Thursday, April 29, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 25 - More Tweaks

Tonight I took my final stabs at three songs; "The Friend That I Once Knew", "Girl #134" and "Let Me Be Your Guitar Player".

Friend had a few little things I needed to clean up, but Girl is where I spent about an hour. I once and for all fixed all the drum fills to my satisfaction. They all sound really great now, and I'm quite pleased with them. Guitar needed no additional work, and I signed off on that one after just one listen. Just a great song that really moves.

UPDATE:
After I wrote the above blog entry, I plowed ahead and banged out the last two songs in my list, "Second Time Around" and "On The Road". For Road, I grafted over a part of the refrain where I didn't quite hit the high note right. Not a big deal, as there were other parts of the song where I DID get it right. So plenty to choose from.

For STA, I just did a couple little things. For example, there's one part where I sing "I would have wished on a falling star..." whereas bill says "Would have wished on a falling star..." Bill's version skipped the introductory "I". So I did the right thing, and removed it from my performance.

SOOOOOO, this brings to an end my participation in the album mix down, for this round. To the best of my abilities, all the songs are technically cleaned up, and knobs are turned. I still expect/want Bill to take a stab at the knob turning, but I think overall it sounds really good.

My next plan is to burn another CD and get it into the mail to Bill, with it being noted that this is the latest and greatest. I suppose now would also be a good time for me to load up everything onto an external hard drive and ship it over to Torrance for aforementioned knob action.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 24 - Mixes, Tweaks, and Artwork

Tonight saw me being pretty productive with the mix down. I hit two songs tonight, Big Tin Truck and Bordered in Black. Again, please note that I'm just looking for technical glitches that can be fixed via cubase. So if there's a drum hit out of place, or some vocal collisions, I fix them.

In Bordered, I found that I had misplaced a tiny patch we recorded for one of the guitar pieces. I found it, re-inserted it, and cleaned up the edges so that it blended smoothly. Now that I am one step above rank amature with cubase, I find revisiting the songs is very useful, as I can use tricks and techniques that were previously unknown to me.

In other news, Jeff More emailed me high res copies of the photos I would like to use for the front and back of the album cover. They look spectacular in high res, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the final product looks.

This weekend, I took a couple of photos that are going to replace the thumbnails that are currently on the covers. I figure there are twenty or so pics that need replacing. I'm sure we will slip in a "knob hill" shot or two. I'm hoping bill will have some travel-esque pictures that he would like to contribute to that part of the ablum


EDIT:
I finished off a few more songs a bit later. Come My Way and Drinks Are On Me are also all polished up and ready for some knob turning.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 23 - Rockville Is Outsville

I had a brief txt exchange with Bill today as he was out getting pizza. I guess this is the way albums are to be produced in the year twenty ten. We went back and forth on a few issues, and both agreed that Rockville was not only not one of the stronger songs on the album, but also adds a layer of logistical hassles as it is a cover song.

So we are going to take it out of the final release. I'm sure it will see the light of day in a web release somewhere, but until then, you can always enjoy the music video for it that we have on youtube.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 22 - Last Sweep For Tech Errors

After listening to the CD this weekend on my way to Indianapolis and back, I picked up on a number of little technical glitches. Sadly, I did not write them down, so I have set myself to the task of going through each song one last time looking for little glitches that I am unhappy with, that I think can be fixed with the magic of cubase.

So far, I have worked my way through Above You, April, and Armageddon Is Here. The first two had no problems. When I got to Armageddon, I remembered something.

On many songs, I ran my voice through Autotune. It's interesting, because there's a little meter on the dashboard that shows how much "work" autotune is doing to correct the vocal track. It looks like on a lot of notes, I am a bit flat. As opposed to sharp, I mean. But sometimes, I go way out of whack, and autotune doesn't quite know what to do with it. Now, I'm sure that if I was really familiar with autotune, I could fiddle with the knobs and get to be just right. But I'm not, and I don't have the time to become a master. I find that when you put it on the default settings, it fixes 95% of the problems.

