Back to Redline

In case you thought the Redline Project had failed, or that its proprietor had been abducted by the mother ship, fear not. This post and the last may have a month's worth of gap between them, but the Redline Project lives on. And I WILL make the album launch deadline that looms 92 days from the present.

It is hard to believe that well over half of this year now sits in our back pockets. I sharply dislike how time vanishes like water in the fingers, but I am delighted that its passing often brings monumental life change and fresh newness.

This is foremost a blog about a renegade music project pieced together with zero budget with potentially unattainable goal of 10,000 listeners at year's end. I have often forayed into personal matters, especially because so often they have been related to the Redline Project progress.

Many of my readers known that my absence is the effect of a worthy cause. Four weeks ago, my wife and I traveled to Seoul, South Korea to adopt a magnificent baby boy. Though early fatherhood is unparalleled joy, it has also managed to knock the wind out of my sails and leave me dizzy on the floor. I have not accomplished much of anything in the past month, including logging adequate sleep hours.

Becoming a parent is all I really have to discuss lately, and that is not pertinent to this blog. However, I have felt a rekindled passion for finishing the project over the past number of days, and I am pleased to report that I am digging into a song rewrite and a new (hopefully final) composition. Once those two pieces are tracked, it will be time to master the recording, send it off to the Library of Congress for copyrighting, and finally distribution.

I blogged nearly every day for half a year, and it was mostly delightful to send oodles of pontification into the digital abyss. With the responsibilities that fatherhood brings, it will be impossible to keep the same pace. So I will write when I can, and all the while I will continue crawl toward the finish line.

If anyone actually finds their way back this blog after my extended absence, you win the gold star of loyalty. You may redeem that gold star on October 15 for a free copy of the Redline Project final album. (And yes, everyone else in the world gets to download it for free as well).

A Stunning Turn

Several hours ago, my wife and I received the phone call for which we have longed. Our social worker finally rang to tell us we have been cleared for travel -- that our son is ready to come home. We depart in a week and return seven days after that, and thus ends a two year road of praying, planning, soul-searching, paperwork, fundraising, and the like.

Assuming we had three weeks remaining, the lady and I charted an agressive calendar for accomplishing all the work-related tasks, avocational endeavors, and endless errands. That calendar flushed down the potty today as a new seven-day schedule took its place.

What does this mean for the Redline Project? I am going to be out of the loop for a few weeks, unable to record, unable to edit, unable to post, unable to progress.

This initiative poses an odd, somewhat contradictory set of emotions. On the one hand, the Redline Project means everything to me. It has become a standby of my routine; a daily dose of creative expression. On the other hand, it is a disposable, meaningless work that holds more narcissistic value than it is an expression of vitality to others. My growing hope has been to finalize and master all tracks, copyright them, and release them to the world in the form of a free download before my son comes home. It appears I have failed that goal, and though disappointed, all I can really think about at the moment is the joy of bringing my son into my family.

Before I take a mid-year sabbatical, it seems appropriate to furnish a brief project update. The Redline Project is alive and well, with nearly an hour of music recorded and mostly edited. One track still needs a rework of lyrics and therefore a redo of the vocal recordings. I hope to write and record one track that is yet to be imagined and composed.

The project was initially scheduled for a launch of October 31, which remains 137 days in the future. Even with a lapse in project productivity, I am convinced there is enough time to tie a knot around the goals of this project and successfully launch its final album.

10,000 downloads is a lofty, intimidating number, but I have nearly 1,000 friends on Facebook, and those friends all have their respective networks. I believe the goals of this project are within reach, and I believe the Redline Project will survive my impending fatherhood.

Lyric Conundrum

Here is the chorus of the Redline Project song called Commons:

Black hand, White hand
Gripping each other
Dance in circles
Sister and brother
Leaping glittered splash
Underneath the fountain
Fifteen miles
A world apart
There's plenty of time
For broken hearts
Drink the moment
At the barefoot Commons

A handful of trusted friends all pointed out that this chorus is riddled with cliche and overused imagery. The song tells the story of two neighborhoods: a rougher part of town and the wealthy urban high rise community. The idea is that both neighborhoods have their detriments and their benefits. Neither one hell, neither one heaven.

