Monday makes us happy, Tuesday makes us think, Wednesday makes us hopeful, Thursday makes us wink

[gurdonark]

I don't live my life from weekend to weekend, but I do notice that only five more days of work will lead to the three day Labor Day weekend. So far we have no great plans for that weekend, except an hour's drive to the largest flea market in the world, in Canton.

The presidential election remains fourteen months away, and yet the news commentary coverage of this election has already rendered it as banal as possible.

This weekend I signed up to make a twenty five dollar loan through kiva.org, which funds microloans to folks in the third world. If the loan "funds", then apparently I'll be a lender to a Tajik clothes retailer. I'm glad to participate in this very small way in micro-lending.

My favorite remix site, ccmixter.org, just added tons of albums by the ambient artist Robert Rich to its sample pool. I do not own much Robert Rich, but I am delighted to have the chance to remix those samples. This weekend I created a song using a sample from my nose flute, a foot-operated bicycle pump, a battery-powered toothbrush, some bolts from Home Depot, and my 25 dollar softsynth Sawcutter 2.0.

This week's song title at Songfight.org is
"history of my broken heart", for which I believe my song has the perfect instrumentation. I have until Monday morning to devise and perform lyrics for the piece.
My prior songs adopted that style of lyric writing involving really trite, obvious lyrics at a failed attempt at irony. This time I will write a long free verse piece that will sound remarkably like my weblog voice. If one is in for a penny, and for a pound, one might as well be in one's own way of doing things.

I still am not very good at recording vocals. I get the raw track down in fairly good shape but I am not good at processing the sound into the mix. I will keep trying to read and learn.

A fellow on youtube who watched one of my Texas hike short films asked me about places to hike near San Antonio. As I put together the information to send him a detailed discussion, I got a longing to go on the hikes I mentioned. If there were but world enough and time, this cloistering at work would be no crime, but I hope I get to take a few of those hikes in the larger world when there is enough time.

Comments

[trshtwns01.livejournal.com]

I am jealous you are going to Canton!!! I wonder if it will be even busier than usual because of the holiday weekend.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Labor Day is Canton's big weekend--more crowds, more vendors, sheer madness, great fun. I have not been in a long-ish while, and an even longer while as to Labor Day. I'm looking forward to it.

[vuzh.livejournal.com]

I still am not very good at recording vocals. I get the raw track down in fairly good shape but I am not good at processing the sound into the mix. I will keep trying to read and learn.

How are you using compression?

You ought to try ducking all or some of the music using the vocal as the trigger, that ought to help the vocal to sit with the music better.

An overall lightly compressed vocal track would make it louder and more present also.

I know what you mean about lyrics. I love singing, but I haven't been able to record song-based music in a decade or more because of my distaste for writing lyrics... and the difficulty of getting good sounds with limited equipment. It's less hassle doing instrumental music.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tips. I don't use compression as well as I might on vocals, which is surprisingly, as I often use it reasonably well on instruments. I like the idea of using the vocal as the trigger. That might be fun.

I love to write lyrics, and I love to sing, but my efforts lately do not spend enough time on either. I'll put it aside, for a bit, but come back to it when I am better able to get the sound I want.