catsittingstill

I have finished the sheet music pages for the The King's Lute sheet music songbook, and I have finished changing the reverb on all of my mastered tracks.

Next week I start again with the tracks clearing up anything else my mastering consultants (or I) noticed that needs fixing. Probably tomorrow I should print out the lead sheet and sheet music songbooks and check if there are any little details that need fixing. And generate first pages and last pages. The tables of contents can't happen until I decide on the song order for the CD, so we'll see when that happens. Probably this weekend when I listen through everything in order on 1) the good speakers 2) the tinny little computer speakers and 3) in the car.

At some point I want to go canoeing. I deserve to go canoeing.

Oh, and I have a concert tomorrow. For which I have been faithfully practicing for a couple of weeks. I should probably change my strings. And a meeting tonight at which I will valiantly resist being made responsible for anything. But I should probably show up because I promised.

I kind of think if it weren't for the meditation I would be a wreck at this point. But I am remarkably unwrecked, just kind of tired and dazed.

But, in the meantime, Pictures!

First, a weird rock that Peter and I saw on our trip to Cumberland Gap National Historic Park.


( Cut to spare your friends page. )

So the past week I've really been making an effort to get to the mixing and keep my nose to the grindstone.  I have 8 songs done to the point where they went on my iPod to be listened to on walks and in the car to try to get the sound quality even and similar to other albums that I like.  I have four more whose vocals need to be redone because of that crackle problem I had with the Zoom H4n (remember; set it to 48 K sample rate when you're using it as a USB interface!).  And I have eight more songs that need to be recorded pretty much from scratch.

I have access to the padded room at Carson Newman as of about two weeks ago, so I knew I would be recording this morning.  Yesterday I set up the Zoom at home and practiced vocals for Cedarglass and Wise Hands, and laid down a scratch track for Oak And Ash and practiced recording to it.  It wasn't going very well--I have a hard time starting on time and confidently, even with a count-in, and I felt like I wasn't matching the timing for Cedarglass and I could hear that I was getting a weird sort of vocal buzz on the highest note in Wise Hands every single time.

But it went much better this morning.  Maybe I squeezed all the mistakes out yesterday (well, most of them; it's not like I didn't make mistakes this morning, but I didn't have the five false starts in a row phenomenon) and started fresh with good "stuff" today.  And it was yesterday's practicing that convinced me I couldn't record vocals for two songs (not those two songs) without some kind of rest in between, which was why I was even prepared to record Oak and Ash, which has a mandolin part I could lay down three versions of while I was resting my throat.  And then I got through Wise Hands with, I think, enough good high notes that I can clone them and make something presentable.

I think I should start practicing recording earlier in the week.  This past couple of weeks has been all about the mixing, though, trying to get caught up.

And now I need to mix Cedarglass, Oak And Ash, and Wise Hands.  And make some tweaks on the other eight mixes.

I sang this one at the last Atlanta Housefilk but only now got around to typing the lyrics into the computer.

This is for a friend who is stuck working a horrible schedule for a horrible employer who is trying to break the union by, for example, insisting that everyone work twelve hours a day every day (like, seven days a week) and that they not remove their safety gear (gloves, welding mask) to eat lunch.  I think the plan is that if they can make everybody quit they can hire people who have no rights (illegal immigrants, probably) and treat them even worse.  The mind boggles at what "even worse" would be--though one imagines it involves no safety regulations, and no pay to speak of.

How they can even get away with treating people this way I have no idea.   And it pisses me off.

I should warn people that this song makes use of the F-word in one place (where I think it is entirely consistent with the point of view character and the situation) and for that reason might not be appropriate for some listeners or listening places.  For this reason I will hide it behind a cut.

( Lyrics and mp3 here )

Also my bandcamp page has album-quality (I think) versions of this song, as well as Art Feeds Life.  They can be downloaded or streamed for free (big files for good sound quality but you have the choice of various mp3 incarnations as well if bandwidth is a problem.)  If you would like to give them a listen and let me know what you think of the reverb and eq and so on, I would be interested to hear from you.