Anna says I should explain why you do CD pre-orders. Okay! Two reasons:

1) Figuring out how many booklets and cover backs to print, and how to print them. If I have over a certain number, offset printing is the way to go. Below that, it’s DYI. (My DYI will look professional. It always has.)

For this, I just need a future count. If you’re on Livejournal, here’s a poll I’d love you to fill out. If not, let me know you’re gonna want a CD some other way. ^_^

2) Paying for printing. If I go DIY, that costs money in supplies. I have access to an eight-colour professional printer I can use myself for the colour sheets, but I’ll have to buy a lot of special inks, paper, and so on, for it.

I’d rather go offset – it’s easier – but I dropped a good chunk of change out of pocket on mastering. Worth it? Yes! But not cheap.

Here’s a greyscale laser-printer rough of the design. The booklet is eight pages, with extensive liner notes. Picture this in full colour:

All this will be in colour.

These’ll be full colour too, of course.

I’d like to run the numbers by the 12th; one way or another, I need CDs by April.

Whaddya think, sirs?

Funny thing about working on CD booklets – you get ideas.

Light cover

Dark cover

Opinions?

Of course, the music’s the important thing. And that is finished, and available for immediate download and CD preorder!

All the mastered tracks for Dick Tracy Must Die have now been uploaded to the website for listening and purchase!

I really hope people will go listen to the final version of the album. It’s been a huge amount of work and an emotional roller-coaster at times, no lie. But I’m proud of it.

• This is the electronic release, and you can download it now. I’ve also added to a lot of the liner notes and such, where we have a lot of thanks given out.
• CD preorders are also now available. If you aren’t likely to run into me any time soon, and need a CD shipped, pre-order through the website. Pre-ordering the CD also gets you immediate downloads; it’s all bundled together. Yay, immediate gratification! XD
• Direct preorders: If you are likely to run into me (say, at Norwescon), or want to pay by cash or cheque, you can preorder by emailing crimecrimeandtheforcesofevil.com. You’ll also receive a download code, so immediate gratification still applies! Mostly. XD

Also, even if you’ve listened to songs from the album before? Listen again. Mastering is a collection of subtle arts, and you can hear a lot of them at work on these tracks. It’s really neat to hear, particularly in the denser studio tracks, and tracks with lots of drum, like “Stay Away” and “Shout at the Desert.”

I mean, sure, some of it is obvious; you’re doing equalisation across tracks, you’re putting everything to CD/download specifications, you’re making sure all the levels are compatible, things like that. And there are technical things, like ISRC codes, that nobody much notices, except that’s how iTunes knows the names of the songs on that CD you just put in the drive.

But some of it’s just surprising. In one case… honestly, I have no idea what he did. But it was like he took an unsharp mask filter and applied it to sound. It was literally like three adjustments, and is apparently a pretty normal thing to do, but… I have to say, it was a HOW DID YOU DO THAT?! moment.

There’s more to talk about, but that’s for tomorrow. To be continued! (つづく)

Too late to say more than that now, but holy shit we have the golden master. That’s right, Dick Tracy Must Die is a release, right here in our grubby little mitts.

More on the music page. Also, more tomorrow, including – yes, I’m sayin’ it – pre-orders. Fuck yeah, mudkips: Preorders. o/

I’m looking for a bass guitarist for an 8pm Thursday gig at the Norwescon Science Fiction Convention in Sea-Tac, Washington. I have two songs I’d like to do which really need their bass guitar parts: Stars and Let Me Help, both of which have bass guitar solos. (There’s no bass in Let Me Help until the bridge, so if you can’t hear it and you’re not at the bridge yet, well, that’s why.) Other songs may have basslines as well, but for me those are the big two.

Know anybody? Sadly, this is not a paying gig, but talk to me anyway if you do.

If you missed the weekend post about a new Trad O’ th’ Month recording, click here to enjoy Paddy Murphy! It’s a night I’ll never forget.

Finally, on a completely different topic, check out friend Jesse’s short film project on Kickstarter – he’s trying to raise money to do better short films. He’s a funny writer and I think with some real equipment could do some good stuff. You’ll find his project here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1447277338/the-xp

I also need to post about CD pre-orders! But that’ll wait ’till next time because this is too damn busy already.

