My Year in Art – 2014

I’ve started writing this retrospective each year to disabuse myself of the notion that I didn’t get shit done each year. It helps.     Goals from last year: 1.            Finish writing the first draft of third book in the Arcane Underworld series. Done! And several people who are not prone to blowing smoke up

Writing Process Thingfish

Conrad Zero, esteemed author of all thinks dark and ominous,  was kind enough to tag me for a bit of writing process discussion. Process is a pretty idiosyncratic thing, and I doubt that what works for me will necessarily work for anybody else, but sometimes there are useful tidbits hiding in other peoples’ processes. Plus, I

On Monitoring…

Scene: My dad’s study/music room, which is furnished with some top-notch recording equipment. DAD and ME are sitting there, each with a pair of headphones on, attempting to get his recorded vocal and guitar to sound right. DAD: The voice sounds too thin. Why doesn’t it sound warmer? ME (twiddling EQ knobs): How’s that? DAD:

Jamie’s Quick Rules for Recording

These are highly idiosyncratic and personal, so likely don’t work for everyone, but these are the rules I live by: 1.) If I need more than 22 tracks to say something, I probably can’t say it. 1a.) Recording guitar tracks in stereo is almost always a waste, barring unusual use of effects. 1b.) That goes

My Year in Art

Every year, I look back and think, “I didn’t get shit done this year!” Sometimes that’s accurate. Other times, that’s more a result of failure to step out of the day-to-day frustrations and look at the broader picture. And also a result of having unrealistic goals, I suppose. In any case, this year, I started

Humility

So I’m recording a tune with my musical partner in crime, D. We’re trying to get all the backing vocals nailed down so we can get the track out to our session drummer with the right amount of energy in it, and D is really sweating the harmonies. There are a lot of them, five