July 5th, 2009

After Dustin left my house, I took a short power nap and then a walk to clear my head and think about this project, it was still too early in the morning for me to actually plug in an instrument and play without angering someone so I posted some want ads online looking for our vocalist. I’m still waiting for some call backs from a few people that I have jammed with in the past that I have left some of my gear at their places, namely my somewhat decent microphone and cable and assortment of bass strings (which will come in handy for me). I took an inventory of the gear I have, a jumble of cables that could short out soon, my electric guitar that I’ve replaced half the parts of, a bass guitar that requires serious neck maintenance but will have to do until my good bass guitar arrives from Virginia (which should be soon I’ve been told.) The two amplifiers, one a 10 watt, the other a 15 watt, neither of them in perfect condition, however one of them has the “Record Out” RCA jacks we can use for recording to our computers without using some fancy piece of hardware. And then there’s my meager effects pedals, which essentially consists of my Zoom 505 multi-effect processor and a few other somewhat useless pedals, there was a time not too long ago that my collection of effect pedals was quite impressive and very useful.
On my computer I have many music related programs ranging from Native Instrument software, Reason, FL Studio, Cubase, and a collection of freeware DAW software. One of these DAW programs is known as REAPER and is highly recommended. However after getting everything set up to record I notice that this particular program has some sort of problem and won’t save my recorded tracks IN the program but rather in the folder of the program, so what I play IS recorded, I just can’t edit it within the program for some reason. This is very frustrating, and the other programs I have are essentially useless without MIDI controllers and other hardware devices, I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to play a piano keyboard using a COMPUTER keyboard but let me tell you this, it’s not the easiest thing to accomplish.
Other software I’ve been seeking is a proper drum machine type program, something easy for me to use (which is a rarity) and preferably easy to record and mix with other tracks. I used to have an electronic drum pad that was bought at the local Meijer’s on sale, it was a simple instrument, four or five pads I believe but programmable to an extent, however I could rig it up to my computer and engineer different sounds using it and could plug in my effect pedals and turn it into an incredible sound making device. That too was stolen along with my synthesizer keyboards, amplifiers, effect pedals, and other instruments. It has taken me a long time to re-acquire the gear I have now especially after spending so much on equipment in the past.
New problems have now arose, both me and Dustin are starting to doubt our computer’s roles in this project thinking we might need to raise up the funds to build a computer made for handling so much audio work, or at least upgrading what we can on our current machines. I’m going to spend a few hours now writing and recording what I can and then work on making some sort of checklist of equipment we need to find and get an approximate cost. Believe it or not though, this project is starting out better than most of mine and certainly better than most of the ones that Dustin has been a part of.