Happy new year everyone and lets make it a good one!   Don’t forget to make a new years resolution!  I made mine but it’d be cheating by telling you what it is!!!

By the look of things, 2010 might well be a year of transformation for my music but I don’t want to give anything away to soonbut stay tuned!!

Also my macintosh is officially on the bay.  Since going “in the box” with my productions, my old mac pro (which was once a towering bastion of technological splendor in 2006) is on its way out!  As reported a couple of weeks back, my workflow has been somewhat impaired by the lack of raw horsepower needed to compute all my digital signal processing (or ‘DSP’ as it’s called).  Hopefully this will be rectified in the coming weeks or so with a replacement computer and progress will resume with the “Drowning In Dreams” vocal and a new a song which I have written.

In the mean time, please listen to the new track “Try” on the Music Downloads section and let us know what you think!  I reckons I ‘pumped’ it too hard with the mastering plugin but this is easily sorted in the future when I have an up and running PC!

Check the Media page for your present!

Well since upgrading to Logic 9 I have noticed a huge increase in sonic quality (even for old projects!) and am extremely pleased with the overall sound coming from my speakers!  Apparently 9 is more sample-accurate than 7, resulting in a sound that is more true to the original source.  This is fantastic news for me personally as I have always felt that there was ’something’ about the way my tracks sounded once mixed.  I could never put my finger on what this annoyance in the sound was and I had put it down to my recording technique.  How pleased I am to find that it was Logic 7 all along!  My tracks seem to ‘breathe’ now in a way which I have always only ever dreamed of!

To top it all off I also decided it was about time I sorted out my mixer situation (having come from the old-skool style of analogue mixing straight to in the box is a bit of a shock!).  In light of this I went and tried out various control surfaces at Digital Village.  Hands down the most impressive was the Euphonix Artist series range of controllers.  They just ooze quality.  So much so in fact, that I bought two there and then!  Guess I won’t be eating for a couple of months now…

Well, in a desperate bid to save as much cash as possible (whilst making sure I do not encounter any further DSP related problems) I have decided to upgrade to Logic 9 for the time being.  Hopefully this will sort out the computer trouble I am experiencing as Logic 7 was apparently written for PPC processors in mind.  As my Mac is an Intel generation Mac Pro, it is not fully utilizing all four cores for any audio processing.  Likewise, as I run Snow Leopard OS X which is natively 64-bit, running an old 32 bit 2004 app like Logic 7 is undoubtedly limiting my performance in other areas as well.  Hopefully I will have my recent projects converted over to Logic 9 by the end of the week.  Immensely frustrating to be this close - yet so far!  Still, it has given me a chance to take a break from the sessions and I will be able to return to mixing with a fresh ear!

‘Try’ has been delayed due to computer trouble.  Really frustrating -  the song is mixed and ready to be exported but my mac doesn’t seem to be able to handle the DSP (digital signal processing).  I’ve posted on a music tech forum with the hopes that someone online can help out but for the time being, the track will have to stay inside the matrix until ‘the one’ can save it.

I’m really pleased with the progress on ‘Try’.  I have laid down the main vocal part (the bit which always seems to take the longest) and all that is left is bvs, mixing and mastering!  I would imagine that a final mix will be ready for upload on the site tomorrow although it might slip to Tuesday.  As for ‘Drowning’, I am yet to lay down any vocals for this but instrumentally, it is ready to mix.  I’m really looking forward to hearing what you people think of these new songs - it’s definitely a new direction for my music.  It hasn’t really been a conscious effort to push one particular style of writing but these tracks sound more accessible to my ear.  Whilst not everybody might think this is such a good thing what I have consciously done is tried to keep the groove and interest of what was typical in my music before.  I am a big believer in music which is challenging but ultimately more rewarding as a result.  However, I think many will find ‘Try’ a lot easier to listen to straight off the bat than our previous tracks although this is all personal assumptions!  Either way you will be able to tell for yourselves as of tomorrow…

Well, we’re nearly there now! Nick and I spent last night putting down the last guitar parts to ‘Drowning in Dreams’ and spent a while mixing what we had already had on disk. ‘Try’ is also now ready for vocals which I will begin today. I expect the latter to be finished by tomorrow and a final mix by Sunday. For Drowning, tracking the vocals will take longer thanks in part to the overall difficulty of the piece and the amount of backing vocals which will need to be recorded. The fun as they say, never stops!

