Nick's Writing Whatsit

As if I never left

2009-04-20T09:42:00.004+10:00

I've decided to dedicate my domain to more - er - professional pursuits, so the textual spojlings are back here in blogger land.

I've successfully migrated all my old wordpress posts back here to blogger, thanks to a rather nifty conversion tool I was able to hunt down on the intertubes. So aside from a few possible dead links on old posts that no-one is going to read again anyway, we're back in business :)

You might also notice I've thrown a little twitter widget thing on the right there... Yes, I've succumbed to the dark side of micro-blogging. Clare's slightly disgusted with me, not so much becase I'm using it, but rather that it's called "twitter" and I'm using it. I'm inclined to agree - it's such a silly name - but as far as keeping people updated on album things and general bits & pieces, I think it could be pretty decent. Much easier to snap a pic and post a sentence or two as things are happening, as opposed to writing masses of verbiage at the end of the day, or week, or month.

I read somebody saying that twitter jumped the shark the moment Oprah signed up live on air. I say "pfffft". If I refused to do things that Oprah had done, I wouldn't be able to sit on a couch, eat fatty foods, or pass loud moral judgement on people with no real knowledge of the relevant issues. And I don't plan to stop doing any of those things...

So, um, yeah.

Good.

Flock off

2009-04-05T22:32:00.001+10:00

I just removed it again. Very useful, but extremely convoluted interface-wise, and ultimately I'm just not that much of a Web2.0 kind of guy.

Was going to mow the lawn today, but it's a bit wet, so I'm working on some uni work, finishing up a magazine article which may or may not get published, and putting together a job application.

The fun never stops at casa de Nick :)

Flocking hell

2009-04-05T08:35:00.001+10:00

I've just installed "Flock", which is basically firefox that's been all tricked out to interact with social websites. So it'll aggregate content from facebook, myspace, youtube, this website (I'm typing on it now) and anything else you can throw a stick at.

So mainly I'm just trying it out here... nothing to report. Well, actually quite a bit to report, but nothing I can be bothered typing up right now.

Ok, you twisted my arm. I'll do it in dot points though, and perhaps come back and fill in the gaps later.

The Who rocked

Counting Crows were OK

We got a neighbor complaining about Molly barking, but they were quite nice about it

I have a mighty sore lower back

5 weeks is a scary amount of time to finish post-production on 13 animated TV episodes

I'll be sans-employment again at the end of May

No I'm not going to fly to Melbourne for the 21st birthday party of a cousin who I've met only twice and wouldn't recognise if I ran into him on the street

The previous is not because I'm a horrible person - I have good friends interstate who I'd love to see more often, and I can't afford to do that either.

I still can't decide if I like OSX Leopard of Windows 7 better. I've been using Win7 beta and it's verily nice, but I've been booting up on the OSX side lately and it's still very neat.

I'm just filling space now.

The End.

Alrighty, let's hit post and see what happens :)

Plug it in, plug it in

2009-02-26T20:08:00.001+11:00

Gooood morning!

It's been a while between posts (again). Been mucho busy with new house and puppy shenanigans, plus work is starting to get to the very pointy bit. Oh, and I'm starting a uni course again today.

So what's news? Well, I've had a bit of time to hack together some T3E stuff, and hoping to spend some more hours (or at least a few minutes) on that particular task in the next little while. I've also been gettin' my developer on, working up a VST plugin. It's based around some workflows that I was repeating over and over for the cartoon job, and I thought "well hang on a darn tootin' minute, if I had a plugin that could do all this, then I'd save a bucket load of time". So I did a scout around the various development/authoring options, picked a flavour and I've been building it up. Of course doing so has used up far more time than just manually working through it in the first place, but I'm trying to take a long-term view. At the moment it's very embryonic and kind of ugly, but it works. Audio goes in, audio comes out sounding (sort of) the way I want. I may even put a spiffy interface on it at some point and see if anyone wants to pay me for it :)

OK, must get some work done before I scarper to Uni.

Busy busy busy

2009-02-14T09:36:00.002+11:00

Alright, so it's been a long time between updates. But we've honestly been flat out. And I don't mean in the lame-excuse way so much as the actually having a boat-load of things to do way.

We're settling in to the new house very nicely. The usual maintenance and upkeep type stuff is around, plus of course a healthy quotient of customisation and individualisation to be done. But generally it's been ready to move into, comfortable, and relatively hassle-free. A massive change from the previous digs (or "that old dump" as Knotty aptly dubbed it for us).

Speaking of that old dump, we had a bit of an, er... "negotiation" with the property manager. There was certain damage which had occurred that they were trying to blame us for. Thankfully, we were anal enough to take video evidence at the time, and they were forced to yeild to our superior evidence-power. Hurrah! I feel a bit mean, but then again, we're only getting what's due, so I suspect I'll still sleep tonight.

The puppies are doing great - coming along in leaps and bounds. No doubt you'll have marvelled appropriately at the photo above. The usual puppy brat-ness abounds, but generally they're an absolute joy to come home to, or wake up to. That's what I love about dogs - they're always utterly thrilled to see you. More than once this last month I've woken up tired, grumpy, and to be perfectly honest, slightly hungover, only to have my bad mood completely evaporated by virtue of the power of puppy enthusiasm. Honestly, it can't be over-stated. If you could convert canine affection into electricity you could power the planet by being nice to puppies. And that's a world I'd be happy to live in :)

The garage to studio conversion is coming along, albeit a little slower than I'd hoped. The floor coating went on in three coats, and wound up looking pretty much like bare concrete, at which point I decided to hell with it, bare conrete aesthetics is just what the audio/muso practitioner of 2009 will be sporting. On the plus side, three coats of bond-crete have made it much more resistant to dust and what-not, so while it might not be immediately aestheitcally different, it's certainly significantly easier on the gear, and much more readily maintainable. The furniture is broadly in place, and I've put up shelves for the speakers (destroying a couple of cheap-ass masonry bits in the process) so now the main issue is to clear away the detritus from the floor, and do something about the fluorescent strip-lighting. Not only is it fugly, but it's pretty poor from an RF point of view, so some tasteful halogen will hopefully not be too far away.

Oh, and I re-applied for uni, and was accepted. Yay! I initially enrolled for a 3-year degree in 2004, and have yet to finish it, the lure of paid work being too strong to resist. Actually the cartoon job was more than that - it was a fantastic chance to get a toehold into an industry that I love working in. Nevertheless, I don't want to throw away the study I've already done, and the powers that be are quite happy for me to continue with study part-time, so this year it's all on. Media Law is my unit of choice, so be prepared for some gratuitous legal proselytising over the next few months.

Musically, sadly, all this scholarly pursuit and domesticity has left scant room for much creativity. T3E is still on the top of my creative to-do list, but there simply hasn't been the time or circumstance to get it done. We're all getting together on Sunday afternoon to have a listen to some things that Knotty and Cornel have been up to, and have a general chat about things, which will be grand, as it's been a very long time. We sort of kind of got together when we moved in here, save Cornel who was otherwise indisposed. And even that was over a month ago now, so we're well overdue.

So yeah... I'll keep y'all posted :)

Four days later

2009-01-13T21:15:00.001+11:00

Well, it was a big weekend for Clare and I.

Friday morning we woke up in the same rental place we've been living for 4-1/2 years. By Monday evening the settlement had gone through on our new place, we'd moved across pretty much everything we owned (thanks in no small part to a herculean effort by some friends and family), picked up two gorgeous cavoodle puppies from the airport, and were generally feeling much better about our living circumstances (although all those zeroes next to the minus sign on the bank statement will take some getting used to).

I'll post some more pics once we're online at home (still waiting for the DSL to transfer across) but I snapped this one of the pups in the car on the way home from the airport.

Three for Three

2008-12-30T05:34:00.001+11:00

Ahh, Christmas over for another year. Not too bad a one overall, family time, some nice gifts on both the giving and the receiving side (at least I hope so on the latter). My lovely wife bought me various bits and pieces for the studio in the new place and I'm itching to get it set up. Speaking of which, there was a tiny bit of a scare with regard to the house arrangements, but that seems to be OK now. Hurrah for banks being open between Christmas and NYE, and sighs of relief all round :)

Frankly, the move can't come soon enough. The new neighbors moved into the house up the road recently. They're the third bunch in the place since we moved in, and also the third to have a dog who sits on the balcony and barks. Hey, that sounds strangely like the neighbors on a 90 degree angle as well. It seems obvious to me that if you place a territorial animal in a position where it can see lots of people moving around what it perceives as its territory, it might just have some words to say.

No incredibly bad visual joke picture up there today. I've spent the day buying tap fittings, packing boxes, and throwing things out, and I don't really have the energy :P

'tis the season

2008-12-22T20:05:00.001+11:00

It wouldn't be Christmas without Clare or myself (or in this case, both of us) having a cold. It would make sense if it was a cliche-ridden "winter wonderland" type Christmas, but we're resplendent today in our 27 degree southern hemisphere festive joy here today, and having a cold just means you're sweating and sneezing.

Thankfully I believe I've done all the singing I needed to do this year, as I'm a little hoarse this morning. The T3E Christmas bonus song is in the can and about to go off to Curtis for mixinating, and I (belatedly) put down a vocal for another fellow last weekend. Hurrah!

It's Here!

2008-12-19T21:58:00.001+11:00

So Pro Tools 8 is out. I gots me some learnin' to do.

Of course I've also got some work to do. Hmmm, decisions decisions... :)

Hit him with fruits and various meats!

2008-12-15T21:57:00.001+11:00

I just got an MP3 from the esteemed Mr Curtis such that I might lay down my vocals for the Christmas bonus song. Hurrah! Sounding good, and it's nice to hear some real drums on some new T3E material. It's still very much a demo-standard thing, and I'd like to get the whole thing a bit tighter on the album version, but it's a great little taster of what the album might sound like. I've liked the song ever since Curtis sent me the demo a few months back, and it's passed through the T3E group collaboration gauntlet with only minor cuts and bruises.

In matters professional, I've realised that the cartoon job has passed the 50% mark for this contract period, so I'm starting to casually browse the employment pages again, as well as starting to brainstorm on other ideas. Not that there's any pressing concern for a little while, but I don't want to be caught like earlier this year. Especially with a mortgage on the way...!

Speaking of mortgages, with less than a month before the big day, pre-settlement packing has begun, and the inside of our house resembles a furniture and applicance warehouse crossed with a municipal recycling depot - a combination that has somehow failed to take off within interior decorating circles. Clare has been extremely diligent with wrapping, boxing, taping and taggine a good portion of our wordly goods, and I have been helping in my own inestimable way by building a home theatre PC. It's a tough job, etc. etc...

