Today would have been my grandfather’s 90th birthday.  Every July 10th I tip back a few manhattans in his honor.

When I was in my early teens I desperately wanted a pro synthesizer.  I had my Casio, of course, but I wanted to get into the realm of real gear.

There was no way, of course, that I could afford the eight or nine hundred dollars required to buy a serious keyboard. I campaigned tirelessly for that ultimate holiday gift, but it never materialized.

One summer while I was staying with my grandparents, they took me out to a few music stores so I could check out keyboards. I fell in love with a KORG DW-8000, and the music store sales guy even offered to throw in a few extra banks of sounds (saved on a cassette tape, nice).

My grandfather was very unsentimental, a career air force pilot and general hardass.  But he dropped the coin to get me my first pro music gear that day.  I think about him every time I play, and I never forget his birthday.

Happy birthday Pappy, wherever you are.

We mentioned earlier that our friend Angie created a video of her creating one of her cool pieces of art, and she used one of our upcoming songs for the soundtrack.

She dropped us a line to let us know that the video is currently being featured on Ovation TV.  Awesome!

Thanks for the update Ang.

We had a great mastering session at Ante Up.  It was a kind of “first date” with Chris Keffer, who was the mastering engineer.

Mike, K-Billy and I really enjoyed the session.  We were only working on a couple songs, so it didn’t last very long, but Chris was generous in sharing his knowledge and experience.  We talked about the mastering process in general, tips for Mike’s live bass rig, and the super-secret colors of Chris’s patch cables (you know, certain colors make the music passing through them sound better…).

After the session we compared the mastered songs to the unmastered mixes.  Sure enough, the mastered songs sounded cleaner and a bit brighter, and the mixes were just a little punchier.  One thing I really like is that Chris’s application of mastering effects (EQ, compression, limiting and so on) was very subtle. There was no over-the-top “make this song uber-loud” stuff going on here.

(where is my umlaut+u character, anyway?)

We’re trying to complete a few more mixes so we have a larger pool of songs to choose from for our upcoming release.  Having started the mastering process is really exciting, because it means that there is actually an end in sight and we can keep moving on to new material.  Woo hoo!

We’re scheduled for a short mastering session at Ante Up studios in downtown Cleveland.  Their facility is top notch (we cut drum tracks there this past December), and we’re excited to return there.

Mastering has always been a nebulous subject: what exactly are they doing with the songs? What happens in those magic pieces of custom gear in their equipment racks?

We learned much about mastering when we worked on our last release. Mastering is (if done well) very subtle but extremely effective in terms of cleaning up and solidifying the overall sound of the mixed song. It may involve some compression of certain frequency ranges in the mix, limiting, application of EQ, application of overall reverb, or some combination of those factors.  Mastering also generally includes putting the songs in their final album order and creating transitions or pauses between tracks.

We used to expect a song to sound completely different after it came back from mastering.  Now we understand that mastering will make the song sound cleaner, tighter and more “glued together”, but not substantially “different”.

We’re excited to be able to sit down with the mastering engineer tomorrow so we can hopefully learn more about the art and take that knowledge back here so we can create better mixes.

drunkdude69 has a last.fm page at which you can listen to our tunes and see info about the band. I also have a last.fm user page where my personal taste in tunes is displayed via their “scrobbling” machinery.

In updating some of our other online pages, I happened to notice that on our music page I appear as a top listener. I guess I don’t always turn off scrobbling when we’re listening to mp3s of mixes that are in progress.

So now in addition to being my own worst critic, I am also my own biggest fan. I think I may need medication for this.