Duff Records

New film, new album

2011-04-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

Gavin Paddock and I worked on the score for JT Mollner's newest short film, Sugartown, a surreal Iraq war thriller shot in one long take. Post production is underway and will be wrapping up very soon. Look for it in upcoming festivals this year. The previous No Remake release, Henry John and the Little Bug, won Audience Choice and Honorable Mention awards at HollyShorts last year, and I'm certain this one will top that.

I posted a few samples from my Postcard album. These are still only demos but I figured I'd offer a sneak preview of what's to come. I'll probably be laying down the actual tracks in the near future once time permits.

upcoming show 7/30

2010-07-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

Well, it's not exactly a show--it's my neighbor Joe's birthday party but there will be an assortment of live music, Joe's trademark tortilla art, and a DJ. I'll be playing some of my new songs as well as manning the board for the other performers. If you're in the area, stop on by.

Friday, July 30th

BYOB

the capo changes everything

2010-07-16T21:40:00.001-07:00

I was playing along with "Thank You, Louise" by Ryan Adams (which is played with a capo on the 1st fret) and I realized "Penniless and Powerless" works perfectly that way. This would raise the vocal melody a half step, making it more singable, but what about that troublesome bridge? Then I realized if I only modulate once (twice is a bit obnoxious, no?) I can keep the entire song in my range. This is really good news because the original version almost spanned two octaves and that ain't very comfortable for me.

I made it a point today to run through my not-so-easy songs and it went pretty well. With that in mind I should probably mention there is a very strong chance I'll be playing some original stuff live two weeks from today... ;)

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Where Will You Go?

2010-07-14T21:40:00.000-07:00

Just finished the demo mix for "Where Will You Go Now, Girl?" I can't believe I haven't been using JAMin all along. Before, I was "mastering" by using some compressors in Audacity. But you can't tweak the parameters in real time. In any case, JAMin was designed for mastering so I should have been using it from the start. I guess I was just avoiding the GUI learning curve. Anyway, I think this means all the Postcard songs have a rough (very ugly) demo mix with vocals, meaning I can put these turds on shuffle mode in my car and figure out which track listing sounds best. Then it's time to get down to some serious rehearsing.

"The Spanish Civil War" demo mix

2010-07-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

I did a demo mix for "The Spanish Civil War" on Sunday night. I also realized I've already done the mix for "Terminal Blues" so that means "Where Will You Go Now, Girl?" is the only that doesn't have a vocal mix completed. This was the first time I tried using JAMin to maximize levels. It does the job pretty well and is similar to iZotope's Ozone, but I'm going to need to spend some time getting accustomed to the layout of the controls.

more mixing

2010-07-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

I did some more mixing for "The Spanish Civil War" on Friday. I wasn't too happy with the results so I left it alone rather than get ear fatigue trying to tweak it. But I need to remind myself that these are only demos. They're going to sound like shit by definition. I guess I'm just obsessed because I'll be listening in the car, and all the sounds have to compete with the engine and the wind leaking through the cracks. Must be the same reason I've recently been obsessed with re-ripping my favorite CDs at a higher bitrate. I've found the following command yields more than satisfactory results, at the expense of slightly more disk space:

lame -V 2 --vbr-new <filename.wav> <filename.mp3>

No, I am not going to use joint stereo on these. I'm drawing the line there.

In other nerd news, the new version of the web site is almost ready. Right now, I'm mainly wrestling with IE6's lack of support for PNG transparency, trying to determine which hacky method is the least ugly. Can we just assume at this point that no one's using IE6? No...probably not. My co-worker's PC still has IE6, embarrassingly enough.

vocal mixes

2010-07-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

I made some rough mixes for "Gold Rush" and "Leaving the Party" last night. A few weeks ago I had gone through the remaining tracks that were missing vocals and knocked them all out really quickly. When I say rough, I mean rough. These vocals will definitely not be finding their way onto the web. But that's ok--the purpose of these demos is to get the songs into a fixed, tangible format so I can listen to them while I'm driving or to get some criticism from friends. I still need to mix down "Terminal Blues" and "The Spanish Civil War." Those are the only tracks left without the vocals mixed in.