Thanks to those who came out for midnight yoga and my music at Laughing Lotus SF on Friday, August 15th. It was a super fun time having all my friends, synths and samplers there, huddled in the corner, and putting this mix together. Even better to hear the recording the next day and now finally get the 2 hour performance/album available for free at hellabaked.com, download or stream. I hope you enjoy the music~
Thanks for your support!

Hi Music-Lovers,

I hope you are all in good health and spirits!

I have been graciously asked by one of the instructors at Laughing Lotus Yoga Studios in SF, to perform at their weekly Midnight Yoga event. Come join us as I perform a special 2 hour organic electronica set featuring a wide variety of compositions - including songs from my new album, "Source Domain", as well as some current pieces using my new collection of analog synthesizers. It is surely going to be one of the most unique performances I can imagine and I'm really looking forward to performing for you all in this flowing & restorative environment. Hope to see you there!


stevedood | Laughing Lotus | Midnight Yoga
Friday, August 15th 2008, 10 pm – Midnight
3271 16th Street at Dolores ~ 415.355.1600
$15
http://www.laughinglotus.com/sfhome.html

Namaste~

Steve

I've been exploring some different things with my music and thought
you might want to see this video of my last show
it's called "electric anaconda"
it's this improvisational experimental/technograss thing with the acidic riffs
of Andrew Poyner on guitar & banjo and the analogue-eclectro of myself on the
x0xb0x, Moog, and MPC. This video snippet is our first show together at Forthrite
Printing Gallery this past Friday 3/14/08.
Enjoy~

Many thanks to my friends in Champaign, Illinois at WEFT, 90.1 FM for playing a variety of songs from Source Domain on their Wednesday programs, "Poodles Ahoy", and in their normal rotation.

Join Poodles McGee of the FCC as he celebrates his weekly escape from the office and his home in Peotone with broken beats, savory meats, and sundry treats. Warning: may involve remix culture; may deviate into themes; may contain nuts.

http://poodlesahoy.blogspot.com/
http://weft.org

Special thanks to the music director and content programmers at WYCE 88.1 FM Community Media Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan for playing several tracks off of Source Domain. We're in rotation on their 7-day music chart along with many other exceptional musicians! Thanks for the support!

WYCE 7 Day Chart

Some of you might have not known I had an impromptu performance the other week ago along with one of my cohorts, Painted Cakes, at the new Forthrite Printing gallery that just opened nearby in Oakland. It was one of my first shows since completing Source Domain and I was quite pleased with how it went. Well it turns out the show was reviewed by Shumit DasGupta, a freelance writer for Stereo Subversion, and he gave us quite a glowing review of our show!
Here's an excerpt:

What sets these musicians aside from all of this is an approach I couldn't conceive of before I watched them do their thing. Not only did they employ live musicians - on this night a bassist by the perhaps self-aggrandizing tag of Super Das G - but took their samples from the fertile grounds of the East Bay neo-jazz scene. That is to say, all of their clips were recorded directly, live, and unadulterated from real musicians, really close. Monstrous polyrhythms, textured chunks of double bass strokes, delicate strains of counterpoint melodies like air-whipped frosting through the nozzle of the noble violin - all of these harvested on local soil.

Master chefs make cooking look like a well-earned joy, and these DJs (and that is far too antiquated a term to describe them, but vocabulary is slow to keep pace with innovation) are no exception. They bring to the table prepared cuts, beats and riffs they've constructed beforehand, and liberally fuse them with both elements of improvisation and craft. At multiple points throughout the evening I watched them pass the buck from set to set, with no other obvious lead to each other but a two syllable vocal cue as to what time signature they were cooking in.

From: Stereo Subversion/Concert Reviews/Painted Cakes & Stevedood
Thanks for the review Shumit!
Stereo Subversion

Thanks to WMBR in Cambridge, MA and their morning show, "Breakfast of Champions" for playing "Hypervigilant", track 4 off Source Domain.
WMBR Breakfast of Champions

01/24/08 Added: Thanks to WMBR for also featuring "Something Suppressant" on their "Breakfast of Champions" morning shows.
010308 BoC
011608 BoC

Special thanks to Dave at WZBC 90.3 FM in Boston for featuring "Compassion Fatigue" (Track 2 off Source Domain) on his ZBC Rock holiday playlist.
Much love to all our friends in Boston!

