State of the Device, 2008
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
Another year has come and gone. I know things happened in it, really, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what a lot of them were.
It started on a decent note, as we broke in our brand new vocalist/keyboardist, Ms. Jill Sheridan. She’s performing with us now like she’s always been part of the group, and is mostly up on all the stupid inside band jokes. We’re still trying to explain LOLcats to her, though.
“Decent” turned into “annoying” and “soulcrushing” pretty quickly when some water leakage and heavy rainfall damaged a chunk of the studio. Luckily, nothing terribly important was damaged beyond things like “carpeting” and “furniture” but nonetheless it made things incredibly inconvenient for a while, as all the gear had to be struck, moved to a drier location, and the room slightly re-engineered to prevent further damage. The new 5-inch raised floor should prevent more damage, short of a major flood (and just in case of that, all the major electronics and instruments are another few feet off the ground - if those get damaged, I’m likely in all sorts of other worlds of hurt too, since it means a large portion of my house is underwater).
As a result, the studio has been officially rechristened “Submersible Studios.” I should have a website up for it eventually.
Speaking of Submersible Studios, our mastering business had a few interesting and unusual clients this year, as well as the usual suspects.
Album 4 is well underway, although currently very little of it is in any state resembling “finished.” As my musical ambitions increase, it becomes harder and harder to just blow through a song the way I used to - wrangling guest vocalists here, scheduling oud players there, figuring out how to properly mic a dhol so it doesn’t sound like a trashcan…that sort of thing takes time, and time is always the resource in shortest supply. I did manage to re-arrange a few tracks for live use in rather dramatic ways, and in so doing ended up basically making new mixes for eventual release. I almost have enough of those for a proper EP of reworked material.
We had some big shows this year too. Not a LOT of them, mind you, but some good ones. We opened for De/Vision in Minneapolis, played a remarkably well-attended benefit gig at The Inferno before the MAMAs, and as a particular highlight for me, opened up for bhangra legend DJ Rekha. Aside from the fact that I’m a big DJ Rekha fanboy, it was also a big chance for us to play for a distinctly different audience than we usually do. That was a big deal. We’ve debuted a little new material this year, and soon I intend to change the way we do things technically and hopefully procedurally that will shorten our setup and teardown time, improve our live sound, and hopefully make us more flexible for various venues.
Picked up a lot of new gear this year, stuff I’d been saving for since last year. My big prizes are the ADAM monitors, which are freaking crystal in their clarity, and the Metric Halo ULN-2 2d. The ULN is awesome and powerful and sounds fantastic although I’m still intimidated by the vast DSP and routing capabilities it has, and already have once screwed it up badly enough to require a reboot. I also grabbed an Oktava 219 from eBay, which currently sits un-modified in my mic locker until I can work up the dough to get it fixed up - currently it sounds a lot like a really good mic recording from inside a large metal tube. The combination of good preamps and some decent microphones has opened up a number of possibilites for me for recording instruments and vocalists - and it’s also allowed me to record with a level of clarity that is somewhat unflattering to my vocal and microphone techniques. That’s another thing that’s slowing down my production - now that I can hear very clearly that a particular vocal take isn’t “good enough” to just hide beneath walls of reverb and effects, I need to actually, you know, practice.
What of next year? I say this every year - more shows. I have a GPS now, so I shouldn’t get lost on the way as easily (as I do at every show outside Madison). I hope to expand my mic cabinet a bit for a wider variety of purposes. I want to make more headway and maybe even release a new full length - at the very least I want to finish the EP. I’ve already recorded with some new collaborators, and I’ve got more in the wings, and all those things look to me to be very surprising from a musical standpoint - if you’d asked me even 4 years ago if I’d ever be recording sufi poetry with an honest-to-goodness trained arabic singer, I would’ve looked at you and said “tajwhat? Is that that stuff made with ground lamb and parsley?” I wouldn’t've expected to have multiple guest musicians at our side, singing in a variety of languages, performing in different ragam and maqam, and all coming from wildly different backgrounds.
It’s an exciting time.
So here’s to a good 2009. From all of us at Null Device Media Industries and our attendent family of companies (that’s my little joke there, see) have a happy and safe ‘09.