The Commons refer to a public garden in Boston that sits under the shade of ancient willows and oaks, where people from any neighborhood may come enjoy a moment of its delights. It is the Eden of the song, and in it the only true harmony is found.

If the chorus is to describe this utopia, it ought to do so in an artistically appropriate and poetically sensitive way. I am going to take a swing at a rewrite.

Anyone have some ideas and want to chime in? If your ideas are accepted, you will get mentioned in the project's liner notes.

A Day Later

24 hours have accrued since I pieced together a prologue for the Redline Project final album. Read yesterday's post for my prediction as to how I thought I would feel about the composition once a day passed.

A grand announcement and substantial surprise: the two minute piece has grown on me and I like it more now than I did yesterday.

Not to say that I didn't add, subtract, tweak, adjust, filter, modify, extract, transpose, and plop a dollop of whipped cream. The track seemed (and after all of my work tonight still is) a farthing or two from perfection. Nevertheless, I bounced out an MP3 file for a listen in iTunes, and so far I am nodding satisfactorily at the sonic product.

On a darker note, I sat with the guitar and notebook tonight in hopes of capturing some new direction for an opening track (the one following the prologue, and the one that I feel is still missing from the current lineup). No dice. I have zero sense of what to write about; if it is catchy and upbeat, it will not fit with the deeper messages characterizing the rest of the album, and if it is thick and deep, it will not work well as a first song. What will I do?

Eat a midnight snack and sleep on it... that is exactly what I will do.

Listening Day Five

No matter how adept I become at working the knobs of Logic Pro, I know I am miles away from producing a professional sound, which is inexpressibly frustrating. I must remind myself daily that I have zero training and am working on a do-it-yourself rig more worthy of a garage sale than a serious recording studio. Pffft.

I am trying to polish up the song called Commons, which has potential to be one of my favorite pieces on the Redline Project. The song is about an unlikely friendship that blossoms in Boston's public gardens on a warm summer day. Initially the two children in the story are assigned predictable stereotypes, with one friend coming from the privilege of wealthy urban living and the other dwelling in the misfortune of the projects. As the verses unravel, the cracks in both foundations of living standards are revealed and the subtle joys found in each setting are explored. Its a lyric that discusses the facade of inequity and the beautiful truth of equality among all human beings.

Too bad the recording quality vomits all over what I believe could be an excellent song.

Song Report Number Five: Commons
I am discovering that the source recording for Commons is quieter across the board than all of the other recordings in the project. I am trying to work with the raw material, but I am wondering if boosting the volume digitally is starting to distort the overall sound a bit. The edits to this track include gain, gain, and more gain to get the levels right. I also de-essed the vocals and added some overarching EQ to the mix. I wish a genius recordist would catch the excitement of this project and volunteer time and talents to make sense of my audio messes. That looks improbable, so I will continue to stab at it alone.

When Enough is Enough

I have been pressing through track number nine for the past three hours, which is probably the 12th time I have wrestled with this particular file. I have nine complete, if rough, tracks stacked in a neat playlist in iTunes. On several occasions, I mentioned the goal of producing ten tracks, and while I am one short of achieving that objective, number nine is more or less three separate compositions in one.

Could it be that I have all the music I need for the Redline Project? Halleluia, Amen. Pass the potatoes.

This is where the smile turns upside down into a frown. There are miles to go before these rough cuts can be bounced down to a final recording. Here's the shopping list:

1) I need to listen, listen listen, all the while taking notes of problem spots, awkward moments, aural issues.

2) Once all music has been polished with fine grit sandpaper, it will be time to learn how to mix the tracks to obtain at least a semi-professional sound. I am nearly positive I will need assistance with this, and I have no idea who may come to my rescue.

3) Should I make it through the past two items, it will be time for the final audio process, called mastering. How exactly am I supposed to execute a decent mastering of my audio when I don't yet have a good handle on what the term means?

4) Copyrighting the music is not a difficult process, but it takes a bit of running around and a few bucks. Thankfully there is one step in the process that is not completely daunting.

Oh yes, and when I am finally through with these gargantuan tasks, I have to figure out how to distribute this music to 10,000 people. Sometimes I wonder who spiked my New Years beverage when I decided to take on this project, and with what illegal substance. Whatever was swirling around in my champagne glass, I want some more.