12-24-7 Spinitron Playlist
WZBC 90.3 FM

Happy holidays and special thanks to KALX 90.7 FM and Marshall Stax for featuring two tracks off of Source Domain over the holiday season as part of his weekly "The Next Big Thing" show. Having listen to his show on past Monday evenings after work, I was also stoked to hear he chose "Caterpillar" and "Something Suppressant" as the feature tracks for his Christmas Eve show.

KALX is one of my favorite local stations here in the east bay and their support is much appreciated.

http://kalx.berkeley.edu/

Marshall Stax | The Next Big Thing

Many thanks to Paul Glanting at URB Magazine for the music review of Source Domain and the plug for "Fake Beats", track 6 of 13. It's free on Imeem too, check the links below for review & download.

stevedood | URB Magazine | Fake Beats

stevedood | imeem | Fake Beats

Special thanks to Maya at KSER 90.7 FM in Everett/Snohomish County, Washington for featuring "Something Suppressant" (Track 8 from Source Domain) on her Starlit Skies Radio Show - Monday 8:00-10:00 pm PST
http://www.starlitskies.org/
http://www.kser.org/

Thanks to Nate Seltenrich at The East Bay Express for a quick review on Source Domain in his blog.
Read about it at Your Daily Lick 12-11-07

...and also appearing in print (page 43) on 12/12/07 too

Thanks Nate!

So Ron Donald (Eric Perney) recommended I send a copy of Source Domain out to WCBN at the University of Michigan and I complied. It seems there's this funny musical connection with Michigan and all these great musicians I know from the area; some of my best friends too. Anyways, it's also funny to get charted (along with some other great musicians) and make the Top Ten in the first week at WCBN and hanging at 23 of 50 last week. I appreciate you playing my album. Thanks!

last week

first week


~steve

Almost forgot two things:


Source Domain can also be listened to free at Rhapsody (a subscription based music provider)
http://www.rhapsody.com/stevedood/sourcedomain

Source Domain in stores:
Wanted to mention that a few of the music stores are filing my CD under the letter "D" just in case you looked through the "S" section in electronic 4 times over to no avail.

Hi music-lovers~

My new album, "Source Domain", is officially released and available on iTunes, in stores, and through my new record company -
"Hella Baked Tapes".
http://www.hellabaked.com

“Source Domain” is my first album utilizing all-original source material: a variety of sounds from an exceptional group of musicians
Drums: Tim Strand
Upright Bass: Eric Perney
Violin: Sarah Jo Zaharako
Electric Guitar: Roger Riedlbauer
(with my contributions on djembe, mayo jar, and Moog and Casio synthesizers.)

In the making of "Source Domain", I wanted to take intrinsic care in capturing both authentic and acoustic sounds using microphones and basic recording equipment. The artists involved were willing contributors in this experiment; clasically trained musicians raised with physical instruments and ears for good sound. They studied their craft in colleges and honed it in hundreds of shows. In removing them from their supporting, collective roles and encouraging raw artistic expression in a studio environment, I was able to evoke some amazing results from their individual solo performances.

Through the careful editing of these sounds to extract individual notes and loops, there developed a palette from which I drew upon to compose these songs. All the sounds were recorded through air and wire; no virtual instruments or mail-order-catalog samples were utilized in the making of the album and all the pieces were composed on a sampler. There is also no record skratching on “Source Domain,” contrary to my strong desire to "kut it up". “Source Domain” instead features urban, field-recorded segues sprinkled between the instrumental tracks that tell a day's story of travel through the Bay Area on public transit and by skateboard.

Engineered and produced at my studio in Berkeley, the course of the album took a year and a half to develop and I am very proud of the results. I am now working on a series of local shows to perform these pieces live (with special guests!) so stay tuned for those updates including a release party in the near future. In the meantime, check out the new sound I have developed and let me know what you think!

