andrew dodson

I’ve spent most of this evening listening through the recording sessions and doing rough mixes of all of the songs.  I still have a few to mix, but I’m really pleased so far.

From a personal standpoint, I’m pleased in a couple of ways.  Normally, I like to lay down scratch drums for everyone to record their tracks, then go in at the end and lay down my final drum tracks after everyone else has laid down parts.  I do this so that I can put fills in appropriate spots.  This time around, I’ve laid down my drums first.  We played the songs “live” while I recorded drums.  Since I consider myself a better live drummer than a studio drummer, this worked out pretty well.  I was able to get most of the songs in two or three takes, which helped speed things along.  I think it’s some of my better studio work.

The drums also sound really good.  I am biased, but I think a good drum sound makes or breaks a recording.  The lodge had great acoustics and you can tell on the drum tracks.  I made some good choices on drum mics, and made sure my drums were tuned well (I am sometimes lazy about tuning my drums). 

We still have a lot of work to finish the album (more songs to record, vocals, extra stuff), but I’m excited for the chance to share these songs with people.  Hopefully that will be sooner than later. 

I did a “live blog” for the JMB recording sessions over the weekend.  This was posted on the JMB website… pictures & videos coming soon:

Tomorrow, the Josh Martin Band begins the process of recording our next studio album.  On the eve of the recording weekend, I had a couple of thoughts.

Two years ago at this time, I was on my way to Minnesota for the Desiring God National Conference.  Head over to my photos section to see pictures from the trip.  It was my first conference and was a blast.  Aside from hearing some great speakers in person, there were a lot of little things that made the trip fun.  The bed at the hotel was insanely comfortable.  The Michigan Wolverines’ football team and the Chicago White Sox stayed in the hotel – I rode the elevator with Jermaine Dye and saw Paul Konerko in the lobby.  It was a great trip.

A little over two and half years ago, as the Josh Martin Band recorded our previous studio effort, The Point Community Church started.  I remember driving from Cedarmore on Sunday morning – after a full weekend of recording – to a skating rink to set up my equipment for our first service.  Since then, The Point has grown to 300+ members and 200-250 weekly attendance.  Sometimes, people ask me why I still live in Frankfort.  The Point is one of the reasons why.  I really love my church.

So, here we go.  Recording again.  The great part about this album is that we have no idea what will end up on the album.  We begin the process with only a handful of songs written.  Over the course of the fall, we’ll finish writing some more songs to finish out the album, but those songs remain a mystery.  Stay tuned for more updates from the studio.

It’s been a little quiet ’round the blog since my Palin posts.  Not much noteworthy happening in my world, I guess.  It will likely stay quiet around here for another few days.  CLS is in full swing, as fall is probably our busiest time of the year.  It is likely that I will be working some overtime for the next couple of days to get ahead.  Why?

I will be taking off on Friday to begin recording the next Josh Martin Band album!  As of now, my plan is to spend Thursday night setting up at Cedarmore.  The rest of the band will come in on Friday and we’ll be rolling by Friday afternoon.

As I did for the Not So Easily Pleased recording sessions, I will be live-blogging the recording sessions.  I also hope to provide YouTube clips, pictures and more.  I’m looking forward to it!

The Josh Martin Band was back in action this past weekend – finally. For the past year, it seems like we played a gig, took three months off, played a gig and repeated the process. For the next several weeks, it’ll feel like we’re a “real” band again with several gigs coming up.

We played at Cedarmore this past weekend (our home-away-from-home) for Memorial Baptist’s men’s retreat. The weekend started for us with a rehearsal on Thursday night. Since we led worship for the retreat, we stayed away from our originals and played some new (to us) worship songs. A modern version of “Come Ye Sinners” seems to be a new favorite for the band. We also played “My Hope Is You” (Third Day), “By His Wounds” and “Days of Elijah” for the first time. It amazes me that we can spend twenty minutes learning a song and play it an hour later (in this case, “Days of Elijah”). We also broke out “Open the Eyes of My Heart” for the first time in about two years – with no rehearsal. Sometimes, we like to fly by the seat of our pants.

