v3o

Celebrating 10 years of fun and sessions, we finally released 3 albums on 7th June - Woohoo! (check out the trailer here ). We nearly didn't make it... but more on the sparks flying off the power supply later!  Firstly though, 3 albums seemed like a huge task to complete on occasional evenings,  so I probably need to find a few facts to understand the scale... ~30 larger recording sessions over 10 years, ~600 hours recording sessions 380GB/~620 hours of multitrack WAVs (320GB via cubase projects and 60GB via Logic) 2,158 Project files: 1,268 Cubase | 781 Reason | 109 Logic (distinct count excluding versions will be lower of course, but there's no way I'm figuring that out!) ~500 recorded tunes - normal recording time was ~20 mins per tune, so total raw mixdown would be over 200hrs In early 2017, we had 109 tunes on the potential albums By April 2017, only managed to cut to 87 tracks over 6 hours. Based on status and duration, I estimated it ...

There's a recurring internal debate popping up - do you have fun and create some crazy noise and call it a tune, or do you tone it down make sure your music is accessible? Seems that sometimes the word "accessible" could be used to define commercialising, selling out, removing the outstanding characteristics, submitting to fear and ensuring conformity to boundaries. The world does not accept the insanity that creates, but if you smooth the corners and create a result which hides its true origin, that's ok. Granted, sometimes "accessibility" means deleting some crazy rubbish born on the wrong tangent if it takes value away from something which could be great. Let's call that accenuating the positive. There are different degrees of conformity though. I wonder if the sex pistols, in all their rebellion, conformed to the style expected of them and lost some of their creative freedom? I admire the way Ween just do whatever they want on their albums , it re...

When great progress is made on a couple of tunes, suddenly the other tunes drop down in quality level. So although you felt 80-90% complete with 10 tunes, suddenly you find yourself going back towards 60-70% as you appreciate the effort required for the marginally higher quality you must strive for (note: percentages are based on general vibe, despite attempts to employ some scientific measurements and approach!). And then a tune gets stale and loses the vibe, so you've got a big gaping hole in the whole mood There is some benefit from increased duration - it's like somebody else's song when you come back to work on it, especially when you can't remember how to play it. But I think we've had enough duration for quite a while - could do with more completion, less duration! How will we get it done....? Option 1... we could probably complete to a satisfactory level if we had 2 weeks full time in the studio, 12 hours a day, working through the weekends coz it's fun...