To preview the album, you can either visit iTunes
or http://www.myspace.com/stevedood

Thank you all for supporting my music throughout the years.
If you can show your support by forwarding along this email to all your music-loving friends, that would be great.
And now we will dance...

http://www.hellabaked.com

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Tim Strand
Tim Strand has been playing drums and percussion since 1988. He has studied a variety of styles and traditions ranging from orchestral percussion, jazz and improv, and more recently, West African traditions such as Sabar and Bougarabou with noted master Saikouba Hadjie. He has toured the US several times with various unsigned new music groups such as Blind Spot Trio with Toby Summerfield (guitar, bass), Patrick Farrell (accordion, keys) and Tim Brown (vibes), and Wheel On My Back with Colin Stetson (sax), Stuart Bogie/Dan Bennett (sax), Toby Summerfield (guitar), Josh Tillinghast (guitar) and Eric Perney (bass). Strand was a permanent member of the seminal San Francisco avante/indie/jazz group Transmission from 2002-2006, during which time they played extensively throughout the Bay Area. He was a regular guest drummer for Ara Anderson’s “cinematic funk” brass group Boostamonte!, hip-hop/big band ensemble Shotgun Wedding Hip-Hop Orchestra, and has most recently performed and recorded with Toby Summerfield’s Chicago-based improv/minimalist rock ensemble Never Enough Hope, featuring some of today’s most prolific and influential jazz musicians. He can be heard on Transmission’s EP “Hollow Sea” (Odd Shaped Case), Gojogo’s new album “All is Fair” (Galaxia), as well as a handful of yet-to-be-released recordings by the above groups.

Eric Perney
Eric studied classical and jazz bass at the University of Michigan with Stuart Sankey and Rodney Whitaker. His musical vision has also been influenced by his work with Peter Kowald, Steve Reinfranck, Joelle Leandre, Steve Rush, Ed Sarath, Fred Frith, and Tom Waits. Eric is a founding member of the bands Transmission and Gojogo. In 2007 he performed a series of concerts with the vocal ensemble Kitka with Dan Cantrell, and frequently plays with local artists Katy Stephan, Lily Storm, and the Toids. Eric also performs within the modern dance scene in San Francisco. Recent projects include performing at San Francisco City Hall for the “Art for the Environment” global exhibition and a close collaboration with new dance company “Project Agora”. He can be heard on Tom Waits’ “Alice”, “Orphans” and the soundtracks to “Shrek 2?, “La Tigre e la Neve”, and “Divided Loyalties”.

Sarah Jo Zaharako
Sarah Jo Zaharako began her musical training at age five in Indiana. She studied classical violin as a child and attended Oberlin Conservatory where she received degrees in violin performance and arts education. Ms Zaharako moved to the Bay Area in 1999 in order to expand her musical scope. There she discovered improvisation and performance art, and began playing in bands. In 2002, she completed a Masters of Fine Arts at Mills College where she studied violin with David Abel and improvisation with Fred Frith. Ms Zaharako now performs and composes for creative music ensembles in the San Francisco Bay Area including Seventh Avenue String Quartet, which recently premiered Paul Dresher’s score “To the Lighthouse” performed at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Ms Zaharako is co-founder of Gojogo, an eclectic quartet that combines violin and bass with Indian percussion and performs original works. She enjoys writing chamber music for unconventional instrumentation like accordion, electric guitar, resonant percussion, and prepared double bass. These works often incorporate improvisation, allowing the performers to integrate their own voices into the score. In addition to composing for instrumental groups, Ms Zaharako creates music for dance. She has premiered works with Ballet Counterpointe, Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet pre-professional program, Project Agora, and the Rotterdam Dance Academy. Her dance scores have been performed throughout the Bay Area and Europe. She collaborates frequently with choreographers Kara Davis and Amy Raymond.

