Hey all,
Sorry for being MIA for the past few days. I'm not in Ireland yet (we'll be driving to the Bay Area this morning, and flying out of SFO tomorrow). It wasn't the silly karma issues that drove me off for a while, either.
I went to ER last Monday complaining of stomach cramps - 6 hours later, I was diagnosed with a mild case of diverticulitis. Nice.
It was one of those things where the ER Doc on duty caught it early enough to treat it without too much issue. Essentially throwin... (485 more chars)
I don't know what I did other than say something in a blog entry that must have pissed someone off.
I'm a firm believer in speaking my mind without any one throwing any hate my way. I disagree with a lot of folks and some of the stuff they say here. That's ok. It's just the spouting of opinions. That doesn't mean that I have to show disrespect. And I'd appreciate it if none were shown to me, either.
I know I'm not the first person this has happened to, either. I can't recall who did t... (340 more chars)
Yes you!
Instead of sitting here pinning away, waiting for some dude from NPR to come by and discover you, get up off your butt and market yourself!
A press release would be a good way to start.
If you are on Soundclick, they have a partnership with myprgenie.com, where if you issue a press release and send it to MyPRGenie, it WILL get published there, and if you pay them a nominal fee, they can get it elsewhere.
Until the end of April, PRGenie has a half-off deal for Soundcli... (1213 more chars)
Angry users, brainfried co-workers...
Came home, had a shot of brandy, and had a frustrated ignored artist rant ready to go, just for your eyes.
Full of all the loathing, self-hatred, seething jealously, and full brunt of resentment that would be the prerequisite of providing such bile.
Then I stepped away and went shopping.
Then I came back to this and realized that I had forgotten what I was going to write about.
That, and understanding that I'm not promoting myself n... (390 more chars)
I've been following the Twitterings of "BuckHollywood" lately, and today, he informed his followers of one of YouTube's Featured Videos of the day - a young man daring users to describe their life in 6 six words as it's happening right now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOJO2wWtaF8
Even though I'm a bit old/not emo enough to do this thing, I thought it was a rather cool meme, and I thought I'd try it myself. So, with apologies to Bob Dylan...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ... (409 more chars)
Settle down with a cold one, kids, it's going to be a long one. I think. We'll see...
1. I'd like to thank artwhore and Tangmo in this forum review thread for their thoughts on my CD. Even though the opinions in it were almost polar opposites of each other, I found usable aspects in both of them - especially Tangmo's! LOL!!! :D
Hey! Some people feel you, some people don't. It's great to be felt. And when someone doesn't feel you, at least you can appreciate it when they have the teme... (3930 more chars)
My official press release. Everyone point and laugh:
For a limited time, Helen's new CD, Monochrome In Technicolor, is available for downloading from her official website, http://www.helensventitsky.com.
(or you can click here )
Recorded during the month of February as part of the RPM Challenge, this lo-fi yet lush masterpiece (ha!) comes in the form of 9 fully mastered, high-quality 128 kbps MP3s, a 12 page PDF of album artwork and lyrics, and a .jpg of the album cover, for asso... (735 more chars)
Hey all,
I received the last of my mastered tracks from songmastering.com. They sound tres-cool. I did find some more mixing mistakes, but I decided to keep as is. I'll actually get charged if I ask for any more mastering to be done on remixes, and I'm also anxious to get this thing out. Besides, the charm is in the imperfection, sometimes.
I'm also keeping it at 9 songs, so as I can TRULY say I recorded this during the month of February, and kept true to the confines of my recording s... (606 more chars)
Hello, everyone!
Sorry I missed all the parties. I wanted to go to the one in the Bay Area, but lack of finances prevented me from going over "The Hill" as they say here. I trust everyone had a great time.
Anyway, I had some comments in my last blog entry about the mastering service I used (thanks to the nice folks in the forum), so I thought I would reply here with an update on the service used.
Gumbo Stu is correct. You get the opportunity to listen to your recordings after they... (1541 more chars)
I am yet delaying official release of my CD once again.
On account of discovering, via this thread , songmastering.com.
For a mere $150.00, I'm getting my CD remastered by someone who's way better at bringing the shine to my recordings than I ever could. Sometimes, if you want a little more professional product, it's worth it to occasionally...just...let...go.
