The new Kirby Krackle album is far from finished but the rhythm section can now enjoy a cigar. Yesterday, Nelson and I went into Don's studio in Shoreline and cut the drum and bass tracks for the entire album. Thirteen songs, nine hours, one lunch break. Kyle was there to provide a guide vocal and guitar accompaniment.
I'm tired.
The new album should be ready to go by the time the San Diego Comic Con rolls around in July.
Posted June 6, 2011
WARNING: if you love kittens but hate spiders, skip this post. No actual kittens are here for you.
Garden spider hatchlings invade our backyard every Spring. To reduce squickiness, we call them "kittens."
I found this clump o' kittens on the side of the neighbor's garage yesterday. When you gently blow on them, they scatter:
Those sirens in the background are probably the Fire Department, summoned by my wife to hose the kittens off the house.
Posted June 1, 2011
The animated video for Kirby Krackle's "Ring Capacity" is finally out! Trust me when I say that all Kirby Krackle gigs are exactly like this:
"Ring Capacity" is also available for Rock Band.
We start recording the third KK record just five days from today. Zoinks!
Posted May 31, 2011
How ridiculous is it that I'm about to write an entire post about a Gateway computer I bought in 1998, complete with uninteresting photo of the aforementioned nondescript beige box? Extremely ridiculous, that's how ridiculous.
Have I ever mentioned that I made it through five years of college without ever having an email address? In fact, I barely touched a computer except to write papers for school. This despite teaching myself BASIC programming while a teenager on an Atari 800. I was pretty good at it, but I never considered any sort of career in computers because of all that math. I hated math and it hated me back. That's another post in itself.
Over a decade later I got my first dot-com job at the only dot-com worth working at in Cleveland. I knew I had to make up for lost time, because nearly everything I knew that got me that job was basically linked to aptitude rather than skill. So I purchased a Gateway G-350 with an employee discount. My first real PC. Windows 98 -- pre-installed! The very first thing I did was mess up the startup config. Phone support talked me through the fix.
I learned so much with that computer. Mostly HTML/CSS, Perl and Apache. I wrote a lot of terrible code that would horrify anyone who actually knew how to write good code. Many, many late nights. I also learned JavaScript, which led to an obsession with DHTML and web standards, which led me to start a blog, which led to to a brief-but-glorious tech writing career, a bunch of code and a number of opportunities that landed me in Seattle where I am today. Much of my contributions to the ill-fated DHTML Bible book were written at that computer.
I also learned how to record audio! The first versions of Gravel Road Requiem and Cast The Net Wide were recorded using that same machine. Some of that original audio is still in the final versions. I did most of the artwork with Photoshop and the GIMP there, too.
Eventually that computer became a web-surfing and email-reading device. Now running Win2K, it was just too slow to do anything else. My phone has more processing power. Last week, after I'd discovered that it had been over a year since I'd last booted the thing, I decided it was probably time to find new homes for the beige boxes taking up our floorspace.
Over the weekend I backed up the entire contents of the hard drive -- almost 13 years of work -- to a 1TB external drive the size of a small pork chop. Then I removed and shelved the original hard drive and loaded the now-brainless PC along with my wife's old PC (purchased around the same time, except she got a better deal on a G-460) into the car and took it to the local recycling center.
If this all seems overly wistful, you should know that I'm the type of person who has to make one last pass through the empty apartment to say goodbye to the linoleum. But it's no different than bidding farewell to your first car or your first home. Our relationships with people are rightfully elevated, but things can be important too, especially when they mark a waypoint in our lives.
So yeah, I was sad when I placed them on the PLEASE PLACE RECYCLED ITEMS HERE cart inside the entrance. They probably won't find much use for its 350MHz Celeron processor, outdated RAM and stock A/V cards.
We had a good run, ol' buddy. Thanks for everything.
Posted May 27, 2011
The new Foo Fighters' record Wasting Light was done entirely without computers. No Pro Tools. What?! Even the mixing and mastering was done by hand:
We mixed manually on the API board, with me, James, Alan Moulder and Dave, all eight hands on board, all doing the faders, no automation; we couldn’t even do mutes. So every mix was a performance. Much like the recording was. I would focus on the vocals, and I’d get it done, and everybody would say, “did you nail it? Did you miss anything?” We all started sweating. We’d jump up when we got a mix. It was so exciting, and so different from how records are made these days.