I'll be tearing down the home studio for the last time over the next week or so, leaving myself with a skeleton system comprising Macbook, UMX49 and Mbox. The rest shall join the ever-increasing pile of "things to be loaded into a truck" that is currently filling up the spare room. I'm also starting to get into some serious planning regards the new digs, and how best to turn a garage into a work-space worthy of my talents (some might say it would be more worthy of my talents if I knocked a hole in the wall and poured pond-water on the floor, but I wouldn't talk to those people if I were you - they'll burn your crops, and make merry sport with your more attractive daughters as soon as look at you). Ideas are still coalescing, but I'm currently envisaging a sort of semi-wraparound desk-type arrangement, with a separate section for less audio-centric tasks. One of the problems with my current arrangement is that it's great for working on the PC, but there's no actual useable desk space for when you might want to perform such arcane tasks as writing with a pencil, or placing things on a clear horizontal surface. Well, there's the floor obviously, but that's a gambit that only works for a limited time. I'll also probably have a couch or a couple of chairs in there for the benefit of collaborators/clients (and myself from time to time). No doubt I'll throw some pictures up here for anyone who might be bored enough to want to look at them.

Industry! Science and Technology! Big men putting screwdrivers into things, turning them, and adjusting them!

2008-12-03T22:44:00.001+11:00

I never thought the iPhone would be something I could use for nostalgic purposes, but I recently found a little application which turns it into a 4-track recorder. You've got record, stop, play, forward and back, with level and pan for each track. That's it.

I sat down with the acoustic for guitar and the phone for a few minutes the other night to test it out and managed to come up with a nice little ditty. There's something very liberating about limiting your technical options. I usually write music on the main studio PC, and while it's very flexible, it's all too tempting to start worrying about how the thing sounds. Switching the musical hat for an engineering cap, if you will. It's hard not to start thinking along those lines given my day job, so removing that option completely for songwriting is a nice way to get into a more appropriate mental space.

In other news, my limited edition bonus-DVD version of Frost*'s new album arrived, so I've been listening to the supplied instrumental mixes of the album. Very interesting to listen to all the details that are hiding beneath the vocals, and it seems to be a lot less agressively mastered as well.

Oh, and we did another T3E video. Check it out, yo yo (that is to say, "yo" twice, as opposed to the toy with the string on the end).

Because I can

2008-12-03T00:36:00.001+11:00

I'm sitting in a comfy chair in the Hobart State Library, writing this entry on my brand spanking new iPhone. There's not really any compelling need to do it this way - I'll be back in front of a "real" computer in about half an hour, and I don't have anything particularly pressing to divulge - but I'm still riding that wave of novelty-factor that Apple products provide so effectively.
We had a t3e get together on the weekend, and pit down some drum tracks for a little song wer'e planning to have ready by Christmas. Felt good to be working on something that people are actually going to hear.
Actually, I think I'll pick this up later, as I'm getting a sore index finger from typing...

Rainbows

2008-11-27T06:06:00.001+11:00

It's surprisingly difficult to get the final version of a performance in the can when you have the disconnection of the internet between yourself and the producer, combined with a picky client who you are both trying to please.

So I've just recorded and bounced ANOTHER revision of this jingle, and I'm sending it off for approval, having recorded some octave doubles of the melody, and revising the harmonies on the final tag. And now the little girl next door is on the trampoline having a temper tantrum, and she sounds exactly like Eric Cartman.

Her parents must be so proud :)

Woof

2008-11-27T04:21:00.001+11:00

I've been reluctant to put these up for fear of jinxing it (and because the two pictures together don't format well), but the deposit's been paid, so I think I'm safe now on the first front, and not in all honesty all that bothered by the second.

We just bought two puppies :)

Granted, they look a little more like Guinea Pigs right now, but I'm assured by the breeder that they are not. We get them early January. Very cool.

Gigantic Bill!

2008-11-19T04:07:00.001+11:00

Holy frijole.

I really haven't been a fan of Telstra, and now that Optus are expanding their 3G coverage in Tasmania I've been sorely tempted to switch back, and upgrade my handset in the process . The main thing that's been stopping me is that I can't get out of my Telstra contract without paying a hefty early termination fee.

But I've just done a look back over the last few months of my mobile bills, and I've gone about $40 over my plan on a regular basis. And that's being careful. So I could have put my Telstra phone in a drawer, started a brand new Optus plan on top, and had the same out of pocket expenses with more call time available.

Of course I could also just make less phone calls...

Extracting the Digit

2008-11-19T00:19:00.001+11:00

It's come down to the fact that I've got a bucket-load of work to do over the next few days, and I need to seriously put my head down and get it done.

How on earth did I get so busy all of a sudden? Two voice recording sessions this week for the cartoon job (plus some potential re-takes to do at some stage), the revision stage of this esession job, a hefty bag of T3E homework from the get together on the weekend (as well as another behind the scenes video to hack together) and now I've gone and agreed to throw some keyboards and backing vocals on an old friend's project (and he's working in Pro Tools, so I'll have to remember how to use that particular flavour of arbitrary limitation software.

We're hoping to finalise our house-buying ventures this week as well, and some semblance of a personal life would be nice to squeeze in there too, if I can swing it.

To be fair, the T3E stuff has been kicking around for a good while, and it's my own fault I've let it slip until now. Plus I didn't have to agree to this keyboard/bg vocals job, but I want to... dammit ;) . It's a good dose of ever-so-slightly-cheesy-but-very-well-executed symphonic metal, and a nice change of pace from the wacky, cliched, and serious tunes that my other three current projects provide respectively (I'll leave it to the reader to divine which project corresponds to which adjective :P ).

But for now, the room next door is full of noisy animators playing with their Wii and talking about colour-blindness, so I think that's my cue to go and have lunch.

Let's hear it for the internet!

2008-11-16T03:23:00.001+11:00

I'm still impressed with the internet. It's become such a standard fixture so quickly that I think we often take for granted the things we can do now.

I've just sung a jingle for a client in the USA. He found me on esession, asked me to submit a quote, and now I've uploaded an MP3 mix for him to comment on. If he's happy, I'll send him the stems. If he wants any changes, I'll re-do the appropriate parts, and send him another version. Money has changed hands, and more will do so when we're done. It's all very simple and straightforward and it's easy to lose sight of the fact that I'm doing business with somebody on the other side of the planet.

So I just wanted to say hooray :)

A bite!

2008-11-14T20:37:00.001+11:00

I arrived at work this morning to find my first ever esession request, along with a personal followup email from an esession manager to verify that I'd received it, as the deadline was fairly tight. I like that touch - it's reassuring to know there are actual people on the other end. I replied to say thanks and to let them know that I was checking out the request immediately, and got a very quick response. Most impressive.

I must admit I'm a bit new to all of this online vocal malarkey, so I've taken a stab at a quote based on what I've been paid for vocal sessions locally. If we can reach an accord, I get 50% up front, then I've got the weekend to do the tracking, send it over to hit the radio-waves in the USA, and get paid the remainder.

Pretty cool :)

Bad Ram

2008-11-12T21:17:00.001+11:00

Hmm, well I tracked my Macbook problem to a bad RAM module. So I'm back up and running, albeit with only 1GB to play with.

It's weird to imagine Apple computers using humdrum components like RAM... From their promotional material you'd get the impression that they ran on magic and rainbows and love.

Oh, and smug. Let's not forget smug.

Sorry Steve

2008-11-11T04:23:00.001+11:00

I'm sure nobody at Cupertino will be losing sleep over it, but Nick's great Mac experiment of '07-08 is officially over. My once-revered white revision 2 Macbook, having moved from "a couple of teething problems" to "inexplicably temperamental" (with a diversion to "warranty-replaced hard drive" land) has finally reached what I now believe to have always been its ultimate destination of "useless piece of crap".

I wanted to love it, I really did. The user experience when the machine is working is absolutely second-to-none. Intuitive, smooth, streamlined, easy. But the caveat to the dumbed down user interface is that when something breaks you get very few clues as to what has actually gone wrong. Shiny shiny isn't much help when you're looking for an error code or some other information that might actually help you to, oh I don't know, maybe diagnose the problem. As it is, you're left with trying various combinations of words describing your symptoms into google, usually to find nothing but other hapless users with the same problem, and no more idea than you of how to resolve them.

And that's the thing - for an allegedly superior platform which, in the words of Apple's own marketing spin, "just works", there are an awful lot of users out there griping about their shiny machines NOT working. And not an great deal of wisdom out there to help them. So we wander through about a million different sites which regurgitate the troubleshooting mantras "reset your PRAM" or "repair disk permissions", and ultimately resolve on "Oh, I took it to the Apple store and they replaced my hard drive/RAM/logic board". I applaud the no-questions hardware replacement, but why not just design and build the things to a higher standard in the first place?

Look, I never really bought in to the "just works" thing, I'm not unrealistic in my expectations, I realise that personal computers are complicated devices. But I've got two Dell laptops at home and they both run pretty much without a hiccup. One is six years old, and the other is NINE years old. And they've NEVER not worked. The Macbook has run about a year, probably about 10% of which was spent in some state of disrepair.

In the red

2008-11-05T23:24:00.001+11:00

Well, as of this morning it looks very much like we've just bought a house - yay! Nice little 3-bedroom jobby in Blackmans Bay, with a garage under which will transform very effectively into a studio for myself and my nefarious requirements.

Rather exciting!

It's a slightly scary time to be hoisting quite that much debt up onto our shoulders (I'm listening to a news report with the Treasurer being quite pessimistic as I type this) but ultimately it was something we've wanted to do for a long while, and there's never going to be a perfect time. Fingers crossed and all that - and at least we're not going to be pouring money into somebody else's investment.

Aaaaaargg!

2008-10-29T20:31:00.001+11:00

I have had it up to here* with the construction next door. They seem to be removing the majority of the pub and replacing it with different pub, and the sound of power tools vibrating through the wall for the majority of the day is rather annoying. Sounds like angry whales crossed with a trip to the dentist.

And they're apparently going to be doing it until Christmas!!!

Good thing I don't work in a recording studio or anything.

Oh wait...

* - not an entirely successful turn of phrase without a visual referece, on reflection. Imagine me holding my hand up above my head and it works (marginally) better.

Housing about

2008-10-21T02:00:00.001+11:00

Ahhh, the indescribeable joys of house-hunting. What started as a whimsical "what if..." discussion a week or two ago has snowballed into a fully fledged procedure. Almost a plan if you can fathom it!

So we've been talking to financey folks, and to real-estatey folks, and generally getting frustrated in all the ways that one normally gets frustrated in this situation. Disagreements over details, money, over-zealous family members, balancing notions of "conventional wisdom" against doing what feels right... Actually it's a lot like planning the wedding, now I think about it.

And that worked out pretty well :)

Weak weak weak

2008-10-17T01:24:00.001+11:00

Ok, so my resolve lasted all of a couple of hours.

Can't say I'm in love with the cover though - for some reason they're not selling the traditional style cover in the shop here. I don't know if they're going for a more "sophisticated" audience or what the story is. Honestly, isn't this much better?

Payday

2008-10-16T22:18:00.001+11:00

I'm trying to resist the urge to go out and by another Jasper Fforde novel. I've recently finished the penultimate (so far) in the Thursday Next series, and I'd love to keep going, but I'm mindful of the fact that once I'm done with it, that's it for a good while. And that'll make me sad.

Plus I probably shouldn't be dropping $22.95 on a book when I still owe Corny some dollars, and while we're looking to buy a house.

Oh, and we're looking to buy a house :)

Quite possibly the most stupid decision in the world given the current financial situation, but then again the other 50% of the analysts seem to think it's a very good time to be buying. So what can you do? I figure jump on board and then see which way it takes you. Wisdom's easy in hindsight, and all that.