Despite promising this track months ago I eventually decided to scrap the recording we had of it as it wasn’t doing the song justice. I wasn’t happy with the overall production quality coupled with a poor vocal and electric guitar sound. However, the good news is that along with ‘Try’, this track is being recorded in it’s full glory on the new gear and progress is much quicker this time due to a number of factors. Firstly, I am totally confident in what I am playing now having tracked it before, but also the arrangement has matured over that time and is better realised in this new recording and finally the overall sonic quality of the session is that much higher, making me WANT to finish it. I know a bad workman always blames his tools but seriously, I felt like I was constantly polishing a turd with the previous session. You could hire a monkey to record a band on this new gear however and it’d still sound good!

Give it a week (maybe less) and there will be two mixes up on the site. After this I will focus all my attention on the song I wrote for my recently deceased friend, James Hill. I promised his fiance that it would be finished soon but the backlog of recording work which we had to complete was quite large with the studio being out of action for the upgrade over the period of a month or two. Still, progress is MUCH quicker now and I hope to have at least something new for you guys to listen to on here.

Been tracking ‘Try’ all this weekend thanks to my good friend Nick Kerbegien. Seriously - this guy is a legend. Always humble, but always able to bring the best out of an artist and capture it to disk! Having already laid down the drums last week with the fantastically talented Mike Malyan, we went into this weekend with nothing but the rhythm section but have come out the other side with everything finished but the vocals!

On a side note - now that the overall production quality is so much higher here, we have decided to release Drowning In Dreams on the site to. Mike is popping over tomorrow to lay down the drums to this track and (fingers crossed) more besides. Having just spend 4 big ones on a new kit I am SERIOUSLY looking forward to recording him on his new setup tomorrow!

Whilst I agree that with music, its the melodies that are the most important thing (followed by groove). I can’t help but find myself in the position these days that the overall sonic production of a record sways my opinion of it, for better or worse (sometimes ignorance IS bliss!). As such, although I have been met with some criticism recently for focusing too whole heartedly on producing and engineering as opposed to composing, it’s just my preferred way of writing. If I record into the computer, I can sit back and (usually with the help of another procucer) listen to the arrangment of the song without having to second guess what I may or may not be hearing in my head. Likewise, often I find myself hearing new parts within the song which I would never have conceived of had the initial idea not been captured. This is where I am most comfortable. Couple this with my desire to produce the highest quality recordings and you can probably understand a little bit more about my preferred way of working. With all this new gear, the latter has become much less of a chore!

Sad I know to write about a piece of gear, but this 8 channel preamp has literally moved the goal posts for me in terms of production quality.  If any of you are looking for a really pristine, class A front end to your prefferred DAW dont neglect this beautiful bit of kit!  It might be a little pricey but it always comes down to you get what you pay for with studio gear!

In other news, we have decided to record the 5 tracks acoustically, just singing and guitar to give a bit more of a singer/songwritery vibe to them in the hope that we can interest potential investers who would be willing to help fund a proper professional EP.  Despite the studio upgrade, I do agree with Bob that, although I am capable of writing/playing/engineering/producing my music (whilst doing a handstand and learning how to juggle) most, if not all professional records are produced with a solid team of people behind an artist, leaving the performer to focus on…the performing!  If any of this does work out for us it will be a great pleasure to work with Bob Cranham again (produced the “Picture A World” EP @ The Soundhouse) not just for his musical/creative input, but for the banter which I’ll no doubt be at the receiving end of!!

Either way, there is a deadline to get these 5 acoustic tracks finished by Monday.  I intend to work to this and thus, anything recorded will be uploaded to the site at the same time.  Jack Johnson watch out!!