Some Things That Have Happened.

January 03, 2005, 05:38 pm

After Christmas, we recorded (and pretty much finished) two new songs, Hey and Lights Out. They sound great. I'm really excited about them. We also live-tracked a new song, Field of Beans and are using the vocals, acoustic guitar, and drums from that tracking, and will overdub bass, guitar solos, and organ. Organ is fun.

New Years Eve was relaxing and nice. I've no shame in being a homebody.

I'm essentially broke for a while due to all the band-related stuff going on. Hopefully, the band will make some money from our upcoming shows (we have five or six this month!) and selling shirts. It'll pay off, damnit.

I'd been having this problem with my AKAI MX-73 keyboard controller, where if I were trying to play softly, the controller would randomly change the note velocity from something quiet like 63 to 127! Very annoying! I heard that this is often a symptom of dirty key contacts, so I went to RadioShack and got ripped off... I mean, bought some contact cleaner and contact lubricant (for the little rubber bushing things). I then spent a couple hours taking my entire keyboard apart, removing each key and button, cleaning the contacts, lubricating the rubber bushings, washing the keys in the sink upstairs, blowing out all the dust, and then putting it all back together. Thankfully, it's not suffering from the obnoxious random-loud-notes problem anymore and it feels great!

I'm very excited about the idea of taking things apart, cleaning them or replacing cheap parts with nice parts, and having things work better than before. I really want to buy a soldering station, a multimeter, and some of those PAiA kits to build mic preamps and synths and theremins and stuff. I can't wait to have some free time (and some free money).

Also, I got an Ibanez AD-202 delay and it's really fun to play with.