Your New Home

New song can be downloaded in high quality mp3 here.

To be fair this is actually something that I worked on and had up on the Myspace in a different form a few months ago.

The song has gotten a remix and a 100% brand new vocal track. This time I replaced the dopey vocal effects with proper enunciation so you can hear the whole story.

What hasn't changed is the song is still a silly stream of consciousness homage to late 80s Touch and Go records bands.

Enjoy. The picture is unrelated. It is from a goat farm I was on last week before seeing Alice Cooper and Heaven & Hell. I threw the goats at the goat and it just kept staring back at me, trying to suck my soul out through my mouth as I breathed. Goats are freaking Metal. I see why people associate them with the devil. Weird freaky gorgeous lovable creatures. Click on the picture for the full size version where you can really see the F'ed up eyes. There was also a newfie on the farm which is the most ginormous puppy I have ever crossed paths with. Although still technically a puppy the dog weighed over 130 pounds. And was wet and stinky. My friend Vince in order to try to not get dog slobber all over him raised his hand up when the dog came running. Apparently this is the command for "hug" so he got a lot more than he bargained for with a face full of newfie. Pretty rad dog anyway, even with the stinkiness and all.

Yes, this was the third time I saw H&H in the last six months. What can I say? I never thought I would ever get the chance to see Sabbath with Dio so I took every opportunity that presented itself. No, there were no surprises, in fact they cut four songs from the set. But who cares? Alice and Dio in the same night? Freaking awesome.

Also unrelated- went to the LI Roller Derby championships yesterday. It was a fun night because of the company but the game wasn't particularly notable except they kept the music going the whole time, not just in between periods. Watching girls beat the crap out of each other to "The Trooper" was freakin' sick. Even though the announcer tried to ruin it by singing along to the guitar harmonies. Actually no, that just made it all the more Metal. We were also coincidentally super close to where my parents live. We passed their house a couple of times and I took everyone in the car to the old diner hang out Shyer and I used to go in high school, On Parade Diner. It is all fancy now. WTF? It was also empty on a Saturday at Midnight. Where do the kids hang out now? Are they all at Syosset House?

New Song- "Under the Wires"

Also up on the Myspace.

High quality mp3 HERE

Right click to download or left click to stream. If you are on a Mac, God willing you know what to do with a link.

While wrestling with a very ambitious song "Exposed" that is far from ready for public consumption, I kinda crapped this out very quickly. That is not to say that there wasn't any sweat or tears over the arrangement or the mix, but the basic structure and lyrics came in a flash. As people who have worked with me know, I love simple arrangements with dense sound layers. This song started as just acoustic guitar and vocals, and I added all the orchestral parts one by one. There are high strings, brass, stringed bass, and some synth pads. The "tropical" guitar is electric, although in context it sounds almost like a very bright acoustic guitar.

Should I add percussion? I am inclined to say no, but I was experimenting with a few hits that I thought sounded pretty good, but also made the song sound a bit Flaming Lips-y. Anyways, give it a spin. New Scream Bloody Virgin on a lazy Sunday.

In case you didn't know tonight is the season premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm!!! I am so psyched. Hopefully divorce has given him some great material.

Also if you live in the UK you are probably already watching the IT crowd. If you live in America you probably don't know what it is. Find a way to watch it. Season two is already three episodes in and they are the funniest things I have seen all year. Find them as torrents, or if you know how to spoof your IP, they stream on the BBC website for UK IPs.

I hung out with some goats yesterday, and the most ginormous puppy I have ever personally had the pleasure of petting. Stories forthcoming..........

Space

I haven't done a good music philosophy post in a while, so here goes.

Walking around the city today my iPod switched over from Clipse ("Chinese New Year) to Dream Theater ("The Silent Man"). Now I was really enjoying the Clipse song. Ben turned me onto him a little while ago, and I think it is one of the more interesting commercial hip hop albums I have heard in a very long time. Granted I am not an expert on the subject, but I like the blend between the abstract and the booty shaking. The Dream Theater song starts as simple as can be, with a strummed acoustic guitar. Which sounded beautiful. Absolute beauty. Hot puppy sleeping in the grass on a lazy summer afternoon kinda of beautiful. You could hear the care that went into the room and mic placements. Then the voice comes in on top and everything is in a beautiful space. It sounded like Petrucci and LeBrie were sitting on 14th street performing for me in a cavernous yet acoustically precise theater.