What's that sonny?!

2008-10-07T19:40:00.001+11:00

Christmas is coming... Not for nearly a quarter of a year just yet, but it hasn't stopped the retail centres of Hobart from starting to put trees and decorations on the shelves. I made a joke about it when we got back from our honeymoon, and was a little surprised to see that reality had overtaken my sarcasm.

But what Christmas in the city tends to remind me of is carols, and the cacophony of musical dissonance. I'm not talking about any specific christmas ditties - Silent Night and Jingle Bells are hardly replete with tritones - but the surreal wash of conflicting tuneage that you get as you walk past shop after shop, each blasting its own choice of holiday cheer. I'll never really know what ADHD feels like (actually some people might disagree with that) but I can imagine that it might be something like the feeling of my brain attempting to track 5 familiar but unrelated melodies, diverting any additional computational power it might need from other activites like, oh... intelligible speech, or not running into walls.

I had a similar moment this-morning on the bus. The drivers tend to play 7HOFM, which is the local middle-of-the-road commercial station. Nothing too objectionable music-wise, and the "zany morning show banter" is just shy enough of completely mindless that it keeps me from wanting to jump out the window onto the highway. I generally read a book anyway, and there's nothing on the radio that's so distracting as to cause any problems there.

Except occasionally - like today - you'll get someone who decides that an appropriate volume for their iPod headphones is the one that allows everyone within a 4-seat radius to hear what they've decided to listen to. He was three seats away from me, and across the aisle, and the leakage from his headphones was actually drowning out the radio in the speaker above me.

At the risk of sounding like a bit of an old fart (actually, I think I may have crossed that threshold somewhere in the last couple of paragraphs), WHY do people have to listen so loud?! I mean, hey... I've been playing in live bands at pubs since I was 16, and I absolutely understand the appeal of volume when it comes to the enjoyment of music. But you've got to hit the point of diminishing returns, and I'd say if your earbuds are running hard enough they can actually keep your head warm, you've possibly passed that point.

Shiny

2008-10-06T20:55:00.001+11:00

Ok, so Pro Tools 8 was announced at the AES show over the weekend, and they've been busy lads indeed. Lots of extra plugins, increased track counts, lots of MIDI love, notation editor, elastic pitch, and a very pretty revamped interface. Look at it up there, looking all smooth and metallic and... well, a lot like Logic 8, really :)

I'll upgrade, if only to keep current with my knowledge of the platform, but I must admit that once the excitement wears off there appears to be a lot of catch up being played here.

I have this constant love/hate thing with Pro Tools. If I'm being honest, I'll have to say that to some degree it's just tall-poppy syndrome. It really rankles when people who don't really know about the alternatives won't look at you seriously unless you're using Pro Tools. You're not going to veto a writer because they use a certain brand of pencil, or a photographer who uses a Nikon rather than a Canon, or whatever. But people seem to have this raging love for Pro Tools to the detriment of some (arguably superior) competitors. Which is not to say it's a bad product, which it absolutely isn't. But it's not the only product.

Is it because it has "Pro" in the title?

I don't know.

And despite my little diatribe there, every time a new version comes along, I still feel compelled to take a look. Ah Digidesign, you seductive little minx.

Platform hopping

2008-10-03T19:15:00.001+10:00

Save for a bit of wood-working and an LCD monitor (which will have to wait a paycheque or two) the studio is complete once again.

Oh, and a rubber foot for my left side monitor.

I've set up the EMU and the Pro Tools box, as I'm determined to get back up to speed with Pro Tools. I only bought the thing back in '07 because I thought I would need the platform under my belt for my current job, only to find they'd bought a SADiE in the meantime and there was no Pro Tools knowledge required at all! But I've been hearing some very good rumours about the imminent arrival of Pro Tools 8, and it's encouraged me to give it another spin.

I have to stay at home all day tomorrow to await the delivery of our new fridge (thank you to all who gave us Harvey Norman vouchers at the wedding - defrosting is about to leave our lives, thank goodness) so I think I'll take the opportunity to update all my RTAS plugins and record a couple of vocal demo tracks I've been meaning to get to.

An exciting life indeed...

Malaise

2008-10-01T18:37:00.001+10:00

I thought "malaise" was pretty much a synonym for "lethargy" or "tiredness", but it turns out it's more of a general feeling of "not right-ness" (now there's a term which should get more use).

So that's about where I'm at. I took the day off work yesterday - headache, listlessness, hard to put my finger on. Just a definitel sense of "not right-ness". Hopefully just a cold manifesting itself in a strange way.

On the plus side, I got my studio pretty much ship-shape again. Hurrah!

Delays

2008-09-28T09:06:00.001+10:00

So it turns out a day to rebuild the home studio was a bit optimistic.

It's looking bloody good, but it's still a mess. The thing is, I went beyond tidying and rebuilding, and started completely reorganising instead. It's going to be a LOT better to work in, but I reckon I'll use all of tomorrow getting it back up and ship-shape again. Possibly longer.

I also think I'll need to buy an LCD monitor to make the current layout work. My old IBM trinitron-tube CRT, while lovely, is just too damn deep to work.

More news as it comes to hand... because I know you just can't wait... :P

Thorough evaluation

2008-09-26T21:00:00.001+10:00

Okay - a brief housekeeping note first. Don't be alarmed if the site's layout and look vascillates a little over the next day or two. I'm still experimenting with various wordpress templates, and I may end up with some fairly random graphics until I customise them. For example, currently there's a rather fetching (albeit stark looking) 3D rendered lounge room up there in the header, which doesn't really sum up the feel of the site.

Okay.

I turned up at the gym yesterday, expecting to get all sweaty.

Not the case.

I actually wound up spending more time in an office than out on the floor - filling out a questionnaire, getting measured and weighed, having my blood pressure taken (in the normal range, but marginally high) and doing a stretch test (do not ask how I went).

Actually pretty encouraging. In my previous gym attempts, I've basically just been given a card and then left to my own devices. That probably works for some people, but when it comes to exercies I pretty much need a regimen to stick to, and that's what they're working out for me. So I'm back again Tuesday for another consult where they'll figure out exactly what sort of torture to put me through on a thrice-weekly basis to transition me from fatness to fitness in the most effective way possible.

In other news, it's studio rebuild day tomorrow! My little spare-room office/studio will be thoroughly gutted, reorganised, and rebuilt bigger, faster, stronger. I ordered a nice (read "cheap") 8RU rack frame from ebay on Tuesday, and it arrived today to my delight. So my audio interface, pre-amp module, lovely DBX compressor, power amplifier and (still to be acquired) patchbay will have somewhere to live. Plus I'm going to try to remove the little "hutch" thing on top of the desk, generally clean out a lot of the ancillary crap that's accumulated, and I've got a couple of new things to put on the walls to make it all seem a bit more inviting.

I'm going to try to get it all done in the one day too, because I have some songs I need to look at on Sunday. A T3E demo which is all a bit mysterious at the moment, and another tune for an online collaboration. It's all on!

Here we go...

2008-09-25T00:23:00.001+10:00

So I just joined a gym. Again.

This one is close to where I'm working at the moment, has a nice vibe (not chock full-o beefcakes), and they did me a great deal on the joining fee. Seven day cooling off period too, so if I have an attack of the can't-be-arsed bug I can backpedal out of there.

But I don't want to do that. I don't know what it is, but it seems that increasing numbers of people who I deal with are going to the gym or otherwise getting fit/losing weight. Clare's always been that way inclined, Half of T3E have been going for a while now, and looking very nice if I may say so lads... (not in a gay way, just in a "hey man I wanted to say that you're looking okay" way) and I'm seeing people from work out jogging and what-not. It's enough to make a fellow go out and do something stupid.

Like join a gym :)

Change

2008-09-23T23:09:00.001+10:00

I've returned from my rather excellent honeymoon with my rather excellent wife (which followed an equally excellent wedding ceremony and reception with the same excellent wife) with renewed enthusiasm to get various projects up and running. Probably the most pressing of these is to convert my studio from "pre-wedding storage and utility room" into "ergonomic and welcoming audio and musical working environment". But that's slightly difficult to achieve between bouts of work during the day at the cartoon job. Tweaking the website, on the other hand, is not too difficult in that context.

So I've cleaned up the design (although still madly swapping themes like a mofo), moved my little stick figure from the header to the sidebar, and decided to consolidate all the various facets of my audio & musical life into the one place. Ultimately I'm NOT a media production company, or a commercial facility - I'm a musician and sound type person with a project studio and a background in broadcast. Anyone who calls or emails is going to figure that out soon enough, and I think it pays to have my web-identity broadly congruous with my actual one.

Of course I'll have to actually do that, which will entail a bit of typing and collating.

Which I haven't done yet.

So I guess I'd better get on with that :)

Reliability

2008-08-26T00:17:00.001+10:00

Toyota Corollas are generally pretty good, so goes the conventional knowledge.

Except when they spit the dummy over 200 km from home and you need to get your long-suffering dad to come and collect them on his car trailer, then pay for a hire car to get home because Dad's truck is only a 2-seater.

We weren't going to have anything to drink that night.

Then we changed our mind :)

Sometimes life IS fair

2008-08-23T00:59:00.001+10:00

I have had coversations with Sam Merlo, Crikey-drummer extraordinaire, about the way that a lot of the world's problems can be boiled down essentially to people being thoughtless, and not considering (or caring about) the effects that their actions have on those around them. Sadly, Karma doesn't always deliver the retribution we might hope for.

Which is why, if it is genuine, this video is absolutely priceless :)

The simple things in life...

2008-08-19T21:29:00.001+10:00

I just had possibly the best sandwich of my life.

Flat white hamburger roll, sliced chicken breast, cheese, lettuce, and Nando's perinaise sauce.

Absolutely non-exciting on paper, I realise.

But my word it was tasty. Just exactly what I felt like.

Of course now it's well before mid-day and I've just eaten my lunch.

Dammit.

Spam spam spam

2008-08-19T18:46:00.001+10:00

I don't get it.

Does comment spam actually lead to sales of drugs to treat erectile disfunction?

I mean, it's not as if viagra is a secret... I'd imagine if you want to get hold of some, it's not hard (pardon the pun, hur hur hur). But it's so heavily advertised. I've barely got half a dozen fresh posts since starting this site, and I'm receiving a couple of moderation requests per day already to clean up some bot's notion of effective online marketing.

Gives me a thorough miffing, it does.

Although they are very complimentary. And they call me "webmaster" which is nice.

Ooh, my coffee's ready. Time to off.

Do not combine with alcohol

2008-08-19T01:02:00.001+10:00

T3E drummer extraordinaire turned 30 last week, and of course we all celebrated the auspicious occasion by getting stonkingly drunk and playing dreadful music in front of unsuspecting friends.

I'm not kidding, it really was quite bad - in a fit of insanity I decided to record the proceedings, thus enabling me to prove to myself beyond reasonable doubt that I in fact do not sing better when I've had a dozen beers.

I know! I'm as shocked as you are!

No, you don't get to hear any of that.

