Short Session…

We got together last night to do some stuff, but we were feeling a bit "under-inspired" to delve too deeply into anything. In messing around with my "new" setup, showing Josh some patches, his ear perked up at an arpeggiated figure I was playing. We recorded it and mucked about with it for a little while, getting an interesting middle section for an upcoming song filed away for future use.

I then was checking out GigaStudio to see how well it was working, and brought up a nice Fender Rhodes patch and was chording about on it, and Josh jumped in again - he made a few chord change suggestions, and we had yet another puzzle piece recorded in a matter of minutes. This could be a "breakdown" section or outro, not really sure yet - but the changes are real nice.

It's funny how, even on the nights you're really not "feeling it," you can still come up with some interesting, useful material. I guess there's something to the concept of running tape every time you rehearse/write/dabble. (Especially since the cool thing I came up with the other night is totally gone, since I didn't record it...)

So far (knock on wood) the studio is running well now that we're reinstalled and back up to speed. I haven't really tried to open too many existing files yet, and I foresee that I'll have to re-map some of the soft synths and such, but I'm hoping it will be minimal.

We seem to be good to go…

Well, I've spent much of the last week re-installing software - and finding some new goodies online (freeware/shareware plugins, that sort of thing) - so we should be good to go for our regularly scheduled program this evening. Here's hoping for a (mostly) glitch-free session. So far, SONAR seems to be running well, but I haven't really pushed it yet. I'm also hoping that GigaStudio will run better with SONAR 4 as well... the GigaPiano is just too amazing not to be using in projects that feature piano.

I've also been reorganizing and cleaning, so I hope to have new photos of Digital Din up soon. I'm sure the new pics will feature the drum set, guitar amp section, more gear photos - that sort of thing.

Someone's Been Busy…

Looks like Mark has been quite the prolific band blogger as of late; I have some catching up to do.

We both spent the majority of our last session doing some more mixing on WOTW. I had some ideas for the mix after listening to it about 6,000 times over the course of the week. I also played the song for a good friend of mine who is a producer in Hollywood, and took some of his suggestions to Mark as well. Although there are still a few very small adjustments to be made, the song is in the bag and I'm happy with it.

I started working on a new song over the weekend; it's a lot more mellow than I thought it was going to be, but it should prove to be quite interesting harmonically. I took a heavily-flanged guitar riff that I wrote a while ago and started building around it. Since pretty much all of the songs we've written so far have been based around piano/keys, I thought it would be good to get back to my basics — namely, the guitar. I've been listening to a ton of old Genesis in recent weeks, so I'm sure that influence will rub off on me in this new song.

Now that Mark is setting up his studio with Sonar, it will be a lot easier for me to send him my ideas. I upgraded a lot earlier than he did, so it's nice that we're going to be able to transfer files to each other again. I'm hoping he's all set up and ready to go by "band night" so we can concentrate our energies on Awaken The Man.

"Digital Din" is under construction…

Well, not really. But with all the problems I've had with the home studio's music computer lately, I decided that it was time to wipe the drive and reinstall everything from scratch. It's going to take some time to get back up to 100% again, but hopefully this will alleviate some of the crashing problems I've had.

Josh and I picked up some new "furniture" for the studio as well; I grabbed a great "guitar chair" (actually a padded leather-top stool on a pneumatic base) for $20 and a couple of really handy lightweight room screens that I'm going to be able to use as sound diffuser/absorbers (once I mount some acoustic foam on them). Also added a couple more storage shelves, and Josh chipped in for a second "comfy chair" to make writing sessions a little more relaxed. IKEA is a wonderful place.

Started Mixing…

I started mixing WOTW last night. I spent about 2.5 hours working on sounds, doing some early EQ work, cleaning up tracks to get rid of extraneous noises, that sort of thing. It's coming along smoothly so far, and I hope to have the song mixed by the weekend. It's a relatively simple song to mix, compared to some of our more complex tunes - the hardest part is finding imaging "space" for the different instruments and many vocal parts. But so far, the song sounds great!