ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん: Solarbird Makes Noises

Okay, so the video and audio quality are about what you'd expect out of a webcam (albeit a pretty good webcam) but! you can watch me premiere two songs, "Stay Away" and "Shout at the Desert" - last night here. I start around the 27 minute mark. They cut to one of the dancer groups a couple of times! But not to either of the others who were too far out of camera range. I really didn't think of "Stay Away" as a dance song but believe me I am not gonna argue with this result! ^_^

Okay! Let's try another voice post. (It's funny; I could spend the entire weekend playing my hands off, but a day and a half of typing totally destroys them. And by funny, I mean brutally frustrating. Anyway, let's see if we can get this thing to accept a few sentences at a time.)

So, Conflikt. Conflikt is one of those words it's going to get wrong every damn time. at least that one I can understand. Fortunately, Conflikt itself doesn't have any of these problems. Honestly, I gotta say, these people know how to throw a goddamn party. The only frustrating thing is how many people I didn't actually get to hang out with. Really, that includes most of the people I know actually at the convention! Irony is so ironic. Mostly, I got to wave at them as they ran on doing some convention committee thing. I also didn't get to play around with... Peg?'s omg huge bass, and I even talked to her about doing that on Friday but never got the chance to actually do it. But I did get to catch up with Tom Smith, who I haven't seen in a long time, and Alec, who I see more often, but not nearly often enough, and met up with Brooke (briefly) and Foxipher (also briefly) and I met some new people! Whose names I can't remember! Even if I can remember their faces, voices, and such quite well, and the things we did. (Sometimes I hate my brain.)

Anyway, highlights: Tom's concert. He's always been a great live performer, and that's still entirely true, and it was good to hear him again after a long time. Finally getting to play in circle with Alec, even if I didn't get confident enough early enough to take the solo that he tried to hand me. (I feel really lame about that. Part of it was me not being sure people could even hear me, but part of it was also ph33r.) Selling my first CD, even if it is an in progress demo! OMG so awesome! Thanks guys! You are awesome. ^_^ The band scramble; I had a lot of fun working on that, and I think the one-time performance of the band Minotaur went pretty well. ^_^ Sadly, my spectacularly bad problem with names is applicable here, so if you were the other people in the band please reply! That way I can say who you were! We covered one of S00j's songs, "Into the Labyrinth", and it's kind of an amazing song to sing. Something about it, as a performer, is kind of intoxicating. I kind of wish I hadn't also been playing bouzouki, I really wanted to cut loose more completely than I could while also playing an instrument. I also got some advice I really think I can put into practice from the performance jury panel; I hadn't really thought about the difference in audience reaction to song length between audiences who are already fans of a song, and audiences who've never heard it before. Also, as everyone here knows, while my microphone discipline has improved, it still needs some work. Oh, and Betsy's daughter Katie seems to be developing a bit of a voice, which is full of win. (Yeah, I'm jealous. ^_^ )

(Oh good. For those keeping track at home, this is the third time I've had to restart the voice dictation software because it's just gone loopy and started doing random things. I honestly don't know what to do about this, and it's intensely frustrating. It does things like add extra letters at the end of sentences, it gets all sorts of things wrong, I typically have to dictate the sentence three or four times, then fix it by hand, and really, to exhibit how frustrating this is, I would need to record the audio of me playing with this toy and post it. Trying to speak this post has taken an hour. I would have typed it in about ten minutes. I think I'm just going to have to have a lot less Internet presence in the future, and that's really bad from anything like, say, a publicity standpoint.)

Right, back to the convention. I got to perform a couple of my own songs in the open filk circles, "When You Leave" and "Outbirds," and I unexpectedly had a couple of requests - JT wanted me to back him on bodhran when he sang "Chemical Worker's Song" and another new-to-me person whose name I have failed to keep but with whom I talked a lot at the con asked me to do "Pirate Bill and Squidly," which I found and really surprising because the original composer was at the convention! ^_^ But he had already gone to bed at the time, so that's probably why. I met an assortment of people I've asked to Norwescon, and did a lot of Norwescon-related business, particularly on Saturday. (I've given up on the voice thing for now, btw. I'll no doubt pay for that. ;_; ) That part wasn't as fun, but did solve a lot of problems.

Really, my biggest regret was having to leave as early as I did, and even with that, I was pretty fucking exhausted by the time I got home each day. Still, I would have totally stayed for the end-of-convention "smoked salmon" extended performance circle. Next year, I think we'll get a hotel room. It'll be spendy, but if the money works out, it'll be worth it.

I had more I wanted to say, I think, but I have to stop - my hands are not happy.

A whole goddamn brick.



Yeah, it's just a goddamn demo, it's a sneak preview of a work-in-progress, it's not done, and half the ones I've made are for sponsors and I don't actually intend to sell any this weekend - I will if people want, believe me! But that's not even the point - but this still feels awesome.

