First, the important news. Tomorrow our dear friends Lis and Troy get married. Whee!
Now, the less important stuff. One deadline down. The other one is pretty close, so I'm feeling a little better.
Going into the studio on Sunday with Antje to record a four song demo. I'm looking forward to it. We've rehearsed the songs enough now that it should be a breeze, but I know better than to think it's really going to work that way. I know certain people who say that a good rehearsal before a show isn't always good karma. This studio (Kingsize Sound Labs, no website that I know of) is where a lot of Chicago's bands record. It should be much fun.
I made my first nasty little loop in Logic tonight, after playing with arpeggiators and delay lines. Now I not only know how to make Logic do the arpeggiated thing from the begining of Baba O'Riley (i.e. teenage wasteland), but I have an actual loop to file away and say "that's never going anywhere". It seems like so many people doing digital audio end up with a bunch of snippets like that, and never use them. That's what next month's project is all about. Avoiding.
I'm feeling the crunch. One big website is launching at the end of the month (I hope), and I'm trying to quickly learn the code of another big site to make some changes to it by the end of the month. And then there's the smaller sites. Too much web work, not enough drums.
We did have a great time in Tennessee last weekend. Last Christmas I sort of blew it by not making enough time for Lisa, me, and my grandparents together. This trip made up for that mistake, I think. We enjoyed beautiful weather and scenery and a relaxed and loving atmosphere. The fact that Isaac came down too was an added bonus. Overall another great experience that I sure as hell won't support with photographs. No sir, not me. I take pictures and hide them.
Back to "not enough drums" for a second. I've been spending a lot of time lately learning how to do digital audio. I've started (and lately not posted much in) another journal and gone through a tutorial, dinked around with some sounds, recorded some drums, and generally taken my first shaky steps toward recording my own music.
Next month, I plan to really get to it. Inspired by National Novel Writing Month, I'm going to declare November Joe Records An EP Month. Considering I've never composed anything, except some absurd poems and dirty limericks, this should prove to be a very torturous experience for me. I say that because I expect it's going to be kind of difficult to produce anything, let alone something good. But who knows, I may surprise myself.
I'd like to update this site somehow as I go along, probably mostly in home audio journal, but we'll see. In any case, I'm looking forward to this project in a sort of scared way.
Maybe I can use it as motivation to get all this work done.
The temperature in hell just dropped five degrees.
The Cubs just won a postseason series for the first time in ninety-five years. The Red Sox are going to try to win their own series tomorrow. If they win, then beat the Yankees, and the Cubs win their series against the Marlins, we'll have a Red Sox and Cubs World Series.
If that happens, hell with definitely freeze over.
[Update: Oh well. Looks like it will be Tenacious Fillet of Fish vs. The Best Team Tons Of Money Can Buy. I won't be watching. The Bambino and the Billy Goat are lying together this evening, copulating with wild abandon. Or something.]