the title of Will Straw’s fall seminar, also sums up my weekend. Three nights of movies (tonight will be War of the Worlds) , and many hours logged in the studio.
One thing tthat sucks about doing it as a hobby is that you have to do all the maintenance stuff yourself. I’d been putting off a software update and then got a notice about a week ago from Waves (they make software plugins) that I had to do it in the next couple weeks or pay (you get a year to do free updates when you buy their software). Actually, if I didn’t LIKE some of the Waves stuff so much (both sonically and in terms of very well designed interfaces, as opposed to “fake” knobs on a screen), I would stay away from them like the plague. They have an elaborate copy-protection scheme on their software (based on the expectation — probably correct — that lots of people will try to pirate it) which means that, essentially, if they ever go out of business or if I update beyond a certain point (new machine, new OS), I will no longer have access to the plugins I have legally purchased. I don’t use Kracks mainly because I want everything to work as perfectly as possible and I want tech support when I have a problem (it’s a hobby — I’d prefer not to have to tinker more than necessary), but Waves just begs for it. Their copy protection scheme essentially punishes users for buying the product legally. You can imagine that I’m pretty hostile to Digital Rights Management in mp3s, but that’s another story. . . .
Anyway, after all the maintenance and learning a new secret-weapon plugin (it was complicated enough that I had to actually spend a few hours doing their tutorial), I have “finished” a song, and I’m now planning to focus on recording for the next week or two to try and get this lo-boy CD fully drafted. Then Mike can have a listen, I can make changes, go get it mastered (time to acquaint myself with the top mastering engineers within driving distance) and then we decide how to release it.
Moving/Canada Day Addendum
Walking in the neighborhood Friday night and Saturday, we saw lots of people in the process of setting up or taking down a new home. In several cases, it looked like new tenants had to throw out objects left by old tenants: chairs, couches, beds, and even a few appliances. There is a new tenant in our building, or at least evidence of one — a fragment of a cardboard box outside our door, and the doormat had been placed up against the wall, probably so someone didn’t slip while carrying a heavy object up to the 4th floor. Desperation, exhaustion, abandonment. That’s why it was almost exclusively large objects and little pieces of things, and almost nothing inbetween. As I know well from last year, moving is the time when you consider your relationship to objects.