Author: h

A little coda for Only Mostly Dead, these were recorded in the basement after I tore down the OMD setup. They were still done in single takes with no edits or overdubs, though I used a looper pedal for “Stuck On You” (the intro is the loop, and it comes back at the end).

The first full set of Fight Songs masters are rendering now, and I’m going to listen to them tonight. They’ve been a long time coming. Pretty psyched. All the guest spots are in. Mixes are good, if not quite done.

Fourteen years in the making, at least. I thought I’d done a post where I traced out when each song was written as best I could, but maybe I’m thinking of doing that for V for Voice. “Cooky” was new in fall 2008, at a minimum.

It wasn’t planned this way, but I’m almost getting the record out for the 10th anniversary of my wedding to the person most of them are about fighting with!

Following up to my compression explainer post, here’s a short video that explains signal compression extremely well and makes zero mistakes! Watch if you’re new to compression, or if you have any questions about what compressors do.

The nearly ten-year-old demo to “2013 March” (working title; now “Let’s Get Out Of Here” from Fight Songs) came up by accident – almost by mistake – in my workout mix on Tuesday. I’d used some weird genre tags to group the shaker demo/Fight Songs material, and this track happened to get tagged as 90s rock.

It had a great energy, something the full studio mix seemed to be lacking. I played it again and realized that in arranging the song for a full band mix and electric guitars, I’d lost the spark that came from bashing away on the acoustic and the harmonic complexity of the chord voicings in the demo.

So I recorded an acoustic track for the real mix, and bam; now it rips like it should.

I’m very lucky to have stumbled over my demo when I did. “First idea, best idea” is often true, and always worth checking.

Did an episode of the pod about my beat tape. All major pod platforms available here.