Been spending around 5 hours every evening for the past few weeks on project "Scratch Paper". I'm getting the handle on the whole production mixing techniques. Monitoring through the headphones, my NS-10 (Yes, it has arrived), my other home-stereo speakers, and finally in the car. Never knew mixing engineers had to do so much work just to get that "right" sound... Phew~ Production is certainly a different beast! Our team is meeting tomor.. err... for some long overdue updates. I'm kinda worried that I'm going to fall into the trap of having to work with college students again, but let's hope that it'll be different this time.

Since I'm heading out to Japan this Christmas I was asking Paul whether he knew of any record shops there, and Rich, my boss, jumped into the conversation telling me there's this rather obscure (and huge, he adds) record shop in Millvale somewhere towards the north western end of Grant ave. I'm gonna have to get myself the VW bus soundwagon record player (whish me luck) and go check it out.

So I just got back from Whiskey Dicks (but all the signs read "Fat Cat", so maybe they had changed their name, I dunno) to check out De la soul on tour. I don't know who was in charge of promoting the event, but I found out about it from a colleauge just a few hours before the show and the house was definitely not full.

I was never a huge fan of De la, but you know me... I'd do anything to get some inspiration, and one would expect the possibility of being inspired by one of the big old skool players to be pretty high.

So cubbie and I got there at 9pm, but the show didn't start untill 11:30pm! -.-;; Grrr... They were probably betting on the side of more people showing up as it got closer to midnight. Despite the not-so-impressive number of audience in the house, there was a good amount of old skool hip hop heads in the house who totally got down with De La's joints, so the atmosphere wasn't bad. The real problem was that the sound system was so horrible that it was really hard to make out the instrumental track in the background. This was rather dissapointing especially when Phife Dawg came out of nowhere and started busting out rhymes to some hot old skool joints like "Hot sex on the platter", "Check the Rhyme", and of course "Award Tour". The inferior sound system really killed the cool sound of Tribe's beats. :( With all complaints aside Phife's appearance was definitely a big surprise! Tribe Called Quest is often noted as the guys who took the Jazz Hip Hop phenomenon that De La had built to the next level, and, as members of the Native Tongues, the two bands had numerous collaboration efforts, but I never expected Phife to tag along on the De La Soul tour. I suppose this is a teaser into their new album? Of course the house went off the hook when Phife came out, and if only the sound system was up to par it would have totally made my night.

All in all we had a pretty good time. Many people these days don't even recognize De La cuz they really haven't had much success at all since their debut album, and I can only hope that their tour gets much more attention than it did in Pittsburgh. Best wishes guys!

My room is a mess right now. It's in the midst of a "remodelling" job... Well, not really remodelling, more like rearranging... ^^;; I've just moved some furniture along with various musical gears around to accomodate easier song writing. To make it easier for me to pick up my guitar and start trying stuff out I moved my amplifier to a place where I can easily turn it on and off, and in order to make mastering jobs more natural I moved my main mixer to a place where I had enough room for my monitoring speakers (which will be arriving soon) to stand on each side. I also made a separate keyboard station which will allow me to mix or jam with a keyboard player much easier. I still have a load of crap to clean up cuz I put all these shit on the floor. When it's done it should be rather refreshing. :) Just trying random crap to in the hopes that it will somehow help me get inspired... -.-;;