I ought to post a picture with this but I don’t have one. THIS POST IS JUST FOR THE LITERATE! XD

The thing about Paddy Murphy . . . the thing everybody forgets about Paddy Murphy . . . is that Paddy Murphy . . . Well . . .  Paddy Murphy was a fine, upstanding . . .

. . . bootlegger. XD

Which explains a lot about this new Trad o’ th’ Month recording, doesn’t it? I like to think so. Enjoy:

So as I mentioned earlier, Leannan Sidhe had a camera rolling for part of the Valentine’s Day show, and I’ve merged that with the monophonic audio feed I got off the board, cropped things a bit, added titles, and voila! Video! I just wish I could pick the preview frame because there are lots of better ones than the one it picked. XD Despite that, enjoy:

The last couple of days haven’t been much about music, but have instead been about getting computers together and upgraded and stuff. I realised that while this isn’t the best time for a week of systems offline, it is as less-bad as it’s probably going to get for a while.

But much to my shock, everything kind of went… sanely. Almost smoothly. Ubuntu 10.04.1 is a lot smarter about letting you ditch PulseAudio and while the 8.04.1 upgrader didn’t work, downloading a DVD ISO and burning an install disc with a 10.04.1 upgrader mostly did work, and ripping out PulseAudio so JACK runs is about a hundred times easier than it used to be. (As in, it’s one command in the shell. After the 8.04 experience I expected to be pulling out spaghetti dependencies and trapdoors for three days, no lie.)

Anyway, check this out, the same day as I started a four-distributions-behind upgrade:

yep, that shit be workin’ – and at 20% of CPU.

And so far, it’s even behaving better than 8.04.1 did. Okay, that’s damning with faint praise, but I mean it: improvement is welcome. There are a bunch of small new features in Ardour that are adding up to a lot of usability improvement already, and JACK is – so far – more stable now, too. Hopefully I’m not jinxing it.

Also, the art machine is a Ye Olde Win2K box with SCSI drives (8! gigabytes!) that has slowly been decommissioning itself over the last few years, and the rate has accelerated as of late (PCI slots? Eh, fukkem, you don’t need them. Monitor card? Well, okay, but I’m gonna be weird about it. Monitor? lol, CRTs die, let’s help this one along) so I’ve virtualised it on my MacBook! Which is how you get this:

Photoshop 5.5 and Microsoft Publisher 98 for … OS X?

I finally have Photoshop on my Mac, like the gods intended, but it’s a perversion of holy writ, as it’s the Windows version run in a VM. XD

I can also hit a key and it’s all back running on a windowed Windows 2K desktop, which is actually the default. And it only took three tries to migrate the machine (aheh) but it did work! And is lots faster being on, um, much more modern hardware.

And! The CD duplicator arrived. In the snow. But! Mostly under the porch roof and the box hadn’t been there long and was still mostly dry even on the outside. (And completely dry on the inside.) Eeeeeee!

Now if the USB serial interface will get here, I can try to make my old Wacom tablet work. (Which is the real reason I didn’t want to decommission the old Win2k box – it’s a very nice tablet and still expensive to replace, and requires a Windows-driven serial port, no exceptions.)

But at this point I’m about five days ahead of schedule on all this IT noise, which means TIME FOR A NEW TRAD O’ TH’ MONTH TOMORROW! Yay! o/

Hey, taxes are done! Or not. But everything I can do before the worm dismantles irs.gov appointment I have with the accountant is done. Yay!

In other news, I’ve been playing with that audio recording I made of the live show last Valentine’s day with Leannan Sidhe. Shanti set up a camera and got a little over 40 minutes of video, too, so she wants to post some videos from the show. I’ve matched that up with the audio recording I got (a mono track from all mics with some audience noise, but I can work with that) and have a test video!

But I don’t want to post it until I get the signoff from Leannan Sidhe, even if holding off on something like that – even if it’s just a static-shot live video – makes my fingers itchy. AAAAAAAAH WANT TO POST NEW THING!

So it’ll have to wait until Leannan Sidhe say yes. I’ll toss a pointer here when it’s online. ^_^

PS: duplicator is ordered! omg yay! o/

I swear to all gods, I did not fake that.