thesnythe: (Default)
2019-06-14 04:11 pm

Hahahahahaha burnout.

I'm starting to wonder if I've done blown my wad, literarily speaking. Used to be I'd reliably write a novel, novel and a half a year, and I had more ideas than I could run after. For the last couple of years, though, I start writing a novel or two, then shake my head at it and set it aside, uninspired and kind of disgusted.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the main one might be, weirdly, that I wrote the thing I wanted to write. Nearly all my stuff going back a decade has been centered around the theme of the day the bill comes due--stories about people making bad short-term decisions, hoping they can stave off the reckoning.

Then my writing partner and I wrote DHNN. And, uh, we *nailed* it. I came up with a character that is the living embodiment of short-term thinking, and we wrapped her in a kick-ass story with a great voice and one of the weirder world-building exercises either of us has engaged in. Usually I finish writing something, sit back, look at it, and say, "Huh. So that's finished. No idea if it's any good..." Not this time. We fucking nailed it, and it says everything I wanted to say on that particular theme. It would be ridiculous to tackle that theme again, because I can't do it any better than that.

And now I'm adrift. I can't seem to conjure up that particular energy in the writing, and I can't seem to find a theme that makes me want to stick with a project long enough to put the words on the page. I don't know if this is permanent, or if I just need a little more time, or exactly what the issue is.

I guess for now I'm just gonna wait and see. My recording project is kicking my ass anyway, so it wouldn't kill me to stop sweating the writing stuff for a while.
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-04-04 09:57 pm
Entry tags:

That's gonna leave a mark

Punching in bass bits tonight.

"Hey, what did you do to the mix on those last tracks?"

"Nothing."

"The bass sounded *way* better. Ballsy, a lot fuller."

"Yeah, I know. What did you do to your bass?"

"Well, I messed with this thing." (Flips switch. Bass sound suddenly gets twenty times bigger.)

"Oh shit. That sounds awesome... But that's not what we did on the preceding nine tracks." (Cues up one of the old tracks. Bass player punches the first verse with the new bass sound. It sounds a million times better than the previous version.)

"Fuck."

"Fuck."

"I'm gonna have to re-track all the bass for the whole album, aren't I?"

"Only if you want it to sound good."

"Fuck."
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-31 01:09 pm
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From the "The Performance is the Key" files

We threw down three takes of "Inner Circle" Friday night. Jeff's back has been killing him lately, so we told him we'd skip tonight if he wanted, but he insisted. Overall, it went pretty well, and we're quite happy with the takes.

The funny thing happened the next day. I distributed three rough mixdowns to D so he could tell me which one he liked best for the final bed track. His answer:

"I’m thinking that take 3 is actually the best performance. BUT it’s a difficult call because not only were the other takes really tasty, but the mix on takes 1 and 2 REALLY speak to me. I don’t know what you took away, mix-wise for track 3, but I need it back."

Of course, I changed nothing in the mix between takes 2 and 3. I dialed in a rough mix for take 1, and I didn't change the position of a single knob or fader for the subsequent bounces, nor did we change any settings during recording. The sole difference, what D hears as a mix difference, is the quality of the performance. That's it.

I heard it, too--the drums in take 2 are played with a hell of a lot more attitude and authority than take 3. The difference is not subtle. It's also not something you can really make up for at mixdown.

My guess is that Jeff's back pain was wearing him down by the time we did take 3. I'm glad for his sake we didn't need a take 4.

That was the last bed track! Now we have a shitload of overdubs to do and vocals to schedule.
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-28 10:14 am
Entry tags:

One left to go...

We got two of the last three sets of bed tracks down last Friday, and it was much less ugly than I expected. We haven't played these songs in a while on account of having wasted a shitload of time trying to get a vocalist up to speed, and we really just hammered six or so songs in that whole six month period, because a) she is the world's slowest song learner, and b) she never really put her back into it.

(Pro tip: When you've been working with somebody for a month and every instinct is screaming "CUT BAIT! THIS IS NOT GONNA WORK!", that instinct is probably correct. I let myself get talked out of moving on this time and ended up throwing months of good time after bad. Gonna try and not do that again.

Pro tip #2: No amount of talent will make up for an inability to consistently find the damn downbeat.)

Anyway, the upshot is that these songs were old and rusty, but for two of them, that turned out not to be a problem. We had such solid tracks from previous rehearsals that it was easy to come back up to speed, and we threw down some good stuff. The only sticking point on one of them was that we really wanted to rush the bridge of "Shadow," but we ironed that out pretty quickly.

