Month: December 2025

Congratulations Lizzy and Josh

It’s time for winter break. Good thing too, I’ve been working real hard and have been feeling increasingly low energy the last few weeks with all the cold and darkness.  A week ago we had a big onsite event at work, with everyone on our team showing up from all over the country to the new NYC office for a day of planning and strategizing, followed by a dinner outing.  The next day we reconvened in Yonkers for more, followed by our office Christmas party.  All very fun and productive, and I must say I feel pretty good about our team and the time ahead, the usual existential uncertainty notwithstanding, but it sure was a bunch of long days.  Then on top this we had a bunch of year-end deadlines and the usual last-minute scrambling. 

We had a big snow a week ago, wet and heavy, lots of shoveling.  But then it turned warm and rainy on Friday and it all melted.  Today is the first day off I’ve had in a long time, easily filled up with random tasks and trying to find a more relaxed pace, even if only for a little while.  I felt somewhat refreshed and did a full weightlifting workout, and it seemed less of struggle than it’s been of late.  I also managed to go on two bike rides in December, but only five miles each time.  It still seems harder than twice that distance then the weather is warm.  The good news is yesterday was the solstice so the days are gonna start to get longer again.

The big event here is Lizzy and Josh got engaged over the weekend. They were visiting New York City and he proposed to her on the ice of the skating rink at Rockefeller Center.  Very romantic moment.  Lizzy has been guessing that Josh would propose for a while now, and is over the moon now that it’s happened.  Josh is very relieved that it all went according to plan.  Jeannie and Michelle and I were told ahead of time so went into the city to see the magic moment.  Afterwards we met them for dinner along with Josh’s parents.  Very nice people, looking forward to getting to know them better.  Jeannie and I are very pleased about all this, and think Josh is great, and can see that the two of them are very happy together.  They’re already starting to talk about planning the wedding.

In music world, my jazz group Spacecats is going to try and record our second album in the new year.  With the drums and mics and audio interface all proved out, we’re all set to make the record here in my home studio.  We have more than enough material for an album, maybe almost enough for two.  Last record we made we recorded the whole thing in one long day, which was pretty exhausting by the end.  This time, I’m thinking of doing it over several sessions, but still doing everything live in the studio since it’s a jazz record.  For the first session I want to pick songs that Josh (different Josh) can play on the keyboard or synthesizer to eliminate one set of variables.  My grand piano is upstairs in the living room and the drums and downstairs in the studio.  So I figure start in the studio and see if we can get a good sound on everything there before we add an acoustic piano the mix.

My song Frozen Ocean for the Spellbound project is coming along.  I tracked the lead and backing vocals, and am learning Martin’s guitar solos so I can lay down the lead guitar track.  Spent some time tonight working on getting the right sound.  I’ve also been listening closer to Martin’s original rhythm guitar part and am thinking of re-recording that with some different voicings closer to his original part.  There’s some ninth chords in there that I didn’t pick up on first time around.  Lastly, Rick is going to come over sometime during the break to check out the drum recording setup, and has agreed to play drums on the Spellbound project if I can’t get the drum parts together myself.  More on that as it progresses.

Drums in the Deep

We’re getting into the season of maximal darkness.  When Thanksgiving rolled around last week I was grateful to have a few days off to rest and get caught up on random tasks.  Lizzy and Josh came home for a visit, which was very nice.  As it was, I caught a cold on the Monday after Thanksgiving and am only starting to feel better today.

My day job has been busy with everyone trying to jam in as much as possible by the end of the year.  I’ve been updating the data sources for our AI app with the new data for the 2026 car model year.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a good workflow for this, so there’s synchronization issues, compounded by AI’s tendency to make stuff up and be just pain wrong. 

In the music realm, I’ve been working on a song called Frozen Ocean for the Spellbound project.  This was one written by Martin shortly after we did the original Spellbound EP, and I chose it for inclusion to bring the record up to full album length, as I did with my own Flock of Fools.  Frozen Ocean was probably the first really great song Martin wrote, great lyrics, melody, chords, and dynamics, with a haunting and evocative sounds.  The song opens with the guitar playing an arpeggiated pattern shifting among open and fretted strings, a little like Closer to the Heart.  Martin was such a good guitarist, even early on, that I didn’t realize how subtle and complicated the part was.  The basic pattern was clearly composed, but the variations, well he was probably just riffing off the top of his head. I wanted to do it justice and make it sparkle, so I spent a few weeks practicing and tracking the part and listening back and practicing some more.  I finally got it together and it sounds great. Next up is lead guitar part, sure to be another major challenge.

The other big music accomplishment over the break was with the drums.  Last Christmas I bought a microphone kit for the drums: mics, stands, clips and cables, with the mics being purpose-matched to the kick drum, snare, toms and overheads/cymbals.  I few months later I bought an 8-channel audio interface.  The whole project got delayed by the necessity of cleaning out and reorganizing my studio space, particularly my stockpiles of origami paper and supplies.  The end result of all that was I had a flat surface to set up my audio interface and plug in the mics, which I did earlier this fall.

Over the weekend I was able plug in the audio DAC box into my laptop and spend an evening setting up the software so it could accept input from the box.  Finally the magic moment when I hit record.  It worked great!  The sound was clear, the levels hot but not clipping, eight tracks of whacks, woo-hoo!  I spent a few minutes adjusting the mic placement and levels and pretty quickly got a balanced and good sounding kit.  It was actually quite revealing they way the different mics capture different POVS on the sound and all interact.  You really could do fine with just the overheads, kick and snare mics.  But I guess since I have the eight-channel version I might as well use it all (the others being for the toms and to close-mic the hi-hat).  I spent a little more time tuning my low drums, to give the floor tom a bit more tone and resonance, and the kick a little less.  My only remaining complaint is when you hit the kick drum in isolation it tends to make the snare rattle.  Don’t know what to do about this, but also it doesn’t matter when you’re playing the whole kit.