Multiple Versions of Me Become One
I am a strange sort of fellow, especially in the music I like. You see, I like Steve Earle, and Tom Petty, and Del Amitri, and some country (especially alt and outlaw!)... but there's more. I also like The Dogs D'Amour and Social Distortion and The Levellers, who have almost a punk sensibility. But it goes on! I also like Motorhead, and I like Hawkwind with their space rock. And I also like instrumental music like Mike Oldfield, and electronic stuff like The Crystal Method, and Ladytron.I am not sure who else listens to all those genres and styles with equal love, but I do. And, as a musician, the side effect is I also love creating that range of music.
Up until now, I've kept that separate, with Tommy Grimes III for the guitar / rock / country / blues stuff, and Faol Glas for the instrumental stuff.
But I have grown somewhat tired of that, it's a lot to maintain, and I'd rather be making music than maintaining websites and blogs... so, I have decided my instrumental and electronic will all just go under my own name. If people get confused, or can't fathom how one person can create such vastly different types of music, well, I guess that will have to be too bad!
In terms of being a songwriter, well, I also write melodies, so the instrumental stuff remains valid if you want to assess me as a songwriter - it tells you about what I like and how I write in terms of melodies and harmonies. So going forward, it will all be under just the one name!
The Five Sisters
So, the piece responsible for that was the draft from this weekend of The Five Sisters - part one of what should be a longer five-part instrumental of varying styles, inspired by the Five Sisters of Kintail, a mountain range in Scotland.
An odd piece as it wanted to be in 5/4 time (or 3/8, 3/8, 4/8 if you prefer), and it's been on the go for ages! And also it has a lot of layers to it compared to what I normally do. Still not finished, but close. Now just the other four parts to go :)
This also came about from wanting to do some guitar-based instrumental pieces, so expect to hear some of those too soon. These will be less synth-heavy than my other instrumentals, keeping the guitar as a main focus.
Stopping Automatic Folder Type Discovery
Windows is always so "helpful" - whenever I create a folder with audio files in it, Windows decides that I want to see "Artist, Album" etc as the file details. For a musician, that's a pain in the arse, as the files are most likely drafts, tests, or even individual audio files for tracks in the DAW.When I look at those folders, I usually want to know "is this file too large to email?" - I don't need to know who it's by, it's by me, I know that!
Thank goodness then for this article on stopping Windows from doing that kind of malarkey.
Laten.....cy
This dual Xeon system has always been a bit crappy with latency. It is prone to drop-outs while I am listening / recording (though these don't affect the recording itself; but it is very off-putting while trying to get lost in playing along with your music!)It reared its head again as an issue when I revisited the instrumental pieces, as they have lots of synths and effects. Even the Focusrite, which addresses the worst of it all, didn't help out here.
I did find LatencyMon which very helpfully gives you some idea on anything that might be causing latency. The test results give the very interesting and I-would-never-have-thought-of-that step of turning off my network adapter while working on particularly heavy songs. Cool.
And the other thing I always have to remember - turn on "Multi-processing" in the Bazille synth, else it just never works!
Cheers!
Tommy