But along the way, it sometimes creates some. Like when it hits a note, which maybe is right in the middle of a specific range, and it choses the wrong direction to correct it. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, but you get the idea.

In Armageddon, there were two spots where it kind of dorked up the line. It was right on "The world is gonna end today". I guess there's a not in there that is not easy for me to hit every time. Long story short, I found one of the refrains where I DID get it just right, and I grafted that part over on top of the two sections where I did it wrong. I tried un-autotuning those two parts, but it still sounded a bit wonky. I did indeed miss the note.

At the end of the day, the vocal now sounds really good, and it's all ironed out. I only did three songs tonight, and now it is time for bed. But this way, I will have some more work to do tomorrow.

Finishing The Album: Step 21 - CD In Transit

I have a tiny update as of this morning. Today I dropped off the new CD for Bill at the post office. MAN, postal rates have gone up! A single CD, with no jewel box ran $1.44! I was expecting it to be like 45 cents or something. Whatever.

Though not album related, I've sort of gotten back on my video capture kick. I guess I am getting all fired up for all things MNI right now. I made a DVD for operation mexicali, and needed some empty DVD boxes. I picked some of those up today. My goal is to have a copy of that DVD out to Bill in a few days. Should make for some good watching, even though it's terribly embarassing.

That's all I have for today!

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 20 - New CD Burned

I spent about 2 hours tonight working on cleaning up a couple drum fills on G134. I think it sounds a lot better, but it is not perfect. CuBase is no substitute for Don Varner! Put that in your quote book, fancy boy!

Still, I think it's getting much closer.

I also re-output Above You, which was the song that showed up as blank on the CD. I burned another, new copy of the CD, and have it all packaged up and ready to ship to Bill.

I think here's what I have in mind for the final stretch of the process. I get the songs ready for the final knob turning, and bill does the final knob turning. I think a lot of the songs are really close, and wont' require much work. But who knows. My fear is that once I hand the mixes over to Bill for final knob turning, he will find himself unable to attend to them, due to the many non-trivial distractions he has in his life, like work and his family. I know, snore. :) Still, such is the facts of life.

If we are shooting for an end of June delivery, that means we should have the songs and artwork finished, packaged, and uploaded to DiskMakers by the end of May. That gives us a little over one month to get everything done.

I will take another listen to the CD and see if I can see any gaping holes. yeah, you read that right. If after the next listening, I find nothing I feel is a showstopper, I will transfer all of the files onto a drive and mail it to Bill. It will then be up to him to do his knob magic. Then he mails them back to me, I give it my once over (I doubt I will have any changes) and then we go to press.

I worry however, seeing as how over the past two weeks I have recieved few communications from Bill, and I understand there is a looming threat that he may be shipped out of country for a bit. That would certainly interfere with our plans!!! :)

Onward and upward, I suppose

Finishing The Album: Step 19 - Multiple Updates

It has been a few days since my last blog update, as I have been out of town. But there is progress.

First, I managed to listen to the CD. The same as the one I burned and sent to Bill. I have two main concerns. First is the fact that one of the songs is blank. No sound. I must have exported it wrong from cubase. That's an easy fix. The second thing I noticed is that the drums on Girl #134 need some help. There's a few fills that sound pretty clunky. I need to clean those up in Cubase. Not that big of a deal.

I think I also need to soften the base on one song. I forget the name.

I am also in contact with Jeff More, the photographer whose work we are hoping to use. I showed him the concept designs, and he likes them. Next step is to ask him for high res versions of the photos.

I picked up another padded envelope today so that I can ship bill another copy of the CD. the one that is on the way can probably just be thrown out.


