Bloggin'

Today’s choir show went amazingly well.

I also finished the full youtube video for the album and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I am currently not busy with anything and that feels weird.

I guess tomorrow I can finally get some groceries that keep getting put off, and maybe I can fill my time in with finally starting up that nostalgia vintage gaming stream idea that I’ve been sitting on for a while (namely streaming all of the games I played in my childhood). I have a bunch of other albums I want to do now but they can wait.

Or maybe I’ll get inspired to do more Novembeat. But probably not. I’ve released five albums this year. I feel like I’ve done enough.

I guess I could finally finish building the new sockpuppet.us website…

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Album release parties!

Last night’s show went really well! There were a bunch of technical hitches and I made a bunch of mistakes and so on but it was a good time and it was great to get a lot more people hearing my music. Hopefully I’ll be able to do more of these things.

Anyway. I have a few listening parties scheduled for the album release:

For the VRChat one, my plan is to perform some of the songs from the album live before we listen to the full studio version, but we’ll mostly play it by ear.

And, of course, I have my TDOR choir show in a few hours (and another one next Wednesday evening), both of which will hopefully be livestreamed.

Charity concert update

There’s been a schedule change with Aga’s Toys for Tots event, and I will now be going on at 2 PM Pacific. Also it seems that I’ll be performing from an instance where I can invite a small audience to join me, so I hope to see folks there! The instance will be owned by my VRChat group. I was misinformed about this! Please join Corbelle’s group.

Albums almost ready for release

transitions.pngdeadnames.png

Transitions is (finally) almost done. There’s just a couple of little tweaks left to do (like, super duper minor things, decibel-level adjustments and slight timing tweaks and a little bit of vocal tuning). It’ll be really nice to finally have this album done after all this time. The oldest song on this was first recorded in 2001! And my first attempt at making an album of this stuff was back in 2003! This album is legally old enough to drink in the United States.

I’ll probably stick to my original preorder release date of November 20, 2024, as that’s Trans Day of Remembrance. Deadnames has also been done and ready to release for a while, and it will also be coming out on whatever day Transitions comes out.

These are the release dates for Bandcamp/itch/mirlo; streaming will come later, as a proper streaming release has a two-week lead time. So it’ll probably be November 29 for those platforms. (Streaming users can wait, anyway. Anyone who’s following me closely knows to buy my music, right? Right.)

I’ve also written some fun visualizer code which will be used to put a full-album video on my YouTube channel. Audio visualizers are super annoying and awkward on every code platform I know of these days, so I just went to Get It Done by modifying Wavemaker, a tool built by my friend John. Someday I want to build a better framework for this stuff but Good Enough is good enough.

Upcoming charity show

Hey everyone! On Friday, November 15, at 2:30 PM PST I will be performing a live set in VRChat for a charity fundraiser, benefitting Toys for Tots.

The show will be hosted by Corbelle’s music events group, so join that VRChat group if you’d like to see me in-world. Otherwise, you can watch it being streamed on twitch. I hope you’ll be able to come!

That rumination was silly

Okay my gut feeling was at least agreed to by a bunch of other people: Material Change will not be going onto Transitions, and instead the chamber pop version will be something I do for a later album, named “Misfits,” which I already have so many ideas for.

Any attempt at forcing Material Change to fit into Transitions would not serve the album, at least not in the modern landscape of how music is distributed and listened to, and as always, I make up my own rules for how I do my music.

It’s funny how much more important and urgent things feel at 1 AM.

Transitions quandry (advice needed)

When I work on an album, I’m not just working on the songs in isolation, I’m also constantly playing the album as a whole to check things like song-to-song flow, dynamics, and listening for defects that I’d like to fix later before I release the album, since noticing and fixing little issues as I go is a lot easier than trying to do one big quality pass at the end.

With Transitions, I started out by recording Valley Highway, because writing that song became the impetus for recording the whole album, and I ended up using it as the prototype for the overall production style for the album.

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Music progress and upcoming shows!

Gosh it’s been a while since I’ve checked in! Here’s stuff that’s going on with me, music-wise.

Transitions

The album is almost done. I finally settled on some album art, all but one song is recorded, and I just have a bit of mixing work to do on half of the songs. Hopefully the Bandcamp release will be available soon, and the streaming release will be soon after!

Choir

As always, my choir is doing a couple of shows for Trans Day of Remembrance. Both will be at University Congregational UCC, with one on November 16, 2024 at 3 PM and one on November 20, 2024 at 7:30 PM.

These will also hopefully be streamed, for those who can’t make it in person, but I hope you will be able to attend in the flesh if possible.

VRChat show

I’ll also be performing at a charity show for Aga’s Toys for Tots on November 15 at 2:30 PM Pacific. I don’t know if this show will be streamed but it’ll definitely be accessible in VRChat. I’ll be providing more information as it comes to me.

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More Mac M4 thoughts

My current hardware setup: M1 Max studio in the office, M1 mini in the recording studio.

The Mac studio is great for editing video and doing compute-heavy tasks, and also has amazing peripheral connectivity which mostly goes unused. Connected to it I have an external NVMe enclosure, a second monitor, and a USB hub full of other stuff. Also a spare audio interface that it basically just uses as an unnecessary, overpriced DAC for my speakers and headphoens (and which I keep meaning to move to my gaming PC to get better audio for my VR concerts).

The mini in the studio is always short on connectivity options; it only has the two Thunderbolt ports, and could really use a third. It also has sufficient CPU for my music, but it’s a bit lacking in I/O, both because its internal 512GB SSD is slower than what’s in the Mac Studio, but also because it’s small enough that I have to offload most of my instrument sample data to a much slower external drive.

So what I need in the studio is more connectivity and more disk I/O, and what I need in the office is more compute…

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I need some real-life friends

Lately I’ve been feeling super isolated and depressed. A lot of it is because I’ve just been so fatigued all the time, and the rare times I have energy to do anything I’m pouring it all into the album. But like, I’m getting very little socializing in with other people.

Sure, there’s weekly choir stuff (and by the way I’ll be performing at our talent show on Saturday! please come!) but that’s not really filling in any social needs.

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