Archive for the 'Main Finger News' Category
First off I would just like to say that album progress is going well and things are coming very close to the final conclusion! Things have been pretty crazy as I have people both moving out of my house and into my house in the same month!
And now for something completely different. I just wanted to mention I started an editorial gaming blog with Jonah of Random Pirate Comics and some of the folks at Gamer Time. You can see the action at WingDamage.com! We just started it last week and already have several articles up. For now, we are scheduled to have at least 1 article about every other day. It’s not a news site, it’s more about opinions and articles. Though we might comment on timely news from time to time and put in our 2 cents. Enjoy!
I have a goal and that goal is to get Mode 7, my album that has taken 5 times as long as any previous album to actually release, ready to go by the start of February. I know I’ve had goals before that weren’t met, but trust me that was for the best. For example, this album got a huge delay when I stopped to read a sound engineering book, but the album wouldn’t have been the same without it. Trust me, it IS coming! And soon! In fact, I just knocked another song into the done pile this very night.
Also it should be mentioned that in the near future I will have a much fancier looking dynamic php site instead of the cruddy old html one that is currently up. I’d like to have that up with the new album, but I’m not going to make any promises.
I’m going to be at Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle again this year (errrr, 2009 i guess), which if my memory serves me right starts April 4th. Random Pirate Comics will have 2 tables this year and I will be at one of them. I’m going to have some actual physical copies of my album there. I can’t sell them cuz of a few James Brown samples I used, but it’s quite possible I could have some other merch to sell and give away free cds with them. Or ya know… if you just come up and say you want one I’m sure we could work something out 
I should also mention we just recorded another podcast, though we had to go back to doing it over skype because there is over a foot of snow all around us so nobody can seem to leave the house, myself included. The newest episode isn’t actually up yet as I type this, but I imagine Jonah will have it up within a day or 2. That’s all for now!
EDIT: When the newest episode is up it will be number 22.
It’s been a long time since I posted so I figure I am due. Couple of things… NaaB did work on another DoD song, but complications led it to be not submitted on time. So we do have another song made, but we won’t be releasing it yet. We’re going to polish it up more since there is no longer a strict deadline on it. But we aren’t letting that late submission get us down in fact we plan to DoD again in the very near future, so look out!
On another note, I might be doing a collaboration as sort of a producer role with Ganymede Radio, but he’s living in the Dominican Republic these days and we’re having some technical difficulties with our different operating systems and what not. But if we get it sorted out I’ve already heard 3 demo tracks and I am really liking what I hear.
And on a personal note, looks like I’ll be getting one of my wisdom teeth pulled next week. Fun times. Oh and I got to go to PAX and check out lots of cool stuff. Hit up the podcast for the rundown on that.
What started out as a mild fever and sore throat turned into an abscess in my throat. I was sick for about a week and in terrible pain. When I swallowed it was like swallowing a spiky basketball and when i wasn’t swallowing it was like my throat was on fire. It swelled up so much that it felt like the size of pencil. I could barely talk and even breathing wasn’t as good as it use to be. I had a very painful experience trying to eat a banana. I went to the doctor a few times and got a bunch of meds and now I seem to be doing ok though so things are lookin’ up.
I was able to add another song to the done pile last night. It always seems like this album will take forever to finish, but I actually was gathering kind of a status update and it’s not so bad. Turns out the overall remastering process is somewhere in the ballpark of 50%. A lot of crazy stuff happened in the first half of this year including a 2 month DoD detour. So as long as I don’t have a bunch more things getting in the way the second half should go much faster. Especially since the first half was so very research heavy. Lots of reading and experimentation really slowed the first half down. And the new headphones are making things go a lot faster too because it’s so much easier to make things sound right on a variety of systems (man, i’ve brought that up a lot). Anyway, things are looking good. I’ll be glad to get this album done and out of the way so I can start working on new projects I have on the back burner.
On an unrelated note, I got to finish off a collection yesterday. I was missing the box for Dragon Warrior (NES) and it just came from ebay thus completing my Dragon Warrior/Quest collection. I took some pictures to commemorate it. Here and here. I’m in the middle of playing through the first game and it’s a blast. It’s ridiculously simple. A one-man rpg. Good Times.
The con is over. Good times were had. Jonah posted his pics here. I went in not planning on buying anything, but sure enough I came back with 5 trades and a shirt =P I ended up grabbing the Hsu and Chan trade as well as all 4 of the Penny Arcade books (they had a sale).
I’ve been playing this game “The World Ends With You” quite a bit. For those who aren’t familiar its a Square-Enix ARPG for ds set in modern day japan. First off, I just have to say that it is definitely worth picking up because it is awesome. Second, it has this feature where if you set the game in “mingle mode” and close the ds you can rack up experience for your pins (similar to materia in ff7) with other players (even if theyre playing a different ds game wirelessly). In addition to that, anybody who you run into will have a shop where you can buy copies of the stuff they currently have equipped and when you do it will actually give them the money for it. So lucky for me lots of people were slotting this game during the con and I was able to rack up a ton of experience, money and rare items just from walking around the con while other people were doing the same. A pretty sweet system really.
I’ll be hanging out at Emerald City Comic Con tomorrow if anybody’s in the area. My 2 brothers that run Random Pirate Comics have a table down there so I’m gonna keep ‘em company Saturday and see how the con is in its new location. Geoffio will be there too, both days I think, but I’m only going Saturday.
I had kind of a scare last night when trying to remaster Passion. There was a problem finding my original source files for the song. For a sec I thought I wouldn’t be able to do anything with it and I wasn’t too happy. Luckily, it all worked out in the end. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s sounding much better. The kick is so much more punchy now and that is making a ton of difference.
I hadn’t felt like working on music in quite awhile but lately it’s all I want to do, which is great for album progress. The headphones seem to be a big help because when I mix on them things actually sound good on a variety of setups wheras when I mixed on my old headphones things only sounded good on them. This is making the mix process much less of a chore and much less work.
I spent another 4 hours mixing “A Timeline Eliminated” last night. I think I can throw it in the done pile, but I will see if I end up going back to it later or not. It’s so hard to let go of songs anymore. Nothing ever feels like it’s done. But I really like where the song went. There’s more variety in it and its got a much more professional sound to it.
Chances are the “Random Pirate Comics Show” podcast that I’m part of will be starting up again tonight. We went on a bit of a hiatus for various reasons, Jonah’s gonna be handling the mixing now which will be a big load off me as that use to take my slow computer quite a while to mix down such long files. Anywho, I’ll probably play the new version of timeline on it, of course it will be mono and compressed down to low-fi podcast quality, but you can still catch a preview if you so desire.
So I just upgraded to a pair of Sony MDR-7509 studio headphones last friday. It’s a bit of a trip. I can hear mid frequencies much better with these. It’s amazing how much these headphones make amateur mixes sound so much worse than professional mixes, but that’s kind of why I got them. They really help me to see the mistakes in my mixing and allow me to fix them.
I worked a bit on “A Timeline Eliminated” (my Chrono Cross/Trigger remix). It’s interesting keeping the balance of tweaking these old songs while still staying true to the original feel they had when I made them (some of which I made 4 years ago now). I had jazzed up a synth lead quite a bit and I had started thinking about whether or not I altered the mood too much, but I really did like how it sounded. It was much more interesting and so I kept it.
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