August 4th 2023 Live Listening Party
It's been a very long time in coming but this Friday, August 4th I will be streaming the new LP in its entirety starting @ 7:00 PM Eastern (US).
The record will be released everywhere on the 18th of August.
Some small surprises for this Friday's live stream as well. So stop by Youtube and get in on some new jams and good vibes!
Subscribe to the Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tomvLQksP3Q
Outcomes
I’ve recently entered the dating world. I’ve met some very nice people and have had some genuinely enjoyable experiences with good conversation and seeing the city again after being so dormant for such a long time (thanks, but no thanks, Covid).
I haven’t dated in a very long time. It’s funny how losing 130 pounds will completely change your outlook, restore your self confidence and all of that self care stuff you learned to get here, actually snowballed into a whole avalanche of positive changes.
As I re-entered this weird world filled with landmines, inexplicable unwritten rules and some slight distortions of reality I figured something out. Granted, what I figured out isn’t original and many, who have taken a step back and thought critically about healthy dating, have also discovered that most people approach this enterprise with a less than perfect understanding of what success can look like.
I promise this is relevant to music. Just doing some scene setting.
The approach in the dating world and this is evidenced by all of the dating apps and websites (I’ve joined a few of them) and the attitudes of many of those out here dating, base “success” on outcomes. Everything is measured and each person is sent through a funnel to hopefully be channeled into a predefined outcome.
What I’ve discovered for myself is that this might not be optimal (or even healthy). What I’ve come to believe is that the experience, the act of meeting a new person, putting in the effort, learning about this person, living in that moment, having that experience is what I consider the “success.” The experience is why, not hoping or expecting any sort of outcome.
Now music. Making music, and more to the point, putting out music is just like dating. You’ve put in the effort, you dressed up, you picked a nice place to go and then what? You’re shuttled into a funnel now, hoping to come out the other side into a nice cozy outcome that you can easily identify, measure and label as a success or a failure.
The way I’ve started to think about this, and I’ve always thought this but was never the center of my brain, that what I am truly passionate about is making this music and part of that passion is putting it out into the world. The experience of composing, performing, editing, mixing and publishing a release is the actual reward. I still do find myself getting caught up in thinking about outcomes and have discovered that when I notice myself considering the properties of outcomes, like the other week I was super proud that I hit a number of followers on Spotify. However, after sharing that metric with some friends I actually snapped back and realized, “wait, that actually felt pretty empty.”
What doesn’t feel empty is sitting with a guitar and just starting to make a noise. Then having that noise slowly get shaped into something that resembles a song. Walking into a recording studio and setting up a drum kit and then sitting down on the stool and putting the headphones on and then hearing the click track start, clutching my drum sticks, with that smell recording studios all have. That silicone electrical insulation smell, I love it. I wish they made a recording studio scented candle.
That feeling of reaching the end of a mix (which is usually achieved when there is no more damage you can possibly do to your song! Ok that’s mostly a joke, and if you’ve ever mixed anything you probably can appreciate more than just the joke here)
The relief and sense of accomplishment when your finished and mastered record is uploaded and all of the work and effort you put into it has reached an actual finish line. You did it. That’s the real success.
Letting go of the expectation that any one will listen, that any sort of outcome will materialize is really quite liberating. I am free from fear and regret and care what the world may think of my work because I’ve allowed myself to have the experience of making it and that is all I want from it.
I don’t practice music so that I can achieve an outcome, I practice music because I get to practice.
And with dating, like in music, should I find someone with whom I have a connection with, then that would be a happy thing, but I practice not setting that (or any) expectation. If someone listens to a song I made, then I am happy that I’ve made something someone else can appreciate. Connection formed.
Live Streams
To very little, well to be perfectly honest, no, fanfare, I’ve started doing the live streams on Twitch.
It’s been interesting, fun, a little jarring, educational and also frustrating and not without moments of real cringe. But hey, this is the internet. Par for the course really.
So far the schedule has been Tuesday and Friday nights at 7:00 PM Eastern (US). I’m trying to be more interactive, but mostly it’s just me taking fragments of songs I’ve written and blowing them out into mostly improvised 15 minute epics.