Laundry and Reruns

As the weekend draws to a close, it is rare that I have much energy, and this Sunday evening is no exception. I have never been any good at relaxing or sitting still. My weekends attest to this claim, each one crammed to the rafters with outings, errands, and activities.

By way of example, please allow the following list: shopping for Mother's Day, mountain biking, enjoying a friend's wedding, dancing the night away, selling a bicycle, attending church, eating lunch with my Mother, and recording another final Redline Project track. There was hardly time for sleep in the past 48 hours.

After I the Waffle House rendezvous with the dude who purchased my bicycle, I took the ride home to prepare mentally for an evening of recording, mixing, and blogging. But alas, when I returned home, Facebook called my name softly luring me into its endless list of random ponderances.

One friend posted his amusement with this week's episode of Saturday Night Live and its featured host, Betty White. "Oh right... I wanted to watch that," my procrastinating self contemplated.

Next stop, Hulu.com for a rerun viewing of SNL. Another hour gone.

Next thought: "Hmm... There is laundry to sort, and if I fold all five loads that are sitting in the basement waiting for attention, I can load up some old Seinfeld DVDs and vegetate a little longer, all while pleasing my wife with a completed household chore."

I suppose honesty is better than indefinite procrastination. Simply stated, I do not feel like working on my recordings tonight. Why push? Why force? This is my project, and it is supposed to be fun. I think I will take the night off and return to the Redline Project once I source some much-needed motivation.

New Term

I learned a new term today. The word is sibilance, which refers to the unnaturally loud frequencies that appear on a recording when a vocalist sings certain consonant sounds. The most pronounced are the s-sounds and the p-pops, but t-sounds, k-sounds, sh-sounds, and others can pose similar decibel spikes.

As I let iTunes cycle through the Redline Project's completed tracks, certain problematic patterns have begun to emerge. Sharp consonant sounds abound in the recordings, even though I have always positioned a pop filter between my mouth and the microphones when singing.

Logic Pro ships with a plug-in called a De-esser, a little piece of software that purports to remove the troubled frequencies. One small problem: it fails to work. Initially, I assumed its yield was unsatisfactory due to incompetent user error. However, a Google search revealed that scores of other recordists have experienced similar woes.

What then is the antidote to this perplexing aural enigma? YouTube to the rescue...

I located a useful video tutorial that outlines the process of using a condenser plug-in to remove unwanted sibilance. A few clicks and loud hissy consonants seem to melt into a natural sonic spectrum. Looks like the old adage of, 'You learn something new every day,' applies to this one. Your ears will unknowingly thank me for unearthing this discovery.

Initial Car Test

Armed with six of my compositions loaded into the trusty iPod, I took the wheel of my Honda Element and headed down the highway. My buddy Peter, a fine musician and sound technician, advised me to do so every now and again to gain perspective on how the music sounds in consumer speakers.

Good advice. What is full and resonant in Studio Redline comes across as thin and whiny in the car. I compared my work to the mp3 files from a few favorite artists; their music is a quilt of balanced sound that fills every corner of the vehicle with their artwork.

How do they do that?

Admittedly, I am recording on subpar hobby gear. Add to that a complete lack of mixing knowledge and no clue how to master recordings, and you have a fair assessment of my capabilities. If I desire the result of the Redline Project to sound halfway decent when I finish with it, some outside help is definitely needed.

My goal for the week is to find a talented, local recordist and schedule a consultation or two. Bonus points if said recordist offers their time on the cheap. While a maneuver of this sort may blow my intended budget, it would be much worse to leave every aspect of the work to my shaky, unskilled hands.

Side Step

My wife and mother-in-law joined me for an afternoon outing to the High Museum of Art, where an exquisite temporary exhibit called, 'The Allure of the Automobile' is on display. A score of the rarest of automobiles from the 1930s to the 1960s are on view for a couple of months only, and the collection is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

What does any of this have to do with the Redline Project? Hardly anything, except that the trip took me away from music recording, mixing, and once again, blogging.

This project has become a fixture of daily life, and a weekend devoid of progress make me feel as my wife does without eyeliner - that something is missing. The habit of producing basement recordings is certainly a better one than biting nails or cracking knuckles, and I am glad to be hooked on this constructive and invigorating pastime.

