Magnificent Meatsticks in retrospect has proven to be a sort of heir to the absolutely irreverent stuff I did with Matt Zuniga in 1992-93 or so, and more broadly, the last hurrah of playing with total abandon and just not caring if anything was good or not. After the taste of live interaction in the MagMeat, I found myself wanting to start playing bass within a band context and was hoping to work in that vein a bit. The quartet I tried to get started later that year was a more developed thing for the few weeks it lasted. Brandon was in it, as was his friend Ryan on drums (still one of the best drummers I played with), and Todd Larowe. Various other groupings over the next year or so included Todd or Brandon at times. Eventually though, all that was way more than I was cut out for, some people within these bands giving me the news that I myself was not good enough a player to be in them if we were to really play the music I was hoping to play. But in the summer of 2000, I did not yet know that.

Ahhh—Hog Heaven in the summertime. No windows. No vents. No AC but for a fan or two. Insane humidity like a gym locker room. Play 15 minutes then open the door for 15 or more, then repeat a few times. Get burritos and beer. Come back and scan the recording for some highlights. Ah. The good old days.

Second Verse Not The Same As The First

There was no fanfare today when the 20th anniversary of the start of my drumming and musical life came and went in a pretty dreadful day of work, toothaches, and just doing life. The story of this day in 1989 probably isn't that big a deal to anyone but it was a turning point for me. Of course, loyal readers of this journal know that music has mostly fizzled out in the past few years as life just got too dense and challenging to invest the time. In some ways I am glad to be rid of it; the layers of negativity that it evokes for me are gone: the darkness and alienation of the Hog Heaven period; the endless consumer merry-go-round; the no-go band projects with the flaky personalities. But as much as that sucked there must be the opposite virtues and joys: the endless hours dedicated to creating something from nothing; the ability to evoke mood and color from several instruments and recording gear and force of will; the sheer bliss of laying on the studio floor and pumping the latest mix and giddily getting a wild shit-eating grin.

Music for a while was my lens to see the world. Now I have other lenses to view things. But for a while, I guess I have to admit that my spirituality was music-based even though I had no way to articulate it as such. I mean, music is a way of understanding things at a deeper level. It is rooted to the mathematics of the universe itself. It is one aspect of our god-like power to create. It allows solo and group expression, akin to what I now understand as contemplation and action. The list goes on.

These days I don't really play anymore but find myself aching to do so. I hear music more fully than I had before, just as I listen to other people's music. That was one thing I never did before I picked up the sticks in 1989 and made a bunch of drum racket. It did happen parallel to my musicking but only in the years since about 2005 have I had more interest in enjoying music at a deeper level than when I made it myself. I anticipate that some day I will find a situation that will allow me the time to pick up a guitar and notebook and convey something real, and all the music that has seeped into me will somehow inform the resulting product. More than anything else I want to sing and write songs now, and leave behind the dissonant and dark stuff.

Not that there was anything so terribly wrong about that when that was what my soul had to say. It was ten years ago—halfway through this past 20 years in question—that the recordings that became my CD Receiving began to take shape. It is mind boggling that a decade has passed since then. It was a very fruitful year, 1999, but a very depressing one too. It was one of my darkest times. And much of what I did musically was dark. It was almost exactly then that I made some of the last recordings with any degree of humor at all. At the time I considered it to be musically growing up. The recordings that constitute Receiving in many cases came from pretty spontaneous moments that were sculpted into form. Some of my favorites were the ones that happened almost immediately. But equally so there are moments that are polished to a shine from long hours and even months of work. If nothing else, Receiving was a commitment to myself to record a CD's worth of stuff, and to press it to a commercial-ready product. I was aware that I was raising the bar for myself, and wasn't sure what would happen next.

