Friday, June 6th, 2008

[Niveous]

Hey folks.

DRC: It's been a weird day, starting off with a Sandra Bullock movie being filming in front of my job.

QotD: Seen any good album art lately?

Album Art in many ways is a dying art with the rise of mp3's. But some bands are still talking the time to put that extra touch on their presentations. So have you seen any good ones lately?

[drë]

RC: slowwww day at work. But i’ve been catching up on my Nur Ein 3 entries, (your all a bunch of talented geeks.) what happen to ADD?

QOTD: I completely agree, album covers is a dying art.
I really dig the single “The Girls don’t care” in Eef Barzelay latest album, but the album cover is pretty intriguing indeed.


CD baby also has a list of covers with naked people on it... can't be that bad?
http://cdbaby.com/flavor/nakedcover

but if you preffer Metal covers they have one too:
http://cdbaby.com/flavor/metalcover

[JonPorobil]

Huh. Has it really been a month since I checked back here? It has been a strange few weeks for me.

I graduated, let's start with that. Got my Bachelor of the Arts in English during the last week of May. (Won't be a bachelor for much longer, though, huh huh huh.)

Then moved. Mostly. My fiancee and I packed up a trailer and drove down from Cleveland to Austin.

Here's the bad news. We'd already booked the ceremony and reception spaces for the wedding, and they're both in Cleveland. We couldn't wait until after the move because her job in Austin wanted her to start immediately, and it's a nice job that she really wanted, so we moved down, and I flew back up for my Fraternity's 150th Anniversary Reunion (yeah yeah, I just graduated, so it's like a 0th reunion; it was fun, anyway). Now I'm hanging out in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, for a few weeks, positively made of time, without much to do. There will likely be a Songfight from me in the near future.

Today I installed the latest distro of Ubuntu Linux on my computer. It took the better part of the day, but it's working pretty much as well or better than the old one did. Some things are much easier than they used to be, and for the first time in about a year, my wireless card actually works in Linux. Too bad all my neighbors' networks are secured...

Anyways. QotD: I really like the frenetic style of the new Lyrics Born album's artwork: http://images.jambase.com/merch/Lyrics% ... 20Once.jpg Other than that, I haven't really seen much new album artwork lately. Realizing this makes me sad. Hmm.

[king_arthur]

Some of the best album art I've seen in a long time turned up here.

Wish there was more...

DRC: stopped in at my mom's today because she was supposed to have a substitute home care person. Somehow the substitution got set up for tomorrow instead of today, which is weird because the normal caregiver doesn't work on Saturdays. Aaaarrrggghhh! Kids, don't let your parents grow up to be old people...

On the bright side... stopped at the Tempe Library today and found two DVDs for movies I've been wanting to see - Giant (James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor) and Bonjour Tristesse (sp?), a movie made from the first book by Francoise Sagan, an author who I've been reading lately. Sadly both are library DVDs which means there's only a minimal chance they'll actually play properly all the way through, but... I can hope.

Spent the morning working on some recording (more tuneflow cover songs), then the afternoon driving around doing errands listening to Dean Martin. "Standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by..." Freakin' brilliant.

Charles (KA)

[Billy's Little Trip]

Some of the best album art I've seen in a long time turned up here.

Wish there was more...

DRC: stopped in at my mom's today because she was supposed to have a substitute home care person. Somehow the substitution got set up for tomorrow instead of today, which is weird because the normal caregiver doesn't work on Saturdays. Aaaarrrggghhh! Kids, don't let your parents grow up to be old people...

On the bright side... stopped at the Tempe Library today and found two DVDs for movies I've been wanting to see - Giant (James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor) and Bonjour Tristesse (sp?), a movie made from the first book by Francoise Sagan, an author who I've been reading lately. Sadly both are library DVDs which means there's only a minimal chance they'll actually play properly all the way through, but... I can hope.

Spent the morning working on some recording (more tuneflow cover songs), then the afternoon driving around doing errands listening to Dean Martin. "Standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by..." Freakin' brilliant.

Charles (KA)

I completely forgot that I did a song for my album art thing.


Congrats Jon Eric!

[fluffy]

Today:

- was falling asleep at work due to sleep deprivation due to working on album. i was unproductive most of the day but at about 3 PM I started to feel a bit tweaky and ended up rewriting major parts of one of my applications to make it properly use some new infrastructure stuff I wrote a couple weeks ago and now the app is about 10x as fast and much more stable (which was of course the whole reason for the new infrastructure so I'm glad it worked out that way). I ended up finally leaving work at 9.

- then I had a quick dinner and started working on music

Album blog:

- I have been working way too hard on music and I hope I am not setting myself for a huge burnout. basically every waking moment is consumed with this stuff and it's hard for me to get to sleep and i've been terribly sleep-deprived recently and stuff. i also didn't even bother to do Wii Fit today. oops.

- worked more on Convalescence. It's close to done, but I'm having a hell of a time getting a good bridge. Urgh. it's sort of at the point where I feel like using the ideas for the current arrangement but throwing everything out and starting over, or maybe practicing the hell out of it on guitar+voice+loop pedal which seems to work well for some songs

- worked a bit on Inclement Weather In Space (working title). finally figured out the overall treatment I want to do for it, and tweaked some lyrics which were too similar to parts of Convalescence. (Oops.)

- Improved the mix for Run Faster

- tomorrow I might be meting up with some internet people i barely know for a few hours, and definitely will be playing in a TF2 tournament so I will not be working on much music.

- meanwhile I have 8 songs done (modulo tweaking and such) which means I'm halfway done with the recording/arranging. of course this was the easy half since most of them are songs which were recent enough that I didn't have to work on them that much. I think the only one I've completely redone from scratch is Run Faster (which, incidentally, I seem to have lost all of the original files for, not that I wanted to use them or anything, but it was while looking for them that I came across Convalescence so that's good I guess). for most songs so far I've just rerecorded the vocals and made the mix/effects/etc. a hell of a lot better and in some cases de-<3ifying them somewhat.


qotd: the image in my mind for 'foodsexsleep' is great. sorry i can't show it to you yet

[fluffy]

oh yeah also condo news! (i am a very busy bee)

all the inspections happened, and there is some termite damage and dry rot to the balcony, which isn't a huge deal or unexpected. it turns out that it's the HOA's responsibility to fix it after all, so that's made for a bit of a weird open issue on the contract, but it'll prbably get resolved. there was also a mini-crisis with the financing (because the lender forgot to ask a few important questions which matter a lot to the underwriters) and for a while it seemed like I might have to find a different lender but it turned out to be okay. so this will be awesome. i am especially looking forward to having an actual room to work on music in, because the tiny and clutteredness of this goddamn "office nook" in my current aparmtent is driving me bonkers-er. plus it'll be nice having sonic isolation from te busy streets at night. i am so sick of hearing freeway traffic too.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Congrats on the condo Fluf, and I can't wait to hear your new album.

off topic:
Have I ever mentioned my accidental bass trap in my music room?
I have a fold out couch in my music room because it is also my guest room. One day when I was listening to a song that I was working on, my wife was folding up the bed. She always stalls about half way through when it's in the upright position, because it gets pretty stiff at that point. Right at that point, the acoustics in the room completely changed. I was all , then I was all , then I yelled to my wife to STOP! She was all , then she was all 8).
So when I'm doing any mic recording now, I open the couch/bed half way so that it's sticking up in the air. works great.