Gainfully employed

2008-08-14T20:37:00.001+10:00

The alleged cartoon job became miraculously tangible again this week, which was quite a relief. There was a touch-and-go moment where I sortofalmostkindof accepted a job elsewhere, and then found out this one was actually on, and then might have rather annoyed some people with my vascillating.

But such is life... I hope the other fellas find someone good for the position, and there are no hard feelings over the long-term.

Musically there has been a bit of a trickle of progress on T3E#2, but mainly Knotty, Cornel and I have been working on this new groovy laid back (*cough*coverband*ahem*) thing we've been toying with. That, and preparing for Knotty's impending rehearsal-themed 30th birthday bash on the weekend.

It's been bitterly cold the last few days, after a brief mild spell. I actually love cold weather, but I'm about done with this winter to be honest. We're very nearly out of firewood, and I am a little worried about the power bill which should be in the mail any day now.

Also, less that 4 weeks until W-day! I think everything is pretty much in-hand, although I have yet to buy a suit, which I think will be fairly much mandatory. I was considering suggesting a jeans & T-shirts affair, but somehow I suspect not all parties would be on board with that one.

Happy trails to you...

2008-07-23T19:25:00.002+10:00

Just a quick sign-off note to let any stragglers know that I've moved the blog to my own site.

I hope you'll come visit :)

Adieu!

Homesick

2008-06-16T14:45:00.002+10:00

The last few weeks we've been in a bigger, nicer house than ours, looking after the place (and the dog). On Wednesday we have to go back to our much pokier, less fancy house.

And I can't bloody wait.

There's something about your own place - everything where you want it (or if you're messy like me, at least you know where it should be, even if you can't be bothered to put it there), that is very comforting.

Plus I've been contending with a very makeshift little music rig here, and I haven't managed to get a lot of work done. Which is frustrating, because I finally had it set up nicely at home, then I had to pull it all apart and bring the guts of it elsewhere to set up on a dining table.

So bring on the Wednesday!

Sometimes I wish I was a Boilermaker/welder

2008-06-10T09:14:00.002+10:00

There always seem to be jobs going in that field... I wonder why the attrition rate is so high?

I'm supposedly starting a new contract with the cartoon people this month, but the last nine weeks of inactivity have made me a little cautious when it comes to signing up for things that hinge on so many external factors. Government grants, distribution agreements... if any one of them goes belly-up, then so does my job for the next 12 months. And even if not, presuming all goes well, I still find myself in the same career purgatory after the next series is done. It's not just the finances either (although that is becoming more and more of a consideration as the weeks drag by), but the self-esteem takes a bit of a knock when you're not actually really doing anything useful with your days.

Enough.

So I've been looking at alternatives - and I have to say that while the allure of the television industry was a very strong one in the mid 90s when I started down that road, it hasn't left me with a set of skills that is terribly portable to other fields.

Actually scratch that - it has left me with a surfeit of useful skills, but very little in terms of being able to prove them. I'm worried that prospective employers are going to be inclined to exclaim "camera, sound, editing, graphics, yes yes that's very nice. But where's your degree and your minimum 5 years of demonstrated experience in marsupial husbandry and what not?"

Which I sort of kind of don't have. Well, I have 83% of a degree, which is not quite the same.

It's helped my crafty resume-writing no end. I almost said "creative resume writing", but the thing is, I'm not being in any way misleading. I'm not applying for anything that I don't honestly believe I could do very well, it's just that it's a challenge making a case that I can do "X" when my practical experience is in "Y", which while sharing a lot of pre-requisites with "X", is not, in fact "X".

It's almost tempting to point to the application itself as an example of demonstrated skill. Marvel at the deftness with which I distract from my shortcomings and exaggerate my abilities!

But perhaps that's a little too forthright.

Lights, camera...

2008-05-29T08:59:00.002+10:00

I wielded a video camera in earnest for the first time in a little while last night. Hobart pub-rock artistes "17HZ" were launching their album at the Republic, and they had a few cameras in attendance to capture the event.

I managed to talk my way into shooting from side of stage, which was great fun - I've always preferred to go handheld rather than be lumbered with a tripod. So while my arms are a bit achy today as a result, I think I got plenty of cool shots, and I'm looking forward to seeing it all cut together.

The guys had gone to some trouble with the lights, bringing in a fair arsenal of bits & pieces to complement the Republic's rather modest collection of hardware-shop coloured garden floodlights. Well, by complement I guess I mean entirely replace. It was no Pink Floyd show (unless we're talking mid-60s perhaps) but it felt a bit more like a "real rock show".

No pictures to show, alas, as I handed the tape straight over at gig's end. but once it's on youtube I'll provide linkination.

Computative Dissonance

2008-05-29T08:29:00.002+10:00

Why is it that Windows XP feels infinitely faster and more responsive on my Macbook than OSX Leopard does?

Don't get me wrong - I love OSX, it's shiny and friendly and ergonomic and all those good Apple-y things. But it's also a little sluggish feeling. Windows is not so nice, but I always feel a little more productive when I'm in that environment. And for some reason my wireless, which might be generously described as "tentatively feasible" on the OSX side of things, suddenly becomes reliable and speedy in Windows. Perhaps it's a driver issue, but you'd think that if there's ONE thing Apple could get right running their own OS on their own hardware, it would be drivers.

Sigh.

I'm going to change the focus of this little regular verbal skittering. Out with the music-only slant for a start - there are many more strings to my bow, and it doesn't really make much sense to arbitrarily limit myself to one of them. I think I had this notion that you can be taken more seriously in a field if you devote yourself to it (or at least give the appearance of devoting yourself to it) but after careful consideration, deliberation, and other words ending with "ation" I've reached the conclusion "bugger that".

Which is why, you might have noticed, there is no musical news in this particular message. It's not that there isn't any to be reported - there is at least a little - but I sort of want to keep this "focus change" post a bit clearer. Well, apart from all this rubbish I'm going on about now.

SADiE

2008-02-21T16:28:00.002+11:00

When I first got this job, I remember trying to research the SADiE H64 system online, and not finding a great deal of information. So I'm posting this concise review in case somebody else finds themselves in the same boat.

DON'T GET ONE.

Err... Happy new year?

2008-02-21T11:17:00.002+11:00

Wow, it's been a long time between entries.

Again.

In my defence, I couldn't be bothered. I realise that's not much of a defence, but it has the resounding ring of authenticity.

Biggest thing to report - and not really musical in nature - is that Clare and I got engaged in December. Yay! Nuptials are set for September, and I'm looking forward to it immensely :)

Band-wise, things continue to trundle along as allowed by other committments - eg. not particularly quickly. I should have a great deal of extra time come March 12 as my current employment contract runs out, thus clearing me of the obligation to spend 40 hours a week away from home. On the flip side, it also removes the impetus for Blue Rocket to make regular deposits to my savings account. That may be a problem.

I have something in the works that will hopefully allow me a great deal more time for music - but in the spirit of not jinxing things, I'll make no announcements just yet.

Alright, back to the grindstone - 26 12 minute episodes to mix in 2 weeks. It's frustrating having to rush this stage when you consider all the down time I've had in the preceding months. I guess that's the inevitable result of being toward the end of the production chain. Every deadline missed by someone before you in the process leads to your time disappearing. To make matters worse, the SADiE's lovable and endearing little tics and quirks are proving themselves to be incredibly fucking annoying when I'm under time constraints. It reminds me of my Dad's Alfa Romeo GTV. It's not reliable, ergonomic, comfortable, or intuitive, but you get a sense of satisfaction from driving it - it's a real achievement and it does perform well when it's all going properly. But if you just want to get somewhere it's not quite as much fun to put it on the hoist and tinker with the engine as you get more and more late for an appointment.

Actually SADiE are a British company aren't they... probably should make it a Jaguar.

I think I should stop typing before I stretch the analogy beyond breaking point.

2007-11-09T11:15:00.001+11:00

We interrupt the complete lack of care and attention to this blog to bring you a musical service announcement.

Son et Lumiere, according to their myspace, sound like "Supertramp in a three car collision with Phish and Spock's Beard, with Joe Jackson directing traffic and (we would like to think) Kevin Gilbert smiling down from above".

I've been chatting to the ringleader on various online fora for a while (fora for a... see what I did there?) and I'm finally getting around to listening to his myspace clips.

It's pretty damn good.

I want to buy it, but I can't yet. Curses.

So anyway, go and listen to it. Then buy it. Except you can't.

Just another day at the office

2007-10-31T08:49:00.000+11:00

Well, here I am again in my little padded room. Having jostled my way through various groups of lugubrious besuited cow-eyed denizens of the public service (whose jobs are apparently so important as to require them to walk 4-abreast along the footpath in order to reach them simulteneously) I sit facing a day of joining and mixing streams of zeroes and ones together in such a way that, converted back to the analogue domain and appropriately transduced, they will approximate the sounds of human speech, music, and sound effects.

But first, a coffee.

Oooooohhhhhh

2007-10-17T15:34:00.000+11:00

It is very shiny.

The Macbook arrived at work today, and it's quite the piece of design I must admit.

There was a slight hitch on the "it just works" front when the isight camera failed to function, but a shut-down and restart fixed the problem. Shades of Windows there already!

I had been planning to pick up the Logic 8 Studio box, but I've decided to give my Pro Tools licence another bash for now. It does have a good reputation, and having paid the money back in January for the little blue hardware thingie and all the associated 1s and 0s, I'd feel it remiss of me not to try and actually use it a bit. After a skim through the 800+ page manual, it turns out it's actually got a lot of features I didn't even know about, so it could work out well.

Also, looks like I'll be able to get Reaper to run using either fusion or crossover, which will give me access to my favourite bits of the PC audio world as well.

But all that is for the future. Thus far I've only had a poke around the various bits & pieces of OSX, and put some loops on the timeline in Garageband and pressed play. Strangely enough it sounded like every other garageband "composition" I've ever heard - 120BPM, 4/4 time, one chord. Get Timbaland on the phone!!!

Actually, he'd probably like it.

Then he'd steal it.

So on second thought, don't.

An apple a day...

2007-10-11T23:24:00.000+11:00

I honestly never thought I'd see the day.

A bit of back-story. I've always... always hated Mac zealots. The smug notion that "real artists/musicians/engineers/editors use platform x" is the epitome of rubbing me up the wrong way.

That said, the one thing that the Mac does have going for it, is a solid, reliable, and above all consistent hardware platform to support. They know exactly what bits & pieces their OS & apps need to run on, and there aren't any surprises on that front.

So today I have succumbed to the inevitable. I placed an order for a shiny new Macbook.

And frankly, I can't bloody wait :D

And with that, I'll probably be griping about it within the week.

But it's pretty and shiny, and isn't that what's really important?

I'm not even supposed to be here today...

2007-10-09T09:01:00.000+11:00

...actually I can't back that up. I'm being paid and everything. However I don't really feel like being here. Didn't sleep particularly well, feeling kind of of "meh". I didn't get my audio fandangling done last night, and I'm considering doing something a bit silly.

