journal
Holiday Update
By Dave on Friday, December 25th 2009 9:02 pm
In between the holiday cooking, shopping, and wrapping I've been getting some work done on the record. After having some emergency surgery done on my bass over at Michael Charles Music to alleviate a buzzy A string, I tracked bass parts for Know Again last week. I've gotten back some much anticipated preview vocals tracks from the singer for the epic piece, Poet's Talespin. I'm real excited about how that piece is shaping up.
I'm on vacation for another week so next I'm going to track bass guitar on Skating on Europa. Then I'll start tracking guitars and keys on that piece and Know Again.
Happy Halloween
By Dave on Friday, October 30th 2009 11:50 pm
Below is a slideshow of my Neighbor's rather elaborate Halloween display. The night shots came out half decent.
Blog upgrade
By Dave on Monday, October 19th 2009 11:40 pm
Just upgraded b2evolution to the latest version so I'm doing a quick post to make sure all is well. So what has been going on then....
I've nearly completed all the tracks for the big long epic piece (working title "Talespin"). Just some acoustic guitar parts left to track. I've been having intermittent numbness in my left hand finger tips and that is slowing things down. Pretty sure it is actually a wrist problem due to trying to ramp up into long recording sessions without properly easing into it after the layoff in July/August. So that has been frustrating. Seems like on the nights when my hands are cooperating the equipment fails me, and when those things are working there is too much ambient noise to record with open microphones. Sigh.
Yesterday I put down the acoustic and I tracked the final electric guitar solo in "Talespin" which was a lot of fun for a change. Pumped a bit of life back into the project.
New Album Recording Status
By Dave on Tuesday, September 8th 2009 11:49 pm
The months of July and August got a bit bogged down in a home remodel that is now winding down. I'm hoping that September will be productive. I made good use of the long weekend, so, so far so good on that front.
At this stage I have all the drum tracks for the 30 minute piece (now called "Talespin" - more on that in another post) and two other songs from Frank. Friday and Saturday I finished tracking the bass guitar parts for "Talespin". Then Sunday and Monday I relearned and tracked most of the piano parts. Wow was I out of playing shape on piano.... my left thumb is killing me.
Tonight I practiced the last couple of piano parts, so I should be able to track those tomorrow and get started on guitars. With any luck next week I can send "Talespin" off to the vocalist so she can start working on that while I begin tracking the other songs.
Photos from NEARfest 2009: Sunday
By Dave on Tuesday, June 23rd 2009 9:48 pm
Again with this batch Beardfish and Quantum Fantay were really easy to shoot while Trettioåriga Kriget was almost as hard for me to photograph as they are for me to pronounce. PFM was reasonably easy to shoot, though there was no hope of capturing how terrific the lights and video looked. The lights always look good at NF but the PFM show was really something visually. Unfortunately I lost my photos of the last third of the show because I was a dufus and had turned the auto-focus off on the D50 to get one shot and forgot to turn it back on. So the last 100 photos or so were all just slightly but noticeably out of focus. Too bad, there were a few good ones in there.
Photos from NEARfest 2009: Saturday
By Dave on Tuesday, June 23rd 2009 12:42 am
And here are the Saturday Bands...
I really really enjoyed CDC.
All shot with a Nikon D50 using either a 85mm 1.4 lens or the 50mm 1.8 lens. Had to play quite a bit with the manual settings to get the exposure times right depending on the constantly shifting lighting conditions. The automatic settings tended to overexpose everything. Some bands were a lot easier to shoot than others - primarily due to differences in the light and video shows. Oblivion Sun shot very easily where Steve Hillage was tough.