slowburn

- Work on “Stuck” Nord Mod sequences
- Work on “Stuck” effects chains
- Figure out what “Stuck” is missing
- Work on installation proposal

Maim That Tune by Fila Brazillia, 1995

Gah, week three already? And instead of getting things done, we just seem to be adding more stuff to the list of things to do. Not good. At the same time, we are making some progress now, and “Stuck” will hopefully be done in a week which will give us something finished and complete to reassure us we’re on the right track. Still, every week I want to make sure we’re moving forward and I’m not just coming up with new obstacles to prevent us from doing that. Hopefully week three will be more productive than the first two.

Worked on “Stuck” a bit today, tweaked the arrangement a tiny bit, experimented with adding another short drum section, and did a very rough mix of the rough scratch tracks. It’s amazing how a few delays, some reverb, and some panning make a mix sound dramatically better. I’m happy with where “Stuck” is, and I have narrowed down the two or three tracks I want to spend time improving. It’s still missing something that I can’t quite figure out, I think it might need a melodic peak of some sort, or maybe just one more catchy hook somewhere. I’ll re-listen to the original version to see if anything jumps out.

The tape echo arrived in the mail, and it looks pretty cool. Unfortunately, they forgot to pack the power supply so I haven’t been able to play with it yet. But soon… soon… soon… soon…

We received an invitation to play at the Circuit Fest in Denver in June, which is great timing to play an ambient set based on the album material. We should have everything recorded, and hopefully have CDs pressed by then, so it will be a good opportunity to promote the album and an excuse to put together a new version of the old ambient set. We also might try incorporating lights and video for the first time.

Speaking of which, the deadline for art installation proposals for Burning Man is in a couple weeks, so I’ve been working on coming up with something concrete to propose. The theme this year is “The Green Man”, so we want to incorporate some environmental aspects to go along with the general Burning Man push to make things interactive. We’d also like to incorporate an art car into it to have a mobile aspect to the project, although from reading their grant rules they don’t fund art cars so that won’t be able to be the focus. The current idea is some sort of structure/sculpture that uses interconnected speakers, lights, and various sensors to make our music interact with people and the environment. I like the idea of the thing being some sort of strange creature with a pulsing heartbeat, and when encountered you can coax it into making pretty music, or piss it off and have it screech noise at you. We’d also have a tricked out golf cart outfitted in a similar way, with some wireless MIDI between the two so they could sense each others presence, and sync up musically when they were both within range. The plan is starting to gel in my head, but I still need to think it through some more… ideally the golf cart would let us drive places and do some interactive concerts and be a little more upbeat, while the structure/sculpture would be more ambient and strange. And then when you put the two together it would bring together the melodic with the weird, sort of like our music, man, yeah. In theory. You know, man. Totally. Hey, I’m still working on it, okay?

Oh, I’m pretty much over the sick thing, other than some sniffles. And I signed up to run the Big Sur marathon in May. So you’ll probably be forced to listen to me drone on about the parallels between recording an album and long distance running. And I actually do believe there are more of them than you’d think. But I’ll save that for a slow day.

Tomorrow I’ll keep working with “Stuck”.

- Work on “Stuck” Nord Mod sequences
- Figure out what “Stuck” is missing
- Play with the tape echo that just arrived
- Maybe start work on Burning Man grant proposal

Pop Ambient 2007 by various artists on Kompakt, 2006

Whoops, looks like I forgot to make a To Do list yesterday… funnily enough, we got a lot more done today than usual. Dallas came over and we cut and pasted a rough scratch version of “Stuck” using raw recordings from the sequences. We also added a rough sketch of a drum part to the arrangement, with some plugins to get an approximate sound. Finally we overdubbed one of the scratch parts with a new recording while we played with the Kaoss controller and various inserted hardware effects to do a sort of practice run of the way we plan to record the final version. It definitely felt like good progress to be working together and actually recording things!

Dallas will be out of town for the next week, so I’m going to work on getting all the sequenced parts tweaked and ready to go, planning out effects chains for each track, creating and recording some random noises, and doing whatever other random tasks need to be done so that when he’s back we can just record and mix it. He’ll be trying to get some field samples we can use with the song, which currently has the working subtitle “Meandering Jellyfish Mix”, which would seem to suggest some ocean related samples. Or he could come back with something entirely different and it will turn into the “Moonlight Mariachi Mix”, who knows…

As I sort of expected, I had to debug a few things with the newly reinstalled and reconfigured setup before we were ready to record. First off, the Kaoss KP3 was sending MIDI clock along with the Mac, so all the sequences were running twice as fast, which took a while to figure out and debug (at first I thought I had screwed up the sequences themselves when I added the Kaoss control to them). Once I knew what the problem was, I realized I didn’t have the Kaoss KP3 software on my computer, and it doesn’t seem to be up on Korg’s web site yet, so I had to sort through a bunch of random stuff in the studio to find it. Luckily, that gave me an excuse to clean more stuff up, and currently things are looking pretty good. Finally, I am only partially through the process of tweaking my Logic preferences to get them back to where they were. Currently I can record things fine, but I need to adjust some delay values so that the MIDI clock syncs external gear up properly with the audio playing, and records it with the appropriate delay so that it ends up recorded in sync with plugins/etc that are locked to the grid. Yeah, fun stuff, I know… then I get to do the same thing in slightly different fashion with slightly different parameters in Ableton Live.

Tomorrow I’ll work on “Stuck” some more.

Not For Threes by Plaid, 1998

Everything is back up and configured and ready to go. If I never have to see another progress bar, it will be too soon…

Brian Wilson was great. When I hear a song like “God Only Knows” I am overwhelmed with awe and more than just a little envy. The show itself gave me mixed feelings. It was great to see him back on stage singing his songs after all he’s been through. At the same time, it was clear that the ordeal had taken its toll, and he was still not completely there and probably never will be. A sense of loss pervaded the evening for me. That made some songs especially poignant, and it made others seem to almost border on inappropriate. Probably I was just reading too much into it all, I do still have this lingering head cold and was a bit out of it. Either way the show was great, the music was wonderful, and it was definitely worth going to.

Tomorrow we’ll try to get back to where we left off with “Stuck”.

- Finish up installations, authorizations and configurations
- Get misc things ready so we can record “Stuck”
- Go to Brian Wilson concert tonight

Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, 1966