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Talkie Talkie - 4.22.10 The time is approaching where I'll need to renew the website, so that reminds me that, if I'm paying for it, I should be using it. I still haven't posted any songs or any videos yet, as maybe you can tell. Progres is being made on a handful of songs though. I can't really post anything yet, because the songs are not complete enough. You'd have to use a lot of imagination to try and "hear" the parts that are not there yet. And for those of you with really good imaginations, you'd probably think up something better than what I'm actually going to put there, so you'd be disappointed with the final version of the song. So it seems that it is in everyone's best interest if I just post nothing for the time being. I did finally update the "Support" page, however. The Bulletin Board is up, though some of the links are not working. I'll be working on the website more in the coming week or two, so hopefully I'll be able to get all of it up and running again soon. In the meantime, head over to the support page and ooh and aah over the fancy graphic. Enjoy! Documentation - 3.04.10 I admire the ability that some people have to write down their thoughts and have those thoughts make sense. I didn't realize that I admired this until I started trying to write myself. Nothing too grand or verbose; just a simple post on the website to say what's up with the Outgunned stuff. Sounds simple, and probably is to some, but to me it's a painful process. First I have to come up with something to write about, and that causes me to throw in the towel about 90% of the time. It might be easier to come up with a topic if my Outgunned-related activities were more than sitting in a chair and starting at a computer screen for hours. It's difficult to make that sound interesting. Or if I recorded a part, what could I say, besides "I recorded the second guitar part for "song x". It's really cool! It goes 'Dun dun dun, meedly meedely meee!! a la Strong Bad." I've tried that. It doesn't work. The second reason I find it hard to write is because I do not put my thoughts the paper very well, at least in terms of structured sentences. If I am able to put my thoughts down, it is usually by scrawling thoughts and ideas on paper, sometimes with arrows pointing from one thought to another, or some of them grouped together with a box or circle. The more arrows and boxes there are, then the more cohesive the thoughts are likely to be. Writing doesn't work like that, though. It's linear, so you have to start on the first word of the first sentence in the first paragraph and more forward from there. Any information that follows has flow from and connect to the information presented before. It is amazing to me that people can write for a living because I probably couldn't write to save my live. If the evil ruler put me at a typewriter with the demand of "write a five-page paper on any topic in one hour or die", I would probably only have one and a half pages of incomplete thoughts completed by the time they feed me to the dragon. If he demanded an argumentative essay, I would spend the hour writing my will. Maybe that's why I like song writing. There is not a time limit, you don't need to speak in complete sentences, and you don't need to cover every aspect of the subject matter. Probably the biggest plus is that you don't even need to use words. The right combination of notes can explain something more clearly than a whole book of words. The funny thing is, that music can present a thought or feeling so clearly, but it cannot be translated to any other language. You can't explain that part of the song that was so moving or exciting to you. I've tried that too. It doesn't work either. The best you can hope for is that the person you're blathering to decides to give the music a listen, because it apparently made you so excited that you had to blather about it. One resolution I've been considering is to video some of my recording sessions and post those on the site. Then you could hear the songs, I wouldn't have to blather about the parts I recorded. You would all get to see & hear some of the progress and I wouldn't have to put myself though the agony of trying to write about it. I think I just convinced myself. At long last...Productivity!! - 1.25.10 I had a three and a half hour session last night, and it went very, very well. I haven't had a session that good since at least a year and a half, or maybe even the Vol. I sessions. The song in the works currently is "Through the Eyes of Mice", and it has been a stone in my shoe for years. This was the first song that I started recording for Vol. I, and it holds the record for times that I scrapped everything and started over. The song time has varied from 6 and a half minutes to 10 mintues, down to 8 minutes, up to 9 minutes and 30 seconds, back down to 6 and a half, and now currently stands at 9 minutes and 21 seconds. I think I'm close to settling on the structure of the song. Let's see if I still agree with that in a month. Of course, length is not the measure of a song's goodness. Every song has a "right" length, and it can take a lot of work to find that right length. System of a Down has some songs that are just slightly more than 2 minutes, and it works. Dream Theater has some songs that are 20 minutes or more, and there isn't any fat to trim. I have to say "right" in the "quotes" because music is so darn objective. Some people would probably say that 20 minutes is too long for any song. The record companies would say the "right" length is between 3:20 and 3:35. I say 9:21. At least for the moment. Renewed Attempt - 09.15.09 It's been half a year since the last update. That seems about right. I am really going to try to update this site more often. The operative word being "try". Yoda would not be pleased. This biggest news is that I am actually working on the website again. It has been "under construction" for 6 months, meaning I haven't touched a thing. But I'm semi hard-at-work once again, and the goal is to make it simple enough so that updates won't be such a chore. My main goal is to make new music, and heavy website updates demand time. I should probably hire someone to do the website stuff for me, but the coffers are empty, so I guess I'll keep truckin' it DIY. The first big news is that I am doing away with the sound clips in the audio section. I've never really cared for sound clips myself, so I don't know why I chose to use them. So from now on, "Vol. I" in its entirety will be available for free listening on the site. Check out the Audio tab. I recently received a new mic preamp, and I am very pleased with it. Bass tracking for Vol. II is under way. If I can keep up the current pace, you can expect an album release sometime in 2014. Let's hope the current pace does not keep. One Man