I love these xtranormal videos.

Knocked another big item off my checklist of things to do this week – finished mixing the new Ol’ Bill Dollar album, “Grab Your Gun and Bring in the Cat.”  This is the third full length album from Bill.  Here’s a little taste of the new songs.

I was inspired to get back to work on the album after going to a discussion hosted at Drexel University with engineer Kevin Killen (U2, Peter Gabriel, Paula Cole, Elvis Costello).  It was a great presentation.  He brought along his computer with a Pro Tools HD rig, and opened up actual sessions to demonstrate what he’s doing.  His approach is so simple but so effective – get good sounds on the way in and you won’t need to be so heavy handed with plugin processing at mix time.  While he tracks through a nice console, he mixes entirely in the box, which is part of the reason the discussion was so enjoyable.  He’s an extremely successful engineer who’s embraced digital audio instead of being stuck on tape for the cool factor, or whatever else causes people to love tape so much.  I’ll take the Massey Tape Head over a tape machine any day.

Best wishes this holiday season to anyone who reads this.  It was quite a year, to say the least.  I’ve been looking forward to Christmas vacation for quite a while… I plan on sleeping as much as humanly possible.

Started working with Solas again, and I’m just about wrapped on their new site design.  The site is live, though there’s a few more nuts and bolts to screw down.  They’re gearing up for their album release in early February, and wanted to get a fresh look.  Though it took a while, it would have taken infinitely longer without WordPress!  On top of the new look and feel, the site sports tighter social networking integration thanks to ShareThis and other plugins.

The goal has generally remained the same: keep the design simple, modern, and easy to navigate.  For the band, it needs to be simple for them to update (which is why I chose a WordPress backend to begin with).  Thanks to the mobile WordPress apps for iPhone and BlackBerry, a quick update is a snap–essential for folks that hardly have a minute to sit between gigs.

And, looking forward to 2010…

Musically: I’m almost finished mixing the new album from Ol’ Bill Dollar, and mixes for batsupsidedown should be finalized in January (fingers crossed).

In the interwebs: I’ll be making a website for The Cascia Center set to be built at Broad and Ellsworth streets.  Prepare for a new media blitz.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, right?

There’s an interesting article on Tunecore’s blog arguing for musicians to use professional studios.  Now, to solve the “making money off your music” problem.  I agree with the article, but I must admit I’m a bit biased.

You’re a songwriter. It’s what you do. It’s what you’ve trained yourself to do through countless hours of study, practice and effort. Your songs are yours and no one can write them for you. In other words, you’ve become an expert at writing your songs. That’s how it should be.
Read more ->

Machine Gun Joe has decided to give away their latest album in digital form.  From the band:

We decided to post digital copies of our album “Worse Things Could Happen to a Man” for free download. So check it out and let us know what you think. Theres a smaller zip file of mp3s and theres a much bigger zip file of high quality WAV files, so take your pick. You can download them by clicking the links in the about me section. Hope you like it.

Download it!
Worse Things… MP3s
Worse Things… WAVs

I’m not one to typically get on a soap box about things, but I recently came across very good cause that’s been started that I certainly feel needs attention.  A large majority of audio engineers and producers work freelance, and most don’t have health insurance.  Joel Hamilton, engineer and producer out of Brooklyn, has started a campaign to raise awareness of this issue, and also to benefit producer Scott Harding who was recently injured very severely.

At 3am on Friday, February 15, 2008, music producer Scott Harding was the victim of a car crash, returning home from a late night mixing session. The cab he was riding in was broadsided by a stolen car; the impact crushed Harding’s T5 vertebrae, leaving him partially paralyzed. Scott’s condition is serious and like many dedicated musicians/engineers he is without health insurance and is facing very large medical and legal fees.

The short term need to raise cash in order to handle Scott’s affairs is very real. His friends and the dedicated musical community that Scott has long been a part of quickly united, forming The Scotty Hard Trust, a special account which will help to handle Scott’s financial needs through private monetary donations.

Joel’s campaign will involve riding his vespa from San Francisco, CA to Ocean City, MD in the Scooter Cannonball Run.  I hope you’ll consider donating whatever you can spare for Scott and Joel.  Please visit www.vespacoast2coast.com for more information and to contribute.

So it was finally time to paint the mixing room.  Moving all the stuff out of the room was an extreme pain, but it was worth it. No more of the strange green that was once on the walls. Now the walls are brown (“cardboard”) and and even stranger green.

So after many months of working on the two new Shadow Loomis albums (“Walkin’ Stick” and “Where Angels Fear to Tread”), we’re almost finished. I finished mixing “Walkin’ Stick” a few weeks ago and got straight to work on the “Where Angels…” yesterday. One thing’s for sure: having free time can be very beneficial when it comes to getting mixing done. Between yesterday and today, I got seven of the nine rock songs mixed. I made many conscious decisions to make the two sets of tunes sound different. Once the final two songs on “Where Angels…” are finished with overdubs and mixed, it’ll finally be time for mastering.

After mastering, the albums will be freely available (or for a small donation if you’re feeling generous) from Shadow Loomis’ website. This would also be a good time to mention I’ll also be setting up a new blog for Shadow Loomis to coincide with the release of the new albums, so look for that soon. Soon as in a couple of months.

Come one, come all…

Machine Gun Joe’s “Worse Things Could Happen to a Man” record release party/show featuring:

Machine Gun Joe
The Tundra Toes
The Beggar’s Son