Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

my music

You can download my album for free!

by

[This “sticky” post will remain at the top of the page; new posts start below.]

Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1

Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1

Do you like free music? Do you also like me? The intersection of those two interests is my first album since 2001, Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1.

Brown Bag Demos collects a dozen of my favorite acoustic demos – including many you’ve heard here – all newly remastered. The album is available for free streaming and download at BandCamp. You can DL in any format you’d like – from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis to FLAC.

Under My Skin

by

It’s that time again.

Decades help us mark the time, draw arbitrary lines around styles and changes in our world. Sometimes my memories of “The 80s” are actually from 1992. Sometimes that great 30s pop art I love is from the 20s.

We claim 10 years as something tangible, but can we really understand it? At age 20 it’s half of our lives! At age 30 it’s just the upwardly mobile portion. So when do we understand? 40? 50? Do ten years ever make sense as a discreet, disposable unit the way one, or two, or five do?

I don’t know, and I’ll have to decide in August when this endeavor hits its own decade mark.

By then I’ll have celebrated dozens of other tiny deca-birthdays, as my early songs are all reaching that milestone. I’ve let most of them slip by unnoticed, or unmarked, or just by playing the song once or twice.

“Crashing” marked the beginning of my “modern” era of songwriting, so I marked that one with a recording.

Today marks something else. “Under My Skin.” God, I cannot even believe I am typing this, but I wrote it ten years ago. And, I never stop playing “Under My Skin.” For the first time, this is a song I’ve been living with – regularly, non-stop – for a decade.

So, there’s my measure. This tune took me from 18 having my first kiss to 28 and about to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. 18 and unsure of what life held in store to 28 surer than ever of what I want from it. 18 and barely able to carry a tune to 28 and confidently holding the stage on my own in two gigs in a single weekend.

But, I can tell you all about that this summer. The blog covers that. What does the song cover? [Read more…] about Under My Skin

Hot off the presses!

by

This week has been one of the more technically challenging ones I’ve ever spent as a songwriter, but right now that doesn’t bother me because look what I’m holding in my hands…

Brown Bag Demos discs, hot off the press.

Yes, that’s right, my first physical mass-produced CD release since 2001, and it’s totally DIY by Elise and I:

  • I decided to put together a CD six days ago
  • I wrote 11 of the 12 songs from 1999 to 2009
  • I performed all of the songs solo in my studio from 2007 to 2010
  • I engineered and mixed the recordings
  • E shot the photo; we both retouched it
  • E designed the cover art; I laid out the disc art
  • E and I worked together to launch the accompanying new website
  • E originally conceived of the Brown Bag Demos name and execution

    More news tomorrow, as I make my solo debut (and sudden guerrilla CD release party) at the Tin Angel – 10:30 pm, $8.

    More news on buying/downloading the CD on Monday.

    • Flip Video Hell

    by

    Good news: wallet found!

    Bad news: still in video encoding hell.

    Since I’m sure someone else on the face of the internet is experiencing this issue, allow me to expand:

    My project: Shoot video with my Flipcam while I record audio in my home studio. After mixing the audio, sync it to the video in Adobe Premiere for a studio-quality music video to post to YouTube.

    Sounds straight-forward, yes?

    The Flip is certainly straight-forward – about the size of a pack of cigarettes and operates with a single button. Its 1280×720 isn’t the crispest, but it does well in all sorts of lighting conditions, and can absorb loud sound at concerts without clipping.

    That said, the sound is still through a relatively tinny single mic, so adding stereo multi-track audio from my studio marks a vast improvement.

    The problem comes when I import the MP4 into Adobe Premiere. It looks beautiful! However, its timing is every so slightly off – compared to the audio track the video falls increasingly behind. The difference is less than a second, but enough to ruin the visual sync of the audio to the video.

    Not only is it visible against the video, but you can hear it via an increasing echo if you turn up the audio from the Flip. And after encoding the problem seems even more pronounced.