The third song, "Inner Circle," was kind of a mess, and mostly that's because we had left too much stuff hanging and uncertain in the arrangement to begin with. There are two sections where the bass goes into a triplet figure while the drums keep a steady beat, and the effect feels like a 6/8 time signature superimposed over a 4/4. The drummer (who I will call Jeff, since that is his name) was pretty uncomfortable with how the triplet figure rubbed against the main groove, so we ended up spending a bunch of time thrashing that out.

We got something that we like, but by then it was late and we were all pretty burned out. Plus we needed some time to live with the new arrangement and decide whether it's a keeper. I think it is, so the plan is to nail that sucker tomorrow.

After that, six million guitar dubs and scheduling vocalists! And it's about time.

(Pro tip #3: Every damn thing takes way longer than I think it will, no matter how often I try to recalibrate.)
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-27 10:56 am
Entry tags:

NGD: So that was mostly unexpected

In recognition of my ludicrous amount of tenure at the day job, the folks at the office presented me with a guitar the other day. One of the weirder events in my career, but it was surprisingly touching.

Now, buying a musical instrument for somebody who takes their musical instruments *very seriously* is a dicey proposition. They did their homework, though, and I played in a band for a long-ass time with one of the guys at the office, so they were at least in the right ballpark. Still, I own some very nice instruments, and I'm very picky about certain things, so when I got wind of what was up, I thought, "Uh-oh."

They presented me with what I believe is a Gibson Les Paul Special Limited Edition in Pelham Blue, and I'm happy to report it's a pretty decent instrument! The frets are reasonably tall (a requirement of mine), the body is comfortable, and it plays pretty well. I had to dramatically lower the action, but that's not such a big deal. It sounds good, too! It's a nice, balanced sound, and, really, if all my other guitars disappeared tomorrow, I could make this one work indefinitely and be okay with that.

One oddity: The neck is actually a shade wider than the fretboard, which is weird as hell and I've never seen that before. It creates this tiny little lip or step on the top side of the neck. Maybe 1/32" or something, and nothing that's really bothersome, but it's very, very weird.

About fifty people or so actually signed the instrument. On one hand, that's not maybe what I'd normally want to see done to a guitar, but it was cool for the occasion. I have to admit, the mess of signatures is kind of growing on me.

One of the guys at work asked me the next day: "Did you play it or just hang it on the wall?"

To which I replied that I absolutely played it. I won't own a guitar I don't play--that's what they're for!
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-21 09:49 pm
Entry tags:

You'd think I'd know how to play this damn thing...

With most of the bed tracks done for ITSOTW, I'm now working on the six million guitar overdubs. The other day, I laid down a solo for the tune "Help Isn't Coming," and, well, it's terrible. Or, as D put it, "Can you play something that sounds a little less like Journey?" We agreed that the best and most appropriate solo for the tune was one I just tossed off like a year ago in rehearsal. It's the canonical version, as it were, though I have never played it like that a second time.

So tonight I figured I'd just re-learn whatever the hell it was I played that night and get it ready so I can record it here in the next day or so. And, well. It took me two fucking hours to figure out what I was playing for bars five and six. It's this weirdly sequenced burst of stupid fast sixteenth notes and it comes out into quarter notes at an odd place, and the whole thing is wildly nonintuitive. The thing I improvised one day. At a speed that is significantly faster than the final version of the song. Nonintuitive. Can't play the fucker. Was I bodysnatched that day or what?

It's not uncommon for me to forget what I played (or even wrote) and for D to have to teach it back to me or dredge up an old recording and tell me to do, for example, whatever I was doing at the one minute and thirty second mark. We've been doing that shit for years. But, seriously, anything I improvised at the tempo we played this song at must have had its components firmly lodged in muscle memory, so where the hell did it go? Why is it alien music now?

I think I finally got the thing sussed out by slowing it down and working backwards from the quarter note bit. Of course I can't physically play it--it's probably going to take another few days of work with the metronome to get the thing up to speed, since I fall apart playing that passage about 20 bpm shy of where the song needs to be (which is another 18 or so bpm shy of the tempo we recorded it at back when).

This is good for me, or so I will tell myself.
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-19 11:49 am
Entry tags:

The Publishing Failure Post

So what happened was my series bombed like fuckin' WHOA. Like, my agent dropped me a note before publication of the third book to say, hey, no bookstores are ordering this damn thing, so Roc isn't going to print a physical copy at all. As for them picking up a fourth book: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ha.

Following that, a highly inconvenient thing happened which is that my agent retired from agenting. That left (leaves) me bereft of an agent and coming off a series for which "tanked" is a grotesque understatement as a description of sales performance.

I am now authorial nuclear waste. Radioactive.

