02023-10-27 | HuHeartDrive, Rain Music
Posted another track from Rain Poems to Backstage. It’s track number 5: Amaryū (for Ryuichi Sakamoto)
Also posted this little note about my new freedom to spell… :-)
Perhaps you wondered why some of the titles for the new album contain only lower-case letters, like dreamy afternoon for example. Well, Apple Music, and all the other streaming companies, want the look of their presentation to look uniform. They insist that all titles are capitalized. They will also change titles according to their style sheet. Thus my album Waiting n Swan was turned into Waiting ’n’ Swan. First they take away the freedom to lower case, then they make us conform to their spelling rules… what’s next? :-)
I don’t have to deal with them anymore and now I can write things any way I like. And that’s why the titles for music on Rain Poems are capitalized according to my whims.
02023-09-28 | HuHeartDrive, Music, Rain Music
Burned a CD of the album and am listening on an old and familiar system to check the relative volume of the tracks. Plus it’s a habit that is decades old. An album is done (or kinda done) when I have a CD of it. I remember listening to albums on DAT (digital audio tape), a prehistoric recording format, at home. In my car I would listen to Mini-Discs (a rather brilliant idea that was terribly executed by Sony) until we got a CD burner in my studio in the late 90’s.
The other day I thought it would be cool to have a 12×12 inch cardboard, which is the size of vinyl LPs, with the cover image on the front. On the back there would be credits and titles and a little foam button that holds a CD. Mailing this might be a pain but there should be LP mailers available that it could be shipped in.
02023-09-17 | HuHeartDrive, Performance, Rain Music
I have been listening to the 18 tracks I recorded for Rain Poems and love the way it sounds. Recording is done and mixing may be done as well, as I don’t hear anything that wants to be changed. Some of the tracks have been mixed a number of times while others remain an early version.
(It used to be quite the occasion to switch from recording to mixing because analog tape recorders have two separate heads for reading the tape. One is a recording/monitoring head and the other is for listening only. The listening-only head reproduces sound in a higher quality.)
We performed one of the new pieces in Seattle and in Beaver Creek this past week and it was fun to play. We may try to arrange other new pieces for the live show.
02023-09-05 | HuHeartDrive, Photos, Rain Music
I created my first binaural surround sound mix today. It took a few hours to set up and to create automation for the three objects (instruments) that I wanted to move in space. It’s a learning process I enjoyed.
02023-08-24 | HuHeartDrive, Rain Music, Recording
Fine-tuning the mixes. Listening, making notes, making small changes, listening some more. Switching between a couple of different speaker pairs and a few headphones. Oh, this is fun!
02023-08-04 | Rain Music, Recording, Studio
A few months ago I looked into audio localization software for binaural and transaural mixing. I downloaded two different solutions and ended up not trialing neither because I started recording again and when the muses visit you must not stop and you must not interrupt them. You do as they say and you say please and thank you.
When I received an email from Flux this week, about their 50% off sale, I took it as a sign and bought the SPAT Revolution Essential software for $199.
Once I am happy with the stereo mixes for the 18 tracks of Rain Poems, I shall begin to experiment with SPAT.
The summer promo of 50% off continues until Monday.
