Category Archives: Music

Another new song in the works…

I’m working on another song for my new CD. This one’s in the bluesy/funky vein, with a working title of “Bluesy Groovesy.” (Hey, it’s only a working title.)

I realized while listening back to this that it’s actually somewhat reminiscent of latter-day Red Hot Chili Peppers. With a sucky bass player. :P

This is just the basic track right now… it definitely needs something over the top… to, uh… put it over the top.

Update March 2, 2007: I’m now up to version 0.6; more details are on the CD page. Still needs some keyboards and maybe some sax or other instruments but I’m waiting for my MIDI controller keyboard to arrive (which should be today if the snow doesn’t keep the FedEx truck away again… they gave up on trying to make the delivery yesterday; Tom Hanks would not be happy).

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!

Take a trip on the “Morgantown Expressway”

The first release candidate (version 1.2) of “Morgantown Expressway” is ready. I have a rather humorous track of my almost-4-year-old son rambling on about light sabers and Pokémon, which he did directly after sitting in while I recorded the saxophone parts, and I’m still debating whether to include it in the final mix or not. Here, it is not.

Read more about the new album here.

Update February 24, 2007: I’ve tweaked the mix a bit; here’s version 1.4, which I think is going to be the final version that will make it onto the album.

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!

Busted by iTunes!

Now here’s something interesting. Apparently a (now deceased) pianist released a series of CDs under her own name that were actually identical to other previously released CDs by other artists!

I’ve had it happen a few times that I would put a rather obscure CD into my computer and CDDB would incorrectly identify it as something else. This is because their key to identifying a CD is the number and length of all of the tracks, which generally is unique, but of course it’s not impossible for two CDs to have the same number of tracks, and for their respective lengths all to match. Out of the 700 or so CDs in my collection, I’d say 10 to 15 of them had this happen when I ripped them in iTunes.

Usually the false matches are so obviously wrong that there’s little room for confusion, but in this case things were different!

How about a fresh Hors d’Oeuvreture?

I’ve continued to tweak the two tracks I’ve been working on for the new album. I just posted a major update to “Heavy Water,” which you can listen to here or on the “official” page for the album.

I also posted minor updates to both tracks yesterday, in place of the earlier versions that were there. I didn’t bother to draw attention to them though, as they were basically just tweaks to the masters.

In addition to the current projects, I have a 16:18 ambient track I recorded last year, called “1.618” (because it’s based on the golden ratio… the length of the track is a deliberate play on that number), that I’m planning to add as the final track on the CD. It needs some clean up back over in Pro Tools (because I discovered GarageBand buckles under the stress of loading a pair of 16-minute waveform tracks) and a new master. I got a new computer since I worked on it, and all I seem to have backed up are the Pro Tools project and an MP3, but no CD-quality mixdown. More on that later.

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!