New stuff going on in 2012

Gotta love it…mid February, sunny blue skies, temps in the 40’s….and a week’s vacation kicking off! Got the new keyboard (Korg microSTATION) installed, the B-3 program that Sweetwater cooked up for it sounds absolutely great…it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting for a very long time now! Planning to get downstairs and start work on a new Blues tune to really highlight that tone, as well as the new Dual Tap Delay pedal too. That pedal, when run through the clean channel of the Fender Super Champ XD with a nice touch of reverb set, just oozes presence….love it!

Speaking of new gear, I’m eagerly awaiting the availability of the new Tascam DP-24 – my venerable 2488 Mk I is still hanging in there, but there’s a lot of features on this new one that appeal to me….I believe there’s an upgrade coming in the near future!

On another front, I cooked up an Android app for Crossroads, which I’ve now seen in use on smartphones in Fitchburg, Boston, and Philly….encouraged by that, I just cooked one up for my friends in Str8 On as well – I’ve not seen any other cover bands advertising an app for their followers, so Str8 On will be breaking some new ground in terms of spreading the word. The Crossroads app is available as a direct download link from our web site, and I think the Str8 On app will soon be available at their website as well, once it’s been tested and approved by the band.

Although we don’t have any new vids of us working downstairs, I’ve added a few songs to You Tube with album covers and titles as the video line – Al suggested making use of the You Tube channel we set up to get the music to new ears, and so I’ve started work on that too. I think I’ve added about 4 or 5 new ones so far.

It’s been a long time…………

I can’t even remember how many years it’s now been since I sat down at a counter in a White Castle restaurant and had their burgers fresh off the grill….as a kid, I’d often walk or bike to the one near the house and pig out (which was an easy thing to do when they were 32 cents apiece!). Since relocating to New England in 1984, I’ve only had the frozen ones, and trust me….they lose a LOT of flavor in freezing and reheating!

Next week, we’re taking a ride for lunch….it’s 227 miles to Ledgewood, New jersey, where there’s a White Castle located on US Highway 46….and we’ll be arriving there at about midday, and it’ll actually be Anita’s first time ever eating at a White Castle restaurant. When I was a kid, their slogan was “Buy ‘em by the sack”….which I often did. Now, they have a briefcase sized case of 30, which they call the “Case of Crave”…methinks I crave a case of crave! Some Onion Rings as a side, and a shake to chase it all down…hell, I’m getting hungry just writing this!

Sometimes, you just have to do what you have to do, right?

ROAD TRIP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Crossroads Music

Well, we took a shot for a couple years, trying to go the indie route, but our shortfall is marketing….we can write and record good music, but the means to successfully sell it remains a mystery. When our distributor more than doubled the price to renew an album (to keep it available at retailers like iTunes) from 20/year/album to 50/year/album, it was time to get off the merry go round. That’s just too damned expensive to maintain the vanity of being able to say, “Hey, we’re on iTunes”.

So, we all agreed it was better to simply share the music with our friends and followers, lose the overhead and headaches of distribution, and focus instead on the simple pleasure of making the music….that’s what we all signed on for in the first place!

Crossroads Music

New Horizons Released!

We’ve been working on this album for a long time now….from last fall through this (early) summer, but it was worth taking the time to do it right…to revisit the parts that needed it, to put the songs on the back burner that aren’t quite ready yet, to not settle for “not bad”, but instead, push hard for “Holy Shit!”….

It was worth every minute of it….it really is that good.

Steve and Sean raised the bar, and raised it high…Steve’s drumming is better than ever, and Sean is simply insanely good, so we had to push ourselves, to play harder and better, and then to take all these great tracks and assemble them into this collection of songs.

There are two tracks on this album that deserve mention…”Eagle On The Wind” is an older tune that Tubby wrote back in the Country Fever days. Ed’s Dad passed away not too long ago, and Ed played that song at his funeral…he asked us to record it, and we were only too happy to oblige. At the time, I thought the recording was to be a personal thing for Ed, but he ultimately decided he’d like to include it on the album. I remixed the song in an effort to really bring the vocals and the lyrics to the fore, to really share that emotion with everyone that hears the song.

On the other side of the spectrum, there’s “Mwahhh”…this short piece is on the album by Tubby’s request, as he absolutely fell in love with it the first time he heard it. The reality? When I bought my fretless Jazz bass, I put this little thing together to test the bass, and how it records. I put together a short MIDI drum track for timing, completely improvised the bass line, and then added the piano afterward….it IS a jazzy little thing, which is fitting for a fretless bass with a woody, upright sound, but it was never intended to be anything other than a recording test…until Tubby heard it.

The rest, as they say, is history!

Do give it a listen, even if it’s just the previews of the songs on iTunes or Amazon….we think you’ll be surprised. Pleasantly surprised.

Sorting through the tracks….

Man, we’ve accumulated a lot of material over the past winter and spring….some 17 tracks in varying stages of completion. Some done, some nearly so, and some just begun. I need to sort through them all and get the “nearlys” finished, and then look at the list and try to come up with an order that makes sense.

In this day and age of streaming, it’s hard to change the old mindset of albums…a set of songs that flow in a good order, and support the overall concept, all while standing on their own merits. Think Abbey Road…Dark Side Of The Moon…Disraeli Gears…these are the kinds of albums that made me glad to welcome CDs…because you didn’t have to pause the flow to flip the disc over to the second side. It simply played all the way through.

I may be a dinosaur, but that’s my mindset when thinking of a new release…then again, I tend to think a lot more like George Martin than like Brian Epstein. I’m not much for the business end of the business, I’m all about the sound, and how I can make it better. I wish we had someone with the right business savvy to properly market these things, but the guys are like me…musicians, not marketers.

And you know what? That’s a good thing.

Rainy Saturday…

Well, it’s raining and raw today, but I stand behind my sentiment…there’s no such thing as a bad day off!

Today, I’ll be migrating downstairs to do some mixing…Steve added a couple new drum tracks yesterday, and I want to set them up properly, and seat them in the mixes. It’ll be a really good chance to do some real world testing of the new stuff…the headphones and the Focusrite VRM Box, which emulates numerous speaker and listening environments.

So far, the headphones have proven to be quite the asset…not only do they sound amazingly close to the active monitors I mix with, but they also block out a LOT of the live drum volume, which makes it much easier to monitor Steve’s recordings…I can better hear what he’s playing against. The true test of the VRM will be when I go through all the emulations during mastering, and then test the CD afterward…if I don’t have to go back and change anything, then the box is indeed a great timesaver and success!

                               

And so, the blogs will commence…….

Funny…I tend to write so much, both on our own website, and also on Facebook, that the thought of setting up a blog hadn’t really occurred to me before. Did I need one? Do I need one now? Hell, I don’t know…but let’s go ahead and give it a test flight and see what happens before we decide whether to keep it or not. It might prove to be a useful tool, or it may not. Let’s see what happens, yes?