The world is highly mobile. In case you’ve missed it.
When you own a car or have one at your disposal it practically is taken for granted that you can get places. I’m sure if you have a plane it’s even more so. I’m working my way towards being a plane owner. I think it’s a nice goal. Thus if you have transportation you aren’t as limited to moving about your city or country. Almost everywhere I’ve ever visited (most of America, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Ireland, England, France; that’s a good representation) involves mobile society. Very few places had indigenous people that weren’t mobile with at least public transportation.
Take away your car, in my case a Land Rover (what a great product name for a vehicle), and you’re suddenly not as mobile as those who have their cars are. My Land Rover wasn’t taken away, stolen or lost. No, it’s not like “whoops, where did my car go?” It’s in for a servicing at the shop. But being a Land Rover, they take their sweet time making certain things happening. Actually, I should say that I did add a few requests beyond the tune-up service. Thus it took a little longer than a day. I will say the peeps over at Land Rover Encino are very nice and very level headed. Kinda refreshing.
Fortunately, I’ve been doing more busy work in the studio after I found that some of my backup measures for archiving projects is probably not as safe and sound as I thought. Yesterday I learned that making DVD backups of large files can be problematic, even if the software that burns it claims to have verified it properly. I now know that an additional step has to be taken to ensure everything will work. That step is, once the DVD is burned, it’s ideal to immediately attempt to copy the information back to the computer from the DVD to make sure the data is working. Do that before you delete any audio from the system.
Because of this discovery, and that I’ve figured out a way to recover files from the DVD with issues (it’s convoluted and I want to avoid having to recover in the future), I’ve now come to the conclusion that in addition to burning DVD’s I’ll be purchasing additional hard drives as well. They’re fairly cheap and likely to be a bit more reliable. Thus I’ll have several means of backup. I’m getting to a point where there’s several projects I don’t want to lose. It wouldn’t be fun to have that data gone. Just like it’s no fun when you can’t get around the way you’re accustomed to with your own car.
Once I have all this together for the backing up, I’m sure I’ll get into a rhythm with an assistant to have them do it. It’s time consuming and I have other things I’d rather work on. Like finding little gems of tunes and artists.
Tarkin hales out of Canada. The Land of “eh?” However it’s their music and it’s universal quality that brings them to your computer screen today. The instant grabber for me is the 16th note rhythm of the dead snare drum. There’s a real nice quality to the brushes, and I’m a bit interested in if it’s a deadened snare or some other drum as it’s lacking all snare quality. That got my interest. Then came the controversy. Here’s a nice down home voice with a soothing quality talking about meeting Jesus. I figured hey, this is a pretty good time being about holidays and such. Pushing further into the song comes Allah and even the Devil. No doubt some very interesting characters on that train.
Like a train takes you on a journey, this song does the same with the lyrics. Beyond the lyrics the song is also a journey. I’m thinking that by the time you get to this in the post you’re already near the end of the song. Thus if you weren’t paying attention Tarkin has introduced lots and lots of layers of instruments. A few posts (maybe weeks) back I was writing about production skills and learning to layer things in a useful way. Here’s a great example of it. Starting with the driving drum pattern, adding a harmonica, a little guitar, vocal. Eventually you get into things like fiddle, multiple fiddles actually and I think I’m hearing bagpipe or accordion too. Read that? When you’ve got lots of layers like that you get people thinking about the ear candy. Good stuff.
Enjoy.
May you stay mobile.
Add this to your iPod legally.
Happy Holidays!