Clipse had no space. Clipse has no instruments. Everything is completely virtual and compressed up the wazoo. Clipse doesn't want to be the quietest mp3 on the iPod. Listen to any recent metal album from the last 2 years. Hell, listen to a lot of recent indie releases like that Arcade Fire abomination. Can you envision where it was recorded? Can you see the room? The downside of freely available high quality recording solutions is we have lost our sense of space. I am 100% as guilty of it as anyone else. Listen to my music. It sounds like it was recorded somewhere in the Matrix. You can't envision my environment. There isn't an environment. My music is made somewhere between lines of code in emulation software. The most my music breathes is when I use drum samples that were blatantly recorded in a real drum room.

No wonder a higher quality music format was never accepted by the public and we all collectively took a step back with mp3s. What would you even want to listen to in high definition audio? All my favorite DVD Audio discs are 20-30 year old albums. People have started working very hard to make albums sound louder and bigger and heavier and more epic. But who is striving to make music sound *better*? Who is the next George Martin? Glyn Johns? Tom Dowd?

Shit the Gods of Fire aren't even using real DRUMS on the next album. And we were seen as relics for using a real kit on the first record. There are a lot of problems with Wrath of the Gods, but you can hear where it was recorded. You hear imperfections in my amp. You can hear the natural inconsistencies in the drumming. Unfortunately it is a losing war. I have shamefully stepped back from all of my analog ideals in favor of louder bigger and heavier.

How are you supposed to get kids to go to rock concerts if they don't even know what a rock room is supposed to sound like? I was pretty shocked the first time I saw a band called Death by Stereo use severe vocal and full mix compression during their set opening for Mastodon. The Bowery Ballroom no longer sounded like a concert venue. There were just pretty dudes sounding like the iPod. I'm sure I wouldn't survive a Linkin Park or Good Charlotte show, or any of those people. Trying to make your music "sound like the records" now means to do as much as possible to remove the live environment as possible. So when you are in a space, you are still in a virtual world.

As I plunge deeper and deeper into the matrix and forget everything I originally loved about recorded sound I hear a beautifully played acoustic guitar reminding me that we all feel relaxed with a little bit of space.

Great Audio Mix- Firewater

If you do not own Firewater's Man on the Burning Tightrope album go to their official site here. On the top right of the main page pop up is a button that says "click here to listen to the new album." Skip ahead to track 8, "Secret."

Firewater albums have all generally been extremely well recorded. Check out this track. In addition to being a great song the mix is very interesting. It violates quite a few of my "rules" about where instruments should live in the stereo space, but everything is so well balanced it works.

As the song starts the acoustic guitar is hard left, with a strong stereo voice keeping both sides balanced. As the song kicks in, the acoustic stays hard left, accompanied by the ENTIRE DRUM KIT. The right channel gets all of the bass, and the electric guitar. The organ (for the most part) stays on the right, while strings are pretty close to hard left, with reverb trails coming in on the right.

This is the sort of thing that should get the "unlistenable in headphones" tag but I am floored by how clever use of instrument levels and EQ allows everything to sit perfectly balanced, even in headphones. I wonder why they chose to do something so bold for this ballad, unless they were consciously trying to emulate a vintage 60s Beatles mix.

Either way check it out. If you have only appreciated the band for their songs in the past take a moment to appreciate the craft. This could have easily fallen off the edge of disaster, but instead makes a good song extraordinary and memorable.

Never say Never: New Pedals!

Bought a Fulltone Wah today and ordered the Blue Box. Got a nice discount. Despite all the virtual modeling of cabinets and amps, it does feel good to stomp shit.

Inside The Studio

A couple of people have asked to see some pics of the Studio, which I have now come to think of as "Oblivion Research." Well, more like my new Blackberry demanded I give them a company name for my personal email accounts and I had to think on my feet and that is the first thing that came out. In high school and college I used the pseudonym Hello Oblivion when I made 4 track recordings. I have always liked the word Oblivion. But anyway here are the first pics, taken with the Blackberry camera of Oblivion Research. Like all good porn it is a little blurry and a little grainy.

Eddication Friday!

My new books arrived today!!

The Barbecue Bible!

and

Mastering Audio: The art and the science

If you are interested in compression or Kofte kebabs, I'm your man!