I've also hit upon the realisation that I'm dressed like a complete slob. I've got slightly too old jeans on, with holes in both knees. If I squint and hold my head at the correct angle I can just about convince myself that they're "fashionably dishevelled", but to the best of my knowledge the vast majority of the rest of the world are conspicuously not doing that (I saw a few people on the way in who were squinting, but it was sunny). The baseball "style" jumper that graces my upper half was never going to be a high-fashion item, and its current condition renders it even further down the ladder. It's not torn or discoloured, but it's really only loosely approximating the shape which its manufacturers intended. Things start ok around the neck, but as it extends down it sort of tapers out in a cone shape and billows around my waist like some sort of demented torso-kilt.

I think I'm going to clean out my cupboard soon.

Technology, making our lives easier

2007-10-08T09:17:00.000+11:00

Well...

I had a number of concerted attempts to work on some T3E material over the weekend. There are two great ideas of Curtis's that I wanted to add some string parts to, and play with some melodic/lyrical ideas I've had swimming around my head.

A while back, I noticed an occasional weird freezing thing that my PC was doing in REAPER.

Well it's doing that again. ALOT.

It seems to be some VSTis that trigger it more than others (SFZ was particularly problematic) but it's still doing it occasionally regardless. If I switch over from the EMU to the Nvidia audio drivers on the motherboard it works again for a while, then freezes again.

It's very weird... I press play (or record, or whatever) and the buttons on the transport "depress", but nothing moves, plus it's unresponsive to MIDI/audio input. The program itself hasn'tf rozen, I can still move around the interface, load, save, change prefs etc. But nothing other than a re-boot of the whole PC will get sound happening again, or the transport moving. Then after about 5 minutes of work, it happens all over.

It's doing it with the Mbox too, so at least the EMU is ok... hrmm...

I tried rolling back to version 1.888 of REAPER (in case it was a funky Beta issue) and it still happens. I'm going to try a fresh install of the whole PC this week, and then if that runs, I'll add VSTs one at a time and see if I can figure out what makes it fail.

I am THIS close to picking up a Macbook and a copy of Logic Studio on finance or Rental. I can't really afford it, but it's fully tax deductible, and at least I'll be able to get some bloody work done.

Sigh...

The hills are alive...

2007-10-05T10:25:00.000+10:00

... and THEY'RE COMING RIGHT FOR US!!!

Umm, so that was actually going to be some sort of witty segue, but I've forgotten the connection.

So.

Anyway, I joined up with Emusic today. $9.99 (US) per month, 30 songs download allowance. No DRM.

Not a lot of major label stuff, but a goodly portion of that is absolute pants anyway. Not that I hold any sort of unrealistic assumptions about the quality of indie catalogs (which I'm sure also scores high on the undergarment scale) but from a quick skim through the artist listing, I think I'll be happy enough for a while.

And now back to my regularly scheduled application of sound effects to a dog.

Studio inna box

2007-10-04T11:08:00.000+10:00

I've been messing around with the rather cool Portable Apps suite, with a view to getting some sort of transportable setup for my musical & graphical noodlings. It's designed to carry a selection of applications & utilities around on a USB flash disk, but it'll work just as well on a hard drive. Even better, unlike the proprietary versions (for example, U3) it allows you to incorporate your own applications into the menu.

I've just set up a test run, and when I insert the drive lead, it autoruns and pops up a cute little XP-style menu with my REAPER install including all my plugins, VLC, and a few other bits & pieces (OpenOffice, GIMP, Firefox, FTP etc). Plus with 160GB to play with, there's plenty of room for quite a few audio & video projects worth of data.

I'm still hunting around for some sort of portable program for basic video editing... but everything I've found so far seems to want to dig its grubby mitts into the registry. But I am confident that I shall prevail.

Hurrah!

I am not an X in a box

2007-10-03T15:57:00.000+10:00

Fixed! Behold my 1337 FTP skillz.

Play

2007-10-02T10:16:00.000+10:00

Ok, so I've just discovered blogger's new play feature. It's just a pretty dissolving slideshow of photos as they are uploaded to various blogs.

It should be incredibly boring, but it's quite fascinating. It's not just a random slideshow - the knowledge that they've just been uploaded, by real people, renders the whole thing really interesting, in a sort of "bordering on creepy" voyeuristic way.

But don't judge me until you've tried it :)

Stoodio

2007-10-01T15:43:00.000+10:00

Well, spare bedroom really. But it's a lot more inviting than it used to be.

Presenting a brief tour, from left to right:

First you'll see a guitar stand, sans guitar. Ignore the green bag, it's full of spare cables and bits & bobs. I'll find a less obtrusive hole for it somewhere. Up above that, there's my trusty Alesis QS6 which I'm using as a MIDI controller and extremely occasional sound source. It does those twinkly 90s digital synth textures really nicely, but I don't have much use for those any more, so it's mostly VST land. The music stand and mic stand are pretty self explanatory I hope.

Behind those, you can see an old Dell slimline desktop case, a 34cm TV, and a bookshelf speaker (I actually have two of those, for glorious stereo). The desktop box is my web broswing, email checking, word processing (etc. etc.) general purpose type PC. It's also got a TV out card in it, so I can chuck a movie or something on if the desire takes me. My Digidesign Mbox is sitting on top of the telly - it's not hooked up at the moment, the new EMU having taken over primary audio interface duties. I'll probably hook the Digi up to the Dell PC and use it as a glorified DAT machine at some point. Maybe... The last thing I want to do is run Pro Tools on it.... *shudder*

Oh, there's also a little webcam sitting on top of the TV which I bought on a whim and have yet to use.

The 21" beige monitor is due for replacement with a nice flatscreen at some stage, but for now it does the job. Under that is my cheap & cheerful Behringer UMX49 MIDI controller, which has the dubious honour of posessing the worst feeling keybed of any instrument I've ever played. It's truly horrible - I seriously can not stress enough how unpleasant it is to play. Thank god I don't use it for that. Instead, I've got keys, knobs and sliders mapped to various functions in REAPER (my audio software of choice) so it functions as a bit of a poor-man's control surface. It's not quite touch sensitive motorised faders, but I can get around a lot faster than with the mouse alone. The key/control mapping is a bit of a work in progress there...

Skipping down past the mouse and keyboard, you can see the bottom half of a Sansui amplifier that I'm using to drive my monitor speakers, a custom built 4 channel mic pre amp that Curtis built, and a DBX 162 stereo compressor. Jumping back up the top again (because I forgot before) there's a vertical rotation fishy lamp which I think is broken (last time I switched it on it made a disconcerting creaking noise, then a SNAP, and now it doesn't rotate any more, which is a bit sad), a baby halogen desk lamp, some miscellaneous pens and stationery, and a small monkey in a chair (without which no home studio would be complete).

The beige box at the bottom right is my music PC. Not much to tell there... it's a PC. Woo. On top of it is the input/output box for the EMU, and it's very pretty. Flashy lights and such.

So there you go. That's what I did with my Saturday morning - debaucherous rock and roller that I am.

I am an X in a box

2007-10-01T10:23:00.000+10:00

Hmm, I've just realised my profile pic is linked off my old ISP's account, which no longer exists.

Must fix that one.

I've been so lax...

I'm Baaaack!

2007-10-01T10:07:00.000+10:00

I'm an anti-social little SOB aren't I?

So here's a brief summary on what I've been up to in the two months or so since my last entry:

Rehearsed for a T3E gig in Melbourne with Victorian progsters Template.
Travelled to Melbourne for a gig with Victorian progsters Template
Played a gig in Melbourne with VIctorian progsters Template
Realised we're not actually that tight as a live unit just yet... and while we were passably decent, Template's live presentation left me in no doubt as to who put on the better show
Continued writing and demoing for T3E #2, as well as gathering snippets of solo project fodder
Bought a new soundcard
Bought some new speakers
Re-organised my little demo studio

Actually that last point probably deserves its own entry, and possibly a photo. I'll publish this one then see what I can come up with on that front.

Stand by...

Pause, for dramatic effect

2007-07-18T13:37:00.001+10:00

So I haven't been writing much lately.

The reason is simple, really. Not much has happened that really fits under the banner of this little journal - at least nothing I'd be comfortable to share with the world at large. That, combined with an ever-decreasing desire on my part to proselytise, all adds up to not many entries.

I imagine I'll be back with more, at some point. But not today.

Groovy baby

2007-07-02T15:48:00.000+10:00

I'm fending for myself for a couple of weeks - Clare is off sunning herself in the balmy 21 degree heat of Queensland.

I've decided I'm going to shift the guts of my studio into the living room, so I can write and record while I sit in front of the woodheater and watch DVDs. In my most optimistic moments I like to envisage a fortnight of whirlwind creativity, during which time I will write and demo the entire remainder of the next T3E album, as well as lending some more concrete form to my sporadic solo efforts.

Realistically, I'll probably just fall asleep in front of the fire and wake up to find I've melted my laptop computer.

Which could be fun also.

Cluck

2007-06-18T17:57:00.000+10:00

I just spent half an hour being paid to cluck like a chicken.

In five part harmony.

This is a weird job.

Coff-sicum?

2007-06-12T15:42:00.000+10:00

I just found a piece of capsicum in my coffee. Most peculiar. It wasn't a bought coffee mind you - just a good old Nescafe instant coffee. I'm sure there was no capsicum in it when I put the coffee & sugar in, and the tap on the urn is too narrow. So I can only assume it fell out of my sandwich which I was eating at the same time. Scared the hell out of me. I guess that sounds strange - scared of capsicum - but you have to take context into account.

Cornel is off galavanting around Western Australia, so we had to get together on the weekend and work on T3E songs without him. Oddly enough, it was extremely productive. We're well on the way (that is, more on the way than before, although with much work to do yet). In bigger news, we may be playing a gig in Melbourne early August. Stay tuned!

I've been mulling over the idea of jamming some of my non-T3E material with actual living/breathing musicians, which I might pursue over the next few months if work/life/T3E allow time to do so. Could be fun, and a good diversion from all of this intricate hard rock sort of stuff we're writing lately.

Brrr, and such things.

2007-05-30T14:04:00.000+10:00

Winter has hit Hobart at last. Thirteen degrees outside and it's plenty chilly.
Of course you didn't really need me to tell you that. If you're at all interested in Tasmanian weather you can get it right from the source. Presumably that's not why you came here, at any rate.

So what's new and exciting in Nick-land? Well, it looks like I've been asked to provide the singing (and possibly speaking) voice for a cartoon character on a nationally broadcast show. That's pretty cool, although of course no chickens being counted just yet. T3E writing plods merrily along as usual, as do my own personal musical & lyrical scrawlings. Also, T3E might be heading to the mainland to play a couple of gigs in support of another Aussie group, which would be mucho funno. And in "everyone's a critic" land, we've had a comment on Youtube that says "the singing sounds like karaokee" (whatever that is) and that I sound like I should be singing "Bon Jovi or any bad 80s rock". Good stuff!

So yeah... probably should have stuck with the weather, really.

I'm not sure I like progressive-rock any more

2007-05-17T09:56:00.000+10:00

It hit me a couple of days ago - I decided to put some prog stuff into my MP3 player to listen to on the bus this week. A few songs from the new DT (yes, I downloaded it, sorry...), and an assortment of other tunes from various artists.

