Lyrics to one of the songs going on the '30 years' album. From the divorce days. Simple but true...

'Wishes'

Time make time, slip away
What I feel, from yesterday
Captured by a memory of a love that turned to pain
I can see the sunlight, but I feel the rain

One last tear, still we cry
To all we’ve known, we say goodbye,
But if I had a wish to keep, just one last lucky star
I’d wish we were together, but so far

All of my wishes, don’t change the way things are
Wishes, can never reach so far
All of my wishes, won’t change what’s in the past
Wishes, won’t change a thing.

Giving up, dreams let go
All those things, we’ll never know
And every time I turn around, still feeling you are there
Forgetting that it’s over, is so hard

But all of my wishes, won’t change the way we are
Wishes, will never reach so far
All of my wishes, can’t change what’s in the past
Wishes, won’t change a thing.

© Ronald Reed Jackson 1997

Progress, same old

Done very little on '30 years' for several reasons. There's two other paying projects that tend to push this one aside for a while. Also several other issues from health to personal that blew up my working patterns. Next several days through Easter are pretty filled.

So as it goes, "life happens while you're busy doing other things" is ever apt.

Group of soundcloud recordings, now from long ago

Wow, lots of big things to tell! Just can't remember them right at this moment. Okay, truthfully a retake of the flu set me back bad since my last post. Still having post-illness effects, but getting back on track finally. Feeling well enough to get excited about tracking again.

I don't gig these days, or even in any of the last years. Two reasons. A book that explains one of them is in the works, but the short version of that is, I lost my voice from long term mold exposure. And second, paying venues generally want cover bands or artists, and I completely quit doing covers at all in the 80s.

But the lack of regularly performing leaves stiff fingers for keys, guitars, and bass. They have to be worked out as does the voice. And vocal training is tough with the cold, and sinus infection residuals. However, it's all coming along. Two other jobs also get an equal share of time. One, the book mentioned, and I'm producing an album for another artist.

I also spend at least an hour or more a day helping other people as best I can in non-music related issues, sort of a personal social cause thing. Hard, cause I can get very engrossed and impassioned in something, and it's tough to stick to the self made time management rules. Plus I cook, clean, pay bills, do all the shopping, and all that routine household stuff like everybody else who doesn't yet have cleaning services and personal assistants. Someday I hope.

If you check back later, I'll try to have a cue mix of the first '30 years' track. Anxious to hear some response on this new "old" stuff. Until soon!  

Minor updates. Dealing with a relapse or new flu most of the last week, so it isn't a happy journal entry. Finally defeated a tech problem that had kept my hands tied on how to work around what appeared to be a software limitation. Turned out a simple manual latency setting was required to fix the issue, though I'd already done that before, it had reset it's self to defaults. So no more immediate barriers are foreseen to get actual tracking moving.

Thinking of switching to a dif break in song from 'Alison' to a song already recorded named 'I want to be bad'  because the production is so much more complicated on 'Alison'. Maybe next one I'll get it, when there's not so many software re-learning hangs. Not sure either will be in the '30 years' project. Really just have to see and hear some progress on something now.

Okay, where's the beef? Or the track? As is so common, I got pulled into something else for a while. Also, software glitches and anti-help menus frustrate me more easily now that I'm just a grumpy old man, yelling at the kids to get off my lawn, while trying to decode the help menu.  This album is #3 on my do it or die work priority list. Oh, I also have a real life, boring as that may be, and stuff happens in it. However, please check back. This track will happen soon. Or that hook
"Alison, where are you now, and do you remember me? Alison, I wonder now, did you ever care for me.:"  will loop in my head until I lose that spec of sanity I may still have.

Don't give up! Close to cracking the drum tracking code. I've been tempted to actually use a real drummer. It's the only instrument I never really played well enough to use for recording tracks. The only thing is, I hate having musicians in the studio. Mainly cause most of them will steal your equipment as soon as you're away.

Basic tracks will be up by this weekend. Weird techy things about doing drum tracks via midi and samples, even if a drummer plays the triggers for MIDI data. There's all sorts of MIDI editors to auto correct timing, then auto mess it up, so it doesn't sound inhumanly perfect or give it human "feel".

Also strange to old engineers, we used to go through major efforts to gate real drums to get rid of the natural acoustics of the drum booth, as drum tones would bleed over into open drum mics from parts of the kit that weren't being played. i.e. tom tom mics picked up the snare drum as a hollow ambient noise, so adding a gate closed the mics until the toms were actually played.

Now there is a 20 minute tutorial involving 34 complex steps with effects and application techniques to recreate the bleed over effect from drum samples to simulate the drum booth that we used to work so hard to cover up. A great deal of flawless digital recording software is being designed and incorprated to recreate the flaws in analog recording we once sought to get rid of at every chance. So in the old days, whenever I missed the levels and caused tape saturation (distortion) it wasn't really a mistake. It was just a future ingenuis insight to modern effects!