Drum Editing & Beer

If you've never had the experience of cleaning and editing live drum tracks...I recommend that you avoid it. It's incredibly tedious and redundant, but sadly it's also incredibly effective and purposeful. You don't realize how much work is going to be involved when you say, "Alright, let's lay down the drum tracks for 16 tunes." And as everyone knows, it's always easier to add drum hits than to take them out. Have an out of time cymbal hit? Those overhead microphones are gonna kill you.

Luckily, there is one thing that helps with drum editing, as with any other monotonous activity: beer. And what's even better is beer that you made yourself. For Christmas, Seth's girlfriend gave him a brewing kit from Northern Brewer, along with the ingredients for an IPA (if you're interested in homebrewing, check them out - the instructional video was hilarious). We started brewing right before New Years, and we bottled about 2 weeks ago. Now, I'm not a big IPA fan, but this stuff is good. Sadly, we only made 5 gallons worth, which filled only 48 bottles. Seth is already talking about upgrading from the 5 gallon bucket to the 14-gallon fermentor, but maybe we should make a few more batches before he goes all out. For the next one, he's thinking an Irish Red.

And the drum editing continues.

Jason Segal vs. Productivity

If you haven't seen it, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a great movie. If I remember correctly, I saw it for the first time in April 2009, and it was my first real introduction to Jason Segel. I've since become a big fan of his work on How I Met Your Mother and in movies like I Love You, Man, but Forgetting Sarah Marshall was the first.

And so I'm always put into this difficult position when I have things that I want to accomplish (like writing, or website updates, or whatever) and Forgetting Sarah Marshall comes on TV. Right now it's on FX. What am I supposed to do? It's a well-known fact that it's one of those movies that I can watch anywhere, anytime. But I have these things to do - specifially, I want to write this blog. Resistance is futile, but maybe I can block out the movie long enough to make this happen.

One of the ways that I'm working to make the new album stand head and shoulders above my first is an element that simply was not an option in the winter/spring of 2007: strings. There were a few tunes on A Thin Line that I defintely could have heard strings on, but money and time just didn't make it possible. But this time, obstacles be damned. Brian Zeller, keyboardist and trombone player for the BIG Shoe, is working on string arrangements for a handful of the new tunes, and we talked today about how it's going. I should be getting my first glimpse at them sometime this week, and I'm excited to see what he's come up with. Other than that, we're working on drum editing and bass parts. The plan is to start guitars and keyboards in early February.

I'm also working on the video for the "Endless Sky," which I will be releasing in a few days. Busy.