My bus trip went like this:

"Hey cool, haven't heard this for a while"
chugga chugga chugga meedly meedly dum dum grrrrrrr
"... hrmm, skip"
laaaaaaaaaaaa swords and fighting shields clashing metaaallll
"Ok, skip"
War is very bad and so are terrorists, although I'm sure some middle eastern people are really rather nice.... meedly meedly meedly meeeee
"... good god. Skip"
drab drab drab depressing soundscape and pre-adolescent pseudo-poetry
"Yawn... skip"
chugga chugga meedly meee, radio or television sample played through a telephone filter... soar soar
"Skip... oh, that's all I have on my player because all of these songs are at least 19 minutes long!"

I'm just so very very very over it. I can't remember the last time I heard a prog song that actually had something to say.

Maybe its just a phase...

Just incase you weren't already feeling melancholy today...

2007-05-11T09:15:00.000+10:00

Happy fluffy bunnies!

2007-05-08T17:00:00.000+10:00

I've been listening to Aimee Mann's "The Forgotten Arm" the last few days, and it's making me depressed. Not "cut my wrists and bleed out into a warm bath" depressed, but that almost pleasant self-indulgent melancholy that some music can provoke. This is actually a glowing endorsement for the album by the way. It's really very good.

Songwriting-wise I don't seem to do "happy" very well. It's not that I'm not a reasonably happy person (at least sometimes) but rather that I don't much like happy music. I think Steven Wilson from Porcupine Tree has a quote along those lines - sad music can actually be uplifting because it's so honest and visceral. Happy, jaunty tunes always seem to come off sounding so... contrived.

La de daa, roses and fluffy bunnies and lace, oh me oh my!

Please.

New and Improved!

2007-05-04T16:54:00.000+10:00

I was recently informed by my esteemed musical colleague Andrew that my blog was extremely fatiguing to read. Ordinarily my response to such a statement would be "fuck off won't you, there's a good chap". However, as he's also rather a good graphic designer and I am, as it were, colour blind, I thought I probably should pay him some attention. So I have switched to this (hopefully) far more legible colour scheme.

In other news, my office chair appears to have broken. I've swapped it for one in the lunch room, so it's all good. Nobody saw a thing. It's the perfect crime.

It's 5pm and I long for a beer.

This is not an interesting entry.

This is a beer.

mmmmmmm... beer

Deadline

2007-04-29T07:37:00.000+10:00

My father helped me to pick up our new washing machine yesterday (rock and roll!), and we visited a friend of his on the way home. This friend had recently had his lovingly restored Mercedes Fintail ploughed into by an over-zealous Ford Escort, completely writing it off. Worse, they were both competing in a competitive motorsport event at the time, so it's very much an "at your own risk" venture. No insurance. It puts my phone into perspective somewhat!

I really admired his "get back on the horse" mentality. Only a week after the event, he's already entered his Riley into next year's competition, despite the fact that it's little more than a chassis at present. However there's nothing like a deadline to motivate you to finish something - and I suspect he will.

So I've been toying with the idea of setting myself a deadline for finishing this long-considered solo project. I've been writing and recording little bits and pieces for years now - well before the advent of The Third Ending - but without a focal point, it's all too easy to put things off until "a better time". Sometimes that actually does lead to a better result, but more often than not it just means nothing gets achieved (except maybe another hour of television might get watched). T3E progress was slooooooooooooow, but we did eventually get there. Without some sort of external impetus, I fear my own venture may stall at the gate.

So I'll get around to doing something about that... sometime.

In-sewer-ants

2007-04-27T12:06:00.000+10:00

And now the insurance claim on the Nokia has been declined.

Apparently the mere four doors the thief had to walk through to get to my private office means that it constitutes a public area.

Let's hear 3 big cheers for ACE Insurance!

To PT or not to PT?

2007-04-27T08:46:00.000+10:00

After a few increasingly terse emails with the (interstate) retailer, it's beginning to look more and more like I'm stuck with my pretty blue and silver paperweight. I could probably kick it along to small claims court, but to be honest, I'm running out of motivational steam. The time & effort it would take to argue is beginning to exceed the AU$470 purchase price. Chalk this one up to experience.

On the plus side, if I ever want to make a dramatic film-clip, I can bring my Mbox and laptop in lieu of a wind machine, so there's some money saved perhaps. Plus if it's a night-shoot, the crew can huddle around the laptop to keep warm.

So I'm left with a conundrum... I have all this gee-whiz-bang-industry-standard-dontcha-know Pro Tools software, and while I'm completely enamoured with REAPER, there's still a stubborn streak in me that says "You've paid for Pro Tools now. You should use it". Not on the laptop obviously (I don't particularly fancy having to prise a heap of smouldering melted plastic off my studio table after each session) but perhaps on my old faithful studio machine.

It's a stupid compulsion really. The software itself is clunky and bloaty - I needed to upgrade the RAM on the machine just to get it running somewhere near smoothly, and even then it didn't match the performance of my previous software before the upgrade. Plus it neatly sucks you in to this cumulative payment system whereby you have to cough up extra dollars to unlock Digidesign's arbitrary restrictions. I understand the need to segment the product range and retain a market for the high-end stuff, that's just good business sense. Hell, I cut my teeth on 8-track tape, so a 32 audio track count limitation I can live with (or work around). But MP3 export, non-realtime bounce... these are universal and rudimetary features. I'd happily trade all of the "looks just like a photo of an 1176, sounds like a photocopy of a digital ass" plugins for a solid set of useful features that don't damage my machine.

Is there a "laptop non-combustion module" upgrade available by any chance?

Anyway, I've been compiling a pros and cons list for persevering with Pro Tools.

PROS

It's the "industry standard", and therefore worth learning
It came with a lot of useful bundled software and plugins
I paid for it, and dammit, I'm getting my money's worth

CONS

It's the industry standard, but probably shouldn't be, and deserves knocking off its perch
The bundled software and plugins are absurdly limited in their functionality, and in most cases are easily surpassed by freeware and open source alternatives
I already wasted my money - no sense also wasting my time
I am neither insane, nor a masochist

So I'm afraid the cons have it. Pro Tools for the round-file. Thank God for that. May it never blight my door again.

Fare thee well phone...

2007-04-24T09:48:00.000+10:00

Some twerpy little maladjust actually came into my office yesterday and took my brand new Nokia 6288 off my desk. I turned the place upside-down all afternoon thinking I'd just misplaced it, but when I checked my un-billed calls online this morning, it seemed someone had been busy dialing "19xx" numbers and downloading songs. Luckily I had the SIM blocked fairly quickly just incase, and the handset itself is insured (provided they approve the claim), but I'm still going to be out $125 excess. They've dialed a few regular numbers as well, and I've half a mind to call them just to say "your friend is a dickhead", but that's not really likely to get my phone back, and if we're being pragmatic about it, that friend does know where I work now.

On the bright side, they used my account to download a few songs, which they might otherwise have picked up from BitTorrent. So in my own way, I'm helping to fight piracy.

God I hate bogans.

Consumer Alert

2007-04-24T09:43:00.000+10:00

If you have a laptop, think very carefully before you buy anything with "Digidesign" written on it.

I picked up an Mbox 2 Mini in late January. "Marvellous", thought me. "I can dip my toes into the wonderful world of Pro Tools, and have a portable USB interface to use with the laptop". It was quite expensive compared to the non Digi hardware, but that's the price you pay for quality... err, right?

Pshaw.

I had some audio work to do this weekend just gone, and I was away from home. The perfect opportunity to use my nifty little USB doohickey. Loaded in the ASIO/WDM drivers, and the strangest thing happened - the CPU meter pegged up to 100% and stayed there until I shut down the audio application. "That is rather odd", thought I. After quite a bit of hunting around, I came across a rather enlightening discussion on Digidesign's support forum.

After acknowledging the problem, a Digidesign representative promises to investigate, and later informs people that they are working on a fix. Then they return (after a lengthy delay), not with a solution, but rather to inform the large number of unhappy customers that this is infact a feature, not a bug. Apparently the variable CPU speeds of some mobile chipsets offends the delicate sensibilities of the sensitive new age Digi drivers, so they just bung a 100% load on the CPU all the time so it doesn't get a chance to slow down.

What it does do is heat up. Quickly. Then of course the fan kicks in - so you end up trying to record audio on a machine that's uncomfortably hot to touch, and sounds like a Boeing taxiing for take-off. The fan I could live with (although it's rather frustrating), but the heat is un-tenable. It will shorten the life of the hardware, and as far as I'm concerned that is beyond the point where it's acceptable.

The funny thing is, I then installed the tiny, free Asio4all driver, and everything ran absolutely bulletproof using the laptop's built in sound chip. The altruistic spare-time coder trumps the monolithic industry standard.

Again.

Suite Sweet Suite

2007-04-16T09:09:00.000+10:00

There is something soothing about coming back to my own little audio-suite space on a Monday morning. I had a good weekend, and was sad to bid Sunday farewell, but being able to come in, switch on the kettle & the genelecs (and increasingly often, the heater), and sit down with a coffee while I mentally gear up for the day is quite pleasant.

I spent a goodly portion of the weekend converting Clare's old laptop into a music production workhorse. She recently bought a shiny new silver Core Duo thingy, which means her perfectly serviceable Pentium M 1.8Ghz goes to me (for a modest fee of course). I loaded Reaper and a bunch of my favourite low CPU VST instruments & effects, and I'm all set for portable demo recording goodness. I was going to hook up my Mbox 2 Mini with the ASIO drivers (Slow-Tools would bog that machine down to a mollasses-like-crawl) but I'm actually finding the Asio4All driver is doing the job perfectly well for the intended purpose. Admittedly I won't be tracking any hit songs with the on board sound hardware, but for donning the headphones and jotting down a quick idea, it's perfect. Like a glorified 4-track, pretty much. Now I'm looking for a solution to use some VSTs in rehearsals/live. I was messing around with the demo for Brainspawn's Forte software, but it seems to have much higher perceived latency than REAPER does under the same buffer settings. Still playable, but a bit laggy feeling. Oddness...

We've done a couple of interviews for the T3E album this past week or so, plus the reviews are starting to trickle in, and they've been very positive for the most part - very exciting. It's nice to feel the promotional juggernaut swing into action, with the ensuing promise of perhaps DOZENS of extra sales. Marvellous. Album #2 is shaping up nicely as well. Of course now that's underway, all the ideas I'm coming up with are completely unsuitable for a nouveau-prog outfit such as ourselves. I'm sure I'll come up with a use for them somewhere.

21 Days

2007-03-24T20:52:00.000+11:00

That's probably longer than I should be leaving between entries - but there's not much I can do about it at this point. I've been fairly busy at work, and we're not supposed to be using the internet there, so I'm a bit short on time to update things. Such is life...

Work is progressing really well on the new T3E material. Curtis seems happy to beaver away at preparing demos based on our ideas, and they're a lot more polished than my crayon-like aural scrawlings. He's a bit more of a perfectionist in that respect, whereas I tend to find a sound that's close enough to get the idea across, and then chuck it down.

Clare and I have both been struck down with a mysterious ailment this week, which has been a great deal of fun, particularly as I've not been at this new job for long enough to earn any sick leave.