    I’ve been trouble-shooting this for 72 hours, and I can’t discern the source of the problem. So far, I have:

  • Installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled all of my various video codecs
  • Tried encoding the end project in a number of formats
  • Tried editing with multi-threading on my system turned on and off
  • Tried converting the Flip video to other formats prior to editing

    At the moment I am truly and completely stumped. On one hand, it could be that I’m simply not unpacking the MP4 file correctly into a format that I can edit with.

    However, my growing suspicion is that the Flip is dropping and/or inserting some frames, and it would only take one or two “skips” to throw the video off several milliseconds against my audio recording.

    I lucked out on Monday with “Icy Cold,” which lags just a hair, but since then I’ve been completely frustrated.

    Unless some video superhero comes through with an explanation and a fix it looks like I’ll be hawking my Flip to step up to a more pro-sumer model for my upcoming projects.

    Updated: Comments from my personal video superhero, Colin, of SeptaWatch.

    MPEG is a compressed format, meaning it uses a combination of dropped frames + keyframes to make up for the lack of real data. When you “decompress” the MPEG, those frames are gone forever, so they have to be recreated. This is an imprecise science. Since the Flip is recording compressed video, you’re not recording with any sort of frame-by-frame accuracy.

    The songwriter’s job is never done, eh?

    PS: Could it be the audio that’s off? It’s possible, but not probable – I’ve been using Cubase for over two years, and my DAW is customized for it. It’s certainly not a logical explanation

    • Daily Demo: Icy Cold

    by

    Here’s a brand new HD video of “Icy Cold” with beautiful hi-fi multi-track soundboard audio. It comes with a story.

    Okay, story-time.

    Ten years ago (less 24 days) I was a freshman in college, and I wrote a song called “Icy Cold.”

    It was an odd one – very oblique lyrics in one of my more unusual alternate tunings (at the time) made it a challenge to sing and play. I left it off my 2000 demo CD Other Plans and, curiously, also did not consider it for my 2001 studio disc Relief. It remained bound to my apartment, where it factored in to a few of my favorite Trio recordings.

    Around the same time I wrote “Icy Cold” – 86th in a rapidly-expanding list of songs – I decided that it was time for me to start playing shows.

    Being rather ignorant as to what that entailed, I assumed that I would just phone up a local, mostly-acoustic venue where people I liked frequently played and explain that I wrote tons of awesome songs, and then they would invite me to play. (Later, after my initial flush of success, I could upgrade to playing the TLA or the Electric Factory).

    The Tin Angel being the only local mostly-acoustic venue that I knew of at the time, I sussed out their booking information and rang them up.

    That was the extent of my year-2000 booking experience at the Tin Angel. No follow-up. No booking. No flush of success.

    To be fair, I would have been an utter disaster. I know some people so wonderful that their first ever show was at the Tin, but I was not that kind of wonderful in 2000. Sure, I had the awesome songs, but I could just barely sing, and I was playing a guitar that didn’t even especially stay in tune!

    Over the course of the past ten years I’ve done a lot to rectify my singing and guitar-playing issues, and I’ve played in a lot of amazing Philly venues – including the Tin Angel, as part of a showcase with Arcati Crisis. Yet, I’ve never fulfilled that original goal of ten years ago – being featured solo on the bill at the Tin.

    Well, that’s going to happen on Friday at 10:30 p.m., so when it came to choosing the first song to post in 2010 in this glorious new HD audio/video combo format it seemed natural to choose “Icy Cold” – especially given the slights it experienced in 2000 and 2001.

    Plus, it’s really freaking cold out.

    That’s my story.

    PS: I owe the hugest possible shout-out to Tim Jahn for explaining Adobe Premiere Pro compression codecs to me via Twitter at the eleventh hour (literally) to make this beautiful video possible. Tim writes a blog of occasional, thought-provoking bulletins that I have been enjoying for months. You can also follow him on Twitter.