Added some bass and more power chords to "The (His and Hers) Vanity Show" this afternoon.  There are at least 40 tracks of power chords now made up of a bunch of stuff...  Industrial fans, metal grinders, dentist drills, tables saws, etc ( Read more... )

I turned my attention back to "(The His and Hers) Vanity Show" this evening ( Read more... )

I've got the Antares back up and running.

I've decided to take a week off from production and dig deep in to my sound library.  Just checking around, seeing if I've missed any cool unused sounds.  Then, of course, I tune and program them as a three or four octave scale.

Over the past couple of days I've tuned some remarkable stuff:  A racing car ( Read more... )

Music making has slowed to a halt in the past week ( Read more... )

After working on it for weeks, I've decided to change the chord arrangement in the intro to "Boys Beware."  It just wasn't feeling dreadful.  Now I think I've got it.  It's very Halloween, oddly enough.  Weird, since the song was written some two years ago and Halloween definitely wasn't in mind.

It feels like I'm walking into a cult circle now.  ( Read more... )

I'm trying to add some staccato guitar like notes to "Boys Beware" to hold the intro together.  The notes are supposed to sort of creep up on you and brush you along.  I first tried a PCP pipe.  Nope, to bassy.  Then I tried a dentist drill.  Too bright.  Water drops were too delicate.  So I dug deep into my sound library and found an industrial ( Read more... )

For all interested parties, check out the latest version of my ever-changing Bowie comp.  ( 45 years of singles, album cuts, live tracks, demos and rarities in seven handy discs )

The toughest part in making music the way that I do is finding the right bass sound.  Tonight I added a foundation to "Boys Beware."  A sort of low-frequency rumble created by using the sound of an industrial-strength factory fan recorded at a laundromat ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of recording Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for Wisconsin Public Radio.  Now I've been a radio engineer in some form or another for 15 years, the last eight moving more towards recording live music, but I think I can safely say recording Wynton was the highlight of my career thus ( Read more... )

I'm working on two songs at once at the moment.  "The (His and Hers) Vanity Show" now has bad ass percussion laid down for the first verse and chorus.  The second song, currently titled "Boys Beware (Neko Case Is A Vampire)", is a simple affair with a murky, shuffling arrangement.  It's about, um, Neko Case, erm, being a vampire.  I guess I've ( Read more... )