Oh, and a scorpion stung me on the head yesterday morning. I bet there aren't many people who can say that!

How to fail and succeed at the same time

2007-03-03T21:35:00.000+11:00

Failure

I didn't record an album in February.

I wrote a couple of songs complete, and good portions of half a dozen more, but it's nowhere near 35 minutes of music. I'm not actually bothered by it - as I said in my last entry, there's a big difference between writing material, and writing good material, and I'd rather have limited high quality output than prolific bilge. I got more writing done that I would have otherwise, so it's all for the good!

Success

One of the things that side-tracked me over the last month was interviewing for, getting, and preparing for a new job. I can actually put "Audio Engineer" as my job description now - at least for the next twelve months. I'm very excited, and keen to get started, but I'll admit to not a small amount of trepidation as well. I didn't misrepresent myself in any way in either my application or my interview, but I'm still not 100% sure why they hired me. Must be my magnetic personality... Honestly, I have no qualms about my ability to do the job, but there will be a bit of a learning curve.

We had a T3E meeting today - it's been too long - and we are building new material at a pretty good rate! There's also been some talk about stepping up the live performance regime, which I'm pretty excited about. I'm about to retire gracefully from the world of cover music, so I'm looking forward to devoting some performance energy to material that I actually care about.

Oh, speaking of live T3E, I posted up some live clips at youtube from our December gig at the Republic.

Falling & Part V
Tungsten Blues
Digging in the Dirt (Peter Gabriel cover)

Hurrah, and such like :)

Halfway

2007-02-16T15:50:00.000+11:00

I've now officially got more album-recording time behind me than in front. And I'm starting to arrive at the conclusion that I'm not going to finish. Balls.

I've got some good work done though, so I'll keep plugging away, and see what comes of it. The thing is, it's dead easy to fill 35 minutes with music - it's just making good music that is the trick. If I get even half that time filled with quality material, I still say it's been a productive month.

Procrastination

2007-02-08T09:34:00.000+11:00

That's very droll, isn't it? I'd like to remove the "congress" from the door, as it's not exactly pertinent in this example, but frankly I feel bad enough stealing some poor bugger's cartoon and not giving him any credit for it - let alone modifying it as well.

I actually had a dream last night that a couple of rather large people in suits paid me a visit and recquisitioned my CD due to a plagiarism accusation. Apparently they weren't concerned with the melody or the lyrics, but rather the drum sound. I was halfway through explaining to them that drum sounds are not exactly copyrightable as part of a composition, but then it all shifted into some sort of spaceship flying around thing (with monsters in pursuit - although the suit people were more frightening). I remember waking up hoping it was portentious, and now here I am blithely appropriating other peoples hard work. I just don't learn.

So, where was I? Procrastination, yes. I've done absolutely nothing toward the album since the last entry - and time is starting to seem like it's moving a bit faster. I had expected the house to myself the second half of this week, but Clare has come down with something, and so she's stayed home from work. So I'm working hard to try and overcome this slight sense of self-consciousness about working on songs while there's someone in the house.

That does sound very silly, I know. Clare knows I play and write music - this is not something I'm ashamed of. It's just that it's a slightly messy, scrappy process, and to a person who is used to hearing finished, fleshed out compositions, seeing the foundations being dug and the frame going up - well, I'm sensitive about that. Actually in my case, it's usually a matter of the roof and windows first, then try to jam some walls and a slab underneath - which is even more embarrasing.

Nevertheless, this is something I'm going to have to overcome - so today I will finish another song. Definitely. Yes.

For sure.

Happy birthday to me

2007-02-06T15:30:00.000+11:00

Things I did from February 3rd through 6th:

Had a surprise lunch thrown for me by Clare
Drank too much imported beer out of a very large glass
Caught up with some family I hadn't seen for years
Had a surprise trip away organised for me by Clare
Took a ferry trip (twice)
Went kayaking (twice)
Had Oysters for dinner (twice)
Read a goodly portion of Nick Hornby's 31 Songs (on which more at a later date)
Drank moderate to excessive amounts of wine
Was molested overnight by relentless, aerogard resistant, kamikaze (when I got a good shot in) mosquitos

Things I did not do from February 3rd through 6th:

Write any songs
Record any songs

It's ok, it's only the 6th... I've got time. No worries.

29 version 2.0

2007-02-03T11:28:00.000+11:00

That's how old I'm turning tomorrow :)

I made a little more writing progress yesterday, but I'm afraid the well is dry for now - and I'm taking a break over the weekend to celebrate the ravages of time.

Hopefully I'll be able to write more next week, once I have the perspective of old age to look back from :P

Ok, done with that line now :)

And we're off

2007-02-01T18:40:00.000+11:00

The clock has started ticking - I have less than 28 days to write and record an entire album. What the hell am I thinking?! If you take an average of the last few years, I typically write less than one song in that period of time... although I suppose that's exactly the creative/procrastination deadlock that this thing is supposed to break. I actually made a fairly good start today - I have the first song entirely roughed out in terms of chords and melody (just nonsense lyrics for now, with a few snippets of goodness that I can build the rest around), and similar bits of sketching for another three, one of which is probably closer to finished than not... So if I can keep up this pace, then I'll be set. We'll see if I'm still feeling this optimistic later in the month.

Other news - work still plows along on the second T3E album. We're not recording yet by any stretch, but we have a lot of material already floating around. Curtis brought a great new contribution to us last night, which I also have to have a bash at adding some lyrics & melodies too in the near future.

I also played the last gig of my 20s last night... I turn 30 on Sunday, which is an odd prospect indeed.

Plagiarism - or how to cover my rear in a single step

2007-01-30T09:43:00.000+11:00

I've had a bandmate raise a valid (or at least valid seeming) concern about this RPM challenge. How do I feel about working on this thing for a month, and then sending it off to an address in the USA that I've never heard of?

Not entirely great, to be honest.

I was a little worried about this for a while, then it occurred to me that this is not a competition - it's a challenge. If I have done what I set out to do by March 1st, then there's nothing to be proven by sending it in - the mission will have been accomplished either way. So the focus may well shift to make this a personal project... and if it turns out good enough I'll put it up on CD Baby or something.

I'm progressing well on the framework of the thing. The inner prog-head is pushing hard to make it a story-album, and I fear he might succeed. This is not neccessarily a bad thing - as long as I can avoid the melodramatic, overbearing "high concept" approach. It's looking more like a collection of individual songs which will cover the ground of a relationship beginning, breakup, and reconciliation. All those pop-song staples, which should allow the songs to exist on their own, but fit nicely into the whole.

In theory...

I'm not setting myself too many parameters in terms of a "sound", but to give you some idea, I've got the following artists/albums on random in my Foobar playlist for inspiration

The Beatles - Assorted Tracks
Kevin Gilbert - Assorted Tracks
Jellyfish - Bellybutton Demos, Spilt Milk Demos
Rob Dickinson - Fresh Wine for the Horses
Tears for Fears - Elemental, Everybody Loves a Happy Ending

I would have included Sufjan Stevens Illnoise, but I couldn't find it :(

Strategies

2007-01-29T08:28:00.000+11:00

If I'm going to meet with any sort of success writing and recording an album in a month, then I'm going to need a plan, and some sort of structure. I would like to have some sort of unifying theme - partly because I like albums like that, but also becase I feel it's going to be easier to get "inspired on cue" from a starting point.

Some potential underlying themes that I've had bouncing around my head for a while:

Songs from my ex-girlfriend's answering machine
Fear of Grass
Canteloupes are tasty, but a bit bland sometimes

I think the first one is probably a goer... the second is cool but difficult to quantify, and I just made the third one up to fill out the list.

For now, I'm going to spend today watching DVDs and reading books, and write down any phrases or ideas that take my fancy. And the best part is, I can technically call it work. I wonder if I can claim the DVDs as a tax deduction.....

RPM Challenge

2007-01-28T15:39:00.000+11:00

I just came across this website. If you've ever heard of NaNoWriMo, it's very much the same idea, only instead of a novel, you're writing and recording an entire album (defined as 10 songs, or 35 minutes of original material) in a month.

I've got most of February off, and I just signed up. I've had this nebulous solo project languishing away in the back of my mind for years now - and this is the perfect procrastination buster. I might have a big old pile of crap come March 1st, but at least it'll be my big pile of crap ;)

No cheating, mind. It'd be far too easy to noodle around on guitar solos for 35 minutes. I want to write a real album full of real songs. The album I would like to have made some time ago, but never got around to.

I'm in trouble now....

Noice

2007-01-26T09:34:00.000+11:00

Clare & I went down to The Venue last night, met up with Knotty & Cornel and thoroughly enjoyed an acoustic set by Jeff Martin. I had missed the last couple of Tea Party tours down here, and was a little miffed when they split up, so it was good to at least get to see Jeff play & sing. He did a goodly portion of Tea Party material (with which I was reasonably familiar) as well as some solo stuff (which I don't know as well, but enjoyed nevertheless). He sang a little medley of Jeff Buckley tunes, and also a song he wrote for another late friend... It was great to see such an honest, no bullshit performance by someone I've been a fan of for some time. Clare loved it, despite having heard virtually none of his music before. Belated new years resolution - see more live music. I was actually hemming & hawing about whether or not to go last night, which seems utterly ridiculous in hindsight. We don't get a huge amount of notable acts down here, but I can hardly gripe about it when I often don't even catch the ones who do make the effort. We got to bed around 2 (ooeer, aren't we the party animals) and I was up around 8, my body clock apparently having decided that 6 hours sleep was plenty. Clare is still in bed, and I probably should be...

Not much has been happening music-wise since the last update (yes yes, over a month ago, I'm sorry). We're in a bit of a holding pattern with The Third Ending album stuff - Prog Rock Records have sold out of the first run of discs we sent them, and we're currently waiting (and waiting) on the printers down here to come up with the booklets and inlays so we can send them over the pond and get them distributed. Hopefully we won't have lost momentum by the time it all gets sorted out.

We have been writing quite a bit for album numero deux, and it's going quite well. Mostly riffs and progressions, not a lot of melodic lines or lyrics as yet, although I plan to spend some time on such things over the next few weeks. With a bit of luck, the gestation period on this disc will be considerably shorter than the last.

Oh, I jumped on the Pro Tools bandwagon last week, and picked up an mbox 2 mini. For better or worse, the software is something of a defacto industry standard, and I thought it would be worth my learning. On top of that, I was looking to get some "real" audio hardware (I've been using my motherboard audio for demos up til now), a DAW program, and a good set of solid "workhorse" sounds to play, and the bundled Xpand! module rounded out the package very nicely for my purposes. Runner up was the EMU 0404, but that would have cost me a similar amount, and left me with no DAW program (other than a host of "LE" versions, which weren't really going to cut the mustard). All told, very happy so far with the Pro Tools experience.

Right - more coffee.

Record Deal

2006-12-16T18:41:00.000+11:00

Just a quick note - after four months of negotiation (!!!) The Third Ending have just signed a deal with ProgRock Records for promotion and distribution of our debut CD. The ink is still wet on the contract, so there's no official release, but it is definitely happening.