So, right now I'm in the process of "decompressing" my mixes, to give the mastering engineer assigned to my project some ... (365 more chars)
I've arranged with the good peeps at RPM to send my vid to them on a CD. Hopefully, it will meet their exacting standards. :)
It's a pretty silly mess, so in the mean time, I've uploaded an MPG preview on YouTube.
The, uh, video
I'm off to take a swill of NyQuil. Ta, all!
So one of the more recent mail blasts from RPM HQ said that they'll be accepting videos about your project until March 7th. So I showed my sick, haggard self on my FLIP camera for a total of 1 minute, 42 seconds, saved it as both a lo-cal mpg file and as a hi-cal AVI file (that fills their requirements...all 2.6 GB of them - YIKES). I tried uploading the vid TWICE to their servers. This is what I get:
Warning: require_once(/home/radikar7/public_html) [function.require-once]: failed to open st... (417 more chars)
Well, the challenge is over and done. And I think that, for the amount of time I spent on this puppy (as well as the health issues I risked from lack of sleep, coming down to the wire), and given the equipment I limited myself to working with, I did pretty damn good. I'm sure most of you posting in this space feel the same about your product as well. It's hard enough for professionals to put together a quality-sounding CD in 29 days time, let alone some of us amateurs! Anyway, if anyone c... (2622 more chars)
Well, the challenge is over and done. And I think that, for the amount of time I spent on this puppy (as well as the health issues I risked from lack of sleep, coming down to the wire), and given the equipment I limited myself to working with, I did pretty damn good. I'm sure most of you posting in this space feel the same about your product as well. It's hard enough for professionals to put together a quality-sounding CD in 29 days time, let alone some of us amateurs! Anyway, if anyone c... (2622 more chars)
Now that I've gotten some sleep (some being an overstatement), I've got some perspective: 1. It might be best to write your songs BEFORE you start the recording process, not during. 2. It would be wise to listen to your CD BEFORE you send it out to be previewed by the heads of the RPM Challenge heads. 3. Don't mix and master using strictly headphones. 4. Don't mix and master using strictly home stereo speakers. 5. Lack of sleep causes poor judgement. A bad mix is not work getting sic... (1515 more chars)
So, on Saturday I finished recording all the songs on my CD, then was up til all hours the next two nights mixing it. I cheated and used the Normalization function in the Nero CD Burning software. I sent off the CD to Portsmouth, NH on Monday without bothering to listen to it. After all, it sounded good on my PC, why bother. Well, I read something in the forum about the normalization in the Nero software distorting the songs. Sure enough, I had an extra copy lying around, which I then po... (962 more chars)
I spent the last two days mixing and remixing. I'm frankly so sick of this project that even the prospect of creating a cover for it kinda irks me right now. So what I ended up doing was doing a PDF of my cover art and lyric sheets and burned it into a copy of my CD. At the very least it's environmentally friendly. I've also burned non-data versions of the CD, for those who can't deal with PDFs on their CDs. All of which should tell you that I'm DONE, DONE DONE!!! The only thing that rea... (1007 more chars)
I finished my last song this evening. It's called "Ringed By Lovers". As you will see, it needs a bit of tweaking done. But an initial preview for your review, possible feedback, and even a chuckle or two. Download Lyrics Given that I don't have a lot of time left for the luxury of plotting extravagant arrangements, this song was assembled as a very basic, minimal, electroclash track. Again, I had these lyrics lying around, and, as I recall. I started writing while I was listening... (260 more chars)
To be truthful, when I started participating in this year's RPM Challenge , I was a little concerned
about running out of material and ideas half way through the month. After
Sheila and Mayron, I was considering whether to hang it up or no.