Thanks Harry for the tip off for the BBQ book. Now I have something to do with all those spices I just got.

Faux Faust

Graham came over last night to create yet more music for his first feature film. He had cut an entire scene to a Faust song of dubious copyright, so like any industrious director decided we should sorta "re-create" the song for the scene.

At home using Fruity Loops, Graham built the entire drum groove and brought it over to the studio. First thing we did was upload the scene into Sonar. After the video thumbnails set themselves up we matched the loop to the timing of the scene. Then we found a nice analog keyboard sound to match the bass of the original track.

Then we went into our own thing. I'm a huge fan of DI'ing string instruments and building all of the sounds in post. Graham really wanted me to be insipired laying down the guitar parts by recording dirty. And he used dirty tricks to get what he wanted. He brought out of his bag the BUZZ BOX, a pedal he owns and knows I lust after. It is a pretty nasty sounding distortion which also has an octaver that goes two octaves below POORLY. I thought it would be fun to shred so fast that the pedal couldn't keep up and sadly it wasn't very hard. The octaver would chug along behind me at its own pace, sometimes hitting the right notes, sometimes not.

So this is how the guitar parts went. I did two tracks of Kraut Rock noodles completely DI'ed with the Buzz Box. Played back straight back through the monitors without any additional effects the sound was very reminiscent of early Butthole Surfers. I'm pretty psyched with it. As we speak Graham is adding vox, an e-bow track, and editing the whole thing together in his studio on a Pro-tools setup.

Between this, our doo-wop tune Spray it On, and the general noise weirdness we recorded, I think the soundtrack for this movie is going to kick tons of ass!

dysgrace

New song up on the myspace. Check it out here.

I'm pretty proud of where I took this one. I didn't expect it to turn out this guitar heavy. A lot of the vocals were recorded before guitars were added to the mix. Discipline has never been one of my finer traits and shit, I can add layers indefinitely. Knowing what to take away or never put in was as important as what to add.

I think I'm getting the hang of the new gear. We'll see where the next one goes.

The first collaborative session!

My spiritually advanced friend Matt approached me recently with the idea of doing a collaboration under the name Sky Burial. His idea of trying to do some somber ambient noise was very appealing to me and I readily accepted. However I was a bit nervous as this would mark the first time I used the studio with someone else.

Generally up to this point if there is something I wanted to do and didn't know how I would either stop working and learn, or decide it wasn't really that important anyway ;-)

How would I handle fielding these same types of requests from an outside person? What if I have major gear failure? What if I just show myself for the hack I am?

Despite my crisis of faith I am happy to report the session went very well. We spent about 8 hours or so working on one 3 minute song we are calling "Exhaust the Sun." The process was fresh and collaborative, and most importantly creative. Most ideas that we wanted to try I was able to program. Never did we have to really stop what we were doing to worry about process. Our imaginations ran wild and we recorded a heavy, dense, at times terrifying piece of music. The drums are a mess and it doesn't sound very good outside of studio monitors, but I am working on it.

Once I re-program and remix the sketchy parts I am going to put it up on the MySpace and send out direct copies to the usual suspects. I was really happy with what we were able to do, and how the technology worked for us. It may not seem like it from some of these posts, but I am not as into the process and the tech, as much as I am into having the tech just WORK so I can be creative.

On a gear note, however, this was the first time I got to use the AKG condenser mic. It sounded absolutely amazing. The one time Matt started screaming and wasn't thinking about line levels the mic peaked in the most amazing way. The vocals sound like they have a nice tube overdrive on them, rather than a muddy crap out. It saved me the time of having to apply distortion.

Also, Amplitube2 completely kicks Guitar Rig's ass, and is far less CPU intensive. I recommend everyone check it out. I am blown out of the water.

New Additions to the Family!!!

Please help me in welcoming my new 250 gig Firewire800 G-drive and PCI Firewire800 card to the studio.

I have decided there is only one way to solve these wacky firewire problems, and that is with dedicated hardware.

Last Night a Placebo Saved My Life

It was about three or four songs in before I even noticed what was happening. Perhaps I was thrown off by the band opening with "Infra-Red," an amazing song of revenge, and one of my favorites on the new record. Maybe it was the rocked up version of "Meds" that kept me from really listening to the show. It could have also been the exquisite lights complimented by three hi-res video screens that were being manipulated in real time by a video engineer.

