Category: Music

Music

Recording an LP!

Today Josiah and I started recording for Deliver Me Seven‘s first LP!

It’s a lot of fun. We’re recording at Summit View Studios, which has a very state-of-the-art setup and knowledgable engineers that make it easier to just do yo’ thang.

I haven’t done much studio work before, and I am realizing that I have to adjust a lot in both my playing style and my approach to performing a song. Most of my experience is in either playing live or playing along to a track that already has a drum part. Now I need to get used to playing to a click and not making ANY mistakes.

We’re doing this totally independently right now, from recording to production to distribution. It’s going to be an interesting journey from start to finish… Let’s see where it goes!

Music

iAm aSucker.

Last week, Apple announced the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the phone. It still has Wi-Fi internet, so as long as you’re in a hotspot, you can browse and stuff.

I ordered it the day it was announced – $399 for 16GB (I sold my fifth-gen one on eBay, so don’t think that I just waste tons on iPods nonstop). They kept it with flash instead of the hard drive that I was hoping for. At first I was worried about it and considered going for the comparatively lame hard-drive model, but then I sorted my iTunes library by date last played, and found out that I’ve listened to like 10GB worth of music since about….May. So I went ahead and made the order thinking that I could keep the rest of my ~50GB collection on my laptop.

In the week after I pre-ordered the iPod Touch, I realized that there was little difference between the $399 iPod Touch and the $399 iPhone. (the Touch has 8GB more storage, the iPhone…. um, has a phone.)  I’d been planning on picking up a smartphone from Verizon in six months or so when they give me a discount, but I got down to thinking about saving more in the long run by just going with the iPhone.

So I did that. I bought myself an 8GB iPhone yesterday.  It lives up to all of the hype – it’s friggin’ awesome.

Most of all, I got it for the mobile internet- both WiFi (without having to lug my laptop) and over CingularAT&T’s painfully slow EDGE network. The $50 a month I was paying just for voice simply wasn’t worth it to me – and now I pay $60, and it includes unlimited data usage (Verizon is about $80 for the same thing).

So overall, it’s awesome, except for a couple of tiny details:

  • E-mail not instant- it aggregates every 15 minutes. Yahoo does “push” e-mail to iPhone, so I might set up a dummy forwarder to the iPhone from my other e-mail accounts
  • 8 gigs is 10% of my last iPod’s capacity. It is already full. And it’s painful.
  • AT&T’s network coverage in Colorado isn’t as good as Verizon’s. This will make or break it for me as to whether or not I keep the iPhone or get a Treo or something through Verizon. I don’t talk a ton, but if it becomes too much of a hassle anytime in the next month, I’ll return the iPhone and get the phoneless Touch instead.

Chances are 80% that I’ll keep it. We’ll see.

Music

Fall 07

So I’m almost done with the first week of school. I’m taking some good classes (Networks/Operating Systems, Database Management Systems, Business Management) and some not so fun ones (Accounting, Statistics). Not a bad combination overall.

One thing I’m liking is my schedule – last year, I had class all day for two or three days a week from 8 to 4 or so. On the days I didn’t have class, I had work all day. It wasn’t pretty. This year, My classes are spread out to a few each day, and I work the lunch shift six days a week (including Saturday). This means that on most days, I can be home by 2:30 or 3:00 if I want to be.

I have run into a few friends from the dorms. It’s nice seeing them – everyone leaves town for the summer – but I still miss my friends in Arizona most, despite the fact that I’ve been here for over a year now. I have learned that I am very good at wearing both the introvert and extrovert hats, but that I am happier when I’m around people that I can be myself around. Up here, aside from my folks, I don’t really have that.

In other news, I passed my audition into the music minor program at CSU. I can’t take anything this semester, but it means that I’ll be able to take the piano and theory classes I’ve been wanting to take. I am very rusty on some things (namely marimba) but this isn’t a super-serious thing, just something I want to do on the side.

Music

Drum Case

Anybody want to give me $500 so I can get this?

Yep. It’s a computer inside of a drum shell.

Oh, if only it were cheaper.

Music

Ratdog at Red Rocks

I’m back stateside!

Last night I saw Ratdog at Red Rocks. It was a great show! Their lead guitarist has throat cancer, which is unfortunate, but Steve Kimock is taking his place for a little while on the tour, which is great for a Kimock nerd like myself.

I also got to break in my new(ish) Canon. Part of the reason I got it was to improve my photos at dark concerts, which usually are so bad that I don’t even bother taking a camera along. This one has a lot more manual control, which is helpful since the automatic point-and-shoot stuff tries to take pictures with super-low shutter speeds that don’t work in a low-light venue. I could definitely get better pictures with a DSLR with an expensive lens, but for the money and time put into learning some settings, I’m pretty happy with what I got here – I fired off 455 shots and got 115 or so that I liked.

You can view the Picasa Web Album of the very best ones here. Or, if you want to see all 108 that I like, click here. They’re still noisy and a bit blurry, but I’m happy just to have the ability to take decent photos at a great show!