Album Release + New Synth VST

I am very excited. After putting in tons of work, my album is finally finished and ready to sell. The box of CDs arrived in the mail yesterday, and I feel like a proud parent. Just for fun, I took all 100 CDs out of the box and arranged them to take a photo of what 100 CDs actually look like. You can see the picture on my Pictures page.

Also, I've been working hard on developing a gripping Flash intro for my website. Animation always takes much more time than I expect, since I like to make everything look really good. This always means that I spend way more time than I should on each art object, but it also means that in the long run I will be happy with the results. So far I've put in about 6-7 hours on my Flash intro, and I expect that it should be finished once I put in another 10-12. Then I'll just have to write a music track to accompany the animation, and BAM! - my site will have a killer intro. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it within a week.

Plus, I'm very excited that my new VST Software Synth arrived. Now I am the proud owner of Rob Papen's BLUE, it has some really beautiful sounds and textures, and a lot of bread and butter synth sounds. Although CronoX3 has been my soft-synth of choice for a long time, I think this might become my primary synth for a while. Though CronoX3 and I have had a great love affair and it has some very unique sounds, for awhile I have been craving some more standard synth sounds, and BLUE has a lot of great presets that will serve my purpose well. I will still use CronoX3 for when I want to dish up something a little bit out of the ordinary. Needless to say, I am very excited and I will probably be messing around with it a lot in the next couple of months, using it in any new music I create.

Inspiration and Art

Today I woke up perturbed and perplexed over some things in my past that were brought up by a friend yesterday. Though doubt and the shadows of a negative perspective threatened me, thinking things through and giving it all to God really helped to clear my mind and restore my joy. Also, the struggle inspired me to write another song, which fit perfectly with the theme of my current project, so now I have the lyrics written for a song entitled "Arrows." Once I finish recording "Born To Soar" I'm going to start arranging and recording "Arrows." I'm psyched!

I would be trying to finish recording "Born To Soar" today, but since I have some congestion, my vocal teacher said I should not sign for a whole day. I'm planning to try to finish it up tomorrow or Thursday. It was really hard to restrain myself from singing at all today, but I mostly suceeded.

I called up the company that made my CDs and found out that they shipped them to me on Friday, but they were shipped standard ground instead of 2nd-day, so they won't arrive until this coming Friday. At least now they are finished, so I'm not too unhappy.

Today I've been listening to Symphony X a fair bit. "The Odyssey" is an amazing, epic track! At 24:14 I'm amazing at how many great parts it has. It has a wonderful balance of orchestral and metal sections and I'm really enjoying it.

Blog Start

This is the first post in my artist's blog. I'm not sure how much of this blog will be used to discuss my artistic endeavors and discoveries, or how much of it will incorporate elements of my daily personal life, but we shall see...

It's the start of an all-new, amazing week, and I am very excited to see what this week holds. Last Monday I wrote a song entitled "Born To Soar" which is the first song that I've written for a new project I'm starting. I'm thinking of trying to record an album of Alternate Rock songs, limiting myself to what a three-piece band could do. In accorandance with that I'm going to limit myself to drums, bass, guitars and vocals for these songs, and I'm pretty excited about it. Born To Soar is nearly recorded; I have the drum track, the bass guitar tracks, the rhythm guitar tracks and most of the vocals. Now I just have to finish the vocals, and record a couple more lead guitar parts, plus a tinyy bit of drum track tweaking. I should be able to finish it in the next day or two.

Also, I encounter some cool music that I have been enjoying. It's melodic, instrument guitar rock by an experienced musician. You can listen to the music of Albert Vinasco at his website: http://www.albertvinasco.com/home

Tha concludes my first blog. Look for more to come soon...