On a recent trip, I made a pawn shop run on the search for some music. Being sick of everything i had and hoping for some random cool music, I grabbed 5 cds that could have potential. I picked a cd each that looked like:

• death metal
• guitar-based rock/jazz
• soft rock
• alternative rock
• techno/electronic

I've heard 3 of the five and none of them suit me. Here's a brief review of what I heard.

Alien Factor - Arterial Spray: With a song named "Ants, Sheep, Drunks, and Whores", I thought I found something worthwhile. What it really turned out to be was a lot of drum machines, samples, guitar chords distorted to the point of noise, and distorted, unintelligible vocals. And I did listen to the whole album. I was waiting for anything to happen and make me go "cool." It didn't happen. I'm certainly not a fan of lyric lines sung (shouted) and one word per beat, or one per bar in some songs. You have to have a bit of thought in your lyrical rhythm.

Cud - Asquarius: I though this was alternative rock. I guess it is. It was done in 1992 and the group had 4 other albums at the time. The singer's voice was starting to grow on me near the end, but the music didn't have anything interesting in it.

John Sheldon - Boneyard: I thought this would be guitar rock. It turned out to be kind of blues/borderline country. Like the others, there was nothing exciting or interesting on the album. This was the best produced and sounded radio-worthy, but eh... who to play it to.

I have two more to go. Soft rock, which looks like a female keyboardist, and electronic, which will probably be the winner in my $10 investment.

Well, it's not really a swarm like I had promised months ago, but it's progress. The website is finally getting stabilized and now I can start doing something creative.

The new tunes are:

• Chuck: This track is not mine. It's from an old archive of MacSnide's from the Boston days. It's a bit of lunacy on a familiar theme.
• Railroaded: This is an old idea I decided to stop working on. For some reason this makes me think of an old Disney song about Casey Jones, hence the railroad reference. I don't remember anything about how the old song went. I would like to hear it again.
• Teresa's Song 96: I was on a remake kick back in 96 since I had the Yamaha SW60 and the sounds were begging to be used. So I took a little time and redid this song. You can tell I liked the orchestral sounds in the SW60. This was probably about the time Gore and Rebirth of Power were done. Anyway, I just left it sit around and never did anything with it (for ten years).

I also genericized the blog into 700cb and general music info, in case I feel like venting on the current state of the music industry.

I'm just cleaning up some old stuff and figured I'd mix it down into a bunch of B-side grade tracks. I have three slated so far and maybe more depending on how deep I dig and how lame I want to get. One of the songs I can try out an idea shown to me by someone at Sam Ash. It should have been obvious, but I never thought of it. Use an arpeggiator with an acoustic guitar patch to get background fingerpicking. Duh! So I'm at Sam Ash looking for a replacement for the ESQ. That poor thing's been in 700cb for 18 years old and needs to give someone else some inspiration. I have a controller in mind, but am feeling a bit cheap lately, so all the junk equipment is now up on EBay. 700cb Studio south is now undergoing a renovation. Less physical devices and more virtual devices. Next up will be a faster computer to handle all these devices. If these items sell well, maybe I will have a bit of extra money to put towards it.

Added the last few tracks to the song today.  Now it sounds like a cheap ELP tune.  but whatever, that's one of my styles.  I guess it sounds like elp because all the lead patches are elp sounds.  When you hear it, you'll know.

I put a little time in on Vincent.  Got rid of some dumb ideas and put in a new dumb idea.  Maybe I can make it sound a bit better later.

I should be doing some mixdowns sometime soon and then I can post the songs.

I also spent some time in Nuendo adding the extra drum kits that come with the SW1000.  Some of them are interesting.  One called "Coffin" that's pretty nasty.

I thought about doing a trace/techno tune, but got sidetracked with adding the drum kits.  maybe other time.

I'm finding I don't really like this javascript-based rich-text editor.  I may go back to plain text.  This editor is slow and has a bug sometimes where it will convert every space into a non-breaking space (nbsp) and it ends up messing up the line wrapping..

I thought I'd better spend some time on Brains to keep myself well-balanced, so I did what I normally do when I need a new tune.  I picked a random patch and started writing.  The patch chosen was a pad-like sound, but had a nice attack and lots of depth depending on the velocity.  I started playing some soft chords and liked it.  Then I repeated the same chords an octave up and the sound changed a bit, making it sound like a different sound.  Nice.  

After playing this chord sequence over and over, I atarted to think of a CD I had heard a while ago with some new-age music.  at the time I could only equate it to Disney theme park music. It had this majestic, uplifting sound, like a soundtrack and less like a song. That's what I heard with these chords, so the next "scene" popped into ;my head and I had a B part. Simple.

So that MIDI track is preserved nicely, and I'll be adding some extra stuff to it and hopefully we'll have a new Brains sequence this weekend.

Which reminds me, I really need to finish Vincent.  Every time I try to add stuff to it, it sounds worse.  I know what I want to hear, but I can't find the patches.  "Too many choices make you change your mind."  Rush?  or someone less cool?