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Just thought I'd mention this music discovery trick that I'm really enjoying.

Instead of keeping many open browser tabs, or writing things down, or emailing myself (all things I never catch up on) I add tracks I come across to a playlist called Inbox.

So songs I come across here, in the background when I go get a coffee, that friends recommend, on the radio, whatever. I may not even think I'll like it, but if there's a chance I will I throw it into Inbox.

I also grab stuff from Liked Songs that I already know I like but I haven't fully metabolized. E.g. I know I like this band Wild Nothings whenever it comes on shuffle, but I haven't taken the time to listen to their whole discog or a whole album, so I throw it into Inbox.

Then I shuffle it when I am in the mood for something new. If a song is good I add it to Liked song and remove it from Inbox. If it really stands out to me I throw it into my Stuff {year} playlist so that at the end of the year I have a snapshot of what I thought was really great music at that time.

It's fun to go through Liked Songs and find individual songs that you liked in the past > View Album > Add to playlist > Inbox. I would never find the time to go back and listen to albums of bands anymore without this system. I think listening to entire albums is an important way to escape algorithm "engagement" burnout. You really connect with an artist, a time and a place. Spotify doesn't do a great job of encouraging you to go down these avenues normally, its very track oriented, its inevitably going to only show you music it thinks you will like, so it becomes very samey: "you bought a rake so would you like another rake" kind of thing.

I like the intentionality of this system, you hear a song, you don't really pay attention, and before you know it the next song is playing. But you need to decide does it stay in the Inbox for another listen in the future? Does it make it into Liked Songs? Or does it get removed from Inbox and fade into obscurity. I often have to go back to the previous song because I wasn't really listening sufficiently to make this decision - and anything that makes me really listen is a plus for me.

I played a gig last night and while it was great, I found it pretty frustrating that playing quietly meant I was barely heard and playing loudly meant I was blasting away the audience to the point they turned me down which made the quiet parts even quieter.

It is frustrating because I prepared a set that was very focused on dynamics, I deliberately tried to make it interesting dynamically, and unfortunately that requires a lot more co-ordination with the venue than I had realised.

At home, rehearsing, this isn't a problem because I run everything through a compressor and a limiter. So the quiet parts and the loud parts are largely the same volume. I have a pretty aggressively tuned compressor and limiter on each input and a more subtle one on the master. I've found this solves for the squashed sound because I can dial in the compressor for each input to exactly where it needs to be for my songs.

After the set I was speaking to the sound guy and he said, that's great, bring your laptop and run your mix through that and then we'll run that into the desk, its better for us if you have everything pre-mixed for the specific artist.

This kind of surprised me, I thought for a singer/songwriter to bring their own interface and laptop and control the dynamics before it reaches the desk would feel a bit like sucking eggs. I think I'm not bold enough to make the assumption that all venues would be into that, but maybe its normal and I'm just out of the loop?

Anyway, I don't think I'll play another show in the mountains as a solo act for a good six months aside from open mics. And next time I'll ask the venue ahead of time if I can bring my own set up, or if their desk has a compressor already built-in etc. I guess its just stuff you learn to ask as you go along. I never had to worry about this stuff when I was in a band, our bassist was the one with audio engineering expertise and we just focused on playing.

I also think I'm done playing venues that are restaurants / cafe's. It is super awkward feeling like you are interrupting their dinner conversation. It's different if you are playing songs they already know but for originals its not compatible I don't think.

They just changed from a Mexican restaurant to a pizza bar which makes me that much more excited. If there's one thing in this world I love more than music it is cheese.

This is my first "real" gig in many years and it is a big one - two 45 min acoustic sets all 100% originals. I've prepared set lists (which I rarely do) and I've tried to make it a bit of a journey in emotion, dynamics and duration's. I'm even trying a few songs I've never played live before. So a few risks in there to keep it interesting.

I'm not really promoting it as it is a booked thing and I don't think there's much vacancy on a Saturday night at the best of times. But just in case anyone in the area happens upon this post and is interested here are the details:

• 13th of Jan @ 7:30pm
• Free entry, but booking ahead is recommended
• 35 Govetts Leap Rd, Blackheath NSW 2785

Started recording another old song, Lone Wolf. Recorded it all in about 4 hours. Things are pretty busy with Christmas and some sad family happenings so I think mixing will have to wait a while.

I've got two songs semi-mixed waiting in the wings (Third Date and Tea and Scones). I was in a rush to release songs rapidly before but now I think I'll record a bunch, revisit the mixes and try to get them to sound good together.

This is probably because I've just learned what LUFS is and can now imagine having a kind of cohesive mix from track to track.

I've been thinking / researching approaches to create a guitar recording set up where I don't over invest in plugins to create sounds I can't recreate in rehearsal or live.

For a while I was thinking, it doesn't matter, I could just bring my laptop to shows and rig up a midi foot pedal to switch different sounds.

