We’re getting into the season of maximal darkness.\u00a0 When Thanksgiving rolled around last week I was grateful to have a few days off to rest and get caught up on random tasks.\u00a0 Lizzy and Josh came home for a visit, which was very nice.\u00a0 As it was, I caught a cold on the Monday after Thanksgiving and am only starting to feel better today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My day job has been busy with everyone trying to jam in as much as possible by the end of the year.\u00a0 I’ve been updating the data sources for our AI app with the new data for the 2026 car model year.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the music realm, I’ve been working on a song called Frozen Ocean for the Spellbound project.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Frozen Ocean was probably the first really great song Martin wrote, great lyrics, melody, chords, and dynamics, with a haunting and evocative sounds.\u00a0 The song opens with the guitar playing an arpeggiated pattern shifting among open and fretted strings, a little like Closer to the Heart.\u00a0 Martin was such a good guitarist, even early on, that I didn’t realize how subtle and complicated the part was.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I finally got it together and it sounds great. Next up is lead guitar part, sure to be another major challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’re getting into the season of maximal darkness.\u00a0 When Thanksgiving rolled around last week I was grateful to have a few days off to rest and get caught up on random tasks.\u00a0 Lizzy and Josh came home for a visit, which was very nice.\u00a0 As it was, I caught a cold on the Monday after … Continue reading “Drums in the Deep”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,18,1],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-6623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-software","category-uncategorized","tag-spellbound"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6623"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6627,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6623\/revisions\/6627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}