I accomplished a skosh of composing and editing today; a twist of a knob here, a tweak of a dial there. That's all. With the house returning to its standard population, tomorrow will bring a grand return to the project's goals as I try to polish and shine the last few rough cuts.

If you have a moment to navigate to high.org, where you can peruse a sampling of the marvelous automobiles on display.

Normal Procedure

I deemed a certain song recording complete about two weeks ago. Since then, I have opened up the file at least a dozen times, tweaking or finessing a small detail with every pass. I will certainly peruse the file twelve or more times between now and the album release, and I am sure I will find something else to adjust on each occasion.

Is this normal procedure?

Often I open up a nearly complete track and let it play on repeat for the better part of a morning. I listen carefully, I listen as a consumer, and I block out the sound altogether, in that order. Sometimes I notice a subtle issue or mistake in the mix, sometimes I observe nothing.

Is this neurotic?

Whenever I make good progress on a recording, I fly around the house in a bouncy iteration of unadulterated bliss. Without fail, no more than 12 hours pass before I hit a sharp feeling of depression, and I become certain that this project will never cross the finish line.

Am I insane?

My wife's mother will be staying with us for the next three days, which means two things: a lovely visit and virtually no progress made on the Redline Project. I will try to keep the posts going, so feel free to check in.

Collecting Mixing Tips

The daunting task of mixing raw files into balanced audio presentations has begun, and I could not be more lost. Not only is every track of mine clunky and unpolished, but the peaks all redline and the softs are downright flimsy.

There is way too much to learn in these brief months. Curses.

I much prefer to accomplish on my own strength, and it takes me a while to humble myself and ask for assistance. When I finally reach out to a fellow human being for help, I am often stunned by the kindness that is extended.

An example: Jan Fischer, a faithful reader of this blog and a stellar musician, offered to take a look at a track, make some fixes, and describe what he did to achieve a good mix. When I expressed gratitude for his willingness to devote time and talent to the project, he responded, "That's what friends are for."

Another example: I called Nick Akin today, a budding southern gospel musician and recordist for whom I have completed some graphic design projects, to inquire if he offers mixing lessons. Though he does not teach for hire, he invited me to his studio so I can watch and learn as his band hones their latest songs. He spent a half hour on the phone imparting tips and tricks for massaging a recording to aural harmony, all while spouting encouragements like, "Just keep at it, I know your stuff is going to sound awesome." He's never heard me play a note, but I somehow still felt fuzzy and warm.

I am struck today by the generosity of these friends, by the many who dedicate time to reading my daily ramblings, and to the countless who have taken a moment to drop an encouraging line. You are all a marvelous inspiration to a guy who can be stingy with and self-consumed during all available free time. Thank you for reminding me the importance and beauty of generosity.

Question Without Answers

While studying art in college, a professor posed an important question.

When is a piece of art done?

Oil paints are malleable for a long time after they are on the canvas, and there is always the option of painting over whatever has dried. One can work, and rework, and redo again ad nauseum. When should an artist sign the lower right hand corner and call it a day?

The question stuck with me as I began a career in graphic design. In commercial art that is driven by budgets and deadlines, the determining factor of a piece's completion often is dictated by the number of remaining items on the project list or amount of billable hours already accrued. That is not a satisfying answer though, because the urgency of the moment should never serve as a litmus test for the completeness of artworks.

As the Redline Project album begins to take shape, I am developing a twitchy habit of cycling through each track, finding something to tweak or adjust, saving and closing, opening the next, and repeating the process. On ocassion, I have de-adjusted a facet I readjusted the day before and then re-readjusted the same detail the following day. I am tending towards obsessiveness as this project rolls along.

I have no answers for this. Feedback is helpful and welcome.

That Bad

The first severe weather of the summer swirled through Atlanta today, drenching the local bike trails and all the other outdoor distractions that would have otherwise loved to lure me away from the Redline Project. If it weren't for this mountain of a hobby, the rain would have me pursing my lips and humphing along through the day.

Instead, I jumped at the opportunity to get some serious work accomplished on the recordings. Drums poorly miked and sticks in hand, I dove in at 10:00 this morning. It is now 7:30 pm, which means I pushed through a plumper period of music today than I usually squeeze out of any given workday. It goes without saying that I am clearly motivated by the former.

With this many hours logged in the recording studio, I am going to keep my remarks brief, limiting them to the following disdain.

