So what gives?

So here's what I've been up to the last 2 months or so, mostly dealing with lawyers in the U.K. and Spain, and accountants here in the U.S. - nothing music related, just things that have needed attention and have taken up a fair amount of time, thus leaving less time and energy to be working on the songs.

Still, I've been focused on ways to make songwriting easier. I sold my big ol' CyberTwin and have replaced it with two small amps, a Blackstar, and most recently a Fender GT 40.

It's just so much nicer when roughing out a song not to have to plug in to a computer and listen through headphones - no waiting for software to start up, not tied to a particular place in the room, and easier to just dial in sounds.

I'm even contemplating getting a digital multitrack recorder for the same reason. Even with a laptop, by the time I have an interface connected up to it, and I'm tapping the screen or clicking the mouse, it's a lot less immediate than the old cassette based 4 track I started out with, so I may have a look into an inexpensive one of those soon.

See, I have about 70 song fragments that have been hummed or strummed into my phone, and I want to start fleshing those out more and getting them finished. I want to focus more on the writing and completing that, than on arranging and recording - get 'em written, then I can always go back through them at my leisure to polish up the ones that seem to deserve it.

I did have something of a break this last weekend, so I dusted this off (it was, literally, dusty):

Have set to work on a traditional sounding song, something a little Celtic, and that inspired me to get the mando out for the first time in years. Rusty of course :) But I'll get better again! That song is called "The Spell".

And to go along with that, completed the words, chords and structure for "You Don't Know Jack", which is one of my punk-country songs (can't think of a better way of describing them). Then I also have the more singer-songwriter melancholy "On the Tin" which has all the words, just needs a bit of structuring.

I think I should be able to wrap all 3 up in demo form this coming weekend, as well as returning to "American Now" which has been waiting on a re-sing plus having the bass added. So could see 4 songs emerge very soon!

You can burn

I want to do more writing, and less recording - that is, get rough drafts done rather than trying to polish them up each time! To that end, to save me being tied to the computer whenever I want to play guitar, got myself a Blackstar ID Core 10.

I do have a Fender CyberTwin, but a 100 watt amp in an apartment building doesn't win you any friends. The beauty of the ID Core 10 is that it's a twin speaker amp, even in such a tiny box, and Blackstar's "Super Wide Stereo" really DOES work. Expect a video review sometime!

And nice sweets from Sweetwater - glad they went with sweets and not water, that would have been a whole lot less interesting.

Mayday Mayday

So, it's a day past May Day, but ah well. Makes for a good title, and "close enough for jazz" as they say.

Did have a long weekend, unrelated to it being May Day, just booked some time off, which meant a chance to focus on some music! I snapped a couple of photos of the guitars, and started a rough draft of an instrumental piece featuring both Strat and Tele through the same sounds so that the only difference is the guitars (and the pickup selections).

I named it "White Blonde & Sunburst" after the guitars, and that means Blondie has become the Teles name. I plan on finishing up the track sometime, keeping it as an instrumental - may even do a little instrumental EP or something!

Songwriting Mar 19th

Quick update amongst a very busy time all round!

Spent today re-recording guitar parts for the song I am working on, as have decided to raise it a tone as I think I can sing it better there. Got the rest of the lyrics written yesterday, so also did a rough recording of them today. They fit. Hurrah! So will re-record them properly next week.

No bass yet, and not sharing the lyrics or words just yet! Should be able to do that in a week or two I believe. Here's the instruments only sample section, since I haven't shared anything with the Tele on it yet (and this is all Tele!)

https://soundcloud.com/tommygrimesiii/tele-sounds

Other thing I did yesterday was install all the necessary claptrap to get the Korg Kontrol working - had it for years, but rarely use it. Was handy though for being able to trigger recording in Cubase while I had the .txt file of the lyrics up on screen (after forgetting numerous times and adding "*" to the text document rather than start recording in Cubase).