Hurrah, and all that :)

All I want for Christmas is A new PC

2006-12-10T12:34:00.000+11:00

I've been working on the audio & video recordings from this gig last weekend, and my poor aging PC is feeling the brunt. It's a shade over three years old now, a humble Athlon XP 1900+, and while it has served me admirably, it has always had a penchant to run rather warm. I think it actually may be the motherboard (a Gigabyte GN400Pro) - I've read about a few problems with inaccurate temperature readings on this particular board, so it may be that it's not infact overheating - it just thinks it is. Nevertheless, it brings my audio work to a spectacular halt each time. Processing slows to a crawl, audio stutters, the poor machine starts emitting a series of strangled beeps, and then has to go for a bex and a good lie down before it's good for anything. Now I'm not one to deny my PC the right to its R & R - it's getting toward the twilight years in PC terms after all, but I still need to do my work.

The recording & video itself are in fair to moderate shape. Some of the problems reflect those on the night - Cornel's vocal parts are virtually inaudible, and the pitch is pretty wobbly (due to the fact that they were virtually inaudible on the night as well, so he couldn't hear himself). The acoustic guitar was a bit out of tune for a couple of songs (again, we didn't catch it, because we couldn't hear it). Nothing irreparable, but then you start to encounter the slippery slope of concert recording post-production fixes. The acoustic is out? Well, let's just grab the Maton & plug it in, we can re-do that one easy enough. Hmm... except now the vocal doesn't quite sit with the acoustic for a couple of lines. Ok, where's my SM58, I'll just fix that up... oh, but the sound is a little different, I can't quite match the EQ, and it's really obvious where all the bleed drops out in the new section, so I'd better re-record the whole song - just so it matches sonically of course - I'll reproduce my performance on the night, flubs and all, so it's honest. Oh, well, except for that note, and this one here... and ohhh that one was quite bad. I know I can sing them correctly, so I'll just do them here, and it'll be more of a "hypothetical gig recording".

The next thing you know, you've got INXS's Live Baby Live, which while it has the word "live" comprising a full two thirds of its title, ironically contains about the opposite ratio of actual live recorded material.

Now, where's that autotune plugin?

Train Wreck

2006-12-05T17:20:00.000+11:00

Well, I'm not sure how much of this little live video/audio we'll be seeing - apparently the reording outputs on the mixing desk were positioned post-EQ and inserts, and so there is precious little low frequency information to be had. Also, as various factors led to the gig starting at 11:45pm, we were all a bit teddy-tired, and the performance is not exactly all it might have been.

I'm personally still keen to mix & edit it up, and at least see how it looks and sounds. If nothing else, we can sit at Knotty's place with a few drinks and a pizza, and watch it on the big screen for a bit of a laugh. I'm also still cautiously optimistic that we'll get something useable out of it, but I have yet to hear the damage with my own ears so far, so I'll reserve my final call. The video looks reasonably ok - I've been assembling a rough-cut, and it's coming together nicely.

Mission accomplished - more or less

2006-12-03T20:03:00.001+11:00

I'm being brief for now, as I'm as tired as a very tired thing, but I'd say it was generally a success, more or less. I'm watching the video recording now, and we seem to have acquitted ourselves reasonably well - and in the face of considerable organisational adversity!

More soon. Thanks to all who came along and clapped & cheered. You rock.

Riddup

2006-12-02T10:59:00.000+11:00

Gig day.

In just over twelve hours we will be taking the stage for our Tassie-prog extravaganza. We ran the whole set at Knotty's place last night, it all times out pretty much exactly right, and is generally sounding good, apart from a few little stuff ups. I think everyone had a bit of a case of the tired's last night - it's been a pretty busy week rehearsal-wise!

My voice thinks so, at least. I started cracking a bit on high notes last night... Ooeer. I made sure I got a good sleep last night, and I'm trying to stay as hydrated as I can today. Ahhh the glamour and excitement of being a rock vocalist. I don't think it would be the end of the world, but after all the preparations, it would be a shame to mar the evening with throat frogs.

Load-in & soundcheck begins in a little under three hours. Aaarg!

Silent, for so long inside your... um... thing?

2006-12-01T11:13:00.000+11:00

As anyone I've been in a band with recently can attest, I have a shocking awful memory for lyrics. Not a useful trait in a vocalist, I'm sure you'll agree. I'm not sure if it's a "too much alcohol in my early/mid 20s" scenario, or simply a confidence issue. More the latter, I suspect. I used to be quite good with lyrics - but a couple of tabula rasa moments can really shake your foundations. I can sit and write down the lyrics to most of our songs (and the covers we're playing tomorrow), but when it comes to actually dredging them up in real-time so I can sing them? And play the keyboard at the same time?

Nope, I don't have that power.

Thank god, then, for inkjet printers, pieces of black particle board, and gaffer tape. I have a cunning plan.

Journalistic Excellence

2006-11-30T14:32:00.000+11:00

Well, if a single column write up in the local paper is any barometer of rock stardom, we have arrived. Or, should I say, if a single column paraphrasing of our press release is any barometer...

Still, it says reasonably nice things about us (which it would want to, considering we basically wrote it ourselves) but I'm sure I didn't say any of the things they've quoted me on. I'm not sure about "Local Lads" either - I feel like we should have scuffed knees and be playing conkers, or making lemonade or something.

All you need is a DAW

2006-11-29T08:57:00.000+11:00

I picked up the "latest" Beatles album the other day as a Christmas present for Dad, but I couldn't resist giving it a spin myself before I wrapped it up and stuck a ribbon on it. Now I think I'm going to have to get another - this is a damn fine musical journey into Beatles-land. Certainly not one for the purists - there are some pretty huge liberties taken with the material here - but as far as the "how is it to listen to?" test (always the most important one, I think) it passes with flying colours. George & Giles Martin have mangled & recontextualised this incredibly familiar material (as well as some lesser known and unreleased snippets) into something that's great fun to listen to. The orchestral crescendo leading up to Get Back brought a huge smile to my face, and the acoustic/orchestral version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is worth the price of admission all by itself. I grew up listening to the Beatles (thanks Dad!) and I don't see this as a betrayal of the material at all. Is it a cynical marketing/moneymaking exercise? Well... maybe. Do I care? Not really in the slightest. I'm enjoying the music too much.

In other news, we ran through all the covers for the T3E gig last night, and it seems I had managed to forget large swathes of my keyboard parts. Not good. Nose to the grindstone today then, as we've only got one more rehearsal before Saturday (although we'll probably have a little bit of time to run things in soundcheck). 24-track recording appears to be the order of the day, so hopefull there will be something to show for all this...

...now we just need to play halfway reasonably :)

2006-11-27T12:08:00.000+11:00

About Bloody Time!

About 4 months after our first web-sale, we're finally going to give this CD a proper send-off. This Saturday night, December 2nd at the Republic Bar, 299 Elizabeth Street North Hobart.

As we have two sets to fill, and a little under an hour of album to fill them with, we've been madly rehearsing some songs by other artists. I'm reluctant to call them "covers" per se - you won't be hearing "Unbelieveable" or "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in there (although, that could be interesting...). We're going to bust out a few songs from our favourite artists & influences though. Current plan is to record the show in some form or another, considering the bulk of the fanbase are actually offshore. Hopefully we'll be able to make at least excerpts available on the website for all to enjoy.

More information as it comes. In the meantime, clear this Saturday in your calendar if you're anywhere near Hobart!

2006-11-27T12:03:00.000+11:00

Hey hey... well, here's my blog. I actually forgot my password for a while, but then I found it written down in a pile of paperwork. I know that's meant to be a no-no, but who's laughing now, eh?

So. What's happened? Well, The previously mentioned guitarist quitting situation was resolved quite easily. The Dave is dead - long live the Stuart! The cash-whore sellout cover band now has a guitarist whose amplifier apparently does have a low volume setting. Egads! Who would have thought?

The Third Ending have been busy writing & jamming material for album #2. It's going well so far, plus there are some developments in the works for promotion & distribution of the first one. So it's all going rather swimmingly in the T3E camp for now. There's one other piece of news too, which I shall put in a separate post just after this one.

It's good to be back :)

2006-09-18T10:49:00.000+10:00

Fucking guitarists who fucking quit your fucking band with less thank two fucking weeks of fucking notice...

(Not T3E, don't worry!)

2006-09-13T18:46:00.000+10:00

Music as a Career

It's bloody difficult. I know a great number of musicians who have more then enough talent to do this thing for a living - and would dearly love to be doing just that - yet they're languishing away in boring day jobs, working in cover bands playing music they don't like to punters who don't care.

So is it just a matter of tenacity? Being in the right place at the right time? Come to think of it, given my present geographical situation the latter option is probably a winner. I'm not sure how long it's been since we saw the last Tasmanian music star, but I suspect it's been a good while. But then, I'm not talking "stardom" neccessarily - I'm talking about making a living, getting by, being comfortable, and not having to rent your soul to the corporate world or the governemnt for 38 hours a week to achieve it.

I couldn't even begin to speculate on a remedy. Just keep plugging away I guess - the problem is it's a great big Catch-22. If you tie yourself to a "real job" (and you pretty much have to if you want to enjoy those little luxuries like a car, somewhere to live, or nutritionally adequate food) then the majority of your productive hours are lost in the name of, oh I don't know, calculating some other bugger's tax returns, or taking pictures of people shaking hands with suits on, or explaining to supposedly intelligent people over the phone where the on-button is. Hard to be in the right place at the right time, when the majority of your time is spent at work. Unless of course the right place happens to be where you work, which (let's face it) is unlikely.

2006-09-11T14:08:00.000+10:00

I really should learn not to start journals if I'm not going to committ to writing in them. A (much belated) gig report will be up shortly. For now, I present the following up to the minute newsbyte:

We are well into writing the first song for the second T3E album, and it kicks the almighty-God-ass my friends.

2006-08-01T20:03:00.000+10:00

In exactly 25 hours, The Third Ending will hit the stage to play the majority of the album in front of people for the first time. Naturally, I have a cold.

I'm a semi-believer in tempting fate, so I'm not going to tell you that I seem to have worked the kinks out of the live rig. Nor am I going to let you know that the rehearsals have been going reasonably well.

I'm hoping to bribe somebody to hold the video camera for me, so hopefully I'll have some sort of record of the momentous occasion that I can steadfastly refuse to post anywhere online.

Hurrah :)

2006-07-21T15:29:00.000+10:00

Fuss.

And what's more, Bother.

I've got more bloody gear to play with. Normally that's a very very good thing indeed, but it comes at a fairly busy juncture in Nick-land. Gear in question is a Roland VG-88 guitar/amp modelling system, on long-term loan from our drummer's Dad. Thanks Knotty's Dad :)

I've been having a play with it, and it's very cool. The hex pickup thing means each string can be processed individually, so I can do all the alternate tunings & capo parts at the jab of a footswitch. Also, it does a perfectly serviceable acoustic guitar simulation. Of course the Gk2a pickup makes my guitar looks like it's been assimmilated by the Borg, but that's a small price to pay for the sonic advantage. If the money fairies decide to visit, I shall have to spring for one of the internal kits so I can use it without looking like such a ponce.