Roger Riedlbauer
Roger Riedlbauer has been involved in a diverse array of music over the years.
• Performs regularly with the noir rock band Boxcar Saints. Also appears on the albums Last Things and No Water. (www.boxcarsaints.com)
• Co-wrote, performed and produced the album There Is Life In This Old Land. Released on Awful Bliss Records by The Cannery (www.thecannery.net).
• Toured and performed guitar with the band Transmission and composed several songs on the EP, Hollow Sea (www.transmissionquartet.com).
• Performed and composed music set to Russian Animations with the band Gojogo (http://www.gojogo.com). Also recorded on the album All is Fair.
• Co-founder of the psychedelic art-damage band Spork, which released the albums No More Feeling Weird and Theory of the Noisy Fourpoles.
• Composed for and performed with Mosthumbz which released Stochastic Farm.
• Toured extensively with Jolie Holland and Halifax Pier, and continues to do freelance recording and performing work.
• Has collaborated with numerous filmmakers and visual artists for multi-media performances.

Special credit is due in part to the following equipment manufacturers:
Akai, AKG, Apple, Belden, Casio, Dell, DW, Earthworks, Ernst Roth (Upright Bass), F.R. Enders (Violin), Gretsch, Ludwig, Mackie, Meyer Sound, Mogami, Moog, Motu, Neutrik, Numark, Pioneer, Presonus, Propellerheads, Rode, Silence Cases, Steinberg, Sony, Tascam, Technics, Universal Audio, Vic Firth, Yamaha

SOURCE DOMAIN is finally mastered and going out to the printers & iTunes!!!

- It took a few passes to get it perfect and special THANKS to Michael Romanowski at Paul Stubblebine Mastering & DVD for assisting me in this crucial part of the project. I have posted a bunch of pics on my myspace page http://www.myspace.com/stevedood from all the recording sessions that went into the making of the album and the various artists that helped me achieve my vision.

I am now seeking out various musicians for some remixing projects. If you are interested in having me remix one of your songs, please send me an email or give me a call. Your song will be remixed on my MPC utilizing only your original source material, but recomposed ala stevedood-style. If I have already contacted you previously and you need info on submitting the audio, please mail me a data CD (via Hella Baked Tapes, address below) with .wav's of the individual tracks and a .mp3 of your original version (if I don't have it already). Feel free to remove any EQ/effects/plugins from these tracks as that will always give me abit more room to rework the song. SINGLES ARE BACK and what better way to collaborate than having one of your songs remixed!

Album release party sometime in November. Can't say much more cause the venue hasn't been booked yet. Stay tuned!

OK, so Burning Man was awesome his year. I did the whole Tron thing again, except this time it was a new "3.0 version" with EL wire and a helmet. I pretty much was Tron-by-night for the entire week, except for those gnarly dust storms we had out there. Ugh. A week baking my brain in the desert and I was oh so glad to be back in our default reality. I will be at the Decompression Party October 6th; hope to see you there too! Oh, and one other thing, Bassnectar rocks!

Also, I recently joined the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, San Francisco chapter. http://www.grammy.com/Recording_Academy/
I had the chance to attend two of their courses at Fantasy Studios and Paul Stubblebine Mastering & DVD where they followed the creation of one song from recording all the way through to mastering. I sat in on the mixing seminar with Stephen Hart at Fantasy Studios and learned quite a few new mixing techniques in Studio A. I also got to hear 2 other mix-variations, one version in 5.1 auditioned in Studio D and the an Ableton-Live "Dance version" next door. It was neat to hear the 3 different variations and go from room-to-room as the engineers discussed openly many of their techniques.

The following week, I gained a greater appreciation for mastering engineers as I watched Michael Romanowski (and Paul) do their "craft" in the Camelia Room at Paul Stubblebine Mastering Studios in SF. It was a good chance to see them in action before I taking Source Domain over to have it mastered. Unfortunately, I missed the first 2 classes where they tracked and recorded the song but it was a real treat to check out both of these facilities at the subsequent courses.