Not much of an audience right now, but I’ll keep at it, because it as actually fun and i’m getting a ton of ideas for an upcoming record I’ve started. This venue just gives me something I lack when I’m writing, that just “go for it” perspective. Don’t think too much about what’s going on, and just play.
The Story Behind "Transformation..."
Everything I've put out previously have mostly "moments in time" almost journal entries, just in music. Which isn't to say that each release and each song doesn't mean something, they've always been written from a perspective of observations and a way to just express the thoughts and feelings about those observations into a song.
And i do realize how stuffy and arrogant that sounds, maybe just to simplify that is to say, the songs i write are snapshots of a time.
"Transformation as a Survival Tactic" is a bit different. This is the EP that released on August 20th 2021 (the day this is published) and I wrote it as a way to chronicle a journey I started in 2020.
On May 6th 2020 I weighed myself for the first time in seven or eight months. COVID was rampaging, lockdowns in full effect and I tipped the scales at nearly 300 pounds. I knew it would be bad, but didn't realize it was this bad. I had a panic attack, that one day started this journey.
After I calmed down I went outside for a walk. On that walk I realized I had to make a change, I can't just keep on going the way I had been. But knowing myself, whatever change I make it had to be small and easy. So I figured it out, a bit. That one day was the day I started walking. Just 20 minutes. That's it. I made a small change where every day I would walk for 20 minutes.
Over the next many weeks 20 minutes turned into 40 minutes, and then fast forward to October, that became 60 minutes. I had lost a good 20 pounds or so. It was slow, but every few days I'd do a weigh-in, log that in my spreadsheet and i also started logging all of my calories. I also did something else, I started functional strength training.
That was very difficult, and I couldn't even do a single push-up. I could work out for about 15 minutes and i just felt like i was going to collapse. That winter, I started making real steps, starting to figure out how to workout, how to get at least 10k steps each day, how to manage my calorie intake.
Even though I would make progress, I would get so discouraged because my mind was already rewired with all of the small moves I had been making, but my body was lagging behind! This is where many people start to faulter, to fail, to lose their way along this journey. I would just start to picture the ocean, a particular beach i would go back to in my mind, and just let the waves wash away that frustration, the waves performing their function, washing away the all that emotional debris.
This journey isn't complete. I have a little way to go, but through just making these regular small changes, consistently over time, over the last year, I've shown myself a new way to live, and it was like I can finally take leave of the baggage, stop carying it around with me and i found the escape hatch.
As of this writing, I've lost nearly 30% of my body mass (that's about 85 pounds), I do functional strength training workouts three days a week for an hour or so, burning 500-550 calories a workout, average 12k steps in a day and it's been over a year now and through that first tiny little change, one small decision, that one day, i've come this far.
This EP is called "Transformation as a Survival Tactic" for a reason. I had to transform because living how i had been is not a recipe for survival.
Transformation as a Survival Tactic Pre-release Listen Party
On Friday, August 6th, I’ll be streaming the new EP on the Discord server.
When: Friday, August 6th, 3:00 PM Eastern time.
Where: https://discord.gg/JrUzatz
The EP will be released everywhere on August 20, 2021.
Stop by the Discord server, I’ll be payment more attention to that and I’ll just start streaming the EP in the voice chat channel (don’t worry, you’ll be muted).
EP Teaser Video
A short teaser video for the new EP. I attempted to post this straight to Facebook, but apparently when i signed to Sony Music Entertainment I forfeited the rights to my own music. (Spoiler alert: I did no such thing, and the SME copyright bot at Facebook has gone completely rogue)
Transformation as a Survival Tactic, update: Spring 2021
Just a quick update on the release window for “Transformation.” I haven’t had as much time as I anticipated to wrap up the production of this EP. Because of that I have to push it back a couple months.
I know not many people are even paying attention, but this is good practice.
I’m even considering releasing a vinyl version of this, which you are probably thinking, “But David! did you post what a horrible mistake the last vinyl release was?”
Yes, i sure did. I want to do things a bit different, change up the conditions, so we’ll see. I’m not promising anything, but just know that it is being considered.
Oh and one last thing, i mentioned not having time to work. That’s changing. I’ve been making some small changes to my life over the last 7-9 months, and one of those changes, is a bit larger than small, but I’ve made it all the same, which will free me up to work on things I really care about. I’m going to write up a whole post next about what those changes have been.
