Silber Blog

Had a few extra minutes, so I thought I’d double blog.

The mic shoot-out in the studio for my vocal between my trusty Shure Beta 58, a $2000 Neuman, a Shure SM 7, & a Sennheiser MD421 was won by the Sennheiser.  It looks like a cross between an electric razor & an old sci fi gun & while it does handle my voice better in general, it emphasizes my “s”s a bit more than the Beta.  Probably going to buy one to use at home (unless somebody wants to mail me one for free), so buy some Silber stuff so I have the extra $300 to get it.

Trying to get some more of the MySpace promo campaign done during the downtime I’ve got.  I just finished sending out the messages for Rivulets & started working on the Remora campaign.

I want to try to do a photoshoot called “Lilly’s Hair Club for Men” where I take the hair that this cat Lilly is shedding & work it into my shaved head for comedic results, but unfortunately I think I got most of the hair she’s shedding for doing it as a onetime joke….

Two Recent Pet Peeves:
If you are going to invite me to a Facebook event & the venue is really somebody’s house, it should mention that in the description & it also should have the address.  Also, if you live more than 50 miles away from me you should never invite me to anything unless your going to advance me airfare.

If you are going to be in a touring band & live in a van you really shouldn’t own a dog.  If you live in a van & own a dog to protect your equipment, it probably shouldn’t be a six month old beagle.  If your guard puppy is hanging its head out of the van window during your show & somebody starts petting it, you shouldn’t run outside & try to start a fight.  Especially if it’s licking them in the face at the time.

Rough first day in the studio.  Eight hours working on one song & it’s not completed.  But it is a song about the politics of war & Frankenstein, so maybe it’s understandable that I need to get it just right.  But I really am hoping to speed up the process a bit.  Maybe 8 piano parts is excessive for someone who doesn’t know how to play a piano.  & the vocals I’m a little torn on as there’s an angry vocal version that matches the music & a lullaby vocal version that I think adds irony & emphasizes the aggression of the music.  It’s interesting to work with someone else for sure as even when Jon DeRosa (Aarktica) or Peter Aldrich (Remora bass player around 2005) tried to help me record there were tons of me wanting to be the boss issues & I’m trying not to do that this time, which occasionally means me needing to walk outside as if I was still smoking cigars.  I guess working on the reality of not having control over all situations is something I need to work on….

I did get a little work done on a top secret recording.  I might mix it tomorrow.  At least then I’ll have one album done of the seven I hoped for in the week.

So last night’s show had some kind of technical issue & technical issues throw off my performance or at least my mood & makes me feel like I have a lousy show whether I actually did or not.  Some kind of weird distortion sounds coming from either my rig (I’d re-worked it to use my new POG on the demos, but didn’t switch the rig around for the live show, so maybe I had some knobs adjusted bad for the volume of the normal rig) or amp (I didn’t look to see if the knobs had been twisted in transit which is my suspicion, the Roland JC distortion is a little bit bad in my opinion).

This morning before going to the studio I am having some computer problems.  Pagemaker magically stopped being able to make PDFs again.  It did this a few weeks ago & then came back.  In addition, because my computer is old, I couldn’t get it on the local internet because of the security settings.  Being away from the internet for a few days could well be a good thing for me though.

Yesterday I listened to the demos of the songs I’m working on three or four times.  It worked out well as far as helping me to get a different listening perspective & being able to say, I need to change a line or two in a couple songs.  I often wish I had someone that I could work with in a way where they could call me out on what isn’t working in my music & give a lot of constructive advice, but I’ve never heard anyone do anything like that with lyrics for anyone really.  I’m still debating about if I should do radio edits of songs to get swears out (I don’t really think Remora has any songs that say “fuck” in them prior to this album & this time there are two).

Spent most of the day trying to get some things ready for going to Myrtle Beach tomorrow to start recording.  I think I finally figured out the guitar part for “We Come from the Sea” (it was originally written for my project “The Call of…” (Lovecraftian based band done as americana instead of metal with a male & female vocal & instrumentation of acoustic guitar, accordion, & percussion) that never took off & it’s all twelve string guitar strum so it mainly just sounds like a big wall of strings) & I wrote guitar parts for “Peanut Butter Cup” & “Close Enough to God.”  The possibility for this week is recording a total of two Remora albums, two Small Life Form albums, an Electric Bird Noise versus Remora album, an Electric Bird Noise album, & a Jazzus Priest album as well as mixing down two other albums.  Which would mean completing more than an album a day.  Which is kinda pushing the realm of possibility pretty hard, but I think three could happen.  It all depends on how the more precision & fully realized style of Brian McKenzie molds well with the primitive & minimalist style of Brian John Mitchell.

I still need to pack everything.  & I suppose it’s going to be on the cusp as far as fitting everything in my car as I need to take down four guitars, two keyboards, two amps, & a bunch of other junk.

Did some scanning in for trying to improve the artwork on a few of the older digital downloads in the back catalog.  The problem is the scanner picks up the registration dots when I scan it in to be the proper size.  So it is still going to look less than ideal.