After much deliberation, I have had to push the release date for "Source Domain" out til late-September 2007.
While it is almost done and ready for mastering, I'm trying to allow adequate time to get it printed and reviewed by some publications and that necessitates a huge gap of time between printing and releasing. If possible, I will try to get a couple of these songs up on http://www.myspace.com/stevedood after they are mastered. Stay tuned for show announcements.

In other news, I have now affiliated with BMI and my publishing company, Hella Baked Tapes, will be handling all rights, royalties, and publishing for my new music. You can reach us at:

Hella Baked Tapes
PO Box 2242
Berkeley, CA 94702
http://www.hellabaked.com (under construction)

Enjoy the summer!

~Steve

Abit of a short notice but I have a music show this Saturday afternoon, 5/12/07 in SF. The venue is a new store called "Swankety Swank" at 808 Mc Allister St. at Baker St. near Divisidero.
It is run by a fellow electronic musician (and singer), Yabette, who I used to do shows with back at the Blackhole Lounge, many years ago.
This will be a free sidewalk event in front of her furniture store with many other vendors selling their wares.
It will run from 11-4 pm with my set likely towards the end, roughly 2 hours long, featuring some of my classics as well as all new material from my soon-to-be-finished
album "Source Domain", due out late June (more on this later).
Hope to see you there.

more info: yabette's website

Happy New Year to you all! I hope 2007 brings you much happiness and new music to your ears. I am working feverishly in the studio to maintain a good pace on my productions and I’m really happy, for the most part, with the results. I have roughed out the sequences for 9 songs and am planning to have 15-20 to arrange for my new album. By February, I will be doing overdubs – violin, turntables, and hand percussion. Mastering will happen in March and printing will be done by mid-April. I will be planning next month a series of East Bay shows at a few new venues for the album release party and then we’ll take the party over to the city to a few spots as well. Expect a healthy schedule of shows for Spring & Summer 2007. Believe me, I’m just as anxious as you are to play (hear) the new material and perform it. In the meantime, there are a few old songs available on my calibrate page – including the 3 LOTR remixes and the Deerhoof remix. *Understand that these are not my only pieces of music but that I have chosen to retract my old songs in preparation for the new album. If you are dying to hear some of my old stuff, send me an email and I will give you a link to my arkive page. Some of my old songs will also be respun into my live performances as well...

The sound of this album is starting to really take form and there is a consistent timbre from song-to-song that I have found unique in my experience doing this stuff. I like to think of this new sound as “syncopated” in a way, where the emphasis of the rhythmic portions of the songs accentuates the “weak beat”. It subtlety makes the pace kind of jerky to listen to; you get this kink in your neck, yet a strong desire to bump it again and again. I’m also taking great efforts to make sure there is a coordinated song structure, as opposed to my previous groove-based productions, and I’ve dabbled in a lot of different song structures as I re-discover new ways to arrange song components. The music has a real “jazz feel” which correlates with the native tones of Tim Strand on drums and Eric Perney on bass. Both of these guys contributed extensively to the productions last year in various studio sessions. I’ve managed to preserve the organic nature of their tones while recomposing the loops and notes into new productions, at times managing to create sounds that are humanly impossible like quick bass-chord progressions and snare-kick triplets superimposed over existing loops. Being able to extract individual notes, change the key, and recompose the temporal & velocity arrangement has given-way to infinite possibilities derived from but a small 6 second snapshot of their performances. I’m also constantly consulting with these musicians to make sure that the sonic character of their sounds is preserved and not twisted beyond recognition. Afterall, much of my new sound is owed to these guys and their assistance will not go without recognition on the album and in my performances.

In other news, the vinyl ninja has struck again (refer to previous blog post of 2006/07/09). The restless youngster next door hucked a few more 45’s over the fence into my backyard. I’m beginning to wonder if one of his parents was a DJ in the seventies because the myriad of funk albums gone airborn is hard to ignore and some of this stuff is so obscure, I’ve found myself looking up the songs on iTunes to buy them outright – particularly since some of the vinyl is covered in mud, scratched, or barely playable. I still appreciate the free music with some reservation & fear of what would happen if his parents knew what their son was doing. I hypothesize he would probably get his ass kicked. One of these days, I’ll take the growing stack of 50+ records I’ve accumulated and secretly drop them on their doorstep.

