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Month: March 2003

My First CD

I recorded the band last night. It went well. In fact, I got praise from Les. As I wrote a while ago, he won a grammy. So the fact that he praised me is definitely a good thing. It’s now a HUGE matter of licensing the songs for use, paying, producing, mixing, mastering, copying, stamping, and delivering. It also looks like we can produce no less than 1000 for financial and political reasons.

So my impressions of last night? The first two songs had feedback. Not a good way to start the recording. Maybe I can fix it and make it sound cool. That’ll be a nice challenge I don’t need. The rest of the songs went very well. Some weren’t as strong as I’d like but it’s no big deal. Everyone shined at one time or another performance-wise. Not knowing whether there would be enough room to re-record songs, we limited the number of songs to 14. There turned out to be enough room for at least another hour of music. So they re-performed the first song and I let them perform 3 more songs beyond that. We’ll see how all these tunes turn out.

I’m not very confident that the CD will actually get made right now because I’m positive they don’t want to spend the money. My biggest chance is to have as much information as I can about how much everything will cost; present a break even cost to the director and project how much of a profit we could make at different prices to sell the CDs. It definitely has potential if we can market it well enough and sell at least 500. I think it’s definitely doable but will take a lot of work.

In other news, I have 3 tests and 1 project to complete before spring break… and Oh crap, the Saturday following this one I’m going to Los Angeles for the week! Wow, time is just passing me by. I’ll be there visiting with an engineer, composer, and hopefully a few studios and such. Something I just thought about is the fact that I’ll be there when the Oscars are taking place!! Maybe I’ll go clubbing and meet some celebrities or something. That’s pretty cool to think about.

Oh yeah, speaking of all these trips and CDs and money issues, does anyone wanna pass some donations my way?! :D

late and tired

It’s almost 4:30 am and I know I should be in bed but I just got back from Boulder from our “dress rehersal”. It wasn’t very smooth but at least we worked out most of the kinks of the songs. I don’t feel 100% confident but I’m sure it’ll be okay. If everything works out alright, the CD will hopefully be released middle of next month, no later if I can help it because I won’t be as busy until finals time.&br;&br;Now that I’m tired and ready to sleep, I think I will.

what’s my favorite food?

On my way to Breckenridge with Teri and Andrea (for those of you who don’t know them, they are on vacation from Richmond where they go to school. I won’t go into details about how we met.), we played a food quiz game. The biggest question was what’s my favorite food? Well, I couldn’t answer. There are so many foods that I enjoy already and couldn’t just pick one. So Andrea asked by categories and I gave my answers for the categories. Through all this food talk, I had plenty of time to think about it.

So what really is my favorite food? I think it’s a tie between fruit salad (just a lot of fruit combined) and grilled chicken spring mix salad (with lots of add-ins). I don’t think I answered the question so I better tell ’em sometime.
*edit* I’ve heard a few complaints. “What about Mexican food??!!” and “grilled chicken salad?? Where’s the beef?”. Well, they make a good point. I love Mexican food and beef. I could eat Mexican almost everyday and beef all the time. So maybe it’s not fair for me to claim that grilled chicken spring mix salad as my favorite. So can anyone have a favorite food? Well, I’m gonna have to say yes and no. I have favorite foods at certain times because I eat them as much as possible. But I find that my food tastes change over time (I’m sick of Strawberry Twizzlers–please make note).

Onto bigger news, I’m in the middle of hell week. Not bad hell, but hell as in way too much to do for my good. And tomorrow and Friday are the worst of it. First, I must setup and record the worship service on Friday. Then comes the bigger part of this job (as if rehearsal and performance won’t be big enough). I’ll be mixing the project by myself and *hopefully* making it into a CD. Actually, I don’t have much of a choice because I keep talking about it to everyone as if it’s good to go. But as always, it’s a matter of money. I have talked to Wayne Kerr a little about what to do, and I’m gonna hopefully be in touch with a couple of other musicians/producers in the next few days and weeks about how to go about this whole thing. I hope to release the CD in the middle of April. NO PROMISES.

aches and pains from snowboarding

I have felt this kind of pain before, but this time it’s different. I decided to go on a ski trip this weekend to Aspen Snowmass and it was a great time. Just after I stopped, I was already in major pain.

On Saturday morning, we arrived at Two Creeks lodge where everyone went on the slopes. I was the only one renting equipment so I had to venture out on the slopes myself during the morning. I decided to rent a snowboard instead of skis partly because it seemed that most of our group was snowboarding instead of skiing. And it looks more fun. Skiing probably would have been easier to try but I felt venturous. Ha. Let’s just say I did more picking myself up and carrying the board than I actually snowboarded. There was one point where I was going super fast and had the boarding down. However, I never learned out to stop properly. Todd told me that I should take lessons before I try but I first didn’t want to pay the money and second no one would have come with me. Oh well. :)

Well, after I made my way up to the top of the first ski lift, I decided I was gonna just stand and sit around to see if I could find anyone I knew. No doubt that it was like waiting in Times Square to meet someone that had no idea you were going to meet them. So that was a lost cause. I finally decided to go find a green path (the easiest one). Well, because the green wasn’t very steep, I couldn’t get a start very easily. It was slow going. I finally ran into some Blue paths and they were much easier to run because of the steeper slopes. But stopping was a constant problem that I almost never learned. It took me quite a while to stop most of the time.

After being late for lunch (and everyone knew I was going to be late because I let someone know by cell phone call) I wanted to try it out once more. Probably not a great idea since I was already tired. So I went out with two girls and after about 30 minutes, I decided they should go on and I’d go back down. Well, I was at a point where I didn’t know how to get down. So after walking 100 feet up a hill for 45 minutes to a lift, I took it down. I was the only one going down on the lift! It was rather amusing. So that pretty much sums up my skiing/snowboarding experience.

The best part of the trip for me was that night we went to Glenwood Springs Hot Springs for the hot springs pool. It was wonderful just sitting there in heated water in the freezing cold weather. I highly recommend it after a long, hard day of skiing.

And now the pain is just throbbing like there’s no end. I took some Aleve but it’s still very present. Bring on the drugs!!

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