The entire article is lengthy but totally worth it if you like geeking out over microphone choices and stuff like that.
By the way, the Foo Fighter's documentary is out on iTunes on June 7. I watched the first 20 minutes a few weeks ago and was totally engrossed, so I'm really looking forward to seeing the rest.
Posted May 23, 2011
No comment!
Posted May 19, 2011
I'm the dude in the center, allegedly.
Kinda terrified to learn what we might be staring at.
Posted May 18, 2011
Chris Onstad writes the online comic Achewood. In his explanation of the strip's current hiatus after a nine-year run, this:
One thing that’s always made me a bit sad is how Internet presentation seems to devalue content. So much art, writing, and news is suddenly available to us that each piece seems nearly a throwaway, lost in the gullet of our now-insatiable appetite for information. Here in the future, everyone is famous for 15kb. Fifteen reTweets. Fifteen LOLs. Should I work fifteen hours on something that will take fifteen seconds to read? The answer is yes, of course, because I love what I do, but after nearly a decade one wonders if one couldn’t do more for people with that time.
As an "internet musician" aka Guy Who Writes Songs And Puts Them On The Web, I have a sense of kinship1 with online comic makers2. So this paragraph really resonates with me. Should I, too, work for weeks (or more likely months) conceiving and recording a song that will be pushed out into the ether, consumed in minutes and ultimately fall into the abyss of someone's iTunes library? Absolutely. If I stopped, I'm pretty sure my brain would eventually try to gnaw its way to freedom through my obstinate, practical, boring skull.
1 See also. 2 My new favorite? Three Word Phrase.
Posted May 18, 2011
Kyle considers which $15,000 microphone he'd least like to knock over.
Posted May 16, 2011
A few weeks ago I accidentally scrambled my Twitter password. I fat-thumbed a typo somewhere and suddenly I wasn't able to tweet or read tweets from my stream.
And then, an amazing thing happened! I got back some focus.
I'd be lying if I said I had no idea how much of my attention was being slurped up by the Twitter sponge. I've always been aware of it, and meant to do something about it. But I am weak. If you're hooked on Twitter, you know how hard it is to put down, lest you miss out on -- well, something.
Like temporal caulk, Twitter is good at filling gaps. There's never a moment's boredom. Riding the light rail, in a checkout line, during the slow parts of a presentation. I've rediscovered how much I relied on these thought-free gaps to think about other stuff. Creative stuff, like songwriting.
Days ago I was riding the SLU trolley to the city center. Normally during such a ride, I'd have my eyes glued to my iPhone. But this time, unable to immerse myself, I just stared out the window, watching the scenery. In a few moments, my brain took over, and I had music playing in my head, a tune I'd been working on for years but never could get to work. By the time I'd reached my destination, I had a new melody. By the return trip, I had completed several verses. A few days later I had recorded a demo1...
My own lack of discipline is really at fault here. And maybe I just suck at Twitter and you don't.
That said, if I've learned anything about the creative process, it's this: it's hard to make something good. Doing hard things is scary because it's almost a given your first attempts will suck. It's easier, and often more enjoyable, to spend a lunch break reading tweets instead of writing lyric ideas. Twitter and other media can make me feel connected to the world, but it's also a great way to idly kill time, and I'm reaching a point in my life where I really, really wish time would slow down, not go faster.
Anyway, I thought I would die, severed from the tweetosphere, but I didn't. Instead, I started thinking again, reading more long-form stuff, scribbling more song ideas than usual. I still like Twitter enough that I set up a system so I can still tweet from time to time without getting sucked into the vortex of odd Trending Topics. Amazingly, I still managed to hear about Osama bin Laden's death, Newt Gingrich's candidacy and just about every internet-fueled Outrage Of The Moment.
The idea that I've written an entire blog post (which will be echoed into Facebook!) about this seems completely inane and appropriate.
1 to be released right after all my work with Explone, Kirby Krackle and the secret project are done, I promise.
Posted May 13, 2011