...Outbirds is six tracks of feature-complete! Even if the hammered chimes I want are currently being stood in for by a Concertmate 1100's "Synth-Pro Crystal" tones instead. Sketchy Characters is gonna be for real omg!

Good day in studio today. Not revelatory like Thursday, but still, seriously, the second best day in studio I've had. (I wasn't able to do much Friday or over the weekend, in no small part because of Anna's birthday but also a little from being totally wiped out Friday morning.) This actually did kind of all fall together last week, and it fell together in a way that's sticking around. I like it, a lot.

Right, so, Outbirds today got a pretty decent version of its mandolin track recorded. It's not perfect; the mandolin part consists of a series of high-speed accent notes played at about, hum, around 410 notes per minute? Just under 7 notes per second. And that's at or near the top of my current ability to play, speed-wise, so the timing's a little sloppy here and there. But it's not bad.

I also figured out a much better way to record the bodhran with the SM-57s, and a former studio jockey I know in Florida has told me how to record bodhran safely with the Novas, which I'll probably take back and apply when re-recording the bodhran part in Artefacts. (I like what I have now on the drum in Outbirds, so I won't re-record it unless I discover I have a reason.)

Oh, and new vocals. They're a lot better than what I had, but I'm still re-recording them tomorrow. I can do better.

Basically, I want to have a few copies of a three (or, if I get very, very productive and lucky, four) song EP by this weekend called Sketchy Characters. See, this weekend, there's a local filk convention called Conflikt nearby, and I'm going. It's not something where I'm going to do SRS SALES OMG; I'm not a scheduled performer there, my stuff isn't really filk because it's mostly not F&SF related, and besides, none of the tracks will be final, and any copies I have of the CD will be burned on Anna's laptop. But it will be a CD, and the recordings will all be complete, in that all the instruments will be there, with polish and such to follow. With Artefacts, that's a seven-track arrangement; with Outbirds, it's four with the strong possibility of a fifth; with Cascadia, How I Have Missed You, it's, um, one. Which is totally cheating, I admit, but hello, Crime and the Forces of Evil. We cheat.

(And if I'm very lucky and very productive, When You Leave will make at least a minimal appearance on the disc in probably the least complete state of anything. But still.)

Anyway, it's mostly just to have something I can hand to people. A sneak preview, and in a couple of cases something I can show to people I know who will be there so they can say, "okay, this is totally wrong, fix it." Later, they can become unbelievably valuable bootlegs! Which I'll counterfeit and sell on eBay! And most importantly, something I can start handing to venue managers saying, "j0. Book me." Even if I have to punt down to one-instrument-and-voice arrangements for the live show demos. Once I have the full songs, that shit's easy.

I know I haven't been posting much lately, but I am still here. My arms have been particularly unhappy with the idea of typing lately, and I've been training some voice recognition software to help out. It is a bit of a struggle quite frankly, but it is working. There are some words it hates, like the word cow. It only gets that word about one time in 10.

Anyway, the ultraviolet LEDs didn't work out very well in fixing the stink of stinky bass. They helped, and while the stink decreased significantly, it still had quite the stench. So I used an alcohol scrub, and that helped a little more. But it was still pretty bad. So now I've gone all out and hit it with a couple of washes of hydrogen perchlorate. And by washes, I mean full-on scrubs with a brush I made out of wire and sponge. Even with all the previous cleanings, the interior was still surprisingly filthy. At least, that's what I get from the colour of the rinse.

(I know, I know, I should never use water on wood. I didn't like the idea either. Of course, the "water" was the highest concentration of hydrogen perchlorate I can make at home. And yes, I'm following the advice of various websites on how to salvage mildew-infected wood. I force-air dried it out as quickly as possible with the output of a HEPA filter for 12 hours.)

Anyway, I've hit it with lemon oil, to try to restore some of lost oils in the wood. Currently, it mostly smells vaguely of lemon. I can live with that as an endpoint. But the stink comes back again, I don't really know what I'll do. Any suggestions? I don't have an ozone generator.

Oh, also, I went down to Rustycon on Friday. I had a good time, and ended up accidentally sort of kind of playing a party for about 15 minutes! Someone asked me what an Irish bouzouki was, and I gave a demonstration, which turned into a mini concert. That was kind of awesome. ^_^ I also think I sold two or three people on them. Someone should give me a commission!

I've been ripping old cassette tapes for Anna, and I came across one of my old cassette tapes, Cancerous Growth's Textures, and threw that into the process too. I've been listening to it tonight. I'd forgotten how epic some of this stuff was - I haven't listened to any of this in a long time but "Tainted," even ripped off a twenty year old cassette, is playing here and reminding me of exactly why I have eardrums. I mean, damn.

Harsh Reality Music still carries some of the old audiophile Tapes back catalogue. Maybe I should dig into some of that.

Spotted going around:

An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you've ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it.

I think it's pretty neat, because it really does sound like American English to me, for the most part.