Category: News

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.

Here’s two songs from my SP-404 SX project, the first featuring legendary Lawrence artist Approach.

I’ve started editing the first set of jams to come out of my MS-20 & DrumBrute semi-generative rig. Here’s an amazing waveform I encountered. This is unprocessed MS-20!

This started as an email to Cory, on the heels of finishing Fight Songs bass lines.

One weird thing about writing and playing bass lines is that, the way my brain works, it feels like I’m searching for the ideal platonic form of the bass line for each song. It feels like there’s only one mathematically correct answer and I have to play around until I find it; which notes and rhythms, which octaves for the notes, where to put the runs, etc.

It’s not entirely literally true; I can hear some spots where two notes might be equally valid, but 99% of the time there’s an obvious right choice and it feels right and moral, even, to play it. That doesn’t at all mean the first note I try is right! Often the first 80% of the line will come to me pretty quickly, on my first few plays through the song, but I’ll spend a good amount of time on the last 20%, especially the ascending / descending runs, to make sure I hit the exact right notes. It feels like working out a proof, and it’s very satisfying to get right (and frustrating to get wrong)!

On one little line in “Lost,” the very end of the chorus that leads back down to the start of the chorus progression, I tried a ton of different combinations of notes for that 4-note descending run before I found the “right” one.

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This is a leftover thought from the “A Life Without Fireflies” episode of The Long Play Listening Party that I found in the email archive.

Talking through my early recording experiments and gear I realized that prior to the purchase of my Digi001 ProTools LE system in November 2022, I had only ever self-recorded acoustic music with either my MiniDisc player and a computer mic or a 4-track tape machine. (howie&scott’s near and far was done by Fred Ritter, Jacob’s dad, on a digital 8-track.)

Just ten months after buying the 001 rig I was in Doug Van Sloan’s mastering studio with signs.comets, plus we had also recorded Shacker’s Pardon My Pretension…, Rob’s A Life Without Fireflies, and Blame The Game’s EP. That level of productivity is bonkers to try and wrap my mind around now! Plus, Scott and I were landscaping in Lincoln full-time that summer, we weren’t just making music!