UPDATE:
I've emailed Jeff and asked for the high res versions. Also, the song that is blank on the album is "Above You", and the bass line that needs some reduction is "Come My Way". I say that because it distorted the speakers in my car. Then again, it could have been my speakers.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 18 - CD In Transit

Not a big update, just a note to say that I have dropped the concept CD into the mail today, and it is making its way to Bill's house.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 17 - Mock Up Finished

Here are a couple pictures of the CD mock up I have prepared for Bill.





Inside is a CD-R that contains mix downs of all of the songs, in the order that they are listed on the jacket. I will try to get this into the mail for Bill tomorrow.

I got an email from Bill today with some feedback on the artwork and progress. Looks like he is ready to sign off on the concept and implementation, so I guess I can move forward on the final version. That's cool.

Ok, that's all I have for now.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 16 - Internal Artwork

After my last post, I got to thinking what if there ARE lots of liner notes and dirt we want included with the CD? Which frankly, we probably do. So I put together a concept for what the inside of the main booklet would look like. Here's what I've come up with:



As with my other concepts, the text would need to be changed, and the pictures along the bottom are simply place holders. The idea behind those photos, by the way is that they are candid travel snapshots. Pictures that document a cross desert journey.

There's also lots of room for interpretation on what those pictures should be, or what they should end up trying to convey. We could always just drop in tons of pictures of Bill and I, documenting our adventures over the years as Black and Blue. The possibilities are endless, though the concept for what is in place is travel pictures. Pictures you took while you were driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Or to Carlsbad, or something like that. Or following Route 66. You get the idea.

Finishing The Album: Step 15 - front cover concept complete

It's not DONE, but the concept is done.



Granted, there will be numerous changes to be made before we go to press. The pictures of Bill and I are temporary, and bad. The text is of course total nonsense. The thumbnail pictures along the bottom of the design will need to be replaced with pictures that we have clearance to use.

BUT, I am diggin' the overall layout and design. Depending on how much text we want to drop into the liner notes, we can probably shrink the font by a few points to fit in more. I know Bill is a fan of liner notes, but I'm thinking the web might be a good place to put those. Dunno.

Recall that as of right now, my vision is that there is NOT a booklet type fold out for the front cover of the CD. what you see above would not be printed as is and folded. It would be one sheet, with the BB part on the back, Desert on the front. If there is huge need for more liner note real-estate, we can do that. It'll just cost a bit more, take more time, etc.

I must confess though, i think it looks pretty cool.

Finishing The Album: Step 14 - Back Cover

Here is my initial stab at the back cover. I actually like it a lot. The verbage will need to be enhanced a little, but the idea is to show where it will be, not what it will say.



Of course, the order of the songs is totally tentative. That just happened to be the order I put them together in for the demo CD. SOME thought went into it, but I'm certainly not married to the order.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 13 - ok, I Lied

I can't resist. Here is the unfinished concept of the front jacket. I'm still not sure if this will be a folded piece, which will free up two more surfaces for art, or if this will be printed on one piece of card stock. So the BB part would be the back side, facing inwards. The desert photo would be the front, facing out.

duh.



I figure A pic of bill and his bio would go on the left hand side of the inside, and the right side would be reserved for yours truly. Or a couple pics, and some bio info. Or some random thoughts. Cuz I'm so random.

Finishing The Album: Step 12 - More Art

I spent about two and a half hours working on the artwork for the cd box. It's coming along really nicely. I don't have anything to show right now, because I'm not a fan of showing off works in progress.

But these are just concepts. They will need refining, and I'm certainly open to imput. Yeah, I said iMput. With an "M". Just like we do at the office.

Anyhow, my plan is to have the concept art finished tomorrow. I'm shooting to have a demo package all put together before I go to bed tomorrow.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 11 - CD and Art

I burned the CD of all of my mixdowns so far. iTunes helped. Actually, it did most of the heavy lifting.

