Producing music again

It's been a long time since I last produced any music in my basement studio. It usually takes some kind of catalyst to place me in the correct mindset. This time, it was twin catalysts.

The first was hearing from an old friend on classmates.com. Well, more than an old friend, truth be told. It was my high-school sweetheart. We had lost touch over the years, and it was wonderful catching up with her. I mentioned this to my old band mates, two of whom knew her and two of whom did not. I could quickly describe her to the other two by saying, "She's the one Times gone by is about." This was one of the first songs I wrote, and certainly the first one that didn't suck. Our band, the Remainders (who had the name long before Dave Barry) played Times gone by quite a bit. However, our one early attempt at recording the song never quite captured what I wanted.

The second catalyst was a disk crash. I take a long time to migrate from one Linux box to the next, and still had all my audio recording and mixing software on 'berkelium', a 600 MHz Dell Dimension that was a leftover from Lockstar, the dot-bomb I worked for around the turn of the millennium. Its disk crash finally forced me to finish my move to 'porky', a 2.6 GHz HP/Compaq that I picked up on eBay for a song. Playing around with ecasound, my favorite audio software, I discovered that jumping from 600 MHz to 2.6 GHz makes a big difference in what you can do.

So, Times gone by got re-recorded. I used Hydrogen for the basic drum track, but recorded everything else live. Ecasound is great for multitrack recording as well as mixing, and the fact that it supports LADSPA plugins allowed me to give the lead guitar a nice fake-Marshall sound.

Anyway, I put the track up on the Open Source Audio collection at archive.org, and you can listen to it or download it here.