Sometimes I think my life depended on this stuff to keep me busy, else I was ruminating on "stopping" cars or trains with my bare hands. Along the way in that period of 1999-2000 I was awake to do audio tech work, a few studio projects for others or my own music. I ate pretty badly. I was going to bed at dawn and getting up at 1 pm or later. I had very little social life. My imaginary relationship with Shelby was in full swing with what must have been mad sublimation of my creative passion—unable to act out with her, all my effort went to studio production while she was in Africa for a couple years. (I've written before that my most fervent and productive studio recording era was bracketed by her reappearance in my life just days before I got my VS-880 recorder in August 1997, and which ended almost to the day in December 2000 when our 12-year "friendship" totally unraveled in one day when she came back from Africa and I had just finished a holiday recording for my niece—on my VS-880, and the last thing of any real substance I did with that machine!) It almost seems that without Shelby, the whole enterprise fell apart, even though I maintained things for a while later with a bigger and better studio, other players, and more time, there was something missing. Maybe she was my muse after all, warped as that seems now.

I keep thinking that for all that musical period, the will to do it all was coming from outside me. Maybe it was the gear and all the promises that were made about how great it would make things. Maybe it was trying to please the people I worked around. Or maybe I was trying to live Mike Keneally's life. Whatever it was, now I get this feeling the stuff wasn't coming from within. The last few years—and the musical silence that buffers my earlier period from whatever may come—are letting me start to find my own reasons for playing, so that I might have a chance to sing my own song.

Party Like It's 1999

I just found out that another snippet of stuff I recorded for Mike Keneally back in April 1999 will be a track on his new album, Wine and Pickles. As he says at his website, this is the album of oddities that slowly collected over the years and finally begged to be assembled into a release of some sort. The track in question is part of a track called Hum, which actually was released on Nonkertompf that year, albeit dressed in some studio overdubs done at Doubletime. There are three cuts on Nonkertompf that originated in my little studio, and another bit or two that were on a companion disk called Nonkertalk which was an interview disk. And now this. I always wondered what he had in mind when he left my studio with that digital tape. He did most of the work himself. He did all the instrumental parts and the mixing too. I pretty much just prepared tracks and moved mics and stuff like that, sometimes leaving the house altogether, with Mike working till after I left to work a gig. That was trust on my part. I didn't just go off and leave all my stuff with the door unlocked, but hey, it was in the old days when I was prepared to do anything for the guy.

Downsizing

Well, after some deferred action due to much agonizing hand wringing, I decided to finally be good on my word and sell some shit and take the loss so that I might feel my overall load of material stuff is lighter. The most significant sale was my Warwick fretless bass which sold for precisely half the price I paid for it about five and a half years ago. I don't know what is more saddening. Is it the ridiculous sale price that eats at me? Or the fact that I had to fess to not being Jaco Pastorius or Jack Bruce (who plays a snappier version of the Warwick as I had)? Or is it that I really have lost my muse and it doesn't matter what I sell now because it all feels like having vestigial limbs or rolls of fat after a gastric bypass surgery?

The year 2006 was a year of really evaluating what is dear to me, and in the process, I watched as my musical gear and other household stuff just ate at me, even at the thought of its very existence, and for being under my roof. Sometime in the coming months, I will have to move again, and I really can't see dragging all this stuff around, while not using it like I thought I would. Glenn (Cheekymonkeyfunker musical buddy from 2005) tries to talk me out of selling stuff, but the last piece of music remotely worth signing my name to was done with him back in May of that year. All of 2006 came and went with not a single piece of worthwhile music emerging. So I feel that maybe I shot my musical load. So I hit Craigslist hard this last couple weeks to try to clean out the shit that is most redundant or underused. I still have more of that stuff, even before I slash into the core of things, but I am not really clear how I want to progress. But some things are obvious. I blew out a small collection of old, cracked, or otherwise unused cymbals today. Other stuff is on the block, including my first G4 Mac and the monitor that goes with it. I don't know whether I should sell my Pro Tools stuff or not. It is handy just as a sound card, but the presence of it drives me mad, considering how useful it would be if I worked the way I did back in 1995-2000.

