Notes I'm Not Even Sure That *I* Understand

Guitar line col bass in One Last Drink? (I've done this twice, once with the Blattocaster and once with the Les Paul. I'm not sure what I think of this idea.)
Additional guitar line in Mouseverture? (That's been done. See post above.)
Add rhythm guitar for Jabberwocky (I added one but it needs to be done again. At least one more time).
Breath at top of Jabberwocky (taken care of).
Check flanging in vocal of Jabberwocky (that was probably a result of a poorly understood second vocal track I think this is fixed).

Maybe we should make a whole album like Frampton's "Do You Feel Like I Do?"

via

I Am Such a Wuss

Today I had a dentist appointment to replace a crown that had a "screw loose". That's right, I literally had a screw loose in my head. And I canceled everything else I had to do today. And I planned to go to my parents' afterwards and curl up in a ball with a couple cats and feel sorry for myself. 

Of course, not only did the dentist not give me any Novocaine, I didn't need any. Why would I? There's no nerve in that part of my jaw anymore. So it was no big deal. 

Still. I didn't do any work.

Keys

So Vinnie borrowed my keys. And then promptly gave them to DeLisa.
Nobody gave them back to me.

DeLisa has attempted to mollify me with pictures of dogs.

It worked.

Lady Gaga

The Grammies. And the Superbowl.

OK, so for Lady Gaga, here are my notes: Have a dancer take your microphone when you're leaving the egg or when you go up and down stairs. Any time you don't need the microphone to sing in or as a prop, make someone else carry it.
Have a safety person walk you up the stairs. Don't worry, you'll look elegant.

Now you're asking yourself: why is the mix for Lady Gaga just fine when the mixes at the Superbowl were so awful? Well that's because experience shows. And they only started doing those halftime shows at Superbowl games a couple weeks ago and...
OK, there's no good reason.
Factoid one:
I can't imagine that the lead vocal you hear on that Lady Gaga performance is entirely Lady Gaga live. Because she's dancing a lot. Her dancers are winded. And you have about zero breath and pitch control when you're that winded.
That being said, we can imagine that a lot of the Superbowl Black Eyed Peas performance was mostly done with live vocal microphones. A little (or, at times, a lot) of autotune goes a long way.
http://tv.gawker.com/#!5759420/lady-gaga-hatches-from-her-egg-to-debut-born-this-way-at-the-grammys

Lady Gaga's performance could be helped with a dancer or two giving her a hand to pick her up. Walk her up and down stairs, open her egg, take her microphone from her when it's holding her back aesthetically. Someone like the girl who gives David Byrne his guitar in Stop Making Sense.

The Superbowl? You didn't have a professional mixing the Superbowl. Wherever they were it was TOO LOUD IN THE CONTROL ROOM. Those levels have to be way down. And don't let anyone talk to you on the IC either. When you mix too loud you just can never "seat" the vocal into the music minus tracks.

Drew.
Out.

Today's Doings

• Managing a flurry of creative emails about the storyline of the third act of Robot War.
• Sent a copy of Day 2 via FedEx to a distributor who might look at it and try to get it to Blockbuster. I'm afeared that we were too late about getting a screener to people to think of it as a mockbuster of Battle: Los Angeles.

• Working on the edit to the first act of Earthkiller. Added a minute. 
• Created the "credit block" which goes to our distributor for the DVD covers, etc.

All in all, better than real life.

Less is Better

You know that when the guitar player finds his attention wandering during a guitar solo, that the solo in question probably needs some help.
In our case, it probably needs to be excised altogether.
And that's just what I've done to one of the many, many solos in the Mouseverture. I chopped another minute out of the middle of the song. Don't worry, it was during the part that dragged. If you don't know what that part is, you'll not notice that it's gone, yet you'll feel the song is just better somehow.

I promise.

Why Can't All Reviewers Write Like This?

From a review of the Neo-Futurists' Laika Dog in Space.

People who would like the show are people who like dogs and people who like space and people who like borscht.

That's really all you need to know, isn't it?

Happy Valentines Day!

Notes of Clarification

The politics need to be simple. Humans battling A.I.'s is simple. We just have to figure out how they get into this Facility -- why isn't it better guarded by robots? 

