The voting for selections on the next record “Nice Cuts” is complete. Thanks to everyone who voted. I dunno if it’s right to call it a ‘greatest hits’ record, but that seems to be the common term of art, so for those of you not clued in? It’s a ‘Greatest Hits!’ record. Actually, if it didn’t sound so bloody pretentious, I’d have called it a ‘Retrospective’. But to do that I’d have to hang with the kind of people who refer to movies as ‘the cinema’.

And the winnahs are:

You Are Loved (Positive) 6:00
Why Don’t You Come In? (Positive) 4:08
On My Way Home (Positive) 2:51
Paul’s Story (Positive) 5:56
What A Wonderful World (Superpower) 4:44
Shy (Superpower) 3:39
Hey Johnny! (Superpower)  2:55
Open Your Eyes (Part II)  (Compartments)  7:30
Too Far (Balance) 3:39
Money (Balance) 3:47
Matters Of The Heart (Balance) 6:25
Teflon (Home) 3:57
Suicide In A Hurry […]

STUDIO I: The Wiring

When I bought my house, I realized that there was no way I could afford to put in a proper studio ‘room within a room’ of proper size for really good acoustics right away. On a different track, my house has a crawlspace. When I went under the house to run a network cable between two rooms I decided, since I had to be down there anyway, to create structured cabling throughout the entire house so that every house could have Ethernet (I’d had very bad performance issues with WiFi.) Now after living there for a few weeks I realized that every room has it’s own unique sound and I decided that, since I already had cabling in place, I’d add audio and digital lines to each room. It turns out that it’s not that hard to expand lo-z audio, SP/DIF and lightpipe connections. This gave me the ability to use each room as either:

a) A place to record; each room having a ‘special sound’

b) The ability […]

As fans tend to know, I utilize quite a number of musical instruments and varied recording techniques on my albums. But at the same time, I’ve made no secret of my disdain of ‘gear sluts’ constantly in search of the next great gizmo that will propel them to stardom. I’d like to address both these topics here in a way that answers some commonly asked questions and hopefully dispels my image as ‘complete hypocrite.’

Some background. We had basically one radio station to listen to in Galway. It alternated constantly between The Carpenters (‘Close To You’) or Don’t Walk Away Renee or Andy Williams (‘Moon River’) or Elvis or ‘Popcorn’ (my introduction to the synthesizer.) And so on. Ironically, there was very little ‘Irish’ music played. There was no such thing as ‘formatted radio’. Every song would give today’s programmer a severe case of whiplash.

My earliest memories of hearing this sort of diversity in one group came in listening to my sister’s Moody Blues records. I was amazed, not only by […]

I get a number of questions re. what I play and how I do things. This article is basically a list of the instruments I play, the songs you’d hear them on and some links to more information on them.

KEYBOARDS

Kimball Upright Player Piano. I got this from a girlfriend who owed me money. When she walked out she left me a note saying I should take it in lieu of payment. Seriously. But a piano is a good thing to have; even a crappy piano. I had it tuned by a friend who remarked, “Well I’d say sixty two or three notes sound OK. That’s not a bad average.” 😀 That said, there’s something nice about feeling the sound as you play… and not having to wait for some electric device to ‘boot’. Good, bad or indifferent, there’s nothing like a real instrument.

All the synthesized sounds you hear are various pieces of software played from a keyboard directly into the computer. These include Native Instruments, Inc. B4, FM8 and Kontakt; […]

I wanted to comment a bit on the kinds of gigs I play and why you haven’t seen much of me lately.

I just got back from Santa Fe, NM where I played a gig at a convention for psychologists studying the effects of various music-based therapies and the unique emotional challenges and personality disorders which tend to affect people in the creative arts.

And let me just say, you’d have to be nuts to play in front of a bunch of shrinks.

<rimshot>

I’m keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeding. I booked the gig months ahead based on a recommendation of a fan who also happens to be a psychologist. If it had been a ‘normal’ gig and I had not already committed, I probably would have backed out. But it wasn’t normal in any sense of the word.

What I do is targeted. When people come to see me they know what to expect and they expect me to docertain things. Because of the nature of this gig, meaning that people had no idea who I was, I […]