lowstring

Recently I have been exploring different digital download paypal scripts that would allow me to sell digital files directly from lowstring.com. I decided to use an open source option I found at bradsucks.net. Brad (also a musician) was nice enough to offer up a script he compiled for doing just what I wanted to do. You can download the script yourself here: http://www.bradsucks.net/projects/bsdds/. This script is pretty straight forward, but does have some bugs that I had to fix. There isn’t much documentation per say, but if you know anything about php you can figure out what is going on. Mainly the bugs were just some path issues.

Feel free to visit the new Lowstring Media Store and check it out. The store is a work in progress as I am still tweaking it, but it does work. If you have any problems with it, feel free to drop me an email and I will try and resolve your issue. Most of my songs will still be available via a free download, but I would appreciate that if you enjoy the music, please feel free to donate some money to the cause. If you would like to donate and not purchase a song/album then feel free to use the donate button in the sidebar. Money earned will go towards the release of my first full length album, which I am hoping will be ready early 2008. As always thanks for visiting the site, and spread the word!

This post has nothing to do with recording, but I figure if any readers are like me, they have large iTunes libraries that they want to share between computers on a home network. Yes you can just use iTunes built in sharing, but that requires iTunes to be running on both computers, and your actual library and associated files are still located on one computer. In my situation, I have my music files on my home server (which is running Fedora Linux), a macbook, and an iMac. I wanted my macbook and iMac to share the same iTunes library. I listen to most music from my macbook, but use my iMac to update my iPod. Confused yet? Yeah me too! (more…)

I spend way too much money on iTunes every year, but I pride myself on having the most up to date music library on the block. As you can tell from my Last.fm quilt in the sidebar, I listen to quite a wide selection of music as well. I download 3-5 albums per month (sometimes more), so much that half the time I forget what I downloaded, and do not get a chance to listen to all of the album. I am also a firm believer in downloading the whole album from an artist, and not just one or two songs. Chances are if I like one song I will like a few more. I am going to try and narrow down MY top 10 albums of 2007.

• Band of Horses - Cease to Begin
• Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger
• Joshua James - The Sun Is Always Brighter
• Wilco - Sky Blue Sky
• Brand New - The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me released 10/06
• The Snake The Cross The Crown - Cotton Teeth
• Circa Survive - On Letting Go
• Against Me! - New Wave
• Rogue Wave - Asleep at Heaven’s Gate
• The Shins - Wincing the Night Away

This Years Disappointments

• Dashboard Confessional - The Shade Of Poison Trees
• Jimmy Eat World - Chase This Light
• Sevendust - Alpha
• The New Amsterdams - At The Foot of My Rival
• My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade

I am fans of the above bands, but I feel based on previous efforts, these albums were weak. I give props to My Chem for paying homage to old school bands, but there is a reason those bands are old school! Maybe I am just too old for that record, as I am sure all the teenagers listening to that record have no clue what I am talking about. I want to hear something new and different, not something old done differently.

Honorable Mention

• The Used - Lies for Liars
• Avenged Sevenfold - Avenged Sevenfold
• Foo Fighters - Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace

Here is another tune for you guys. This song was more or less an experiment in trying to write a super simple song, but still have it be some what interesting. The song only features 3 chords, but for the most part I only uses two. I also was trying to get away from that folk acoustic type sound, and get more of an indie or alt sound. Lyrically the song is kind of out there, and actually is two songs combined, but hey it works lol. An interesting fact about this song is the fact that my cell phone rang while I was recording the main solo. You can’t hear the ringing, because of course the ringer was off, but you can hear how the cell signal screwed up my guitar at the end of the solo, and it actually sounded cool so I left it in. Drums are straight forward, recorded with the V-Drums via midi and then switched out with Ezdrummer. Guitar is my Strat through a Fender Blues Junior using an SM-57 driven by my Focusrite Octopre. Bass is direct into the Octopre

After my PC crashed, and I switched to Pro Tools I have decided to release some of the songs I recorded using Sonar as a Digital EP. The “pre Pro Tools” EP if you will. The EP will have about 5 or 6 songs, and maybe an unheard demo or two and will be digital only. I will have a series of posts documenting how I am going to release it, and where you will be able to download it. Stay tuned, and for now check out Had Enough, and some other music!

Had Enough
Music/Lyrics - Driscoll
Had Enough

Whether you are just starting to get into recording or live audio, you are undoubtably going to need to use a compressor on almost any project you are a part of. Like any audio signal modifier, you can use a hardware compressor or a plugin version. There are too many models, types etc to cover, so I will only cover the basics of a compressor, and how one works.
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I had another chance to check out one of my favorite bands on Friday; Brand New. I’m not a fan of seeing bands at colleges, because it always seems that the students are just there because “everyone else” is doing it, but it did seem the crowd actually wanted to be there and were fans of the artists. I missed opening band Me Without You (because I was late) but I did get a chance to check out Thrice. I have a couple Thrice albums, and also the Dustin Kensrue solo album, but I wouldn’t say I am a huge fan. Digging that Alt Country sound, I really enjoyed Dustin’s album Please Come Home, and was impressed at how much of a departure it was from any Thrice material to date. Still, I am an alternative / alternative metal fan, and was looking forward to seeing what Thrice was all about. The band to me, sounded very tight. Kensrue obviously can sing, and I enjoyed the show. They played a couple of new songs (new to me at least) and the crowd seemed to enjoy the show. I will have to go back to my iTunes library and listen to those Thrice albums some more.

