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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Gave Him an Inch and Now He Thinks He's a Star

A new dental promo/testimonial video with the music of Black and Blue is up over at mattmunson.com, conveying persuasively the orthodontic skill of one Dr. Hutta.

The video is short, but sweet, featuring some classic Munson "hamming!"

Background music is "Bordered in Black" from the forthcoming Black and Blue CD "High Desert Mystery."

Perhaps "Dr. Brumbacher (and his Tools of Torture)," while more thematically relevant, just wasn't in the cards message-wise.