This might be easy. Maybe the A.I. in Yonkers (Alice) made a deal with the humans in the Free Union to build robots for them. So they Union sent scientists to Alice in order to build an army of the Yurra-type robots. But Alice was secretly trying to build a Foxwell-type robot in order to place her mind so that she could escape the Facility.

When she couldn't make a Foxwell variant, she killed the humans in order to get Foxwell to come to her. 

Sadie Eden is hot.

I'm thinking that the android variants are like the way chips work now. You keep making chips and some of them are naturally faster at lower voltages than others. With the androids they just keep coming out different rather than faster or slower. 

David Frey, Hero of the People

Dollygrippery talks about dollies and sound. Personally, I think that the grip department should carry its own little rugs and such to set the dolly on.
The issue he talks about never hearing what the set actually sounds like 'till the first take is one that comes up all the dang time. Sets are noisy 'till you call "roll sound".

The Rostronics 6-banger florescent light bank looks very cool. If it were up to me, all light on a movie would come from either sunlight or lights built into the set. But sometimes you just need a big ol' pile of light. This is a link which originally came from Chance but I've just been looking at it, keeping that tab open on my computer. For months.

Our man on 8th Street, David Frey, broke the third act of "1101". Ironically, in the email he sent which broke it, he said it would work the way I'd originally ended it at page 60. But he suggested we "Predator" the movie a bit more. So we're moving the Big Bad to the very end to get killed.

Frederick Leighton.

I'm feeling Boared.

Ha! I slay me.

Royalty-free is a royalty-free music house. I don't know why I have that link open on my computer but now it's in this blog.
Composer John Mackey on self-publishing music.
Here's an article about indy music labels in NYC in 2007.
Lansing-Dreiden is, or was, on one of those labels. Kemado.
There's also Nublu.

The Windup Girl

So I just finished Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl and it's pretty brilliant.
I'm reading the acknowledgments and right up there at the top is a thanks to Daniel Spector.
Well there's only one Daniel Spector that I'd ever heard of and he was a childhood friend of mine from about the 7th or 8th grade through 10th grade (when he moved to California.)

And I checked with Daniel (the Internet lets old school chums get back in touch you know) and indeed, it is he who is thanked.

I have a very specific and formative memory of Daniel Spector. He and I would have been about 11? 12 maybe? And we were in the band room in middle school sitting next to one another. We were both playing brass instruments, Daniel seems to think that by that point I was playing a Sousaphone although I could very well have been on valve trombone.
And Daniel leaned over to say something conspiratorial to me, as 12-year-olds often to. And doing so he put his arm around me so he could lean in.
And I specifically remember at the time thinking "That's nice, he has nothing against putting an arm around a friend. He's not afraid of this while listening to whatever he was saying." And it felt nice and comfortable. And, of course, no sooner had I thought that when some jerkwad immediately called us (or possibly just him, I don't remember) "fag".

And Daniel's reaction to it, in my memory and my feeling at the time, was exemplary. I don't know whether he flipped the other kid off, or just waved his hand in disgust and irritation, but he didn't let the jerky kid affect him.
At the time, and even now, it seemed to me like a very brave thing to do: to resist the merciless thought control of public opinion just to be human.
It was formative because I learned that there were some people who could be your friend and not be deathly concerned about how your friendship was perceived by other people. And that there's simply no good reason boys can't put their arms around one another.

I don't Look Happy

Playing with Pizap to see what I'd look like with hair on my face. Not terribly attractive as it turns out. Also I look like a Hollywood version of a Honduran drug lord.

This one looks the most realistic.

If I had any kind of rap career this is where I'd be.

Here I look ancient.

 Below are different mustache colors.

The Shriven

Brian Schiavo's The Shriven is available for preorder at Amazon.

The movie is also available in Japan.

Any Japanese speakers out there wanna tell me what the cover art says?

Again, the Japanese doing great cover art.

According to Google Translate, which I trust about as far as I can throw it, the Japanese title is "Whisper of the Parasite Species XXXX" or some such. Which isn't a bad title, honestly.

 The distributor is apparently amg-films.co.jp

Keeping You Up-to-Date

Rather than wasting Bandcamp's drive space with slightly newer and different versions of mixes, I'm just going to keep updating the mixes here. Remember that you can't see the widgets in an RSS reader.
Mouseverture

Mercury

One Last Drink

Ice Maiden

Arabesque


Jabberwocky

Narwal Song