My options at this point would seem to be one of the following:

Lots of rambling follows... )

No conclusions here yet. Mostly this is just a brain dump as I evaluate my options.
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-18 06:30 am
Entry tags:

Mixing Tips

I had a friend ask me for music mixing tips recently because he was super frustrated with the process and his results (because it's a super frustrating process). The following lengthy diatribe is adapted from an email I sent him. I thought it would be useful to keep this stuff around for my own reference. I am, after all, staring down another mixing project here in a couple of months...

Lengthy diatribe in here... )

Related: I have to admit I feel a little bit of dread about mixing my next project. My songwriting partner, D, is a great guy and I am extremely lucky to work with him. However, he has a) very specific ideas about how he wants things to sound, and b) the most peculiar set of vocabulary to describe them. Like when he told me he'd like to hear more clarity in the bass in our music. So I asked him to send me an example of a recording that sounded the way he wanted it to, and he sent me this track wherein the bass was all low subsonic rumble with the highs rolled off and no attack whatsoever--it sounded like a synth. Or the time he told me that he wished we could make a certain part more percussive but that he'd also like to take some of the attack out. Or the time he told me he wanted something to sound more compressed, and, after twenty minutes of wrangling, I figured out that by "more compressed" he meant "less compressed." One time I listened to some music in his car, and he's that asshole who always cranks the bass and the highs and leaves them that way in every rental car I get, so all I can hear is this sizzling shrieky hi-hat while the kick drum evacuates my bowels.

He is also the only person in history ever to say, "Can you make this sound more digital?"

We laugh about this shit together, and I give him a hard time, but he really does have a great ear and the music comes out better. It sure is rough getting there, though. Divided by a common language and all that.
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-17 09:05 pm

(no subject)

Saw this posted by [personal profile] used_songs and thought it was fun.

Post six (or more) sentences from a current WIP.

Here's what I got, sans context:

Everything went to shit when Gil’s head showed up on my porch. For me, I mean. Obviously it went to shit for Gil before that. They left it in a box. One of those brown cardboard ones with blue numbers on the side for, like, machine parts or something. It was leaking.
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-17 03:36 pm
Entry tags:

Current music projects, March 2019

I need to get a handle on this shit before it runs off on me again...

1. Must finish recording the In the Shadow of the Wall album. This fucking thing has been in the works for two years, an egregious amount of which we spent fucking around with vocalists. I now have bed tracks for 9 songs and should have 3 more come Friday. One song still to be completely written. Need to do guitar overdubs on, um, basically all but 3 songs. Have vocalists lined up for ten songs, which I need to start scheduling. Yikes. Still need vocalists for 3 songs. Maybe D will sing them. Maybe I will. Somebody's gonna sing the damn things.

2. Working on using SuperCollider to replace my sequencer and do some synth work. I have some basic stuff done here, but I've let this lapse.

3. Need to get the rhythm section of Schillinger's book built in SuperCollider as well. There are some cool tools here and I'd like to explore them, but first that means I need to build a fair amount of functionality. (Then it's on to the tonal stuff, which will be a gigantic amount of work.)

4. Still working on composing Drop the Hammer for my lesson. Need to nail down a melody for this by, um, Tuesday. Fuuuuuck.

5. Acoustic EP. I have a bunch of songs I was thinking about working up in full band fashion, but really they will be better served by stripped down acoustic renditions, and anyway I need to stop dwelling on old shit. This might be a good candidate for summer solo time work.

I think there are more, but, really, isn't this enough? Jesus. I need to do some planning around organizing this mess or I'll have another year like 2018, in which I completed not one damn thing.
thesnythe: (Default)
2019-03-17 02:51 pm

Is this thing on?

I've been reviewing my social media use lately, and it seemed like a change was in order. I nuked my Facebook account, because a) I never used it and b) Facebook is a bad actor. I've also changed how I use Twitter--it had been that I followed every last political thing, but it has become apparent that getting my news in an up-to-the-second fashion like that is really not great for my mental health. It also, due to the nature of Twitter, ended up exposing me to a lot of really stupid shit. I am now aware of scads of right wing grifters and a few left wing ones, not to mention every last little weird, useless outrage that popped up over the last god-knows-how-long, and none of that has enriched my life or made me a better citizen. So I've dramatically trimmed that back.

It occurred to me that the form of social media, if you want to call it that, that I most enjoyed, was LJ back in the day. Rather than an endless stream of retweets and forwarded articles, I got to read the unique thoughts of interesting people, and I got in the habit of maintaining a journal in a way that was actually useful to me.

So I thought I'd give this a try. It'll probably be mostly stuffed with thoughts on music and writing projects, as well as family stuff. We'll see how it goes. It would be good to get back in the habit, in any case.