But somewhere along the way I realized that I was at Roseland, a venue notorious for having some of the muddiest and over-modulated sound mixes in Manhattan, yet I was hearing one of the best sound mixes I have ever heard, period! Being as I was somewhat near the soundboard I decided to stroll over and see what was happening. There I became witness to art, beauty and grace. The unsung hero behind the digital console was a true genius, and horribly underpaid no matter what the band salaries him.

He was rocking a fully digital console which had a breakout flat screen monitor. All of the songs had their own automated presets, but all of the faders and effects were being controlled by hand.

During "Follow the Cops Back Home" there was a really cool reverb effect on the snare that isn't on the album. Every hit had a different reverb level/decay. I was watching the sound man control this manually by hand, while actively managing all the other levels. It was amazing to watch. He was also manually activating all the vocal effects, and adjusting their levels live. Looking at all of his peaks, nothing was even close to over-modulating, and all of the levels were well below 0db, despite the crushing volume of the show. Perhaps his board is designed for the much larger venues they play in Europe, and in the smaller American venues he can get away with a loud show at a very low strength. I am only guessing. Bottom line is the man is a genius.

The whole show was slick as hell in a very satisfying way. The core trio was augmented by two multi-instrumentalists who were able to quickly and silently grab a bass, acoustic, keyboard, or whatever they needed. There was none of the awkwardness of instrument switching that you sometimes see even in professional shows with a road crew. Also a Gibson Thunderbird was in play most of the gig. That bass. That BASS! And for the first time I understood the appeal of a Fender Jazzmaster. I have never before last night heard one sound good through any setup. Now I get it.

There were also real dynamics in the show. I give 50/50 credit to both the band and the sound man for that feat. There were genuinely quiet passages, and places where instruments swelled up to amazing crescendos. In "Without You I'm Nothing" the "I'm unclean a libertine...." portion of the song crashed in with layers of distortion and crisp drum hits that were a stark contrast to the verses.

Placebo is now on the list of bands to not miss when they come through town.

Electrical Porn Company

I was talking to my homie Steve about the idea of Eon Mackaye, and how it is such a bizarre and obvious assumed porn name. We also acknowledged a twinge of jealousy that this twit with a dumb assed name is getting paid more than us to film tattooed people fucking.

So we are going to start our own porn house, Electrical Porn Company. His porn name will be Steve Albini. All films will feature the credit "Filmed by Steve Albini" because he doesn't actually "direct." He would never infringe on the actors' privilege to direct their own scenes. He will never take a cut of DVD sales or online downloads. He will charge a flat fee if using his own locations, or a sliding scale if he has to film elsewhere.

I will occasionally collaborate. My porn name? Knob Weston.

Watch out Vivid Alt, you are on notice!

If you see me eating Ramen, don't be surprised...

I am now the proud owner of an AKG Perception 200 microphone, and I got the 8 inch M-audio studio monitors. I'm just hoping my desk can accommodate the largeness of these things! However the 5 inch's sucked. I A/B'ed the speakers against my own music, Holy Wars by Megadeth, and This is Hardcore by Pulp. Since the Pulp record is so rich as it is, Holy Wars was where I noticed the major difference. On the 5" speakers the toms and kick drums simply disappeared, and the 8" speakers sounded like I was in the studio sitting next to Mustaine.

I'm getting there! A nice condenser mic, some monitors to hear how my mixes REALLY sound. Gods of Fire, you fuckers are on NOTICE!

The Studio, an Introduction.

Aside from all the funny secondary connotations of the name, I am calling the blog latency issues because there will occasionally be a bit of a focus on my "home studio." Of course since this is 2007, we are talking about a home computer and a couple of audio interfaces.

Latency refers to the time delay in digital audio systems due to analog to digital conversions, processing and conversion back to analog. The lower you set the latency in your Audio drivers the more instant the music sounds, but if you are running a lot of applications, can make things go haywire. The best way to stabilize a home studio is to increase the latency, which takes a lot of pressure off your system, but will produce a noticeable delay between you physically hitting a note, and hearing it through your speakers.

These posts may be long. Please feel free to skip right by if hearing a semi-techie bitch about his gear is not exciting to you. There is a funny piece right below about how I am considering falling in love with the State of New Jersey. Skip ahead, I won't judge.

So for the record, here is my current system.

