Ovation Elite Plus Contour overview, and finally found lyric video software!

Weekly update time! When shopping for a new Ovation recently, I couldn't find the information I needed - how much difference does the contour back make vs the traditional Ovation round back? What is the new Op-Pro Studio pre-amp like, and what do the Drive and Expressor do exactly? What does it sound like?

So, I made my own video now that I own one:


The guitar arrived on Tuesday, and is quite a stunner! Always been a huge fan of Ovations, and this one is by far the best one I have owned.

As yet haven't recorded anything with her (except for the video above), but will be doing that in the coming week. I got some great feedback on "Long Time Coming" from Brent Baxter of frettie.com which is a great place to share your songs and get feedback, and based on that I am going to rewrite it some, mostly restructuring and removing rather than adding. That will give me the perfect opportunity to put the new Ovation (named Spirit :) ) to good use.

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I mentioned last time I was searching for software to ease the time involved in making lyric videos, and I found it - under the unlikely name of YouTube Movie Maker.

The beauty of this software is it will import your lyrics in text file format (.txt), and then your mp3, and as you play the mp3, simple presses of a key on your keyboard will define the start and end point of each line, et voila, your lyrics are done in time with your music!

I will be putting this to good use in coming weeks, and getting some simple lyric videos done and uploaded. Using video sites to listen to music is an increasingly common thing, even if the video is just a still photo, so it's good to have the music available on those sites too.


Cheers!
     Tommy

New Year is on its way!

Whew, 2017 was one busy year!

I just spent 3 days in Moscow and 2 weeks in Prague, not music related mind you - with that, plus the preparations for the trips, I was unable to do anything musical for the last month or so, but getting back into it now.

Moscow, view from the hotel window

I also managed to pick up a persistent cough, so not sure how that will impact my plans to do some recording over the Christmas vacation, but we shall see! I can still write and work on the instrumental side of things of course, so it won't all come to a complete standstill.

Prague, one of the smaller Christmas market areas

It's a good time to be thinking of plans for 2018, and for me I plan on doing some co-writing rather than write it all myself. I am also contemplating a move in May or thereabouts, and may move to Nashville for a bit, because Nashville. I think it would be fun to live there at least for a year or two!

I am also considering working less on production, arrangement and mixing, and more on just writing - there are so many songs I have in progress and if I stop to play around with them all in detail then that will slow down finishing writing them. After all, everything I create is just a demo or showcase of what the song can be, the plan is always that someone else will pick up on a song and record or perform it.

So what are your plans for the year ahead? Whatever they are, may they come to pass, and here's to it being an awesome year!

Old but very serviceable

Not me, the iPad. It's an iPad 4, which apparently makes it about 7 years old. As much as I dislike how Apple manages their infrastructure, I have to say that this 7 year old device is still enormously capable - great battery life, runs smooth, and as it turns out, a very easy and convenient writing tool!

The guitar sounds in Cubasis are very basic, will see if there's anything optional that can be added there to make those a bit more pleasant, but all the same it's very workable for writing. For practicing guitar solos, I might Bluetooth it over to the GT 40 amp (though I won't be able to record if I do that, but it could be good just for practice).

Thanks to that convenience, I was able to do some writing today, and it will only get easier the more I use this combo of iPad and Cubasis!

Making Writing Easier

The set up for songwriting that I came up with today.

One thing I am always looking to do is make the writing process easier. I do main recordings on my desktop, but I don't like being tied to the desktop while just experimenting and writing - inconvenient!

So far I've been using Evernote to sing or play into on my phone, but it's become inconvenient. It used to be easy to add several recordings to one "note" which kept multiple attempts at pieces of a song in one place, but now I can't see how to do that and I have to create a separate "note" each time which gets cluttered fast.

Besides, I wanted the ability to play and sing separately, so I could have my guitar playing away in my ear while I come up with words, or I could use it to work out soloes and or bass lines without heading to the PC.

I have Cubasis 2 on the iPad, which I like a lot as it is just like Cubase on my desktop. The problem with it was Apple - because they don't let you just browse the files on your iPad, you have to go through some app or another to see them. That meant moving anything OFF the iPad to start building the proper recordings on the desktop seemed to be a pain in the arse.

I was considering buying a mini-digital multitrack recorder, but joy of joys, I just discovered that Steinberg actually do things better than Apple - Cubasis has a wifi server mode, where I can see all the Cubase files on my PC and copy to and from the iPad with ease and abandon!

The raggedy collection of not much yet on the iPad, easily accessed from my desktop.

Enable it in Cubasis, enter the URL it displays into a web browser on the PC, and that's it - and like it says on the tin, it's wifi, so I don't even need to bother with all that cable-y nonsense. Well done Steinberg!

Labouring Away

The blog has languished a bit due to life being pretty chaotic!

I had a long weekend a while back and managed to wrap up the roughs of three more songs - American Now which was the second song I had on the go about my naturalization, On The Tin which is all about addiction and its false promises (I have a great idea for a cover image for that song, just have to find the time to get the stuff I need and snap the photo!), and You Don't Know Jack which is about one specific kind of addiction.

I did do a bit more work on The Spell, restructuring it and writing some new parts for it (bass line, an oboe part), but then things got busy with other things in life. Not least was the apartment flooding - nothing to do with Hurricane Harvey, I was blessed to be too far inland to be affected. This was just from the poor state of the city drainage system, ugh.

As a result, I had to bunch everything up in the apartment, and then live for 4 days with two fans and one dehumidifier running 24/7, which was disruptive to getting any good sleep and of course meant no hope for music with the constant racket!

However no permanent damage to anything (other than a bathmat and some clothing) so I can't complain.

Lots of other things also took up time, including a trip to a conference in Dallas, so there's been little progress on getting new songs wrapped up or written. This was the first sane weekend in a while, and I spent it mostly sleeping to catch up!

Things to look for next - The Spell getting to a point where I can post it, plus I think I will finish up a traditional blues number that I have on the go, There's a Storm a-comin', and I'd love to get back to the instrumental White Blonde & Sunburst and finish that up too. So those are likely what will happen next!

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.