Hope everyone is well.
Transformation as a Survival Tactic. New EP, Winter 2021
New EP is getting close to being done. Look for it, winter 2021. Four new songs. Released everywhere. Maybe vinyl? Possible. I will post a release date when there is one! Questions? Let ‘em fly!
Working On New Material
Yeah, no one cares. But I am working on new material. It’s not important, but there will be something come out hopefully before the end of the year, to make up for how horrible the last EP was.
I really dropped the ball on that last release. I should have just deleted it, but i get infected by hubris and grandiose thoughts that interferes with my better judgement (which would have told me to just not put out that last EP.)
I’ll try to make this next release not as cringe and pointless as the last.
Making Guitars Sound Good: Kemper Profiler
Trying to record and reproduce a good guitar sound, like all things sound related, is so much more complicated and difficult. I’ve tried every guitar amp sim/plugin under the sun, and to my ears and limits of my capabilities none of them ever sounds quite like the real thing. Every now and again I would get lucky and with enough EQ work get something I could live with.
Typically for real recording, I would record real amps in a recording studio, but that is very expensive, very time consuming and given the constraints of the studio there just isn’t time to explore. You really have to go in there with a very good idea or at least a plan of attack when getting anything done in the studio, very little time or tolerance for dottering about.
I made the decision to save up for a Kemper Profiler which is a pretty simple device in principle: you take a guitar amplifier, speaker cabinet, put a microphone in front of said speaker cabinet then hook the Kemper up to to the amp, and plug the microphone into the back of the unit, plug your ears or go into the next county, and let the Kemper zap signals through the amp, cabinet and captured by the mic. You can then save all of that data and sitting quietly in your loft style apartment with neighbors snug in their beds, you can blast in your headphones a JCM 800, perfectly mic’d and not be evicted the next morning.
That’s really the thing. Guitar amps are loud, and they only sound good loud (and by “loud” i mean some value of loud, greater than normal conversation decibel level) and when you are listening to a record that has really good guitar tones you are hearing more than just the guitar and amp/cabinet combo. What you are hearing is all of that combined with the microphone(s) used, the room that it was all in and the thousands of variables that go into creating the guitar tone you end up hearing.
That’s why, and this is just my opinion, guitar sims and modelers just don’t cut it. Yes, many are even modeling microphones and room characteristics, but the second you start adding some distortion, things go pear shaped. The sounds become inarticulate, fizzy, harsh and to combat that you have to do a ton of EQ shaping on that sound. I’ve come to believe that if you just start with a good sound to start with then you don’t have to do a lot of modifications after the fact.
Oh yeah and there are lots of good impulse responses out there, but even to my ears many of those just fail the realism test, and playing when using an IR is just has this kind of “fake” feeling to it. When you play a guitar with a nice tube amp, there’s a feeling to it, that “push pull” quality you get from the tubes and the speakers moving the air around.
The first thing I noticed when i hooked up my Kemper was that the guitar tone i heard was what I feel when playing through a real amp, there was no harshness, which is the first thing I always notice with amp sims, there’s always this harshness, this artificial “forwardness” to the sound.
The profiles I use have a very analog quality to them in that they are more rounded sounding, nothing stuck out, the tones were just all very well balanced. I wanted to put this to the test so I dug up a song I had been working on for a project. This project is a collection of songs I simply call “Loud” because it has lots of guitars. This was a good test because it has a bunch of clean guitar parts and then concludes with louder guitars, and not just a standard guitar (which for me is a Gibson SG) but also has a baritone guitar part along with bass guitar (I have a Fender p-bass and a Fender telecaster baritone).
With all of that going on it gave me a chance to really put the Kemper through a bunch of tests, and I have to say it came through with flying colors. I managed to find profiles from the TAD collection and the STL Tones Kris Crummet collection of profiles and took the original DI tracks I recorded and fed them back into the Kemper and then just recorded the output of the Kemper straight into Pro Tools via my Lynx Aurora 8 converter.
I did some minor EQ (using the Plugin Alliance SSL 4000J channel strip) and just a bit of compression as well, on each guitar track. Below is an MP3 I made from just doing this bit of testing:
I’m not suggesting that this is the pinnacle of guitar recording and mixing but given my past results with guitars, outside of actual amps recorded at studios like Q Division, this is a pretty significant step forward.