I often talk about just heaving shit off a cliff and being done with it. Or heaping it onto a bonfire. Or just smashing it in the driveway. I've had many a thought about how I worked hard in the late 90s to be able to afford that stuff, with it often being a way to fill a void in my life that somehow I feel has been filled by being in a relationship and now married. Other gear was bought with inheritance money from my grandmother, and not insignificantly, I have realized that the shopping spree of 2001 was a huge mistake. The spree was the final blowout of my effort to replace a need for something wholesome in my life with gear that would permit me the means of channeling my fear and anxiety and frankly, hatred for the world into something meaningful. But when I go that far, I say, why would I want to make music now? Why spend all that time? Who cares? I played music for friends in my heyday and they pretended to like it. But now who are my music buddies? Who gives a shit? With mp3s and all the devaluation of the art of music and lack of respect for musicians, how could I ever even pay back my investment? Am I good enough somehow to even call myself a musician? Or am I just a guy who owns a lot of shit that has the potential to make music if someone with talent and vision picks up those tools?

Recording for me was always a very isolated thing. Rare were the days when I actually jammed with people, or actually collaborated. The studio was small, windowless, hidden in many ways. The world outside was harsh. The world inside was freeing. But I had to be very isolated, and I just can't do that anymore, at least not that way. I have a responsibility to Kelli to be present in the marriage, and frankly, the time I spent in the studio has always been well fed by a persistent hatred for how the world works, and the depression that follows. I just can't see returning to that type of life. Other things are too important.

I still pick up a guitar or bass or hit the drums some, but it's just not there. The spirit is just not in me to do that stuff in an original music setting, though I have fun poking around learning something now and again from other music. But it doesn't take my once-significant investment to have the tools to do music at that level. I miss having a keyboard of some sort, and I find myself longing for an acoustic piano again—after selling one in 1996, and also having sold over the years two subsequent electric pianos, and a synthesizer. I don't know why. While in exile in my apartment in late 2005, I found myself longing to have my studio put together again. Now that I have it and everything is ready to work with, I don't use it. All I have is a museum of who I used to be, or so it seems.

The Power Of Bill Ray Compels Me

Required listening while reading this: The Power of Disco Compels You

Sometimes you just never know who will validate you seven years after you wanted or needed it. Artists are always in that bind; who can tell when their work will ever matter to anyone? And of course, it happens often enough that artists get dead before they get famous, or even recognized.

In late 1992, I wrote some silly song lyrics about a guy who had disco fever despite being a gross anachronism, and a first incarnation of the song was recorded by my buddy Matt and me in our drum-vocal duo Rhythmic Catharsis. RC was something that we did so we could get out and play drums and be loud and obnoxious youth. It worked. I never planned for it to be the start of my recording and composing history, but that is what it became.

I reprised that set of lyrics in 1995 when I embarked on another recording project and was looking for some material. This version was marginally better, but not worth writing about here.

Then, in 1997-2000 or so, I spent time re-recording a number of my older and completely irreverent songs and placing them alongside newer ones that were of similar character. The gear I was using was newer and would have been a total wet dream to an earlier version of me, given the various things I could do with it in the recording realm. Light years ahead of my cassette work, the VS 880 was the recorder I used for those years. I once again took advantage of my earlier work and wanted to give it a more refined recording while not losing the spark.

The odd thing about these re-recordings is that during my work as sound man and instrument tech, I happened into a number of professional gigging musicians who somehow were conned into saying they liked my stuff. A few of them came in to record bits, some specifically intended for certain tracks, and some were just off the cuff jams that got turned into something. Drummer Bill Ray is well known in town as a technically proficient and versatile player, and is among the upper crust in town, as far as players go. We had met at the Music Mart store back when it was on Convoy St. in 1990. At different times, we had both worked there. But after some early encounters with Bill, he slipped off the radar for me. Then I happened into him as he was doing this ultra schmaltzy corporate cover band gig with Polyester Express, for whom I sometimes worked as soundman/assistant. So Bill and I got a chance to reconnect and around that time, I was working on a new version of my song, and hitting road bumps. In fact, it was hitting so many road bumps, I was about to totally ditch a version of it which still goes unheard to this day!

