Darren Halm

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Well, there’s between 15 and 20 songs cooking for the next album, 8 of which have vocals (more may get vox as well). So I’m aiming for finishing all of them, if I can, for a release end of year.

Spend 4 hours saturday at Sebastians music haus on lake Hopatcong. Recorded many loops of trapkit, Dumbek and Conga. The resulting footage will be whittled down, edited, chopped and otherwise mangled into a set of samples for an upcoming Totalmusik release. Stay tuned.

Got a new battery for my old Macbook. It’s like having a new computer! The Macbook has been kinda just hanging out next to the PC Music desktop, and I’m not sure why as it’s clearly more powerful. I’m definitely going to be doing some laptop guitarring with this, and bring it on the train for DSP and further tweaking and beatmaking. Only problem is, I uprgraded it to Snow Leopard recently, and now Metasynth 4 Pro is broken. Oh well, still have Live and all my fave plugs, Reaktor, Guitar Rig, Plogue Bidule and Peak running strong. Yes!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230468452232&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

I’ve had an H3000 for several months now, since I traded it for an MPC2500 with a hip-hop dude in harlem. However, just this week I finally got a working integration into my recording setup. You see, unfortunately the H3000 has XLR in’s and out’s. Initially I just bought converters at Rat Shack, but the levels are way under for guitar and the sound was quite noisey. Now, I have my Allen and Heath mixer going into the H3000 then into the computer, so that everything recorded in goes through the Eventide. Lately I’ve kind of given up playing electric guitar. My focus has been more on bass, mining samples for the MPC and playing Ukelele. With a full mixer and microphone, I’ve really been delving into the capabilities of the unit. SInging choirs with one voice, lush ‘verbs, weird rooms. And the unit is from 1990. I love it. Fuck 64 bit, fuck touch screen tablets running iPhone apps. I think I’ll hang here awhile.

No, a box with lighted buttons is not an important musical innovation. Knobs and buttons? Play a goddamn instrument already.

So now that I’ve set up a studio in the lakehouse, I’m kind of re-thinking my recording process. Having used Live predominantly over the past few years, I’m feeling more of an old-school (?) recording process. Been playing with Cubase and Reaper, but today delved back into the NFR version of Tracktion I have. No BS, very straightforward, and although I can do everything FX and automation-wise with it, it feels like I’m just working in multi-track recording rather than the loop/sample based way Ableton works. Working with Battery is a real buzzkill, too. Having to stop and write in piano-roll/midi file crap just kills me. I think I’d rather get some real hand drums (or buckets or pipe, etc.) and just record my own drum parts, then mangle the crap out of them.

Make that ELECTRIC baritone ukelele. This thing is beautiful. Can’t wait to record it into the H4 or MPC, sitting in a boat, in the middle of a lake.