Band - 03.06.09 I've been doing the solo music thing for a while now, and at times it gets overwhelming to a point where I consider reconstructing Outgunned as a fully-staffed band. Then after a few minutes of looking at musician classifieds online, I remember why I stopped doing that. There are tons of postings, and about half of them are looking for drummers. I should have picked up the drums instead of the guitar, because the drummer deficit / guitarist surplus is staggering. So I'm scanning the postings, looking for the keywords "drummer", "drums", or "percussion". Most of the time that I find these words preceeded by the word "seeking", which ends my interest in that post. After twenty or so posts, I'll find one like "drummer looking...", and it's usually from the guy who posts the same thing three times a day, just in case bands only read the most recent posting. If it's not from "that guy", I click on the post, and then immediatly look for the musical influences, often finding country, pop-rock, college rock acts, another definite kill to my interest. If its not one of these, then it's the death, thrash metal influence, which is not a bad influence at all, considering the stamina and practice required to play at full throttle for an entire song. However, every time I find a post where the drummer can play metal, that's all the drummer wants to play! "None of that sissy crap, just balls-to-the-wall metal, all out, all the time!" Or sometime of the sort. Then I do find someone who lists some of the same music that I like, then they say that any interested musicians must be a friend of Mary Jane. Fantastic. As for singers, LSD (Lead Singer Disorder, aka David Lee Roth-itis) is so prevalent with these folks, I just avoid it all together. And lastly, there's all of the other "me's" out there. "Guitarist/self-absorbed,self-proclaimed musical mastermind seeks drums, vocals, 2nd guitarist, keys, and trianglist who are fantastic musicians and have no opinion of their own." We are the Dave Mustaines. Not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it comes to a groups' longevity. As long as Dave is breathing, there will be Megadeth. In many cases though, this person cannot see their own project from the outside. To them, it is the next Sgt. Peppers or The Wall. And that's the carrot on the string. I've been there before, and the sad thing is, I'm still there. It's like Jamie Foxx's character in the film "Collateral." We have the dream of owning the limo company, and we're always working toward that goal, feeling like your moving forward, but it reality your just spinning your wheels. Currently, Vol. II is my limo company. Rather, it's my new limo company. My old limo company was Vol. I, which I built from the ground up and then sold off for a huge loss. The analogy has stopped working so well. Vol. I was not actually a loss, though I still have yet to make anything close to 1 cent of profit, so I guess in terms of finance & business, it was quite a loss. But that's the benefit of the next album, because you can take all of the frustration and push it into making an album that surpasses the previous one in every way. And maybe that one is a huge loss too. But then there's another album, and maybe it's a loss too. But then there's a fourth, and if that one tanks too, well, then I quit. But only then. 02.20.09 Diego, our fish, passed away last night. I guess we were as close to him as anyone could be to a fish. I've never had to deal with a dead fish before. I don't really know what to do with the body. I could flush him, but that just seems disrespectful, even for a fish. The other option is the standard burial. Six inches deep seems right for a fish that can fit in the cup of your hand. I don't have a trowel (aka hand shovel), so I looked around online to see if the nearby Walmart or Target carries them. Target has them on their website, but it apparently isn't a stand-alone item: you have to buy the whole mini gardening set, complete with standard trowel, skinny trowel, little tiny rake, and little tiny fork. I don't even know what the fork is for. Walmart was worse, because it didn't even recognize the word "trowel". It replied "Did you mean "trower", "towel", or "torel". I'll give them "towel", but the other two? What are those? I googled the first one, and the main result was for Robin Trower, who apparently is an English rock guitarist. The name sounds a little familiar, but after reading the Wikipedia page, I don't think I know who he is after all. I still owe Diego a proper burial, so I'll probably just borrow a trowel from my parents. We'll miss you, little blue buddy. 02.16.09 Happy belated New Year. I just got charged for another 2 years of hosting for this website, so that acts as a kick in the pants to update this thing more often. Nothing much new in the Outgunned camp. More recording. I picked up a copy of Sonar 7 Power and read a lot of it on my recent trip to Guatemala. Maybe I'll be able to figure out how to use this program before I finish the next album. If there's one thing I can never figure out, it's MIDI. I've done some simple MIDI files using the staff view, but when it comes to MIDI interfaces, drum maps, controllers and junk like like, I get lost. I like my meat and potatoes, guitar to amp to mic. Done. I realize that the capabilities of MIDI are pretty incredible, so I'm not against it. It's just too much for me right now. With all the possibilities that MIDI offers, I could spend a ton of time and money on it and still not have done much more than scratch the surface. On a somewhat related note, about a year ago I was looking into amp modelers. I only have one solid state, and I can't afford a good tube amp, so I read into the POD and the V-Amp Pro virtual amp modelers. After a bit of reading, I decided to go with the V-Amp because it was cheaper. I decided to buy one I found used because it was $70 cheaper than a new one. Well, it turns out I put $110 into it, and I didn't really like the results. The product is fine, but it doesn't beat the sound of a mic and an amp. And in the past couple months, the unit has been shorting out on me, so I can't sell it in good conscience because I know there's a problem with it. And I checked with the local servicer, and it will cost about $80 to get it fixed. So I would need to spend $80 to get it fixed so I could sell it for about $100. So I would have put $190 into this thing, so that's a $80 loss. Hooray for used gear. My advice, it you can't fix it yourself, don't buy used electronics if it isn't a super deal. It's not worth it. I hope the days of letting this website sit stagnant are over. I plan to post regular updated to this site and the MySpace site, so there should be more interesting stuff here from now on. Or maybe just a lot of rambling.

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