I am still learning mixing and how to work with guitars and drums and everything else, but when you have a good sound to start with, which the Kemper is providing, it makes mixing so much easier and requires much less fuss and bother.
Discord Server
As I said earlier I’m am not interested in social media. Twitter and Facebook are. horrible places where horrible people prove just how horrible they can be. I really want no part of that.
I do however really like Discord, a realtime chat server that was super easy to setup, and can go away the second if it ever starts to feel horrible.
I just created it for people to maybe talk about music, ask questions, leave comments, whatever.
Click here to join.
Mistakes, Failures and Missteps
Being an independent solo musician is not that difficult. You aren’t responsible or accountable to anyone but yourself and there aren’t other voices you have to take into account when making decisions or to follow a path (creatively, technical or business). You are an island and the music you make are smoke signals you send to other islands that are more often than not, missed or ignored. Such is life as an islander.
This is how I generally think of this hobby (lets be super real here, this whole project is a hobby, to think it’s anything more than a model train set, golf or HAM radio is delusional), But sometimes I get it in my head that it could be something more, like a real legitimate music thing(1) and when that happens I start thinking I may be able to build a bridge off my island. This is where I start making foolish mistakes, experience some embarrassing failures (to me anyway) and have enough cringe material to keep my self awareness finely tuned for years to come.
I just want to use this space to highlight some of my mistakes, failures and missteps, mostly because it’s entertaining for me, but maybe it’ll help others who happen across this piece.
First, the big one. My last LP, “(Re) Routed.”
I thought this was my “Citizen Kane” (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). I was so convinced of this that I spent an enormous sum of money to have it pressed on vinyl. Double record set, colored 180 gram vinyl, gatefold jacket the works. I had 300 pressed (that’s 600 records). I recorded it on one of Boston’s finest studios, even hired a professional string quartet to record two of the songs.
I released the digital and CD version of this record on a label, and here’s the first embarrassing thing. I was so excited for this record to come out, but the label messed up uploading the release so the date of the release I had been sharing on social media and in emails for weeks came and went with nothing. I emailed the label several times and never got a response. A few days later, i believe it was on a Sunday night, the upload showed up. I know and understand that no one really cares about stuff like this, but it was just so deflating that something I put my everything into was such an after thought to this label. I believe the mistake here was putting faith in a 3rd party that they would care as much about the thing as I did, which I understand is not fair and that’s why it’s my mistake.
How Many Copies?
Moving on, but sticking with (Re) Routed. Remember how I said I got it pressed on vinyl? 300 copies? Would you like to guess how many were sold? If you guessed about 90, you would be correct. I have a daily reminder of this in that the apartment I live in is quite small, it’s a loft-style apartment with very little storage, so every morning I get to see the stack of boxes holding some 500 records collecting dust. Every now and again I just feel like pitching them in the dumpster that’s right outside the side door to my building. Yes, pressing this record was something I wanted to do. Getting any vinyl pressed was a thing I’d mentioned, in public posts, a number of times in the past. So yeah, score one! I did a thing I wanted, now I have to live with the consequences of that decision.
The record is now over two years old, the vinyl is still for sale on the Bandcamp page, but I think the last time a copy was ordered was last summer (2019).
Engage Autopilot!
Next, let’s talk about record labels. I was introduced to a record label through a music publisher that at one time expressed interest in publishing some of my music. The label owner was receptive and we agreed to work together. The label has an outstanding reputation and is a good and decent label and I’m not going to speak ill of them in any way. But what I will do is detail a mistake I made.
My intent was to work with this label because this was going to free me up from doing all of the release stuff, the promotion, the distribution, all of that stuff and in exchange we split whatever revenue the record makes. It’s pretty easy, no weird 360 stuff, no advances or loans or budgets to make a record. I make a thing, they put it out. Easy peasy.
The problem comes from the fact that I had an expectation that the label was going to solve my promotion problem (I’ll get to the fact that I had no problem in the first place and that my perception was skewed, thus resulting in bad expectations). I thought with a well established label that an audience would just automatically materialize, with a few emails from them and poof, this thing is on autopilot.