Josh broke out his electric guitar for the weekend. Since Bert left the band, some of our songs need a little more body to them, so Josh has decided to play his electric on a few songs. I thought it sounded great on “My Hope Is You.”

The only other real news from the weekend is that we will begin recording our next album this fall! I wasn’t expecting us to start recording so soon, but it’s coming together pretty quickly. Bert is gracious enough to let us use the facilities at Cedarmore for recording, but we have to use them before they shut them down for the winter. This means we have to get rolling, and that’s just fine by me. As of right now, this is how the album breaks down:

• Christ Is Our Life
• Clumsy Believer
• Exposed
• Good Enough
• Come Thou Fount (maybe)
• Come Ye Sinners (maybe)

We’ve worked on at least three other new songs that still need some work (and titles that I forget right now). One song in particular has come together very quickly over the last couple of weeks, and we still have more material in the works. Looks like we’ll be shooting for a release date sometime early next year!

Just wanted to check in and say hello. Haven’t been blogging much lately, I know. So, we’ll go with some rambling, random thoughts.

Did anyone catch Josh Hamilton in the Home Run Derby? Wow! What a story. I haven’t had a “favorite player” in baseball since Eric Davis & Nolan Ryan, but this guy would come close. If you haven’t caught up on this guy, please, please, please Google him and read up. I don’t know if his Home Run Derby highlights have made it onto YouTube yet, but you could check there too.

John Piper is doing a sermon series right now on the importance of church membership – specifically how it relates to baptism. It’s an interesting subject. It’s hard to disagree with Piper on much because we all know he’s searched the Scriptures on pretty much every topic far more than any of us. But, I will say, even after reading his first sermon, I haven’t landed on how I feel about the matter.

I’m spending this week recording the band Altered Worship at Georgetown College. They are the worship band for the Centri-Kid camp hosted by Georgetown this summer. It’s all very similar to my experience recording the Crossings bands last summer. The band is great, and I’m praising God for yet another opportunity to record something like this. So far, so good.

BADmedia has been busy in the past couple of weeks. I’m praying that work will continue to come in and the business will grow. I’ve had a good time getting it off the ground over the past few weeks. It’s the first time I’ve really pushed the business and advertised for it, and I’ve been encouraged by the response.

Here’s to hoping there are more frequent posts coming soon!

At last!

After months of kicking around design ideas and finding time design a site for BADmedia, the task is finally complete.  If anyone out there needs design work, recording, or the like, please head over to the site and contact me!

> Visit the BADmedia site

Howdy y’all (That’s Kentucky for “hello”).  It’s Derby Week here in the Bluegrass, and to be honest, I don’t care that much.  I always hate to say “I’m busy” because everyone is busy this day and time, but that would be more true right now than any other.  Seems like spring time is always my busiest time of the year.

I’m working on several recordings right now.  I recorded a southern gospel concert a couple of weeks ago, so I’m moving on to the mixing stage of that project.  I recorded last week’s Georgetown College Symphonic Band concert.  That recording should be wrapped up this weekend, since it was just a few mics.  Mixing will go quickly on that.  But, I turn around on Sunday to record the Central Kentucky Concert Band’s spring concert.  On top of all this, I’m beginning the process of picking songs for The Point’s first worship album.  It’s really more of a glorified “bootleg” concept.  I plan on recording all the services from now on, and every few months, making a low-budget CD of 10-12 songs.  I’ll manufacture all of them myself in small runs of about 100.  It’ll mostly be a good outreach tool, I think.  We’ll see.