AMD X2 64 2.4 GHZ 4200+ 2 gig ram running XP Media Center Edition
250 gig 5400 RPM internal Hard Drive (running my OS and apps)
250 gig 7200 RPM external Hard Drive (recording the audio)
Focusrite Saffire Firewire Audio Interface
M-Audio Axiom 61 Keyboard Controller

Software:
Sonar 6 PE w/related soft synths
Waves Diamond Bundle
Guitar Rig 2
NI Pro-53
NI B4

The first few experiments have been, shall we say, less than encouraging. The first hurdle was the Saffire. It would either recognize the signal coming into it, or Sonar attempting to recognize it, but never both. I would get errors that the SaffireControl software was unable to locate the interface. Didn't the weasel at Guitar Center sell me on Firewire because unlike USB 2.0 there is a continuous signal path between the device and the CPU? How come it seems like my interface will only recognize one path or the other, but never both. This is hardly "continuous." As I have come to learn, focusrite.com was one notch below useless, because the information on their site is so poor as to encourage you to do harm to your own machine. Upon independent investigation I discovered that by default, XP SP2 turned everyonejs Firewire ports to S100, regardless of their original spec. HOLY SHIT! So, I did some poking around in my machine and discovered something interesting. The Firewire port that came standard on my HP machine is by default S100 and cannot be raised. Fucking corner cutting. Did they assume no one would ever use Firewire since there are admittedly about 250 different USB 2.0 ports sticking out of my box? Maybe. However the Firewire port that is gratuitously on the back of my Audigy2 card was recognized by my machine as S400. Success!

Now my Saffire is being heard by everyone. This has turned out to be a mixed blessing. I have discovered that the instrument input on the Saffire hates my guitar. At least the bridge pickup. I put a really hot Seymore Duncan in a few years ago. It is about 4 or 5 dbs louder than the stock Ibanez pickup that I keep in the neck position. In a dubious cost cutting measure, most Ibanez guitars that roll off the assembly line have 2 humbuckers that aren't technically wired as such. They are instead wired in series, so you in effect have four single coils. Although I had the bridge wired as a true humbucker when the pickup was installed, I opted to leave the neck pickup in series. I like the sound. I don't mind the clean sound of a single coil. It sounds kinda strat-ish. But anyway. The Focusrite HATES the bridge pickup. If I leave the level at zero it still clips the level and produces a lot of distortion. And this pickup is PASSIVE. I tried switching to a balanced line input which does bring some sanity to the levels, but at the price of substantial tone. You can even hear it when I apply processing. There is no brightness left at all. So I am still working this one out. I cannot lose access to my awesome pickup. I tried distorting the neck pickup and it sounds like a distorted Tele. That might be your cup of tea, but if you are reading this you know the tea I like to brew, and that shit is LOUD BRIGHT AND GNARLY.

So there have been some monstrous latency issues and disk issues I am still resolving. There are mystery clicks I am still trouble shooting and eliminating.

A major victory I had was routing everything through the Focusrite. I tried to be cute and use the Audigy2 as my playback interface so I could use my default speakers. No dice. The WDM driver support sucks for the Audigy, and the Saffire is a bit wonky with ASIO. Routing everything through the Saffire using the WDM drivers, which Sonar greatly prefers anyway, has brought a much greater degree of stability.

Also, taking advantage of zero latency monitoring is helping. Instead of listening to my tracks being played through the DAW, I am listening to the untreated clean signal through the Saffire. For trying to play dirty this sucks. At least there is some built in DSP that you can choose whether or not to apply to what is being recorded. Therefore I can use their really shitty built in amp sim to at least get some life in the performance, but the sound being passed to Sonar is 100% clean and ready for real processing.

MUSIC IS BEING MADE. Samples will be up soon. My bass sounds incredible through it, my guitar's neck pickups sound great, and the Axiom controller has a pretty amazing feel. I love the semi-weighted keys so much I have temporarily given up my M-audio prejudice (and I am trying to ignore the fact that my PC only recognizes the board as "USB Midi Interface" and "USB Midi Interface (2)."

Hopefully by the time the Gods of Fire are ready to record a new album, or some tracks, or whatever the hell you do these days, this bright orange colored room I am typing this in now with wacky angles which hopefully will kill a lot of standing tones will be ready as an over-dub/mixing/post-production facility.

Once I find the battery charger for my camera, I will take some pictures of the room and post them up.