Before this I’ve mostly thought about my contributions in music as chords & riffs, melody and words. The groove was just something that happened — or sometimes mysteriously didn’t happen and I’d have no idea why.

But what to do? I can’t re-record the album every time I learn something new or get better at something. I know that doesn’t end well for me (or anyone who wants to hear my record in the next ten years).

So I took some time and I’ve gone back and re-addressed things, trying to avoid re-recording everything or changing them too much (people already like a lot of these demos! some have already been licensed!). Here’s an example of one I’m working on right now:

Excerpt of the original “Feel Free Plastic Surgery!” instrumental

Excerpt of the new version

It’s been confusing to diagnose and treat this without starting over. In this one I ditched the South American drum loop that I wrote the song on top of and replaced it with a more straight ahead rock pattern I tapped in. Then re-recorded the bass to fit better.

I’m still working on it (I’m concerned the snare on the 4 is late sometimes), but the new one is more fun to me, dancier and rockier. It’s such a small change and I feel dumb that it’s taken me forever to understand and figure out. But… maybe it’s a good thing? I don’t know, we’ll see.

People have been asking me about my record and I really appreciate that you guys are looking forward to it despite all the radio silence from me. Honestly I’m still struggling with it, getting the songs how I want them while not going all Chinese Democracy. It’s a tough balance.

But it’s moving forward now and I’m optimistic I’ll be able to wrap it up soon. Thanks for your patience and support. Have a sweet 2012.

I wanted to ask your opinion on what you think computers could do to make it easier for musicians to create and perform music.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and wanted to blog two of my replies:

Collaboration: There’s a lot of opportunity right now for better creative tools. The biggest feature missing from all the major Digital Audio Workstations is semi-realtime collaboration (realtime is probably asking too much until the net gets better). I was just bugging Justin at Reaper about that the other day. Maybe ohmstudio (http://www.ohmstudio.com/) will fill the collaboration role but I think it’s a feature every DAW should have within a few years.

Songwriting: For a long time I’ve been fantasizing about rapid songwriting software. Something analogous to a lot of the more creative, less technical software for screenwriters. The software could prompt the songwriter for sections, melodies and riffs and keep them cataloged. It’d let you easily rearrange the structure and experiment, organize your notes & ideas and help you generate new ideas. Throw a good rhyming dictionary in there, a markov chain generator for lyrics, etc. So a musician can quickly hammer out a bunch of song ideas and flesh them out without spending much time dicking around in software. I should be able to write and record an entire song with a guitar, microphone and foot pedal to control the software.

And that’s the tooth.

I’ve decided to get my mid-life crisis over with before 40, so I’m off the antidepressants, in two types of therapy and I hired a personal trainer. While it wasn’t a disaster, I’m not interested in doing the next 35 the same way I did the first. So I’m trying to put some work in on that.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes, I really appreciate it.

I threw all my bags of tapes out long ago but I still have have an emotional connection to some of the cassette designs.

Anyway what I’m saying is that in this context, holy shit this video of Gary Glitter performing “Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah)” is the most psycho thing ever:

I mean that’s like a musical number in a movie about a horrifying child rapist. Who looks and is named exactly like Gary Glitter.

Anyway I’m conflicted because the song and performance is bad-ass and I feel like a Gary Glitter fan now.

I’ve been just plain working on my album. Growing a beard. Trying to drink sensibly. Also:  playing some video games here and there. Arkham City comes out next week. I might be too busy to play it, how sad is that. Seriously how sad for me are you right now tell me.

I keep thinking of writing about recording the album because they say you should keep your ‘online presence’ going but that’s so fucking boring. Does anyone really want to read that? “I’ve been re-recording all the basslines.” Oh kick ass, Brad. “I’m enjoying playing bass more.” Awesome, awesome! I’d rather talk about my awesome dog Rufus:

Just look at that fuckin’ guy. What a dude.

But I’m getting restless, which I think is a nice sign. I really want the album to be done so I can move on. I have all these fantasies about how creative I’m going to be when this is over and I’m not working on the same batch of songs anymore. How I shouldn’t wait so long between albums anymore. That all my fussing is really only mildly improving the songs. I should be more spontaneous! I should be more like Prince!

But I also want to obsess over every part of it forever until the end of time. I know that my restlessness will overcome my perfectionism soon though and that, my friends, is how babies are born.

[My new nephew Crue (as in Motley).]

You don’t get asked to be made an uncle, someone just makes you one.

So we went to MCA or whoever has it and they said, “Well, we have the master rights and Pete Townshend’s publishing company has the publishing, and it’s a favored-nations deal.” In other words, whatever we negotiated with them, we would then also have to pay Pete and the publishing. So their first offer was, I think, $150,000. [Laughs.] Because it was the whole song! So we’d have to pay $300,000 total. That’s a whole episode for us. That’s the whole budget for the entire episode. But we didn’t give up. That’s the way it worked. And either the company or someone else told Blair, “The other way to work it is to go to Pete Townshend first.” Because it’s the same in the other direction: Whatever deal he makes, they have to honor his deal, too. They have to take whatever offer he gives. They have to match it. But try to go get Pete Townshend on the phone. That’s even harder. So it just took a lot of fuckin’ time. And occasionally, we’d be on the set shooting “Blueberries” or “Moving” or whatever it is, and I say to Blair, “How’s it going with The Who?” and she’d either say, “Dead” or, “I just talked to a guy today” or, “A guy I talked to today is looking into something.” And it went on and on. And finally, she said, “Well, Pete Townshend wants to know exactly how it’s being used, and he wants to see the show. He wants to see some episodes.” So I wrote him a synopsis of how it would be. I described it very carefully, and we sent him the DVD of five episodes from last season. And then, I don’t know, three or four months later, it felt like, he came back to us and said, “Can you send me 7,500 bucks?” [Laughs.] Yeah! And so the whole thing cost $15,000, which is fucking nothing!

I agree to a lot of licensing (and have always been laid back about it) so that’s fun to read.

Here are some of my favorite things in v4:

- ReaEQ – They added a live spectrograph to the EQ, which was a feature other EQs (like the one in logic) made me want.

- Selecting chunks of audio in the media explorer is pretty sweet when you have compatible VSTis. You can preview an audio file and select a section from the waveform and drag it right into the plugin or timeline. Very handy.

- Midi Track Controls (ReaControlMIDI) – I’m not actually sure if this was in v3 but I know I was trying to get a weird midi controller to control the tracks long ago and had no luck. This makes it easy.

- Project Bay – Now you can see and manage all the effects and media you’re using in your project.

- Screensets – save and recall Reaper window layouts easily. Nice.

Here are some things I am not fond of:

- The default theme is too dark and the color coding of tracks is really hard to see. I was finding it really tough to organize my projects so that I knew what was going on at a glance. So I switched back to the v3 theme, which is OK for now.

- The Media Explorer is slow on my Mac. Hopping between files with the cursor keys is weirdly slow. This was never a thing on Windows.

And here’s my wish list:

- I’d like a simple multi-sampler. A Battery-style ‘pad’ sampler would be my preference. Setting up many tracks of ReaSamplOmatic5000 is cumbersome.

- Some metadata/search in the Media Explorer would be great. I have a ton of samples kicking around but if they’re not easily at hand.

- Workflow improvements – Reaper is already so far ahead of the competition in functionality that I think it’d benefit from some time spent on its usability. While it’s awesome that each pulldown and context menu and preference page are overstuffed with cool options, it can be overwhelming. And I’m a pretty huge nerd so I assume the less techy out there go into cardiac arrest at the sight of it.

Anyway, great job Reaper team.