Then Kosovo declared independence. Yet another song idea! This tune is a
soul/trip hop kinda dealie (or an attempt at one), called "Taking Back
Kosovo" Lyrics
Download
Being that I'm ethnically half-Serbian, I was wondering if I... (2051 more chars)
Once again, I had some spare lyrics laying around. I finished them, polished them the best that I could, and set some music to them that I had been toying around with in my head for the past year or so. It's about a good friend of mine, and it's called "Sheila and Mayron". Lyrics
Download As with everything else in this competition, it's gotten easier and easier to put things together the more often you do them. So today, I was able to lay the guitar part down without so much of a ... (457 more chars)
From the latest blogs side bar: "Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends"...ah, SOMEONE remembers ELP. I took two days off from putting the CD together last week: Valentines' Day and the day afterward, obviously. On VDay, we went to a famous restaurant in our town, just to see if we could wing getting in without a reservation. Wouldn't you know it, the moment we stepped to the Maitre (sp) d's desk, someone had called up to cancel theirs. SWEET! Place was noisy - hardly conduciv... (1815 more chars)
As of tonight, I have five songs down. As I kevetched of in my previous blog entry, the going has been slower than I thought. On the other hand, the limitations I've set myself r.e. the composing and recording process has been quite liberating. Sure some of the songs may be borderline tacky, trashy, and the synths WAY too obvious, but every once in a while, you need to get that stuff out before you get on to the good 'uns. Anywho, here's my newest tune. It's called Alzheimer's. Having se... (480 more chars)
The process for me has been slower than anticipated. It's Feb 11th, and I'm only up to 4 songs. I either get easily distracted or the composition process has become a pain, due to the equipment I'm using. Also, I'm not trying to be perfect, but it seems I hear others with less sophistcated equipment than what I have and their stuff sounds better. WAY better? Not hating. Not jealous, but why not me? GRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....maybe I need to go hide for a while
Here's my latest song. Again, had the lyrics lying around, and rather quickly put music to them Download Lyrics It took me about three hours to put the music together, and I would have finished it yesterday, and my husband not decided that I've spent too much time on this project as it is, and hauled my butt out for a motorcycle ride. That and I wanted to watch Amy Winehouse at the Grammies. I tried to do a quick mastering job in Audacity: the equalization function kept giving me e... (377 more chars)
I took a listen to my first song of the challenge, and, no, I'm not the greatest singer in the world, but I decided that my vocal decisions on several aspects of my initial performance, and decided to 86 some vocal parts and do some more punchins. I decided I was trying too hard in the first verse, so I went for the more "subtle" approach. I got rather breathy on the bridge, and got rid of some of the ham at the end. Download What do you think? Better? I mean, I see from the latest ... (166 more chars)
I was home sick today. Stayed in bed until about 2ish, then completed, yet,
another song for that RPM Challenge: It's called Incident at Motel 6. Composed completely on my Dell Axim 51 PDA
and recorded on the Zoom H4.
As it IS my song, and it's kinda rough, here's a download ,
if you're connection's too slow for the preview. And I'll spare you the
exposition by providing you with the lyrics .
Before I burn this thing to CD, I'll probably have to tweak the drums a bit (a ... (188 more chars)
I've been having stomach issues today. They were bad enough for me to take
my last two work day hours as sick leave. I'm feeling a burning sensation crawl
up my esophagus and into my throat. I hope this doesn't turn into anything
worse.
Anyway, I took a two hour nap, cleaned house a bit, then finished my second
song for the RPM challenge CD I'm working on. I actually started on the lyrics
aback in October, and faked a bit of melody at the time for my vocal coach, who
is a als... (1079 more chars)
3-2-1-GO!
It took me a couple of days but I've finally put my first song together I had the lyrics lying
around, so I tweaked them a bit then put some music to them. It took me about 4
hours to complete backing tracks on the PDA on Saturday, and today, it
was two hours on guitar parts and vocals.
So, for those of you who care, here's the finished product, Because this is a family-friendly place, we'll just call it "It's You And Me", and leave it at that. Download
And here ar... (707 more chars)
Before I comment on the nice folks I've seen over at the discussion board, I thought I'd give you a link to another real world reference: Idolator post Anyway... I've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of cameraderie (sp) that I've seen over at this site's BBSs - no pissin', no dissin', just some light teasing over who finished what song (or what album) first, comparing equipment notes and the like. I've had my share of flame wars in my day (even participated in a few, I'm ashamed... (616 more chars)
Howdy folks, Just signed in today and getting my engines warmed up. As with many of the folks who came here, I found this place via a slashdot.org entry, and was intrigued, to say the least. I'll probably be doing a lot of my progress updates via my "regular" blog , but I do my best to check back here from time to time, should you not be able to handle the other blusterings in that rag. I also have a music blog where I'll also be posting my progress in the form of either an ogg vorbis... (401 more chars)
