slowburn

I recently bought an Apple TV so I can listen to all of my music through my stereo without fiddling with the iPod (and also to rent movies, but it won’t let me do that yet). It works okay as an mp3 player, but the absolute best part about it is the screensaver mode, which can be set up to randomly send all the album artwork from your music collection whizzing across your TV screen. This is the closest thing to sitting around and sorting through a random pile of actual physical CDs that I’ve found yet, and I am so mesmerized by the thing it is scary. Listening to your entire music collection on random play has always been one of the best things about the mp3 revolution, but you can only listen to one song at a time. With this you watch about twenty random albums a minute scroll by reminding you they exist. For an unrepentant music junkie like myself this is worse than crack. I can spend all day staring at it and finding more and more music I want to listen to. I’m sure someone else did it somewhere else first, and in retrospect it’s a really simple and obvious thing for an mp3 player to do, but I can’t get enough of it.

As you’ve probably guessed by the lack of entries, the year 2007 ended without slowburn getting finished. Bummer. The holidays ended up being a lot more distracting than expected, and after my last post I basically got nothing done.

The good news is I’m excited about 2008, and I have a mix of three more tracks for you to listen to. This mini-mix consists of lurp, flicker, and upbeat, which will be tracks seven, eight and nine of the ten song slowburn mix. They are mostly done and I think they are sounding really good. For the final mix, we’ll work a little bit more on making each song on the album sound unique, add a few bleeps and bloops and noises and flourishes where needed, and do a little bit more work on reverb design and drum bus eq/compression/sidechaining, but these are most of the way there. Now I’m going to move onto the last set of three songs and get them in the same state so we can do that final mix of the overall album.

My new year’s resolution for 2008 was to stop making deadlines for finishing this project, because I’ve missed every one so far. So, we are now in “it will take as long as it takes, it will be done whenever it’s done” mode. On the bright side, in the past couple weeks I have gotten into a great working groove, my sleep schedule has been adjusted for optimal creative output allowing me to work on music during my preferred vampire shift of midnight to 6am, and after successfully managing to avoid being put on a jury duty trial last Thursday I now have no distractions on the immediate horizon. I am going to try to stay in this groove and ride it out until this is done.

Anyway, happy 2008 and hopefully I’ll have even more songs soon.