On to why I was really there; to see Brand New! When you see the same band on the same tour, you are always assuming the set list will not change. To my surprise Brand New really mixed up the set list from the last time I saw them, playing a mostly new set, with some oldies thrown in. They played every song of off The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me, with the exception of “untitled” although the encore jam, seemed to mimic “untitled”. All in all I thought the show was great, and the sound was excellent. Sometimes gyms aren’t the best place to see shows for acoustic reasons, but the sound guy was on top of things and did a good job. They didn’t play many songs off of Deja, but that is ok, I enjoyed hearing the latest songs live. The show was stopped because someone was injured down in the pit, so maybe they took a couple songs out of the set list to make up time, I don’t know.

If you have the means, I highly recommend checking out a Brand New show in your area. Or better yet, drive your ass somewhere and check them out!

One of my first fears with switching to Pro Tools was the fact that I would not be able to use the 100 plus Cakewalk projects I have created over the past 4 or 5 years (yes I do have projects from that far back). Luckily for me I have always used Cakewalk’s per project audio files option, which keeps recorded audio in a project folder, instead of a general audio folder. This made my job somewhat easier (it’s still not painless though).

One of the first things they tell you on the Pro Tools getting started DVD is to name your tracks before you record! Recorded clips or regions will take the name of from the track they are recorded onto. So if you have a track named “Acoustic Guitar 1″, the resulting name of a recorded region will be “Acoustic_Guitar_1-01″ or something along those lines. If you did not name the track before hand, than it will take the name “track 1-01″ or “Audio 1-01″ …etc. You can see that if you had 50 or 60 regions or tracks in a project file it could get confusing if the tracks aren’t named logically. For some of my old Sonar projects, I did name tracks up front…..however some I did not, or I had a mix of both. So I could see that simply importing one region/clip wav file at a time, and trying to rebuild a project was going to be almost impossible, because in some cases I have 7 or 8 different clips/regions that make up one track. A vocal comp could be even worse!
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After 10 or so years of using Cakewalk products exclusively I have made the switch to Pro Tools. This decision was partly made for me though as my homemade recording computer suffered a motherboard failure. Being a Mac fan, I did not want to build or buy another PC. The only reason I kept a PC around was because I had so much money tied up in Sonar, and VST plugins. You are probably wondering why I just didn’t keep Sonar and run XP through boot camp on the Mac right? Well my main interface was a MOTU 2408 which uses a PCIe card installed in the computer. In order to continue using the MOTU interface I would have had to purchase a Mac Pro, which is way out of my price range.

So after doing some research, I found that all of the plugins I have purchases offered RTAS versions that would allow me to use them in Pro Tools without an extra VST wrapper (although at $99, the FXpansion VST wrapper is still a good investment, as there are many free VST plugins around worth checking out). So off to the Apple store to pick out a new computer! I ended up getting a 20″ iMac with an upgraded hard drive, wireless keyboard/mouse and 1 gig of ram (I will upgrade ram later). Now I needed a new interface. I have always been a fan of MOTU recording interfaces, and considered getting another 828, but that still would have left me without a sequencer. Enter Pro Tools. Digidesign has always been a hardware company; they make interfaces that cost anywhere from 300 to 10s of thousands of dollars. All of these interfaces come with a version of Pro Tools. In the end I picked a Factory 003 Rack system. The factory system comes with a plugin package that was enough to get me going, and connects to the iMac with a supplied firewire cable.

Setting up the interface and iMac was simple (there is nothing too the iMac!). Installation of Pro Tools LE 7 was straightforward but authorizing the included plugins was not. I have never used an iLock USB dongle before, and found the documentation was lacking, but after I figured it out, it is actually quite easy to use. Luckily for me the 003 comes with a Pro Tools DVD that is geared towards Pro Tools beginners. There are many cool things that Pro Tools offers, that Sonar does not, but I don’t have time to go into them now (I will save that for another post).

Digidesign does not recommend recording straight to the iMacs main hard drive. Instead they recommend using an external firewire hard drive (approved by digidesign of course). I decided to use a Glyph GT050 250 gig drive (which comes pre formatted for use with Macs).

My first impression of the 003 Rack was good; the converters sound to me much better than the MOTUs. I do however miss MOTU’s cuemix functionality. The 003 Rack cannot be run in a stand-alone mode like the MOTU. This is probably my biggest complaint with the 003 because I used to use cuemix to allow me to jam on my V-Drums along with songs on iTunes. Without a hardware mixer in my setup, this is almost impossible to accomplish. But this gives me an excuse to pick up a digital mixer now!