Saturday I went over to my friend Hunter's garage studio. I am collaborating with him a lot on my next release, since he is far better at writing guitar than I will probably ever be. He and I have both actually been in quite a rut lately, struck with a case of severe writers block. It's looking like I might actually be breaking free from that a bit. While I was waiting for him to come down, I had opened up one of my songs and just hit play. Minutes later I was beginning to structure the song, which I had been sitting on for months now. Maybe the change of scenery was all I needed to jumpstart my creative drive. There is a part in the song where I had wanted guitar added, and Hunter wrote the perfect part for it. Since his studio is undergoing some changes and is not quite set up to record, I simply translated it to MIDI and saved it to bring home with me.

Guitar for the song (the file is titled "Enemy", but the final song title will probably be no where near that) will likely be recorded tonight or later this week. I have been looking through my lyrics for something for this song as well. The structure of the song isn't the usual verse-chorus-verse and so on, but I should be able to find something in my mess of lyrics.

This song is probably going to be the last track for the CD. It just has that feel.

My new computer is a beast. I won't be able to fully make use of it until after the move, but I was able to test one of my Reason files. A song that makes the CPU meter jump to around 50% on my AMD machine didn't even budge the CPU meter on my new Core 2 Duo machine. I'm in heaven.

Unfortunately, not even a half hour after I had installed Windows, the IDE connection died. At least my hard drives are SATA. Rather than dismantle the machine to send the motherboard back, I just put the DVD burner into my AMD machine (it works there btw) and ordered a SATA burner instead. I should be fully in business once that arrives.

I suppose my days as an AMD man are over.

take off the fucking gas masks.

fuck your fashion.
fuck your accessories.
fuck your fake hair extensions.

I finally ordered the parts for my new studio machine. The new beautiful widescreen monitor will arrive today, as well as the case. Another box should be arriving Friday with all of the other parts. This thing is just going to blow my current setup out of the water, CPU load-wise:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz (Currently AMD Athlon X2 2.4 Ghz)
2GB RAM (Currently 1GB)
80GB Drive for the OS and Programs
250GB Drive for audio/reason refills/samples

I'm also not intending to let this machine touch the internet. Not going to let any nasties from the web slow this baby down.


Also waiting on the porch when I get off work is an Ebow. I've just been in love with the audio samples I've heard of what this thing can do, and I'm itching to run it through some wild effects. I plan on jamming with it later tonight, if anything interesting gets recorded maybe I'll put up a sound sample.

toodles.

A couple weeks ago I posted some descriptions of tracks I'm working on. That list has now grown from 7 to 8. I should feel like I'm getting close to reaching some sort of milestone for the record, but I really don't. With the exception of the two complete instrumentals on my Myspace/VF pages, the rest of the songs are all simply a collection of ideas right now. They are in serious need of structure and finishing, but the problem is, before I get motivated enough to finish one, I get an idea for the next.

It's hard to say what's going to happen to some of these tracks. I like them all so I will hope that I will get around to finishing some of them soon. Perhaps moving into my new studio space will spark something.

I really want to get some vocals down so you I can give you guys at least a small taste of what's to come. I am still rather new to the whole writing thing as far as lyrics go, and I'm finding it more difficult than I thought it would be.

This sort of expands on my post about what avenues independent artists can take to sell their music. Trent Reznor recently revealed the sales figures of Saul Williams' last album. A whopping 1 out of every 5 people decided it was worth $5 to download. I have absolutely nothing against piracy, but when an artist puts something out there at such a low price for you, and you still would rather just download the free version or find a torrent, that's just sad. If people didn't like it that's fine (i love the album), but I know there are people out there that just plain feel that music should be completely free, and the artist is entitled to nothing. Ridiculous. Still, there were 28,322 purchases at $5 each. That's $141,610 in sales. Saul's last album sold about that much, but it was on a label, and I can guarantee he didn't see that kind of money. There's certain expenses I'm sure, but that's almost 4 times my annual salary, I could more than live comfortably on that. Obviously you have to have the kind of fanbase that Trent and Saul have to pull those kind of sales, but I'm not looking to quit my day job any time soon anyway.

Music is very different today because of the internet, because of piracy. I don't believe that it has to be a turn for the worse though. We as artists just need to adapt. Stop selling your CDs for record label prices for one, you do not need to be as greedy as they are. $15? Give me a break. The information is out there on the net for anyone to see, and they all know that you only had to pay a couple bucks, maybe $3, to get that CD pressed. This would be fine on a label, considering you'd only get a few bucks or something kicked back to you per sale, probably less. But if you're independent, and getting the discs pressed yourself, that much profit, while nice, is too much. $10? Okay. But you could even go as low as $8 or $6 and still make double your money, which could then go into supporting a tour, or pressing more discs.

I still believe that a physical disc is not dead just yet. Here's a new thought I have had.

1. Sell pre-orders of the album at your designated price(probably $6-$8 by the time I'm ready).

2. As reward for preordering, give them a digital copy of the CD.

3. Offer incentive that if you reach a certain number of preorders (100 maybe), that you'll get the discs pressed and send them out when you get them back, free shipping in the US, or wherevever you're from. (Will probably have to sell for closer to $8 to offset that cost though, but that's still a great deal).

Think about it, you sell at least 100 preorders, giving you at least $800. That's the majority of the CD Duplication cost. I think this model could work out well for the independent artist and his/her/their fans.