Tim Strand drums out of the closet at stevedood stoodios (06/25/06)
Under controlled experimentation, Tim Strand has actively contributed his drumming skills & sounds to the Automatic Stoodio (see April 2006 post below).
This particular rare footage was shot during a pivotal moment of Tim struggling with his drumming affairs, having been a closet/pocket drummer for many years, and visibly working to get his sounds outside of his head, only to be contained within the kit and the closet that binds him. We usually track the drums in the living room but this experiment was organized to suppress & deprive sensory and motor activity. This video is a testimonial to his capabilities given the heinous drumming conditions at my studio.



Direct Link: automatic stoodio @ http://video.google.com

For more info on Tim and his skills, see

http://www.transmissionquintet.com/

A few things to talk about this month…

I’ve been spending long hours the past few weeks in the studio doing more and more editing of past recording sessions. I flip between editing and production regularly to make sure that I’m both productive and creative with my efforts and time. I’m getting significantly more efficient at editing and I can now run through and mixdown a session in one evening and then edit for loops and notes, with about 4 minutes of tape taking an hour of seat time. While my ears and eyes have always been good at going through waveforms and finding usable material, I’m getting considerably faster at it, with a system of keyboard shortcuts and naming conventions that make it easy to undertake.

While I try not to blab about the gear I use, some of you are interested in greater detail of the software & hardware I use and I owe much of my sound to the manufacturers of this stuff (and their accomodations for stevedood.com). I recently installed a Universal Audio UAD-1e DSP card in my DAW along with their entire suite of “powered plugins”. I haven’t done much work with plugins prior to this and the UAD card was a perfect fit for my digital studio, offloading the plugin processing onto a separate DSP card so that the main CPU doesn’t get bogged down with multiple instances of plugins. It was also considerably cheaper than any sort of external hardware. So far, my favorites are the LA-2A Leveling Amplifier, the Neve 1176 Compressor, and the Pultec Pro EQ. I’m starting to experiment with some of the reverb plugs but haven’t committed fully since much of my recordings already use distant room mics to capture the sound of my space. For more info, check out www.uaudio.com

Yeah, so what else?
Well, I went to burning man for my first time just recently. I got to ride backwards on the back of a dirt bike while flying my parasail kite and getting chased by the rangers. I think adrenaline was my drug of choice in that experience…I also absorbed so much techno and progressive house that my music is sure to change from here on out. If you saw someone running across the playa in a glowing TRON suit, that might have been me. Special thanks to ManiTron and the guys at Camp Bigtime for making my experience so awesome it brought tears to my eyes.

I went and saw DJ Shadow and Massive Attack this past weekend. Awesome. Don’t listen to any fools who bag on Josh’s new stuff – hyphy is da new crunk! I think it’s pretty sweet that he chose to really do what he wanted to do on this album (The Outsider) and it shows in his production. I embrace my bay area locals with wide ears and his set was unbelievable with Lateef the TruthSpeaker getting the whole Greek rocking. On the other hand, I think Massive Attack was kind of a downer...these guys have been playing the same 12 songs so long I think they are due for either a new album or early retirement. Their set was an amazing sound albeit but when you have 7 people on stage, there should be more chemistry. They did manage to rock out a little, however.

Other than that, we have AES coming up October 6-8 in San Francisco. I plan on being there Fri/Sat, under one alias or another, and hopefully getting to go on a few studio tours. I’ll likely bring both my hats and a bag of CD’s to hand out. Hope to see you there. More info at aes.org

I just recently finished a 5 day course in MAX/MSP software. For those of you that don’t know about it, it’s a graphical programming environment used for music and audio. I’m not a big software user in my studio to synthesize sounds; I use software primarily for recording and editing. Personally, I have some apprehension using “soft synths” and VST Instruments because the sounds materialize with little to no effort and lack uniqueness in their origins. However, I’ve always been interested in tearing the GUI skin off these programs and being able to build my own from the basic elements; sine waves, square waves, filters, modulators, etc.

