Monday 15 September 2008 at 4:34 pm
1945-2008
Richard Wright, keyboardist, singer, and founding member of Pink Floyd, has passed beyond the shadow realm we live in and has joined the band of rock and roll heaven.
Listening to Comfortably Numb as we speak.
They keep on dying.
Sunday 14 September 2008 at 10:17 pm
2008 has been the year of the ulcer for me. I seem to suffer them a lot recently. Watching another anti-union propaganda video at work didn't seem to help. Finding out that Cayla is getting fucking married at the dinner table caused a temporary halt to all mental activity. I can't take this shit. Its like Barron all over again. I barely hang out with her after I graduated, she's on her first 'boyfriend' (she had some small flings) and now they're engaged. Some chum from Hawaii or something. I feel like I have to beat him up or something. I wanted to marry her at age 7. This is too whacked out for me. When Larry gets engaged that will be the last straw....might as well prepare the papers to enter me a mental institution now, since once that happens, there won't be very much time.
So Metallica's new CD came out on Friday, I promptly purchased it after hearing some positive hype and hearing some leaked tracks on YouTube. I am very unfamiliar with their last three albums (1997's Load, 1998's Reload, and 2003's St Anger) but I have heard consistently bad things about them. This does harken back to their older days, its like the album after 1988's ...And Justice For All, with some additional pop elements that were apparently apparent in the Load era. Very good songs and songwriting....but the fucking mastering job sucks shit.
Kids, I think Metallica won the Loudness War. I can't listen to it loud, its so fucking overcompressed its not even funny....by far the loudest thing I own. I saw a screenshot of the waveform from the Internet, and its a freaking brick. No dynamics at ALL! I mean, when I first listened to The Black Album back in middle school, I thought that was a pretty loud album. I listened to Enter Sandman after hearing a song from this album and its so pleasant to my ears. Oh Metallica, why must you ruin a brilliant album with poor mastering. The snare drum clips every hit, its so godawful. Y'know, I read someone's hypothesis that the mixes ran through a brickwall limiter before hitting the mastering facility which is why it sounds so bad, and I can place some faith in that statement.
Regardless, there's some really nice gems on there, you just have to turn the volume down to enjoy them (oh and when listening on Headphones you can hear an Autotuner on James' voice, but its not obvious). The Day that Never Comes, Unforgiven III, and Suicide & Redemption are awesome, and despite a negative backlash to its "pop" sound, Cyanide is wicked as well, with one of the catchiest choruses I have heard in a long time.
EDIT: Apparently, the tracks were ran through a brickwall limiter on the master bus prior to being sent to the mastering engineer. The mastering engineer has gone on record saying that he was ashamed to work with mixes like that and he refused to have his name on the album. Go him.
In some hopeful news, simultaneous to the CD release, all the songs were available to download for Guitar Hero 3. They used a separate mix from the album, and there's some youtube videos that despite the crappy youtube sound quality, the sound is much improved. No clipping at all, everything is smooth (its still smashed dynamically but its a vast improvement)....listening to the Day That Never Comes was fucking kickass.
Wednesday 10 September 2008 at 9:22 pm
Behold, my first official single, Spania. From 27 days ago, when I first began composing the song, to writing lyrics, to recording the drums, bass, organ, and vocals, to mixing everything, and then the final master preparations. Here you go....you can stream it from soundclick, or purchase it for 99 cents and download it! And its at a respectable -18 dB RMS level...I did have to compress it a tad after the mixdown, but MUCH quieter than anything put out today.
http://soundclick.com/share?songid=6881767
Monday 01 September 2008 at 12:57 am
So nothing interesting in my life right now. I feel the summer was wasted. Still no truck, still nothing done for my album, Steens trip has been cancelled, I barely see Merrie....meh!
I've begun working on a solo song (I may have said this last time, I dunno), its me on everything. Drums, bass, keys, and vocals. I can't save my voice. I've tweaked it and run auto tune on it and manually changed the pitch of individual words to be in tune, yet it still sounds bad. Garbage in, garbage out. But how do they make crappy singers sound mediocre? Oh well. The instruments sound great, it is definitly pro quality if I say so myself (I want to commercially release this for kicks and giggles) but not without vocals....and I can't just hire somebody. It'd be like "here have $20" and then I don't even make $20 in royalty payments. And who would do it for $20? Might as well do it for free.
McCain's new VP pick is hilarious. She will screw him over. Right now people are like "Oh a strong woman with executive will!" but after a few months she'll be considered trash. Joe Biden will rip her in the debates. After the VP debates, she will truly understand her policy of "No abortion EVEN in case of incest and rape." I mean, I'm sure he was hoping of riding the Hillary bandwagon, but Palin is NOTHING compared to Hillary, which is saying something considering how much I didn't like Clinton.
Keeping Eskimos from voting? Shooting bears from choppers? Drilling everywhere? Being hot? Keeping polar bears of the endangered species list (an act started by the most hated conservative, Nixon)?
McCain lost his experience card. Shucks.