The only problem is there isn't a clear place that writes out how to get it working - so in case you are wondering (and in case I ever need to remember, ahem), here are the steps:

- Install the Korg nanoKontrol drivets (http://www.korg.com/us/support/download/driver/1/252/1357/ ).

Download the nanoKontrol template for Cubase (http://www.korg.com/us/support/download/software/1/252/1377/ ).

- Hook everything up to the USB, run Cubase, go to Devices -> Device Setup, click the '+' to add a device, choose a Generic Remote.

- Use the Import option for the Generic Remote set up to load the template downloaded earlier.

Not exactly hard, but it just isn't written up step-by-step anyplace - but it is now!

So that was this weekend! Oh, and took a set of arty photos of the Tele as you can tell from them scattered through this post - the light was just right today when I thought about it :)

My mushroom is infected

Along with the Tele and Focusrite Scarlett, I also added the Infected Mushroom Pusher plugin from Waves into the sonic arsenal lately. I know it's designed for EDM, but I find it works very nicely on guitar and rock music mixes - at least, I like the effect!

I've been using it on the "rough notes" with the Telecaster, haven't tried it out with the bass, the Ovation, or the Strat, but will be interested to see what it does there too.

Updates and Upgrades

Couple of weeks back, got my first Tele. Had gone into the store hoping to buy a fairly standard one, but wasn't enthralled by them, weren't doing much different from what the Strat does. Just as I was done and deciding I'd just wait, the salesman put this Limited Edition into my hands, one of the "Magnificent Seven" that they did last year, and that did the trick!

I think it's the vintage pickups on it, gave me the sound I had expected and wanted from a Tele. Have been playing a lot since, as haven't done a lot of that - I find that there's writing, there's recording / mixing, and there's playing, and if you do one, it's at the expense of the others, and that meant my playing had slipped.

So it was time to put on other people's music and play along for practice. The other thing about that is, then I find my brain is full of other people's music and has no space left for its own ideas!

Despite that, when I have a day or two where I don't fire up some tunes to play to, ideas have been trickling in, mostly little fragments so far, but they will turn into something eventually!

Drivers again

So, remember some time back I was struggling with latency, dropouts in monitoring, and occasional CPU dropouts that made Cubase stop recording? Still going on - this dual Xeon machine just is not cut out for audio. With no happy resolution in sight, I decided to replace my Presonus. It had a few other things happening with it too:

- A high-pitched whine all the time, only for me listening, fortunately it never recorded. Not the Presonus's fault, same as the latency issue isn't, it's the shitty motherboard in this workstation, and drawing power from the USB bus was not working well.

- The volume knob for the headphones lost the left channel now and then and needed a "wiggle" to get it back. Old age comes to us all.

- Never did like the layout of the knobs, it saved space, but meant I never instinctively knew which knob was for which input.

- It couldn't run phantom power for my Audio Technica mic without introducing a whole crap-ton of noise (again, crappy motherboard.)

Thus, enter:

A Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 gen 2. Now, I don't need 6 inputs, nor two headphone outs and all that - what I did need was external power, and it did the trick, no more annoying whine, and it can phantom power the mic without noise. Love the layout of the knobs, though it has a larger footprint as a result.

The dropout issues are better due to the latest hardware and drivers - not perfect, because shitty motherboard remember, but I can find settings that don't give a problem in the sample rate, buffer size and Cubase settings.

The key thing here is to get it up and running smoothly so that technical malarkey doesn't get in the way of writing or recording. The less bumps in that process, the less there is to knock me out of the creative flow!

Installing synths....

... is hard work.

Always amazed to find that synths have the most convoluted and unpleasant download and licensing systems of any software I own, so when I change computers the work involved in getting them back up and running again is astronomical.

I don't use synths much in my country-rock side, they are mostly for my instrumental side, except for one song. Decided to bite the bullet and get the synths I need for it reinstalled, since I am remixing everything from the last 2 years - 10 songs down, 4 to go, and 1 more that needs a female session singer!

Anyway, time to get back to those installs..... wish me luck!