I had a tentative drum loop which let me compose the track, lots of ideas for how to record things, but it was all getting real dense on my little eight track recorder. I asked Bill to come in and record some drums so I could get a convincing part in which at least would improve my sense of what needed to stay or go. So, one cold day in the last week of 1998, he came by my then-newish recording shoebox of a studio and proceeded to lay down the drums to this fourth incarnation of my little bit of disco fantasy. He did it with authority. I had what seemed to be a basic sound ready to record, and back in those days, I had no tracks to give to each drum on its own. It went down as stereo, and it was all EQ'ed and compressed as it was going to be printed. So Bill came in, and proving that no two drummers are alike, he played my same kit with my same mixer and EQ settings, and totally sounded unlike anything I ever did. You can hear it now; the snare drum hits the compressor and it explodes in your head. I was actually going for that lame dead 70s snare drum, but he just gets the sound out of any drum, see?

Anyhow, the song took all of 1999 to finally nail down and mix. The drums went down and were never changed a bit since he played them. All the other work was trying out doubled guitars, layered vocals, alternate vocals, solos, and so forth. With only eight tracks and two going to drums alone, my options were few except for all the sub mixing and bouncing, and finally, a lot of cutting of redundant parts of the arrangement. Mixing was made easier but by no means easy. Finally, in early 2000, over a year after the recording commenced, and years after the first idea for it, I got a version that was far grittier than I imagined, but far more fun and amusing when you factor in all the things I didn't plan on—Bill's explosive and dynamic but ultragroovalicious drumming, Todd's half-improvised monologue at the end, and then of course the fact that I finally improvised my way through whole new sections of lyrics while keeping the best of the old stuff intact. I also have to say that there is some bass playing on there that I did that I still marvel at because even now I don't approach the bass that way, despite bass being a favorite instrument of mine for the years since. The rhythm guitar is my work too, but it's totally uncharacteristic and another element of chance that keeps this track exploding. The guitar solo is by Danny Donnelly, the guitar player in Polyester Express, right along with Bill Ray. The whole lyrical story and monologue of Todd's is a tapestry of in jokes concerning Bill and Danny, and a nod to our late soundman buddy Phil Cole, who did in fact attend the last Led Zep show in the states in 1977.

Yeah, it was a victory to get that one in the can. I still listen to it and just enjoy it because it's funny. It's one of my finest pieces because it was one place where a lot of things came together for me. It's one of the few tracks that took a year to nail but still sounds spontaneous and edgy.

Skip ahead some time to the last month or so when Bill Ray sends me an email saying he thinks the time has come for my music to get heard and he wants to do anything he can to help. He heaps praise upon me for the stuff I've done. I'm sort of caught off guard; it's welcome but so out of the blue as to almost confuse me. He started talking up the song, and all things TAPKAE in his web world. He got me to create a MySpace account which I previously avoided like the plague. He got me played on some podcasts that were inclined to listen to his advice. He says he wants to play on some of my new stuff.

Flattered, me, but I'm at this point where I don't even know what I want to do in music. Not that I knew what I wanted to do back in the late 90's, but I did invest all the time I had in making music, not knowing if it would be heard, or when, or by whom. I wasn't concerned with peak oil or world economic collapse. I wasn't concerned with corporate mischief, or being a husband. I just recorded by throwing a load of shit on the wall then watching to see what stuck, and working with it accordingly. I didn't worry about if my gear was good enough to record professionally. I just threw myself at it because there wasn't anything else to do. I pushed the wrong button until I got the right sound. That's all I did.

So now, Bill is making himself at my disposal, and I have to wonder where the spark is. Do I record the various "serious" music scraps that have been accumulating for the past few years since Receiving was made? Do I just jam and hope that I get better stuff than all the things I've thrown out in the last few years with myriad other players and combos? Oh, there was no formula to my madness in 1998. Getting a guy like Bill or Danny, Marc Ziegenhagen or even Mike Keneally was utterly huge to me then, but I sort of had to take what I could get and make it work because it's not like they'd be at my beck and call. I guess I'm not used to someone of Bill's caliber stooping to my level and confusing me with a certain type of validation that I don't even get from most of my listeners. On one hand, I want to just shed all my complex thinking of peak oil and economics and all and reclaim my innocent halcyon days of recording into the wee hours. On the other hand, that is impossible, but it's not like my current musical output does much to reflect the current complex world-weary person I am now. I have long since burned a notebook of naive and cliche-ridden lyrical ideas that didn't have the goofy spark of The Power of Disco Compels You, or the utterly childlike love story of I Wanna Be Your Puppy. I've erased hours and hours of wanky jams that were possibly okay at least to keep around as notes, some of which were transcendent in moments, but the sheer amount of material, all with no particular focus became overwhelming for me.