This is not the case. This never happened, and after a couple releases something became quite clear: it will never happen. Couple this with the foul up on the release of (Re) Routed, I realized that I should not put any faith in anything when it comes to this music stuff. There are no magic bullets, no shortcuts and no one-thing-will-solve-a-problem-you-think-you-have.
For now, I am not looking for or interested in record labels. Doing the release stuff is so much easier and requires almost no effort now to get material up on every single platform and also costs peanuts to do (I used DistroKid on the last EP). And since I’m no longer interested in promotion or marketing of any flavor, why do I need anyone else to attempt to provide that service?
I think if I were more talented and my records didn’t sound so amateurish I would have slightly different opinions, but dealing with reality is far better than dealing with “what if.”
Hubris! Take the Wheel!
Here’s some cringe. Being so proud of (Re) Routed and having it on vinyl I took upon myself to reach out to a very well known and well established artist. I’m not going to mention any names, because it’s not important, but I did reach out and after several weeks this person was kind enough to respond and I told them how important their music was to me and how i made a thing and I’d love to send them a copy. They, being as kind as they are, agreed. I sent them a record and thankfully I’ve never heard anything back, and it’s been almost two years. I know exactly what I was thinking, that this person would listen and be blown away by my work and then talk about it, but that is not what happened. I try not to have regrets and in the grand scheme of things none of this even approaches anything that could be considered a Big Deal, but I regret that. So yes, more cringe for the cringe bucket. Yes, this entry here is a bit tongue’n cheek because of the classic Wayne Gretzky quote (you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take). But the lesson, for me anyway, is to make sure pride and hubris don’t hop in the driver’s seat too often.
Eh, This Doesn’t Sound Better, Just Different
Mixing. Mixing music is very difficult. It’s mostly an art with a whole truck load of science to back it up. Like most arts, there’s a craft to it, and you have to constantly practice that craft in order to “get good” at it (whatever value of “good” you want to use here). Typically, in mixes the “good” is a rather objective measure of your work against someone who makes “good” mixes. A good mix has lots of different qualities you can use to describe it: clear, good separation, measured and appropriate use of low-end frequencies, colorful (with intention), appropriate dynamic range (balance of loud and quiet), effective use of the stereo image. There are probably thousands more but i think this list encapsulates it without getting too nerdy.
Mixing is something i care about a lot. I want to be good at it. I practice it a lot. I go back into my old sessions, remove every single plugin (like equalizers, compressors, limiters, distortion generators etc.) and just do a mix of a song over again. It’s good practice, and I think I’m getting better at it, the material I mixed last year compared to something I may do this evening is pretty noticeable. My mixes today are clearer, less “muddy” have better separation (separation of each instrument so you can hear each one) and so on.
The mistake I’ve made, and made it twice, is to think that I’ve gotten so advanced in my capabilities as a mixer where I actually re-released two older records thinking that my progress was such that it warranted a whole new release. Even if that was the case, which at the time it was not, without any shadow of doubt, it was not, you just have to let the past be the past, warts and all.
I could do that with everything I decide to release, just constantly remix things because at whatever point in time I’m at things will sound marginally better. It’s foolish and stupid and I wish I had never done it, but now that I have, I won’t be changing it.
Faking it till you make it.
This is a common mantra of those who have not “made it.” After thinking about this a lot, with respect to this project, I cannot define what “made it” is. It is not my desire to do music full time. I think that would sap every last bit of enjoyment I have for making music right out of me. So, if “made it” cannot be defined by some monetary benchmark, then what is it? Audience size perhaps. Yes, that probably makes a lot of sense. And with that the cousin of audience size: people who care about what i do.
In the past I used to post photos and updates with whatever project I was working on, with some amount of detail, post short Instagram videos of clips of songs being worked on and especially when I would spend the day in the recording studio. Look! I’m a Big Deal! No!!! Stop!!! That’s too much faking! I am not, and this foolishness isn’t helping. People don’t have the cycles to care. They have enough going on to care about what a hobbyist is doing with their hobby. It is a mistake to think that people care. And by that i mean not friends and family. Friends and family, if you are fortunate to have them, do care, and that’s great. That’s actually pretty amazing really. But to think anyone outside of that circle does care is a waste of time… for me (as a hobbyist). For large, legitimate artists, doing that stuff is part of what you sign up to do because it’s actually part of the job description to keep the audience engaged.