I also downloaded a bunch of templates from the Disk Maker website for the jewel box artwork. I think we're going to go the cheap route. Have the front cover just be a two sided piece. No fold out. Back side will be one sided. So when you lift the CD out of the jewel box, you don't see any artwork. Never liked that much anyway. It's supposed to be all about the music!

I'm hoping to put together some rough artwork tonight, just so I can get a mock up CD ready to ship out to BF/Ripstick.

Finishing The Album: Step 10 - Cover Art Tweak

I wanted to see how this cover would look without all the visual noise on it, so I removed it entirely. Looks pretty clean! And if you didn't know any better, that might ACTUALLY be Bill in the foreground.

Finishing The Album: Step 9 - Finished MixDowns

Today at lunch I came home and cranked out the last few mixdowns. For the most part, I didn't really turn any knobs, just output them the MP3. Next step is to burn them to a CD, get a copy to Fischer, and listen to it myself a few times.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 8 - Mixdown 'Splosion

Tonight I did mix downs of each of the songs that are album bound. I made a few little tweaks to each song as necessary, but nothing major.

The real point here is to put together a collection of the best and current mixes, and get it off to Bill for listening.

In my opinion, we are in the "showstoppers only" phase of the process, which means that unless there is something CRITICALLY wrong with the song, my feeling is that we should just plow ahead.

Because sitting on our hands an analyzing this to death has gotten us really far to date.

or not.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

It's A Lizard!

Ok, so this is not album related. I get that. I was goofing around on my computer tonight, and ended up doing a little video capture project. I stumbled onto the 8mm tape of "operation mexicali", which seemed like a good candidate for capture.

What was surprising was what was at the beginning of the tape.



This was really just a fun exercise to see if I could learn how to automate volume within a clip. I did.

And this is also meant to fuel Bill's fire to eventually make "Stickmen: The Movie"

For those of you who do not understand the historical significance of this clip, don't feel bad. There's probably only five or six people in the world that do.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 7 - Artwork and Photos

I did some playing around with Jeff's photos, since most of them are just great. Here is an example of how I just dropped a new photo into my existing template. Granted, the arrangement doesn't work perfectly with the existing text and visual noise, but you get the idea.



And for reference, here are the other photos that I consider interesting, and will take a shot at integrating them into the cover artwork.





























Finishing The Album: Step 6 - Artwork and Organizing

I spent some time this evening organizing my files on my computer. I got all of the "Frankenstein" versions of the songs loaded onto my desktop, in a new folder. I do this to preserve data integrity. You know, in case something happens to my external hard drive, or if for some reason I screw up a song beyond hope, I will want a version I can revert to.

I am sad to learn that a lot of the research I did for the album cover has been lost. I originally saved off a lot of photos I found that I thought would make good cover art. I still have my master "High Desert Mystery" photoshop files, but those were really just conceptual work.

The GOOD news is that with a little google magic, I was able to find Jeff More's Flickr page, which is where I originally found so many of the photos I was considering. For reference, here is a link.

I've also decided to start adding a bit of a description to my post titles. Numbered posts will not make for good reading by future generations of fans. right?

Finishing The Album: Step 5

I finished a mix down of "Friend", and have emailed it off to Bill.

The main thing I did was straighten out the vocal tracks. There were a lot of vocal "collisions" between my two tracks and Bill's track, so I cleaned those up. Now we hit words at the same time, and hold the sustain for the same duration. Overall I think the vocals sound a million times better.

Guitar solo still isn't perfect, but with AutoTune and a Leslie filter, it's hard to notice.

Finishing The Album: Step 4

Today I finally finished something I've been meaning to do for more than a year. I fixed the guitar solo on "Friend That I Once Knew". I did it using AutoTune. I'm really not sure what all the knobs do, but with a little tooling around, I got results that I wanted. I have to say, I'm really stunned at what an amazing tool it is.

I think I will have to fight the urge to run everything through AutoTune.