I once used multitrack recording to hide my utter lack of ability on most instruments, but the current me doesn't want to do the multitrack recording thing, nor is the current me quite up to performance level on bass or guitar, nor is the current me bursting with ideas for things to compose. Nor is the current me loaded with enough clout to be a band leader. So what does a guy like me do when a guy like Bill Ray wants to play on my stuff mainly because he believes in it and would far rather do original music and stay clear away from the corporate cover band scene which took him to a desperate personal crisis? When do I decide it's time to not throw out all the stuff I record? When do I compose something that is "good enough"? Or when do I re-adopt the old habit of working with tracks until I know they are either good, or total shit? When can I shake the self consciousness?

Lame Excuse For Not Writing

It has been a long month. First I was working like mad on my presentation and then for a couple days after that, riding the wave of email praise and a sense that maybe I was of use to the world. I went out to Guitar Center to buy some drum sticks, having decided that my remaining sticks must be about five years old, all falling in numbers, and the ones still usable are splintering like mad. So I plunked down on what must then seem like a ten year supply, given the rate at which I wear them out. I went to Pro Sound and Music to look at some software and talk shop with the owner. Then I went to check on my custom guitar-in-progress, which was actually not even started beyond sanding the pre-milled body. It was meant to be a Telecaster with two humbuckers and some simple hardware options. I took a look and feel and was oohing and ahhhing on it and hearing the notes go “weeeeettooooo teeeetoooooooo neeeeeeee nnooooooooowwwww” and contemplating the classy “Mary Kay” finish—a white wash stain over light wood (ash in this case) and my variety would have a dose of purple thrown in but only enough to keep the white from turning the usual pink tone that the Mary Kay finish creates. And black hardware, resulting in a black and purple-tinged white. Yum. Then I drove home with fanciful dreams of playing my first custom guitar in my newly reinstated studio.

When I got home after music geeking in three music shops, there was an envelope on my screen door with nothing but an address on it, and a single page of paper inside. I opened it with my hands full of stuff and fumbled around to get it straight. All I had to see was that it had the names of the three of us who live here. Then it hit me. Holy FUCK!!! It was real.

I got an eviction notice finally from a property management company that my old man hired to do the dirty work.

Kelli was gone to Florida to see her mom and grandmother for eight days. She had only left two days before, and she had all of a week to stay there. I was floored at this news. There had been talk of such a thing for years, and more rumors in the recent months since the garage and patio have been knocked down. But here it was, and with Kelli being gone, it was hell. I’ve been here for seven years now and have had to do some really dogged things to stay here or to bear it, mostly because I wanted to keep my studio intact, but then later on because it was a good place for Kelli and I to start with, and we were hoping for another three years while she went to school. On one hand, for her, she was in Florida helping her grandmother get into her newly rebuilt place after the hurricanes rippped her house apart last year, just a week or two after the wedding. And as she talked on the phone to me, there was nothing but dismal news here regarding stress and angst surrounding the eviction notice. One house happy, one house sad.

I’ve since struck a tentative deal with my father as to what the future will hold after all this blows past, so I don’t want to sabotage that here, but for the first two and a half weeks, it was utter hell and confusion. We still have to move, but at least we understand the situation better, and it's not as draconian as it seemed earlier on.

So now Kelli and I don’t know really where to live. She has a guaranteed housing situation at her school in Claremont but if we don’t have work there, we don’t have much chance to make that work either. On the other hand, if we stay in San Diego, we need to pay for whatever we get here, plus her commuter housing for three nights a week at school, and the cost of commuting one way or another, and throw on top of that the cost of storage for stuff we clearly can’t use in the sort of abode we can afford. We’re talking a big downsizing here. We fill all but one bedroom in the house. That’s a lot for a couple with one foot on each side of the “30” fence—she 28, me 31. The biggest challenge is in what to do with furniture. Most of it is inherited from my grandparents and some collected on our own because it looks compatible. I have most of a full set of furniture. And it all more or less looks like it belongs together. I could sell it to offload it but I don’t anticipate being able to replace it with something of quality. IKEA doesn’t count. It would suck to see it broken up because it makes a nice working set. Anything else I could readily afford would look like toys compared to this, but none of this would fetch any premium rates.

