It's vaguely trip-hopish...hence the name. I really, really love my mic+duet. :-)

UPDATE: Finished the song and wrote lyrics. Vocals aren't mixed well yet. Dearly Departed

( Lyrics )

I splurged last month:

* Macbook Pro (2.4GHz, 2G, 200G) w/ Garageband '08
* Logic Express
* M-Audio Keystation61
* Apogee Duet
* Rode NT1A

Not a lot of time so I just wanted to try out the mic for tonight.

Folks, it's amazing what a good condenser mic & preamp can do...for comparison I give you "You Learn About It" by The Gathering:

Original
Cover (abridged)

Just listen to the first 30 seconds. Pretty fucking crisp, eh? I would have never gotten this clarity over such a large frequency range outta my last mic & preamp. Clearly a better signal-to-noise ratio.

Garageband '08 is much more useful for preventing bleeding. The parametric EQ comes with a visualizer so you can actually use it without taking stabs in the dark at the right frequencies. You only get 4 points to parameterize with, unlike Logic, but hey it's still hella useful. That's how I kept my vocals above the instrumentation.

The panning echoes in the beginning (actually throughout, but there are more of them at the start) had to be done with separate tracks, unfortunately: 6 for the main vocals, 6 for the background reverb on the three loudest main vocal tracks. The 6 main vocal tracks are, believe or not, completely dry. I cranked up the highest frequencies (>=3K) on those, and dulled them on the reverb ones. Makes for nice crisp vocals that fill out the soundscape and focus your attention simultaneously. (Of course it only works right when you have a kickass mic & preamp!!!) I toyed with doing a manual delayed reverb, but nixed it favor of just using a spacious reverb setting on the master track. Manual delayed reverb would have created a heavy, cumbersome reverb trail that would have muddied the echoes.

I also discovered that I can use the phaser effect to pan background instrumentation hard left & right by putting it on one of the two dupes with low gain. This prevents them from adding completely back together, thus freeing up the middle a bit, but without noticeable distortion on the tracks.

So one thing I'm curious about now is how to get an even tone out of my vocals throughout without creating dozens of dupes for each section, because I would need to re-equalize the vocals in different sections of the song depending on what instruments it's competing with...didn't do this tonight cuz of time restraints, but it's easy to hear that the beginning acapella vocals are breathier than the high-register chorus section in the latter half, even though it's the same track (or same 12 tracks, I should say). I think I'm trying to do too much with equalization and volume alone.

At any rate, I swear I'm moving onto Logic Express before the month's end. Swear.

And yes I know the arrangement is bare bones, I threw it together in an hour, and I was more interested in mixing vocals anyways.

In other news...I officially hate all people. My favorite vacation would be to rent a fully furnished house in the middle of nowhere (prefferably a nowhere with mild balmy weather, few trees, and between 1 and 3 rainstorms per week) all alone for two weeks, with one book, my budding home studio and a couple of CDs. In fact, I may just plan such a vacation for next winter sometime.

What's worse than facing the wrath of thousands of grieving parents whose children were killed by your shoddy construction?

Facing the wrath of thousands of grieving parents whose only children were killed by your shoddy construction.

Something tells me the PRC's gonna have a hell of a time atoning for their mistakes this time.

Takes place behind the Orange Curtain, apparently. What the fuck is so interesting about Orange County? It's just a giant narcissistic suburban sprawl. I mean, I love it, but that's just because it's my home. And it has good weather. And the ocean. And 24 hour grocery stores every 5 blocks. And blocks.

Sigh...I miss home.

Dear Diary,

Well, it finally happened, just as folks said it would: my trusty hitman rm -rf * turned against me. Now I get to come in over the weekend and rewrite the code I've been working on for the past two weeks.

Why, you might ask, is snapshot not enabled on the machines nearly everyone in my office does their development on? Because we are the government, apparently.

• Presentation for work
  
• That thing at work that changes every time I think I've got it finished
  
• That thing at work I'm still learning how to do
  
• That other thing at work I'm still learning how to do
  
• That thing at work that's been on my "to do" list for 3 weeks
  
• Those three things at work I can't do until that other guy does his part
  
• Get to work by 1330 tomorrow
  
• Go to bed before 0600 tomorrow
  
• Record vocals for "Ever Dream"
  
• Break out separate vocal tracks, midi tracks and loops for "Only To Be With You"
  
  
  
  Making "to do" lists is ever so fun.

So, every now and then I warble through some torch song and my dad compares me to Shirley Bassey. So I finally found a halfway decent midi track and recorded Goldfinger. I think it came out pretty nice...except for the last note. :-)

Goldfinger (Shirley Bassey cover)

Finally, a decent clip of me singing! This was from a little benefit concert I did a few months back.

Unless you've been Internet challenged for the past week or so, you might have run across a little thing called the Open Source Boob Project.

A sample of the shameless arrogance contained within: By the end of the evening, women were coming up to us. "My breasts," they asked shyly, having heard about the project. "Are they... are they good enough to be touched?" And lo, we showed them how beautiful their bodies were without turning it into something tawdry.

While there have been many insightful responses to the above display of blatant idiocy deep fried in male privilege, springheel_jack's responses have been far and away the best. Not only does he call out theferrett for using a libertarian approach to individuality as a pretext for objectifying women, but he goes on to present a lucid rant on the rampant immaturity in geekdom at large.

Also, much love to misia for her smartly written Open Source Swift-Kick-In-The-Balls satire.

As you probably guessed from my class ring post, thesis is done.