One of my favorite albums as a teenager was In God We Trust Inc. by the Dead Kennedys so I was pretty jazzed when I heard about the The Lost Tapes DVD. I had a chance to watch it last week and it was pretty fascinating.

The story goes that the original recording session for In God We Trust Inc. on June 19th, 1981 was lost due to defective tape. They re-recorded the album some time later and that’s what actually made it onto the In God We Trust Inc I know and love. They have since rescued a lot of the recordings from the defective tape and from other sources and were video taping the recording session at the time. So this is a pretty good look at what it was like to be in the studio with the Dead Kennedys.

The songs sound more or less identical to the album versions and it’s pretty strange to watch the process of recording one of my favorite albums.

Saw The Stills and The Miniatures Saturday night. It was an okay show I guess. The Miniatures had great energy and The Stills were interesting, but nothing really rocked me too much. I found it funny when The Stills’ frontman ranted against the American government and said Ottawa was a very cool country’s capital, all the while the bassist was violating our no-smoking bylaws.

You would think that a book called “How To Write Songs On Guitar” would be relatively simple and straightforward, but you would be wrong.
(more…)

I’ve been meaning to complain here about books on mixing and recording not including audio example CDs. I don’t understand why they don’t all come with them. They don’t cost much to include and it seems stupid to even try to talk about audio concepts without audio examples to illustrate what the hell you’re talking about.

I own a lot of books on recording, and yet for some reason Sound Advice on Developing Your Home Studio is the first one I’ve bought with an included audio CD. This is just one book in the six book InstantPro series and as the name implies, it mostly covers things like cables, monitor positioning and room acoustics.

It would be a good book without the audio CD. For a small book (79 pages), it has quite a bit of detailed and practical information for the beginner. But with the CD, it’s fantastic. You can write pages and pages about why it’s a good idea to worry about your studio acoustics, but one good audio example will get the job done better.

The book covered a lot of stuff I was already familiar with and didn’t have a lot of new information for me. However, the audio CD was well worth it and I’m really interested in checking out some of the other books and CDs in the series, particularly Compressors, Limiters, Expanders & Gates, and Equalizers, Reverbs & Delays.

Reason 2.0 is the bees knees. I picked up my copy the other day and the Malstrom synth is a truly impressive piece of work. So much so that I’ve cleared off my newly-made Linux box for it and am now thinking about selling my Emu ESI-2000 sampler that I spent a lot of money on and almost never ever use. It’s been a year and change since I bought it and I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered from the expensive and draining multi-month process of hooking it up to my computer. SCSI was very mean to me and I’ve been unable to put it behind us.