But it feels complicated. I also really abhor the licensing model of a lot of VSTs. I hate having millions of things sitting in the system tray bugging me about system updates and having to reinstall and juggle license activations across different machines.

I also don't want other guitarists I play with to have to learn / master my very specific DAW / midi tricks if they want to jam or record using my gear.

And what happens if a VST I use ends up bugging out on some new chip architecture and is no longer supported, if I write a song that relies on that sound, I can't really play that song anymore. Not ideal.

And finally, having the guitar modelling external to the recording software means the machine running the DAW is doing less work, less CPU cycles which I really like the sound of.

So I think I'm largely sold on the idea of having the guitar tone/modelling external to the recording software.

But on the flip side, I don't want to give up on the power of software, I think it is kind of ridiculous that you can spend <$200 for a single piece of software with virtually limitless effects, but people still spend ~$200 on a single pedal that can only do one thing. Seems crazy to me. Maybe that is just because I am a programmer.

In my research I came across the Spark GO.

https://www.positivegrid.com/products/spark-go

It is this tiny little practice amp, but what makes it a good solution potentially for my problem is that it has thousands of pedals / cabinets / tones etc accessible via its software. And you can skip the small tinny speaker and plug it straight into your DAW or into your audio interface. Equally you can plug it into a PA or into the mixer at a gig and have exactly the same sound live. You can switch your presets via the amp itself, the software on the phone, or more preferably via a foot switch (sold separately).

It goes for about $200 in Australia, plus a 4 button pedal board, all in would be about $400 to hopefully solve this problem.

I have never tried it, and I'd really like to. There's also a bunch of other amps out there with in-app modelling. And there are larger variants, so you can skip going into the PA and mic the amp like normal when you play live.

Prior to all this I was getting pretty excited by the thought of loading impluse responses and not using any complicated modelling. I tried it out, but it is fiddly and clunky, at least for me. I find I'm spending a long time trying out different IR files, instead of having a system that emulates the amp that I can just tweak directly. I might use IR's for other things, but for guitar amps, I feel like it was a bit of waste of time for me.

So that's my current thinking, we'll see what happens. Next time I'm down in the city I might walk into a music shop and try some gear out and see if it holds up.

I've been sick the past two weeks. Nothing too bad, just a cold. But as a result I haven't been doing any shows or recording.

Today though I'm back! I'm recording a very old song of mine called Tea and Scones. I honestly don't remember what it was about at the time. But reading it now, I take the lyrics to be about prioritizing civility over action.

Tea and scones
Leave me alone

But also a little teenage post break up angst

Happy school girl
Don't you laugh at me parading
You love the funny man
But you really love to hate him
I feel dead and I am drowning in success
Going green inside with my jealous lips and jealous eyes

It feels a little Nirvana and a little bit country.

Some of the lyrics need some workshopping.. anyway we'll see how it goes. It's just nice to be out of bed!

Update: Mixing thoughts / struggles

I pretty indulgently spent almost all of today mixing this song instead of doing my real job. I have this theory though that if my brain is really focused on some productive thing, I may as well just take advantage of that instead of being unproductive on the "right" task. Hopefully then my brain gets obsessed with the thing I'm meant to be doing instead once the stack has been cleared.

This was the first time I really tried to pay serious attention to LUFS / volume normalization. My main take away from this session has been, having distinct tracks for different dynamics is helpful, but far more helpful is put your compression / limiters / gates on those groups instead of trying to do it globally.

I wasted a lot of time trying to save time. I thought I could put a lot of compressors and gates on the entire group of vocals, or the entire group of guitar tracks, but it just lead to a loss of clarity.

I'm also starting to really appreciate / understand why all the music production nerds in my life spend so long trying to get levels / dynamics correct before you even start recording. As I was mixing this I kept thinking, if I just was further back from the mic, I wouldn't need to remove this bass. Or if I didn't use a plectrum here, there'd be a lot less artifacts in the guitar mix.

I think over time you just build an intuition on how to save yourself time and I don't have that yet, or not enough.

Monitors? Wonderboom

Before showing my girlfriend my first mix, I spent a good 2 hours with headphones getting all the levels right. Then I played it on her little bluetooth speaker and the vocals were so loud. I still can't believe the difference in dynamics between headphones and speakers. It always surprises me.

So this mix, I only used the wonderboom. I'll go back after this pass and listen on various things, but as a baseline I wanted to use this thing because it has such variation in dynamics and its a pretty common / popular bluetooth speaker that is probably similar to a lot of other speaker people use.

After this mix, I'll not play too much with levels but instead focus on qualitative things like fades, or de-essing, or eq and listen in the car and with headphones.

Not too interesting or surprising but I thought I'd mention it.

Played another set at the pub, but most importantly it was the last open mic night with my new good friends from Wales (Dave & Pauline). We even got up together and played some Radiohead and Neil Young which was a bit of fun.

Set list

• Third Date
• New Nostalgia
• Walls