Editors' Blogs

...to bring you a blog entry or three.

I'd like to start off by apologizing for my long silence here. It's been an interesting spring in many ways, and I've been chest-deep in the reason I never launched a blog of my own on another site: I've largely been too busy living my life to stop and write about it. But a nice confluence of scheduling issues has opened up some (gasp!) free time for me to get caught up, and to at least offer the hope that I'll stay more current from now on... if only by saying a bit less in each blog entry.

First off, I am now the primary (but not only) contributor to a Twitter feed for Recording; my username is "recordingmag" and you can follow my 140-character snippets of dubious wisdom daily (or as often as I manage them). Tweeting is way easier than blogging, but it's a bit harder to get into depth on anything...

Second, I frankly admit that the photos from my China trip were what stopped me from finishing Part 3 for several months; I went through over 400 shots to choose the ones that best fit my story, and had to edit and upload them. Sorry it took so long, and that it formed such a stone in my blog's craw... I'll have to do what I can to avoid letting blockages like that form in the future.

Third, I've been producing a pretty hefty load of music for one reason or another; in April I did a live show at the Fiske Planetarium as part of my annual mindSpiral concerts (more on mindSpiral in a future blog), and while my colleagues David Herpich and Darrell Burgan were in town, we did three live concerts on the air, two for StillStream and one for Second Life (yes, I owe you blog entries on both of those, not to mention on David and Darrell themselves), and discovered upon later listening to the recordings that in addition to the music we composed and performed for the stage show, we had three hours' worth of live improvisation that could be edited down to a nice album or two. That's a ton of music to get through, and I argue with David and Darrell at a level commensurate with my respect for their opinions (which is to say, very high), so it's been a long process getting it all ready to go. But it'll be worth it in the end, especially being able to release songs with names like "Split-Level Kiva", "Coda Chrome", and "The Ring-Tailed Lemur of Heaven (Tuesday)". Also on the way: a set of collaborations with Darrell under a new band name, two recently-released solo albums, and the audio from the 2008 Different Skies festival.

In amongst all of this success, there was room for abject failure, too. I recently hosted ambient musicians Jesse Sola (a.k.a. Numina) and Stephen Philips (who runs the netlabel Dark Duck) for a live concert from Subterranean Scumbarge. We played for 90 minutes and the audience was ecstatic over the quality of the music, as were we... until we listened back to the board recording. A mis-set software menu in the recorder activated a peak limiter over the incoming audio with its threshold set way too low, and as a result, large chunks of the recorded program were marred by unfixable pumping and breathing. I was heartbroken... all that work and fine musical output, lost forever.

I derived a lot of benefit from Stephen's and Jesse's reactions to the news: they both shrugged, smiled, and said, "We played a live concert, had fun, and the audience liked it. If it's now gone, it's gone, and oh well." Probably a healthier attitude than my moping over it. The flip side of that was Darrell's: "It was a great performance, and not all of it was ruined by the pumping. Leave me a copy and I'll work with cutting out the bad parts and seeing if it can be turned into something." Also a healthy attitude.

Fix what you can, and let the rest go. Words to live by. So... time for me to fix my blogging habits, and let the lost months go, I guess. See you on the Net.