Over the last few weeks I’ve finally had a little time to let out some aggression and put together a new song Day by Day and updated No Privacy. Both can be found here:

http://www.west-wind.com/music/anti-trust/showpictures.pho

They're P.U.N.K. so if you're not into into loud music don't bother <g>.

It’s funny how much of a distraction this stuff can be from getting work done <g>, but that’s a good thing once in a while. I’ve been too busy to make the time and with the constant traveling back and forth between here and the mainland the music stuff always gets put on the backburner or else the inspiration is just not there. Sitting down with a guitar after a coding session is not always the most inspiring experience.

I’m still struggling to master the gear. I’m using Sonar 4 and have a good handle on the software at this point. But recording freaking guitars and getting solid heavy and non-muddy tone totally escapes me. I’ve tried a ton of different mics with god knows how many angles and while sound in the room is pretty good, I cannot for the life of me capture that heavy yet crisp tone through a mic. It always ends up sounding really thin and tinny.

In the end I ended just running through speaker emulation of my Line 6 Spider amp which is decent but far from the sound I’m actually looking for (which is sort of super crunchy yet still clean sound of say old Anthrax or maybe more recently the earlier Offspring records).

<sigh> Recording is yet another mystical art you have to study forever to get it right. But what the heck, it’s the process and discovery that’s the fun part after all… If only it was figured all out so I could just pick up and go, I'm sure I'd be a little more prolific. Agh...

Then there’s the whole drumming gig. I was lucky enough to get my friend Chris Kontos (formerly of MachineHead)  to play with me for a few of the original tracks, which made life so easy even though we had only a couple tracks to record the drums on in our one day session. Since then I’ve been farting around with drum loops and midi. You’d figure I’d be able to work with midi, but drumming is just one thing I don’t think I’ll ever get <g>… well you can hear my attempt at drum tracking on Day by Day.

Hopefully this summer I’ll have some time to cruise up to San Francisco and talk Chris into doing it again. There are after all a few extra songs floating around now that we didn’t originally play together ( I ended up re-using some of the drum tracks ). We’ll see how it goes… Chris is a busy guy.

On to the next one…