Plan is to do a good mix down of Friend and email it off to Bill.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 3

Before I went to sleep last night, I realized I had a problem. Cubase 5 does not come packaged with a number of effects that were used by Bill on his mix of "Drinks". ModDelay, Compression, and three others were all showing as missing. I spent some time trying to find them and/or configure them, but it turned out to be too big of a pain.

Then, as I drifted off to sleep, I had a bit of a revelation.

So this morning, I removed Cubase 5, and re-installed Cubase SX. I loaded Drinks into SX, and sure enough, all of the filters were there.

The main reason I installed 5 was because it included AutoTune... or so I thought. Turns out AutoTune is a third party product that is sold separately. You can download a trial version from the website of the manufacturer here. Since it's a plug in, I have to believe Cubase sx also supports it... which it does.

So I installed AutoTune, and all is right in the world.

The only bummer is that I will need to repeat the changes I made to Drinks last night, as the cubase project files are not entirely backwards compatible. Not a big deal, as it was under an hour of work, and there was nothing I did that I could not easily repeat.

Though this constitutes "one thing" that I did toward the album today, I believe I will spend some more time this evening getting Drinks back up to speed.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Finishing The Album: Step 2

I did a mixdown of Drinks, now that I have cubase up and running. There were a lot of settings I had to mess with to get it working, but all that is behind me now.

I did a lot of doctoring to the track. I cleaned up all of the intro hits to make sure the drums and guitars sync'd up properly. Sounds great now.

Perhaps on the controversial side, I chopped off the intro, and removed one verse. The song comes in at 3:17 right now, which is a few second shy of radio worthy, if you ask me. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but some of the problems with length are obviously gone. I think it's the right length to hold a listners attention.

I'm going to email the MP3 to bill for peer review. I think it might be good. I have to confess also that the leslie speaker on the organ is great. Gives the song a good feel.

Finishing the Album: Step 1

My new plan is to do ONE THING per day towards getting the Black and Blue album finished. Even if it's just something small, I want to do one thing each and every day.

Today, I installed Cubase 5 on my PC. This is some leading edge stuff. Should be good. I also copied the "Drinks Are On Me" source files from my flash drive onto my desktop. I will probably do a little messing around with Drinks tonight.

Stay tuned.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Drinks Are On Black And Blue

This past weekend, Bill and I put the finishing touches on the long-since-percolating "Drinks Are On Me", a song written long ago, and performed only slightly less long ago for the last time.

Bill and I laid down the first few tracks for this many months ago. I want to say sometime mid last year. We had drums, vocals, and a few guitar tracks. The only thing that remained was drums and piano. Which is sort of like saying the only thing that remains in my plans to get remarried is finding a girl.

So the other day, Bill and I hit the garage running.

Actually, I take that back. I'm telling the story out of sequence. We first went to Guitar Center to check out some bass gutiars. I personally prefer to shop at Sam Ashe, just because they don't have that "Corporate bohemoth" feeling to them, and we all know how much corporate rock sucks. Right Zybul? sorry, inside joke. Anyhow, I personally have had great experience with Sam Ashe, and even better experiences with mom and pop music stores (or pop and sons, in some cases) so I'm happy to see my money go there. We tooled around with bass guitars for a while, with my opinion resting solidly on the belief that a 200 dollar bass "will be just fine", to quote VA Stryker during the recording of the My New Invention single. Bill is convinced that a mid-tier, 500+ bass is better. I will leave this one in the hands of the pros, as I have no dog in that fight. If Bill wants to buy a "nice" bass instead of a bare bones one, that's cool and I will sign off on that. Not trying to be snarky either. I mean I will actually support it, because I admit that I do not have the insight.

