Cleaning out old external hard drives is much more interesting when there are gigabytes worth of lost music on them. Just a quick update today to share some NotGrllBrush practice recordings from July 2014.
Catch a Star by Men at Work
Home at Last by Steely Dan
Too High by Stevie Wonder (into Home at Last)
You Part the Waters by Cake
During a visit to Narragansett in preparation for the Newport Jazz Festival a week or so ago, the opportunity finally arose to put my new M-Audio M-Track II to use.
My three year old son was looking forward to seeing Robert Searight of Snarky Puppy. He’s already declared that he wants to be as good of a drummer as him, and I applaud his (extreme) ambition. The Puppies tightly funk-jazzed their way through a handful of instrumentals in front of Fort Adams as the sun threatened to set. We capitalized on the energy the bands brought by playing some music of our own.
What better way to celebrate modern jazz than to learn a Led Zeppelin cover and adapt it for two acoustics and a mandolin?
I plugged the M-Track II into my Surface Pro (1st gen) and ran everything off of battery power. We gave Jim one mic and positioned it so that it picked up more of his vocals than his guitar. The second condenser sat between Steve and I, slightly favoring Steve’s mandolin.
So far, I have two concerns with the M-Track II. First, it doesn’t have any MIDI inputs, which the competing PreSonus Audiobox USB includes. Second, the Zeppelin recording came out nicely, but the other two jams we recorded had a hiss on the mic pointed and me and Steve. This could be due to a number of factors not directly attributable to the interface (too hot with direct sunlight? bad cable? bad microphone?), but either way I’m leery.
Hopefully I’ll know more when I get to record something else. Until then, though, Steve has a few originals he’s been working on that might get some drum tracks later this week. In addition, I’m still telling myself I’ll rerecord some Rama Ram Jat. We’ll see!
-Mike
Now that I’m off of work for the summer (ah, the luxurious life of a middle school teacher), I’ve started organizing my computers and music recording folders. I suppose after nearly fifteen years, my process was worth revising.
I’ve been working between two desktop PCs and a Surface Pro, and file management has gotten a little sticky with legacy files. Steve went with a NAS, which has been great for sharing wavs while doing long distance recording (some of the recent THC songs have been recorded this way). Currently, I’ve got a “Things” folder for all random nonsense and an “ACID Stuff” folder for songs that are in progress. Then I’ve got an external hard drive that has backup versions of these folders along with pictures and videos and stuff. It’s all manual and it’s all sort of a mess.
I have a few options. I could get a NAS or use synctoy to keep the external up to date, but these are either pricey or cumbersome. Why not let the internet do it for me?
At this point, I’ve got over a terabyte of space in my OneDrive account, and it’d be silly not to use it. The only problem I can see with this method is that the Surface’s hard disk space is limited. Should be an easy solution, though, since I can tell OneDrive which folders to keep locally and which to leave up in the ether of the web.
The next step is to get a small USB Audiobox so that I can record using the Surface and the AMD computer (which lacks the firewire port necessary for my 8 input Firepod interface). If recent email chains are to be believed, the band not formerly or currently known as GrllBrsh may be making a comeback along with the 90 degree days. Should that come to pass, having the Surface function as a live recorder would be sweet.
Anyway, while digging through songs of musics past, I uncovered one that I thought I lost in a hard drive failure a few years ago. It was written after a student’s mother passed away, and it not-so-subtly tackles the issue of longing. Despite some rough vocals and weird sound/mixing issues, it still mostly holds up. I had it labelled as Victor Frankensteins, which means I was thinking of working on it with Blonski for the Antimony album. That puts this track somewhere around 2010 or 2011.
Steve and I are still considering a release of the unfinished Steve Blonski is Go!, which could show up soon. I also found the old Rama Ram Jat recordings, which could be fun to re-record…
Until then,
-Mike
Devin’s a little low in the mix, and Dan’s face is a little big and hairy, but otherwise this live video we made turned out OK:
Still no band name!
-Mike
As mentioned in the previous update, there’s a new band afoot! After a couple of practices, several sandwiches, and a few extraneous bagels, we’ve got some fly-on-the-wall recordings of a few covers. No band name yet, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be Grill Brush.
As always, our real thanks goes out to those forced to listen to us work out harmonies and Purdie shuffles. Thanks, Julie!
More to come…
-Mike
