Music on the side

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DCYC 2010 – Never be the same.

February 4, 2010 in Music on the side, news | 4 comments

This past weekend was an amazing experience. One I will likely not forget. It was by far the largest motivating crowd of young people Soundwave has ever had the honor of serving. It was the most performing we’ve ever done as a band over a weekend as well. It started Thursday for us. We set up till midnight and was back at it around 8:00 AM. There was sound and lighting work, sound check, practice for the band and the Youth Animators, and things kicked off that evening. The Youth Animators actually taught movements choreographed to our song that we recorded in my studio to a crowd of over 1,800 excited young people. We then got to perform it live all throughout the weekend.  Friday, Karli became very ill and had to go to the hospital Sunday morning at 2:00 AM. We’ve been praying for her. Jeremy’s last tweet says she’s doing fine, but please remember her in your prayers. I hope this video will lift their spirits. After the stills at the beginning, there’s video. All of it was shot from my iPhone except for some of the pics Jeremy tweeted. I shot the video portion at the end while we were tearing down after a massively huge and motivating God-filled weekend!

Piano update:  It’s still not tuned, and I will be blogging very soon why -- sorry for the long stretch between podcasts.

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Over a month and no podcast? Here’s why:

December 17, 2009 in Family, Music on the side, Non-music blogs | No comments

The past few weekends have been non-stop family and Soundwave. We had the “Night of Worship” on the 21st of November which encompassed a day of practice, Thanksgiving with the family the following weekend, two entire weekends of Soundwave recording, mixing, and mastering here in the studio after that, and I’ll be out in Sonora, TX hunting at the deer lease with dad and all my brothers this weekend. My goal is to take down the buck I passed on last season. (see last year’s blog and Youtube video)  I’ll try and send out some tweets about the hunting experience if I can get online.  The best part of it is going to be chillin’ with all my bros, David, Adam, and Josh for the first time in a very long time. 

Here’s the song we recorded. Jeremy wrote it for the DCYC event we’ll be serving an entire weekend at in late January. It is going to be awesome!

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If we had some global warming…

January 22, 2009 in Music on the side, Non-music blogs, news | No comments

I heard a part of this song listening to Fox News on the way in to work this morning and had to share it.  It sure is a catchy little tune. 

Also, thanks for the prayers -- I’m starting to feel better today.

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Vocoder Synths are cool…

January 11, 2009 in Music on the side, tech stuff | No comments

If you’ve heard the song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Daft Punk, then you know what I’m talking about.  Anyway, Jeremy enlisted my help in doing a version of this song for a youth conference coming up this week.  He already had an instrumental track so all we needed to do was record vocals with the new words that fit the theme of the conference and apply the right vocoder synth sound.  Simple enough right?  I figured a couple hours of work, but it ended up taking a weeknight and most of yesterday.  At first, Jeremy actually tried to sing the part.  Well, I wouldn’t actually call it singing.  In fact, I was very tempted to post the audio of that first take, but Jeremy would probably kill me.  After trying that a couple of times, we realized that with the vocoder synth, you just speak the words and the synth does the rest.  Well, it’d be that easy if there was a MIDI track of the song anywhere in existance, but there isn’t – at least not on the WWW so I had to record it myself.  Once the MIDI track was done, I broke out the EVOC 20 PolySynth that comes with Logic Studio 8 and started tweeking.  I literally spent hours trying to come as close as possible to the original and learned quite a bit along the way.  Here are the settings I ended up with:

evoc_20_polysynthAnother key is to use lots and lots of compression on the original audio track as well as the software synth track.  I’ve read somewhere that distortion on the original track can have a nice effect as well.  Oh yeah – and don’t forget about your EQ – you can really manipulate the end result with an EQ.  If anybody out there is interested in acquiring the MIDI, feel free to drop me a line.  I’d be happy to share it.  Here is how it turned out:

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New Soundwave sounds…

December 14, 2008 in Music on the side | 1 comment

Jeremy came over today and we did a really rough “unplugged” recording of two new songs he wrote.  I used the R-09HR to record them – the same device I use to record the MTPB blog.  The piano seemed to bit too loud in both songs…  We tried to compensate on the second song by moving the recorder closer to Jeremy and the guitar, but that didn’t help much.  We only played through them a few times before the final take.  Today was the first I’d heard them and I really like them both!  Soundwave will be recording these songs and more in either 2009 or 2010 for our new album.  It’s gonna rock!  Please let us know what you think:

Love Inside:

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Run:

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There was quite a bit of stuff going on today so I decided to do the podcast tomorrow.  I’m sure there’ll be a little bit of the new Soundwave song  ”Love Inside” in it.  It’s going to be a good one – stay tuned!

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