Firstly, I'm disappointed in you, Pennsylvania. You can probably guess why (hint: it's about politics).

Down to business.

1. The move was successful and I am very comfortable in my new recording space:

2. I'm no longer using Reason as my primary musical program. I'm moving on to Ableton Live and VSTs, and loving it. I feel renewed inspiration now and am really digging in. I absolutely adore the Tension plug-in that came with Live, since I'm a sucker for a plucked string sound, and putting all sorts of effects on it.

3. I've been really messing around with the Ebow lately, and getting some crazy feedback sounds out of it when held a certain way, it's really cool and I need to just record myself fucking around for later use.

4. I'm going to work on a cover soon. It's a well known song, or at least it should be. The band is still recognizable today, and the song is from the early 90's. I can't really think of anyone else covering it, honestly. Everyone can send me a guess. Or just wait.

5. More and more lyrical ideas are coming to me. I may finally be settling into having to be a lyricist. I just hope they sound as good sung as they do on paper, or on the computer screen in this case.

6. I'm going to stop being social soon and really concentrate on the work ahead.

It appears that the latest Nine Inch Nails release, "Ghosts I-IV", is going to be a HUGE success for Mr. Reznor. I couldn't be happier that this type of business model finally seems to be working well for someone. Sorry Trent, I only bought the $10 version, because I don't have a Blu-ray player and honestly, we both know that the multi-tracks will hit the torrent sites the day it reaches someones hand. That said, the printed book would have been very cool to have.

Onto my point, and why I'm posting this in a blog that solely pertains to my own musical endeavors. Just a couple weeks ago I was pondering over good ways for an independent artist to release music today. One of the ideas I posed was selling a pre-order of your physical CD along with an immediate download of the mp3s. Oddly enough, I was thinking around $10 as a fair price for this, CDs are too expensive nowadays. Now I'm not saying that my idea was stolen or anything, anyone could have thought of it, but it is nice to see that it can work. It just remains to be seen if it will work for someone who isn't as well known as Trent Reznor.

Unfortunately, it's looking more and more likely that I will have to stick with digital release only for now. Now if my fanbase starts to drastically grow when I start revealing vocal tracks, then maybe I can go back to this original plan. I figure as long as I were to sell at least 100 preorders, I could still do the physical release.

More music on the way, for now enjoy a demo version of "Enemy" on my Myspace or Vampirefreaks page.

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.