As a hobbyist, that is nowhere near anything that i need to do. As a hobbyist, my job is to work on my hobby. Now again, my behavior in the past is not a hanging offense I believe, but it is pretty cringey. The lesson I take away is that putting myself in the shoes of others, to try to shift my own perspective helps level-off any false expectations I may have. Spend time and resources on the thing that is important and ignore those things that are not. As a hobbyist, engagement is not a primary concern. I’m not trying to move units, count likes or chase clout.
Alright, there are more examples, but this is getting long. I think what’s important to take away from any of this, if you even got here, is to keep perspective. Yes, things can and will change. Being capable of seeing a thing like a hobby evolve is a wise thing to do, but worrying about stuff that isn’t directly related to the work, as I’ve spelled out in a meandering sort of way, is just going to set you up for disappointment. Which also isn’t to say to take risks! I need to learn more about that and what that means, and that is important. It’s all just a balancing act. We’ll figure it out.
Try Hard
When working on a release there’s a big job, one that has nothing to do with writing, composing, mixing etc. Telling people about it so that when it comes out there’s an audience to listen.
It’s not easy, and 99.99% of the time it’s a task that has no positive result, especially in the music world. There are just millions of others clamoring for attention.
The other problem is that this task falls on manipulating social media, which now days is just a toxic dumpster fire of people trying to prove just how how horrible humanity can be.
So, given that promotion is useless and involves social media, I’m just not going to be doing any of that any more. I’ve given up Twitter, Facebook and if you follow me on Instagram, you probably notice i just share random photos that are really quite pointless, but I digress.
I’ve also just noticed something lately, there’s just too much promotion happening. This isn’t to say there’s an inherent problem with that, there isn’t, and if it works, then excellent, but it doesn’t work for me.
I’ve tried doing everything “by the book”; emails, Facebook posts, Twitter campaigns, released through a label, none of it actually moved the needle in terms of growing an audience. I decided that with this new EP, I wasn’t going to do any of that again.
When this project started a very long time ago, it was just me posting MP3 files then letting a few friends know about it and they would listen, and that was it. It was simple and easy and I didn’t have to spend cycles wondering how to promote this project to grow the audience.
Going back to a time where I can just work on the music, completing a project and then uploading it somewhere is really what I like doing, it’s where I find the most satisfaction (finishing a project). If people discover it, then I’m super happy about that and am quite grateful, but I just can’t see myself investing any more time, resources or energy in what really comes down to achieving outside validation for this project. I felt like a “try hard”, and that is a very uncomfortable thing, for me.
I will just continue to contribute to the noise and find the satisfaction of finishing a project and let the rest of everything else that goes along with making music not be my problem. I’ve got enough stuff on my plate anyway.
Hello From Quarantine
A new four-song EP, “Hello From Quarantine” will be released on all digital platforms on June 19, 2020.
This EP was recorded in my living room between the end of March and through May of 2020, and is just a way to say “Hello” to those who notice during a really difficult time.
I had been working on a bigger project and was preparing to go into the studio to record in February of this year. I had spent most of 2019 working on this project, but when things went south, I shelved this project. See, I enjoy going into the recording studio and tracking real drums, guitars and basses, but with the lockdown coming, I just couldn’t go through with it.
I really like the songs I wrote for this other project, but to do it right is to record it for real, and I just don’t know when that will be possible.
I didn’t want to have a whole other year pass without putting something out, so I came up with this. These last few months haven’t been easy on anyone and the best way I know to deal with anxiety is to sit behind the keyboard and fiddle with music. Before I knew I had a couple of fully developed songs and by mid April I had what I thought was an actual EP release.
I spent my vast amount of free time mixing in the evenings and completed it at the end of May. I asked the very talented mastering engineer, Taylor Deupree, to master it and well here we are.
I’m not promising this record is anything earth-shatteringly new (in fact, one song is a re-imagined older song that was released on “Miscellany”) or terribly brave for that matter. No, this record is really just a way to say “hello” to anyone who finds it.
New Website (Again)
File under “not all interesting” but here’s a new website, again. I just need a system I can update and not forget about (because it’s so impossible to work it). So yeah, new website. Super exciting.