We also looked at some microphones, as we are hatching a plot to put together a more stable recording environment, which was kind of the long term goal of the project. The main idea is that we currently spend WAY too much time dorking around getting SET UP to record, which takes away from actual recording time. Even switching between instruments takes way too much time. So the idea is that everything is already in place when you walk into the garage. Er, I mean recording studio. So when you walk in, all you hafta do is power up, sit down, and rock. By our estimates, there are two missing components to that strategy. A dedicated microphone system for drums, and a dedicated computer for the studio. The new bass guitar is simply part of the "Get instruments that don't suck" strategy, which is decoupled from the other strategy I'm currently discussing.

So we looked at microphones, and discovered a very well priced set that is intended for mic'ing drums. That may be the one we go with. Which would be just fine with me.

We then went to costco to check out desktop computers. I'm absolutely convinced that an entry level desktop computer will more than satisfy our needs for the recording studio. I don't think Bill is convinced though. Sadly, Costco was closed as it was Easter. Whatever.

SOMEWHERE in between us leaving Bill's house and our return, a big 7.2 earthquake struck Mexicali, though somehow both Bill and I totally missed it. I'm not sure how that really happens, but it did. Neither of us felt it, though his entire family did. It's not as if it wasn't felt in that area. It was. We just didn't feel it. I have to believe we were in the car at the time, and just assumed it was engine weirdness or something.

After ALL THAT, that's when we went into the garage and started working on the song.

Bass line was first, and despite my efforts to convince Bill that "less is more", he put down a bass line that I felt was a bit too "deedle" heavy. Now I'm not telling tales out of school here, and I know that bill won't read this and say "oh, so NOW he's bustin' my chops for it!!!!!". No dear readers, there was plenty of chop busting "en suite" that day, so fear not. I'm not going to belabor the point, because it just doesn't matter, but I felt that there was already a lot going on in the song, and yet another instrument doing "solo" like riffs seemed out of place. TO add insult to injury, Bill took the same approach with the keyboard!!!! LOL. so now we have three guitar tracks, a bass track and a piano track, all of which are essentially playing a "lead" riff. Too funny. Again, not trying to bust chops, just reporting events as they happened. Bill and I talked about it, and I think we just disagreed. Back to my "no dog in this fight" comment I made earlier, I guess I felt the same way about this song. Though I think it's a good song, it's not worth making a big stink over and bruising frayed nerves. I trust Bill as a musician, and his instincts are good for stuff like this. So even though I think differently, I'm willing to defer to whatever thoughts are going through Bill's heads.

See? How's that for a nice little bit of diplomacy to wrap up what was turning into a smack-down of a write up????

It was then my turn to work my cubase magic. I went into the song and doctored up the parts that were a tad out of sync. I removed a few little errors, cleaned up some junk, and just cleared up the timing on a few hits. Just techinical stuff that the casual listener probably would not have noticed.

We tweaked some knobs and settings for a bit, then output an MP3 for our listening pleasure. And that was about the end of that. I have all the cubase files on a flash drive, and plan on giving it some more attention when I get back to Ohio, but I would say for the most part, this song is finished.

In retrospect, after listening to it, I am beginning to feel that this is one of those songs whose value lies not in it's essential goodness, but instead in its nostalgia. The performances are solid, and it makes me smile, but I'm not convinced it's a good song. It goes on about 2 minutes too long, with lyrics that aren't clever enough to be worth waiting for. There's also pretty much no sense of variety in the music, without a solo or middle 8 to speak of. Naturally, not every song requires that, especially when the narrative of the song is compelling enough to hold the listeners interst throughout. I just don't feel like this song has that. I will listen to it a few more times to try to be a little more disconnected from it, but I think out of ALL of the songs we have slated to go on the album, this would be my first choice to cut and release as a web special. Maybe I will try cutting out two verses and bringing it down to three and a half minutes or something. Not sure.

Anyhow, with all of that said, I don't want readers to think for one second that it was not a whole ton of fun putting this thing together and getting it done. It's one that has been on deck for ten or more years now, and it's really rewarding to see a studio quality version of it finally finished. The whole experience also got me re-pumped for recording more songs.

Ok, that's all I've got for now. carry on, true believers!