Starting with a blank screen in Max/MSP, you drag and drop graphical objects & commands into your workspace and connect them together with lines representing the signal path. You add buttons and faders to control the variables and oscilliscopes/VU meters to watch the outputs. The software has a myriad of applications from audio processing to synthesis; you can make your own plugins, soft synthesizers using your own custom algorithms & signal paths, polyphonic samplers, sequencers, filters, modulators, etc. You can read/send MIDI data (from keyboards/samplers/controllers for example) and use that to control your programs (and any external hardware) any way you want, with any platform you want. If you have a multichannel DAW with I/O, Max/MSP easily allows you to discretely address the audio inputs/outputs so that you can patch it through any of your external hardware and back into your DAW. The possibilities are infinite with this software; your primary limitations being your imagination and your learning curve. Any software you currently use can be built in Max/MSP. The course was offered through CNMAT (http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/) at UC Berkeley. A week with these electronic music gurus will blow your mind. Further info on Max/MSP can be found at http://www.cycling74.com/

After getting schooled by PhD’s and pretending I’m an undergrad, I spent another week of vacation, indoors, working on my new album. Not that you were worried about me or anything, but that’s why I wasn’t returning phone calls & emails last week. The time off and focus in the studio has boosted my momentum; I am most pleased with the progress. I am sitting ear-level in drum and bass samples working on new productions. I’ll call you back tomorrow, I promise.

June-July 2006

I went to TapOp Con down in Tuscon and I must say how blown away I am from the whole experience. Not only did I learn amazing
techniques for studio recording, sound synthesis, and music production, but I got to meet alot of amazing people who are all part of the process.
It's possible you are reading this first because I met you down at TapeOp in which case I welcome you with wide ears. I have alot to learn; I've
realized on so many levels - just pick your direction. Producer, engineer, musician, enthusiast, philosopher, artist, historian,
anthropologist....each field has a plethora of knowledge; lifetimes are spent on the smallest details, and with a few moments learning from some
of these people who have spent a good portion of their lives pursuing these fields, your eyes are opened to so many specialties.
T'was special indeed. By all means send me an email and let me know what you are thinking these days.

Now I lack some focus as I write this but I must continue with the details...

1) I found out who the "Vinyl ninja" was...
VINYL NINJA http://www.stevedood.com/images/ninjas.gif

A few months ago, you will recall my story of the mesmerizing collection of 45 rpm records that magically appeared in my backyard garden
on numerous occasions....Well I finally went Columbo, put my facts together, in action, and intervened as they were firing up to throw yet another priceless 45 from a lost garage collection next door. I think I caught the ninja in action (with a camera) but didn't have the heart to confront him, nor did I offer to buy the entire collection, which I subsequently thought would be a good idea. The best option, I figured, was to let nature go its course and continue to take &
play whatever flew into my backyard. I also didn't want the kid (ninja) to get into trouble with his parents and, in a weird way, it felt so liberating to
watch someone huck records into oblivion. The free music has since tapered to the occasional tennis ball.

2) The past 16 months have been alot of learning new things (equipment, software, techniques, instruments,...) and I am now sliding towards the
production. Now, more than ever, I feel the strong pull to truly create something original and it is this force that is shaping my actions.
Part of what you produce is personal by nature, and that is one of the elements I am pushing for. I am aiming for something musical also.

Doing stuff: The drum kit is in the vocal booth on 6" of rubber & plywood. The edited sound libraries have bulked out. I packed the turntables away in their
cases early, for my vinyl will not see the light of day nor moon for many seasons. Every sound is accounted for; each source domain is
documented. A significant amount of time has been spent working on the capturing of material for the production. The process is coming to re-placing
these sounds in the time domain while maintaining the source domain. Organic if you will.

3) I saw Radiohead at the Greek Amphitheatre on June 23rd; Deerhoof (trio) opened promptly with a blasting set.
I can't say such more than that.

back to work...