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On the musical front, I had something of a setback in June as a vital part of my studio gear, the monitors (speakers) went on the fritz. I had to figure out how to get a power amp and whatnot together on the cheap, which took some doing. It sucks not having gobs of money, don’t it? Anyway, as it happens, this fit in with my creative pattern pretty well as I was at a point where I needed a break from the whole creative process. I do this every once in a while, a deliberate separration from the constant quest of writing and producing music. Clears the mind and replentishes the soul. A good thing to do once in a while.

Two weeks ago I finally solved the studio monitor problem (found my old NS-10M’s in a closet from the Some People’s Children days. An old power amp from Uncle Sam’s and Voila!) just in time to work with Kylewilliam on a remix of his imadethismistake album “Tomorrow, We Start New”. Seems that Kylewilliam has found himself a label through a new YouTube spin-off and he wanted to address some nagging concerns about the record. See, that’s what he gets for recording elsewhere! Anyway, he re-recorded some of the vocals and re-wrote some of the words to reflect the newer, more mature Kylewiliam. You know, he’s an old man at 21 now. But it was a good chance to get my head around these new monitors AND I get royalties this time around, so it’s all good.

Shawn Snyder and I have cut up all of the tracks from the live set at The Chocolate Moose that we’re mixing and releasing as a live album. The tracks are ok, but the levels are all over the place so it takes some time. We keep kidding ourselves saying we want to go all “Peter Frampton” on it and pump in some artificial crowd noise and re-cut some solos, but we’re playing true to the cause. Mostly. There are some things you just HAVE to do to get the sonic space covered properly, reverbs, compression, EQ and such. But it’s sounding great so far. The hope is to get it all sorted out by the end of the month and then worry about artwork. The photography was done last week with our buddy Big Tall Geoff whose architectural eyeballs captured the project well.

On the personal music front, well, this has been the struggle. I am torn a bit here. I have this definitive “George Zhen” track nearly done. It sounds great, but I have yet to settle in on a mix. I’m hoping to get that bugger out here as soon as this live project with Shawn is done. The other thing nagging at me is this concept I have for a project based around the sound of “Yuri Geller Spoon”, you know, a Brit pop kinda band thing. Not a real band, of course, but a band in concept. I have two other songs I have penned that are in this theme so far and I think I am going to package them all up under the project name “Starpilot”. That will be my focus for the Fall if everything else goes to plan and no monitors burst on me or anything…

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

G