… struggles of the day …

Apart from finalizing some of the last chunks of “Kaboom!” from my forthcoming album “Bits”, I spent a small part of the day battling some old enemies from the original Megaman game.

Listen to the theme from the Cutman stage:

Megaman was released in the mid 1980s in the U.S. for the NES. I had the game as a kid and found it particularly challenging.

Liz and I have a Wii and I downloaded the game for it a week ago. I have been battling old foes ever since. Bombman … Iceman … Fireman … Elecman … Cutman … Gutsman - they’ve been waiting for a rematch for years and I’m gonna give them all I got!

I have yet to beat the final boss, Dr. Wily.

… and yes - I worked my butt off on “Kaboom!’ … more on that later.

… next up - Breakaway …

I’ve been kabooming “Kaboom!” in my spare time for a couple weeks now and I’m almost ready to move on. Everyday, I come home and get just a little more done. Next up on the list is the song “Breakaway”.

I play acoustic guitar on this one. It is one of the more mellow songs on the record. I tracked quite a bit of it back in June when I spent two weeks in Palouse.

As I recall, I need to record about half the vocals. It should go much faster than “Kaboom!” due to the fact that most of the vocals lines are not doubled and there are minimal harmonies. This “Kaboom!” hurdle has been pretty tough … doubling all the harmonies … uhhhhh … what am I thinking?

Record …. erase … erase … record …

… my first keyboard - Yamaha PSR-21 …

I’ve been thinking about my first musical instruments lately.

In 1986, my mom bought my a Yamaha PSR-21. This baby had 16 totally awesome built in sounds like “Cosmic” and “Funksynth”. It had four waveforms for each sound and four variations of a amplifier envelope as well.

That makes 256 sounds!

256 sounds that all sound strikingly similar to a bad digital waveform. I do remember liking the trumpet sound.

It also had a (slightly) programmable drum sequencer. I remember tapping out the disco rhythm for my first song “Nuclear Toxic Sludge” in 1989 on this baby. I really have to put that song up here … along with the original versions of “Eating Light Bulbs” and “Moth on Bass”.

I had a copy of the “Pseudo Echo” cover of “Funky Town” I taped off the radio and I would JAM with that tune all day long. If you have no idea what I am talking about, click on the Youtube video above.

Maybe someday I’ll find the old PSR-21 … sample it … and turn it into a VSTi.

Hmmm……

… my first multitrack recording device:MT-100II …

Here is a brief history of my early music career:

1st grade - 3rd grade = private piano lessons
4th grade - 5th grade = trumpet in the school band
6th grade - 8th grade = bad 80’s Yamaha synth at home
9th grade - 12th grade = timpani, electric guitar, electric bass in the school band

In the summer of 1989, My mom bought me my first electric guitar. It was a red Fender Strat that I still own today and has morphed over time into something called the “K1″. With that guitar, I discovered that I really enjoyed writing songs.

I had a horrible Radio Shack mixer that I would plug into my tape deck and try and record my songs. The first song I wrote was called “Nuclear Toxic Sludge”. I was 14.

Someday, I’ll post it on here. I have a recording of it that I made on my tape deck with me on guitar, my best friend Dewey on vocals and the above mentioned bad Yamaha keyboard on drums.

Somehow, I discovered that there were these crazy devices that allowed you to record and overdub tracks with normal cassette tapes. I convinced my mom to help me get the Yamaha MT100II.

I spent hundreds of hours of my life in my room, making songs on that thing. Sometimes I would borrow my friend (and musical mentor) Rafe’s crappy digital effects processor and make songs like “Space Whales”.

Later, after I graduated from high school and moved to Bellingham, I did quite a bit of recording with a Yamaha MT4X. My friend Nick had one and we used it to record our demos for the band “Shed”.

When Rafe got married, I gave him the MT100II as a gift. I think it needed a new power supply or something, but it was a huge thing for me to part with.

I’ll have to pick one up on ebay or something … just to have around …

I bought a MT4X a few years back, so I guess I need a MT100II now.

… flat …

So I’ve been tracking vocals for the song “Kaboom!” the last few day. I was getting close to being done today … when something didn’t quite sit right in the mix.

The chorus of the song just seemed to be to be slightly dissonant. It is a melody that is reinforced by a three/four part harmony … doubled. There are eight vocals tracks all together and it can be very tough to harmonize with yourself (twice) and keep everything in tune.

I thought I had it … I really did.

It turns out, all eight tracks were equally flat by a microtonal amount … enough to disturb me and probably shut me out of my bid for the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

Oh well, that’s what the DELETE key is for. I’ll hit it over again tomorrow.

On another note (hahahahaahahahahahahhaha) … I GOT MY JOB TODAY!

AWESOME!

I am now a weekend warrior. Well … I guess I should really say “Let the countdown to weekend warriorhood begin!”

… feeling isolated (Grendel Dead Room) …

Recording electric guitar can be a pain in the butt. Guitar amps that use tubes for their preamps and power amps generally need to be cranked up really loud in order to get a nice interaction between the pre/power amps and the speaker.

A while back, I posted about an guitar isolation cabinet called the Axetrak. It is a very small and almost dead silent solution for recording guitar. It sounds good for many things and is very simple to operate … you plug in your amp and you plug in a mic cable and you’re done. This has many advantages for people that just want to track guitar parts. Ultimately, I found that I just couldn’t get some of the sounds I needed out of the Axetrak.

I (maybe unfortunately) have a deep curiosity when it comes to exploring different sounds so I turned to the Grendel Sound Dead Room. I looked to be of a better build quality than the Randall Iso cab, cost about the same (at the time I purchased it), is made in the U.S.A., and has loads of speaker options.

After an extended ordeal that I don’t wish to go into at this point, my Dead Room showed up last week and I started playing with it. I like that it has two mic mounts so that you can double track your guitar with different sounds and mic placement. I will say that it was a pain in the butt to get the enormous Blue Ball mic and a 57 to get along inside the cab. The mounting bracket that is built into the Blue Ball was really loose and I had to take the mic apart and rig up a system to tighten it down so that it wouldn’t sag.

Anyway …

I’m not going to post any sound samples until I get a handle on this thing. Once I feel competent, I’ll probably run my Bitmo modded Blackheart 5 watt tube amp into it and the Axetrak and post some comparison samples.

… my favorite headphones …

Today I broke out the soldering iron and fixed (for the fourth time) my favorite pair of headphones - The Optimus Nova 71. Yes, these are Radioshack headphones. I am not insane. I have had many pairs of headphones in my life and I have always ranked these up towards the top. They don’t sound 100% awesome. They are more like 82% awesome. But I enjoy listening to them. They are fun.

I worked selling high end hi-fi for a while (see this post) and had a chance to listen to the high end Sennheiser and Beyer phones. I own a big honkin pair of Sennheiser HD 280 Pros (the 64 ohm model). The 280s are good and pretty clean. They cup your ear so that you are isolated fairly well (good for vocal takes).

The Nova 71’s deliver (at least for the price). When I was working at Radioshack (see this post), they were discontinued and I bought three pair for $6.95 each. One pair went to my buddy Dave. They broke and he threw them away (&*%#@)! I’ve gone through five or six pair and I am down to my last two. Liz uses one pair every day and my pair conked out on me a few weeks ago. Tonight I replaced the cable and it’s good to go.

So if you ever see a lonely pair of Nova 71’s just hanging out somewhere … let me know.