everything old is new again!

The initial riff here was written the same day I first jammed out "the wait" from the ep in June 2007. It was one of the first tracks I had organized by date and I'd been afraid to do anything with it for fear of sullying its potential. However, that's stupid, you can't learn unless you make mistakes. I went balls out and rocked it into a full fledged song. I like how it turned out.

Dope by werewolfmask

the haunted walkman, part 2

I needed to change my approach to everything. I had this analog 12 channel mixer since the beginning that hadn't incorporated into the recording process, and the 2|6 was by now collecting dust in the closet. I picked up some RCA to 1/4" adapters and plugged each of the output channels from the 2|6 into the mixer. In the software, I dropped the volume to "pretty low," and implemented all necessary high and low cutting. Everything else was jacked up, gained and equalized on the mixing board. It all sounded so good! Sooooooo good! Good in the headphones, good on the hifi speakers, good on your mom, good in your face. Good everywhere! The only problem that remained was that I had no immediate way to get it back into the computer. 

Trolling around on ebay, a cheap Fostex DAT deck from 1997 for $30 popped up almost immediately. It looked about as large as EIGHT X-BOXES stacked two deep, two wide, two tall. It was robosniped up to something stupid like $370 in the last ten seconds or so, which was upsetting, but inspired me to do some price hunting for a sensible alternative. As a video guy in college, the staff swore up and down on the virtue of minidisk recorders. So duh! I bought one on Amazon. I ordered it on a thursday, with an expected ship of friday. When friday rolled around, expected ship was still friday. However, as the weekend rolled through, they shifted the window to a friday after next through end of the month, which got me a bit spooked, cuz they already took the charge and I had no cash left over. 

I received the minidisk recorder in the mail that monday. The part number described the inclusion of a car kit, but instead I received a virgin collection of blank minidiscs, which was actually way rad.

I want to think the player boxed itself at the post office and was probably unable to file its own paperwork because it hadn't had internet access from inside the box. It has more flavor than two dudes having no idea how to correctly parse Amazon's complicated dance moves. 

I've been squeezing better and better sounds out of this thing with every session. It makes me feel like the Ultimate Warrior.

Here's a demo from the second ep, tentatively entitled "cyberpunk." 

The city above us by werewolfmask

the haunted walkman, part 1

I've been using Logic audio to lay down sick jams since spring of 2004. When I started out, I was running 5.5 on a PC, with an loaned Emagic 2|6 external sound card to handle my samplers. I decommissioned my extremely awesome PC and moved to the Apple platform in early 07, and by extension cross graded to the new version of Logic and dropped the 2|6. Sometime between 5.5 for PC and version 7, they stripped away VST support and added all of these channel strip presets (you know, to make the tracks sound instantly overproduced) and fucked something up in the rendering engine. Post logic express 7 everything I output was both too quiet and clipped unless I spent a long time tweaking the tracks before output. This on top of the fact that everything sounded great in the live playback. It was upsetting because I was comfy with 5.5's seemingly wysiwyg output and suddenly had to start doing things the technically right way every time. Flash forward to a couple months ago: I was closing up the mixing on the EP, but wasn't quite satisfied with the way the tracks sounded. The individual segments were so top-heavy that it caused my computer to go into fits whenever I introduced new note sequences. I eventually got it to not clip, but it was at the expense of being wayyyy too quiet. Like, itunes be bouncing around the library, make it to my stuff and it sounds like someone just nudged the volume down. A little. Just enough to be aggravating. Bullshit! Something had to be done. 

Tune in tomorrow or the next day for the excessively technical conclusion to this awesome story. In the meantime, here's a demo for ya. The song is entitled, "bad hair day."

Bad hair day demo by werewolfmask