And then my studio gear is something that even when broken down takes up a quarter of a room and more. In a one bedroom, it's a dead deal. In any place but here, it's a huge question mark as to whether or not I will be able to use it like I have done. I’d need a garage to play drums in and have the luxury of leaving things all set up. Grrrr. I sold a few small things and have put more on the block, but that just bends my mind. In one post, I put up my Warwick bass, Rhodes piano, DAT recorder, second guitar cabinet, eight channel compressor, djembe drum, two snare drums, and some smaller stuff like cymbals, pedals, pickups, etc. I purposely priced it high so no one would respond, or at least once a deal was closed, I’d hopefully be left with a respectable sum. At this point, everything is taken apart for the most part and is stacked in the corner in the big room, in preparation for whatever solution comes up.

Opening The Vault

I finally got around to indulging myself on the luxurious two gigs of space my web host provides me, and with this gesture, I am only using up about 45% of my space, and that is with two sites included (old TAPKAE and Hog Heaven Media) that have some of the same material as this new stuff, so in some places, there are three of the same things in different folders. Maybe I should clean that up some.

I spent all of Friday putting up a shitload of songs from the widest range of my work yet, and I still have left whole projects unrepresented. Still, I have none of my pre-1996 work (Rhythmic Cartharsis, New Electron Symphony, Slaves By Trade) up there, none of the stuff I recorded with Kelli, only one or two tracks from my 1996 CD, and some other things that accumulate along the way. I know I have DATs with stuff scattered around, either as outtakes from certain projects, or whole things that just got shelved. There is one totally ignored CD of things I did in the opening days of my multitrack recording work. There are things that are too embarassing now, but some things still resonate. So, there is stuff out there, but in almost every case, not a lick of it will be heard from before early 1993, and even that is pushing it. LOL. But most of my stuff from 1996 and onward at least bears a satisfactory recording quality. Prior to that it was all cassette and bouncing technique.

But close down this blog and go over to the music page before long and listen to the range of things that I've done. Most of it is still intelligible as music, albeit goofy or irreverent, or meditative, or intense, or even lame. But it's a decent taste of things.

Hog Heaven II

The old studio used to be on the other side of this wall where the control area isWell it seems all is not lost afterall. Hog Heaven has a new lease on life, so it seems. The old room and the wall it used to hide behind in my carport/garage has been obliterated and hardly any of it remains even evidence that there was once a studio there. There is a pile of drywall, studs, and other junk sitting where my drums used to sit.

A few years ago I would have been pissed out of my mind that the studio was gone. I sort of wanted to be pissed as hell, but with the old man, it never seems to do much good. Besides, he was the one who fucked it up anyway, and he had to take all this illegal construction shit down. He had always promised me the studio space would be contingent on real flimsy circumstances he himself would put in place. Namely, it was supposedly built to serve my needs as long as my grandmother was alive. Well, this particular week is four years since she died, so I reckon I got a four year extension on my lease.

So much more spacious in here!The room was always total ass when it came to ventilation (none), sonic aptitude (none), and aesthetic beauty (only good if you like pigs, really). There had been times when I WAYYYYYYY overshot the carrying capacity of the room, and while it was nice for one person, the times when I had a trio or quartet in there all playing at once, it was just a total endurance test.

