spacebug | weekend roundup

Friday night I was really crabby. Part of it may have been caused by driving to Oakdale in rush hour to see if the stupid music store had a midi pedal I wanted. I got lost, rediscovered how much Oakdale is not only confusing but depressing, and found out that neither that Guitar Center, nor any other Guitar Center in the twin cities has the thing that I want. Or anything remotely similar. After my last few less-than-awesome online shopping experiences, I was all set to just pay full retail for something so I could actually check it out, take it home immediately, not worry about shipping or ebay douchebags, blah blah blah. Apparently I should just stick to having UPS bring my gear right to me at work because then I don't have to deal with rush hour or Guitar Center salespeople or depressing suburbs with nonsensical layouts.

After that, S4 and I went to see The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D. It was well done, and nice to see again, and got the crabbies right out. We were very nearly the only people in the theatre. It would have been a lot more fun if we had been the only people in the theatre, but as it was, I didn't want to subject the other couple there to my singing all the songs out loud.

Saturday morning into afternoon was the big huge work event that was lots of work/talking to people/being smiley and helpful/etc. I was really worn out after that, but still managed to get to two parties. I was really really done with talking to people once I hit bedtime last night. I made

echoegami nearly hurt herself she laughed so hard at my costume, so that was rock solid awesome and made up for the fact that no one else had any idea what my costume was.

Somewhere in the middle of that, my external hard drive, less than a year old, decided it to die, which was the impetus for Spacebug Is Grumpy v. 2.

Today we went to meet fdot and beverly penn's newest addition to the universe, and she is very small and adorable.

Then home, where I did some work on mixing my album instead of going to the concom meeting. I've been really really hesitant to mix my stuff "for real" because I've had it in my head for a really long time that I'm lousy at the production side of music stuff. In reality I don't think I'm lousy just so much as less confident and... honestly... less interested. Whatever the case, it's been blocking getting anything resembling an album from me finished, so I'm trying to suck it up. So far it hasn't been too much of the nitpicky drudgery I've been fearing; it's even been kinda fun, so that's a nice surprise. I plan to bounce what I've been doing off a few musicheads which I think will help a lot. I still feel like there's a whole intimidating universe of stuff I don't know about music production, but I also just don't know how much I want spend the time and energy required to learn about it. While they overlap a lot, especially with electronic music, writing music and engineering music can be very different things, and I definitely feel more at home with the former. I get far less excited about things like minutiae of microphone placement or compression/gating/limiting/panning/effecting, making things "warmer"/"punchier"/"more present"/ whatever-the-fuck, what frequency bands to boost or attenuate- just the whole the art and science behind making eight million itsy bitsy changes that can't be heard by themselves but cumulatively make essentially the same piece of music "better" in some pretty damned subjective ways- this is just not the brand of music geekery that turns my crank. On the other hand, I am learning things, and learning things is good. Perhaps one day I will be able to pay someone who isturned on by that stuff to worry about those things for me instead.

And then I went to Mayhemily training for derby, which, after hearing the reports from Rollercon about how ridiculously hardcore her derby bootcamp can be, was a little nervous about. Instead, it was skills-based and covered a lot of injury-prevention kinds of stuff, and was a lighter practice in terms of bodily stress than what I'd expected. So, that was kinda nice, I wasn't sure how much I was in the mood for a total physically exhausting ass-kicking after a pretty jam-packed weekend full of work and parties and people.

Then I ate a burrito, and it was good.

Man. Monday already so soon.

I start yoga class again tomorrow, and I'm really really looking forward to it. Also Omegacon. Yay for stretchy-relax-y-pyjama-pantsy-sleep-inny-hottubby-goodness!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Do you have a subscription to Tape Op? If you don't you totally should, its free even. I'm not a musician or anything even close to one, but I now find recording technique really fascinating, and its mostly due to reading Tape Op (and hanging around the Mr.). It might help your interest level to read it.

yep, I signed up for it on Jj's advice, I have a mixing engineering book that's decent, I read Katz's mastering book. I've interned in recording studios. I really have made a pretty good effort on the whole thing. Still, most of the time engineering feels like the last 10% that has to be done that takes 90% of the time after the fun part (to me- the creating/preliminary recording) is done. I feel like it's the nitpicky finnicky tweaky stuff and it's never "done" to anyone's satisfaction but rather just stops when money or time or patience run out. Dunno. Maybe that's not fair. I've never really done it myself, so it will be interesting to see what I learn and how my attitudes shift. It also might not help that my only paid work in a music studio, while exciting in that I was paid to use music software and my ears and stuff and got to hang out with smart engineers on the final mixdown days, was, in practice, hours upon hours of mind-crushingly dull work.

Tape Op and I started out on kind of an unfortunate foot. I brought my first issue with me to the ER when S4 had his appendectomy. I read every printed word in every article and on every ad in that thing while I waited, so now reading Tape Op reminds me of hospital waiting room. Sad.

Oh, that is sad about the Tape Op and the ER. I hate associations like that. (though I associate it with the bathroom, which isn't so good either, come to think of it)

Many things are like that as far as never being done goes, writing, paintings- I can't even begin to tell if somethings "done" sometimes and there's always something else that could be noodled with... its very frustrating, indeed. Maybe that's why I like cooking so well. The product gets eaten so there is a complete end to the fussing, there is only trying again. I suppose that's why some folks like doing live performance so well, too, a show has finality.

Well, I hope you get more enjoyment out of the process. I'll be glad to hear it when its done (or possibly sooner, if you send stuff to Jj for comments I'm sure I'll hear it).

I made echoegami nearly hurt herself she laughed so hard at my costume, so that was rock solid awesome and made up for the fact that no one else had any idea what my costume was.

I got it, but only after being reminded of an old pasttime of pilfering and/or rearranging the reader board letters at the church near the Highland Park Perkins. I'd run around the restaurant at bar close asking people if they either wanted to buy vowels or (audience depending) Es and Xs.

I'm having someone else mix the Wedlock album. We got a really good, professional guy, who is also a really good musician. I told him to go nuts on it and do whatever it needed. I'm stoked.

I procrastinate as long as possible on mixing too. But it can be fun. It gets funner the more effort you apply to it. The first few times are just arduous, and then after you hit a certain point it gets pretty close to effortless.

I've had a lot more fun mixing stuff since I started mixing in analog again. Its much more hands-on and fun. Touching faders is a lot more rewarding than mousing an abstraction up. =%>

Email me an mp3 and call and we'll listen together some evening or weeekend afternoon.

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