Once again I am shocked by the honesty of recording. On many occasions during these nine hours, I performed what seemed like a good take. Alas, the playback had another tale to tell.

Am I really that bad of a musician? My mother always had complimentary things to say about my abilities, but somehow the tape offers a different opinion. I am suddenly struck with deep respect for the pros who churn out excellence in one take. Bravo to all of you. I am starting to understand why I never made it as a gigging musician.

Jiminy Cricket

Allow me to paint a picture. Logic is running and I have opened the file requiring tonight's effort and attention. Atlanta is a gargantuan heap of yellow pollen and all of outside is abuzz and aflutter with the earth coming back to life. Wood bees whizz and pop outside the window as baby birds chirp their requests for worms. Sound lovely?

Mostly it is, until I innocently string up a microphone to redo some subpar vocal tracks. All of the lively hubbub finds its way through the tangle of wires and into my headphones.

This will not do.

I decide to wait out the spring symphony by cooking up a chicken sandwich and curling up for a fifteen minute catnap. The sun heads toward the tree line and a sense of cooling calm begins to blanket the suburban landscape.

I Had just settled down for recording vocal matter,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of carpets of pollen
Gave the lustre of mid-day to the spring that had fallen,
When, what to my wondering ears should arise,
But one thousand chirping crickets for me to despise.

The night was spent tweaking midi, mixing audio levels, and honing arrangement ideas. The new vocal tracks never came into existence. The winter had me competing with the borbarigmi of the furnace and water boiler, which seems tame compared to the nature's April incantation. This new challenge leaves me confounded; when am I to record anything?

A Look Around

Quick question. Is the Redline Project remarkable?

Though rhetorical, I imagine my readers to be split on the matter. One perspective says this initiative is nothing more than a hobby and a blog - a dual claim of ownership that far too many Americans can make.

Between yesterday and today, I landed in blog spaces covering golf swings, copyright laws, the healing wonders of the acai berry, and sadly enough, the possibiity that the National Enquirer may receive a Pulitzer Prize for excellence in journalism. To start a blog, one must have three things: internet access, a username, and a password. That's it.

There is a term for efforts that span the course of a year, often with accompanying blog entries. They are called '365 projects' (or perhaps '366 projects' should they fall on a leap year). For every one of these startups that manages to go viral, I estimate there are 1,000 others that get noticed by a score or less of regular visitors. Multiply that out again to find the quantity of 365 projects that make it past the first month.

Why? Because American life is startlingly packed - not simply busy in one area, but chock full of a million different commitments pulling in as many directions.

I make mention of this because I feel as a spider would if eight predators were yanking on each of its legs. With only a handful of weeks between today and the glorious day my soon-to-be son will finally come home from South Korea, I have a dozen or more items to accomplish and many more obligations yanking me away from progress.

In less than a week, I will write the 100th Redline Project post. With as much content here as would be found in a brief novel, my commitment to realizing the goals listed in this page's header should be apparent. Despite the my drive to succeed, I fear that all corners of life will tug, tug, tug until I have nothing left to give, and this project would fall to the wayside.

In a word, burnout.

Last night, I recorded 90 percent of a song's final version. This makes four tracks of ten (or more if there is time - insert sarcastic inflection here) that are nearly wrapped. Completing this album is so near I can almost smell sweet victory, and yet somehow distant enough to seem well out of grasp.

Since I started chiseling away at this idea in January, the paradox of so close yet so far away has haunted every day of this quarter-year. I plod on somehow, and inch ever closer to making a reality of this romantic pipe dream.

So, is the Redline Project remarkable? Should I manage to sculpt it into an accomplishment, it may someday become so. Until then, I think the unfortunately true answer is, 'No, it is not.'

1st Quarter Update

An unexpected side effect of plugging away at the Redline Project is having a pointed awareness of just how speedily a set of months can slip away. Tonight is March 31st, relegating the first three months of 2010 to the past and leaving only nine in the future.

Does this shock anyone else? We just sipped champagne and exploded poppers roughly 14 days ago. How can March 2010 be hours from vanishing?

As my custom has become at the close of each month, I am taking the opportunity to scrutinize the successes and failures of the Redline Project. Where has there been progress? Where has the momentum slacked a bit? What needs to happen to keep this initiative moving forward? Are we on track for an album release on October 31?

