RED WINE & SOLDER IN THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING

Greetings from Washington, DC where I am once again writing new material and recording new tracks. It's been a long, long time since I actually sat down and came up with new music and new lyrics but I've definitely been in the mood lately and the ideas are flowing fast.

After releasing "Sara" earlier this year I'm kind of over the whole Stevie Nicks thing! Don't get me wrong: I love the Nickster but it's way time for me to catch up on my own ideas and the things that I want to express.

I'm having a blast using some of the new software I bought back in 2006 but had not had time to explore. I was so busy trying to get "Sara" done that I never got to really sit down and check out SONAR (made by the wonderful people at Cakewalk).

I spent pretty much every night last week drinking red wine and making minor upgrades and fixes to some of my studio wiring. Things get frayed when you're pulling patches and cables around during sessions and there were some connectors that had gotten crudded up with dirt and so on. So those were all pulled apart and everything was re-soldered. (Solder, for those who don't know, is a metallic material which is heated with a soldering iron and used to join wires together---that's the simple definition.) And I do love the smell of solder in the wee hours of the morning!

So, after making repairs I settled down to recording some rough tracks and laying down crude test vocals---in an effort to get comfortable with the new programs. The fact that I am working totally in a digital world these days makes things sound SO clear that it almost freaks me out sometimes. The mic preamp I'm using now is so pristine that I have to EQ it down a little! I actually have to kind of dirty it up a bit to make it sound right. Yes, things can be too good sometimes. And rock'n roll and pop music was never about being perfect from a sonic point of view anyway. It's more about the overall sound I think. But it is weird to have things sounding so good that they're actually better than I need them to be.

And I am amazed at the effects possibilities now a days. Back in the 90's you kind of had to put effects like reverb on your voice and record it that way unless you were using a big board and outboard processors. And that method had a lot of drawbacks. It is much better to record vocals "dry" with no effects so that you can change your mind later if you want to. And now I just click the mouse and turn a "dry" vocal into a "wet" one with compression, delay, reverb and whatever else I want. And it all works in real time. Of course, it helps to have a computer with 2 Gigs of RAM.

And if I wanted to cheat and fix vocal mistakes (which I do not ever do) I could. There's a program built into the new software that allows me to adjust places in a vocal where I might have been off key. It works so well that I intentionally sang a few lines way off key and then applied the program and it really got me to laughing because it's like magic. It makes you kind of giddy to experience this level of control---even though I have no plans to use this stuff on my releases. You can actually apply this trick to an entire vocal track if you want and it makes minor "improvements" throughout. Tempting I will admit---but I prefer to do my own singing with my own voice. I mean editing a bunch of takes to get a good final vocal is one thing---but letting a computer fix your pitch problems is going too far in my opinion. But hey---Madonna will no doubt continue to sound far better than she did back when she started (when vocal processors were not yet invented). Ok, I'm sorry. Madonna does not fix her vocals. Right. For that matter I'm sure Britney doesn't either. But those Simpson girls are another matter.

I have a better idea: have some actual talent at singing. What a novel approach these days.

Anyway---I have no idea what I will release next. There's a lot of Delphinium Blue music out there in the world already so I hope that will be enough to hold all the fans over for a while. I wish you all a great weekend---what's left of it---and a productive week.

If you need me you know where I'll be: in the studio. PEACE.