The week or so when the place got emptied out I just brought stuff in the house and set it aside, not knowing what to do but to pile shit in the closet. But then Kelli and I got the unrented room to ourselves, so we got to set up her little office/workspace in there, and she gave up the big remodeled room (formerly garage, but always a big room to me). I got to thinking, that if I could get that space, I could at least put together the stuff I know I can use, and sneak my way back into using it for more and more stuff. So I set out to basically rebuild my entire studio in the big room. It's a nice step up. The old room was an absolute square of 11' dimensions, and this is 15'x17', with nice French doors, shelved cabinets, and a closet. It has fake hardwood floors, and it looks a hell of a lot nicer. There's a couch too. I have enough space to be more liberal with the arrangement. I have the monitors spaced over a foot from the wall (unheard of in the little room). The drums are up just beside and behind where I sit in the center of the room. The electric piano is off to the right, the rack to the left. The guitar amp sits left of that, and the iso cabinet is tucked into a corner and buried with a gobo and tons of blankets, all with a mic on the speakers. Behind the drums, I put up my big 2x4 stud-with-guitar-hooks for six guitars. The only thing that bugs me is that with almost NO storage space in the house, I can't really keep my drum bags, guitar bags and cases, and other leftover stuff anywhere but in the main room, so I still get clutter. But the functionality is great.

Glenn and I set up the place about two weeks ago and we got to find out that even the drums were fairly well contained in this room. It isn't as leakproof as the other room was, but it isn't too bad at all if I stick to my usual habits. The drums are wide open and ringy, and with the room's hard walls and floor, the kit explodes. The space allows me to be more creative with mic'ing the kit and the room. The overall space is greater, so I don't get such obvious and dreadful acoustical mess with reflections and standing waves when I am monitoring. I wish I could get the speakers spread out by about 18" more, and sit further back. If I get bold, I might try to do some full band jam stuff to see if I can get away with it. Even if not, I can still record a good sized group with direct feeds, and live drums. I still have the channel count and headphone distro to get a lot of people in on one recording, if need be.

So this was a pleasant surprise. I didn't really think it would come this far, but on the last three weekends, Glenn and I have been getting it together and making some shit happen. This is cool. Of course, my rates are going up now. (That means Tim Robertson has to pay more, bastard.)

Swine Revival

The last several days have been one huge mess of a house for me and Kellipup. Losing the studio alone was cause to have to absorb a whole room's worth of stuff into the house. Wednesday was the day when the street facing side of the studio was torn wide open and laid flat on the concrete. Since then, things have been a total clusterfuck of drums, studio gear, electric piano, guitars (in bags or cases, and a couple without—I never take my guitars anywhere, so I never bagged or cased them all), books, shelves, sofas, desks, and all sorts of other junk has all been moved from one room to another. The living room is littered with all this stuff. Finally, today I got the most work done in getting Kelli set up in the bedroom that we haven't rented in two months. She now has a whole bedroom to herself for her office and study. And I got the big room that was remodeled last year for my studio. Today Glenn and I set it up more or less as it will appear, with drums and piano and other stuff. It's sort of like the studio arrangement I had back in 2002/2003 before I packed it in for several months. Now, this is not a room prepared for sound so it remains to be seen what sort of drum use I can get out of it, if any. However, things here are not as restrictive as they once were at the old man's house while I was there, and I had spells of being able to play there with modest concessions as far as dampening the kit and room, but never any construction modifications. One wall faces the rest of my house, and my bedroom buffers the space between this room and the living room. Another wall faces the garage space, another the back yard with the hill that juts up, and the last wall is facing my neighbors. This room probably won't be able to get the sorts of mods that made the other room the great place it was, but you never know what could happen. But for now, I won't go bonkers worrying about that. It's just cool to see my gear set up again, and now in the coolest looking room in the house. As I sat at the drums today while setting them up, I looked out the window at the huge tree in my back yard. That alone is weird. For the last nearly seven years, my drums have been in a windowless sweaty box.

Now I have to put up my guitar hanger (full sized stud with six guitar hooks mounted to it), and find places for my guitar amp, mic the drums and patch some stuff into the rack. As for my guitar amp sounds, I am banking on my remote speaker cabinet trick that was used to some degree of luck in the old room when Glenn and I were recording drums and guitar at once. I have a 2x12 cabinet buried under a plywood and carpet box, which itself is buried under blankets and beside couch cushions. Its crude but it worked well enough to keep my guitar and drums separated while tracking simultaneously. I still like to use high gain for my guitar tones, so I can't really be goosing the power on the Mesa too hard without some heavy dampening, and I hate the idea of using digital models.