Let's commence with the plusses. In three months, I have acquired more than enough gear to adequately record, edit, and publish an album. Many of the acquisitions (including an electric guitar, microphones, and studio monitors) are borrowed instead of purchased, which is the only way I have managed to stay within a budget of $1,000.

Speaking of budget, I am thrilled to announce that while I have spent far less than $1,000 on the Redline Project ($877 to be exact), I have sold $900 worth of bikes and related gear to offset the cost. This has required a sizable and complicated effort. If anyone has ever tried auctioning items under Ebay's asinine new user feedback policies, you know that sellers have no recourse to deal with feisty, manipulative, or deadbeat buyers.

As I write this blog post, I received an email from one such buyer who is demanding more money back from me than he ever payed for an item sold 'as is.' Lovely. Ebay is wonderful, and Ebay sucks eggs. If someone with the username jmdesigns2 tries to buy an item from you, run far and run fast.

Frustrations considered, piecing together a basic recording studio for zero dollars is a grand success, and one that pleases my wife as well.

This month, I wrote what I consider to be my best songs so far. The tally so far is nine, including vocal and instrumental numbers. Several pieces are five minutes in length, and some are longer. Mind you, these are not final recorded versions; the tracks are currently scratch recordings meant to capture the basic form and textures of each composition.

With a baby boy coming to join our family around the first of July, I have decided that the Redline Project's final product will feature 10 original pieces of music. Originally I was aiming for 12, but I needed to adjust in order to keep the project moving forward as I prepare for fatherhood.

After the scratch recording roadmaps are all pieced together, the next step is to scrap and re-record just about everything. Three or four months worth of knowledge is virtually nothing when compared to giants of the recording industry with decades of experience lining their pockets. Om short, I am a noob. That said, I know considerably more than I did 83 posts ago, and I am hoping this base of knowledge will lend a relatively clean and polished sound to the final cuts.

Is the Redline Project on schedule? The answer, according to the original array of deadlines, is a resounding yes. I am supposed to complete all the rough cuts by May 15, which is still a month and a half out. If I Complete one more composition and two more recordings by then, I can draw a red line (pun intended) through this mile marker.

Nevertheless, I feel hopelessly behind. After the scratch tracks are complete, I must get to work recording palatable music that is at least somewhat iPod-worthy. Then comes the mixing process, with the mastering procedures hot on the tail. If these daunting tasks somehow are accomplished by October 31, I then must climb the mountain of distribution. At a glance, this final step is made easier by offering the music free of charge to anyone and everyone, but that in turn complicates the matter as it begs questions of copyright issues and distribution venues.

[Insert panicked nail biting here]

Scores of miles fade into the rearview mirror as hundreds more appear on the horizon. As this project turns into something of a second full-time job, the television tempts me with endless chasm mind-numbing nothingness. But I will press on. I will create. I will get heard.

A Magnificent Dilemma

Though the Redline Project blog is not a venue for my personal life, I can not help but exclaim the marvels of what started as an ordinary day.

My wife and I have been working and waiting for two and a half years to receive word from South Korea that they had a child for our family. We were expecting to hear news to this effect months ago, but week after week slid by in silence.

What commenced as an average Monday morphed into a prodigious milestone with a simple phone call. In a matter of three or four months, my wife and I will travel to Seoul to become a family of three. Cheers!

For the record, we are welcoming a marvelous boy of six months with an open face, midnight eyes, and a smile that sends laughter bouncing around the room. I have only laid eyes on a handful of photographs and already I am madly in love.

Of course, this poses a rack of hurdles for the Redline Project. As an active father of none, I am free to scamper after the muse until all hours. What is to become of this humble venture as I step up to the calling of fatherhood?

Good question. I don't know.

Perhaps the whole thing will come tumbling down leaving only plumes of failure in its wake. Maybe the goals perched atop this page will join the ranks of all that remains unaccomplished in my life. The Redline Project finds itself at a definitive fulcrum. From here, I either ramp up the effort or throw in the towel.

With a handful of months standing in the gap between the day my son finally comes home and today, I choose to put my feet to the fire. The goal of making a releasable album of music pulses liquid life through my veins, and giving up would be nothing short of tragic. I shall continue, and the music shall be heard.