I’ve been digging in to some new graphic design techniques as of late.  I’m a self-trained artist, so I still have a lot to learn.  Mostly, I’ve been digging into Photoshop a bit more to create stuff for web and print.  The majority of my time is usually spent in Illustrator designing shirts.  But, I’m doing more graphic work for The Point these days, and I’m looking to expand BADmedia some more.  So, I think learning more in Photoshop will help.  Mostly, I’ve been playing around with new brushes and the like to create the ever-so-popular grunge and distressed looks that are “all the rage” right now.  I feel like I’m jumping on the bandwagon, but I’m learning new stuff, so that’s always good.

I’m not doing a whole lot of web stuff for the time being, but I think that will change as I move into the summer months.  I have a few sites in desperate need of redesigns, and as mentioned, I’m working on getting some more clients.  I’ve struck up a small partnership with another local business that might lead to some new web clients.  More on that to come.

Tonight was PCG night, and our group went through the study fairly quickly.  It was a good study and I think we were all surprised that we hammered through it in under an hour.  So, I find myself with some free time that I don’t normally have.  Hence, this novel of a blog post.  I’m off to enjoy the rest of the evening…

Not really a music specific post today, but more of a gear post.

Over the last few years, I’ve used several audio interfaces with my computer.  When at home, I mainly need a good, solid interface that will let me mix anywhere from two to thirty-two channels without any hassle.  To be specific, an interface that worked well with my Mac mini and Tracktion.  I don’t do a lot of recording at home, so having multiple inputs (XLR, MIDI, etc.) isn’t an issue.

I’ve settled on a Behringer FCA202 FireWire interface.  Yes, a Behringer product.  A lot of people bash them, but when it comes to bang-for-your-buck, there’s no better.  I’ve owned several of their products and never had any real complaints.  The FCA202 is a very simple firewire device – two 1/4″ inputs, two 1/4″ outputs, a headphone jack and two firewire ports.  That’s it.  A negative of this interface is no XLR or MIDI inputs.  But, if you want to upgrade your computer’s sound card (using a factory sound card for pro audio applications is not recommended) for a cheap price ($80), I highly recommend this card.  It’s also extremely compact, making it a great, portable unit.  I often throw this in my laptop bag to work on audio projects on the go.

The main issue I ran into using other units dealt with audio dropouts, pops, clicks, and more noises.  For some reason, a couple of units would only briefly work with my setup before the audio would drop out.  But, I would expect more from $200-600 units, so this was disappointing.  The FCA202 performs much better with my setup.  The units that didn’t perform as well included an Edirol FA-101, Alesis MultiMix 8 FireWire, and a PreSonus Inspire.  They all resulted in glitches while I tried mixing a project.

I can’t verify if this product would work well with a PC, or another Mac setup that differs from mine.  It does work great with my iBook G4, though.  If you have a 6-pin FireWire port on your computer, the device can be bus-powered (no power adapter needed).  Looking through reviews on Musician’s Friend shows there are issues if you try to use it with Vista (but, what else is new?  The surprise would be if it WORKED with Vista!).

If you’re in the market for a great little (affordable) audio interface, and if you don’t need XLR or MIDI inputs, I highly recommend this unit.  Combine this with GarageBand on a Mac and you’ve spent $80 to start recording your ideas and more.

The remainder of my week will be fairly jam-packed.  I have a lot to get done before I leave for Seattle at the break of dawn on Saturday.  Just to fill you in (since I know you’re on the edge of your seat), and to wrap my head around what I have to do, here’s a breakdown:

Life at CLS

After a slow January, work is picking up at CLS.  A couple of days last week were fairly busy, and today got a little more hectic as the day went on.  I’m hoping to have a really productive day tomorrow to stay on top of things.  Not only do I need to stay on top of things, but I also need to get ahead, since I’ll be gone all of next week.  To top it off, I need to post over thirty new t-shirts designs to our Got The Shirt site, as we try to finally get that project off the ground.

Life at The Point

I’ll be missing the Sunday service at TPCC for the first time in a very long while.  I really don’t remember the last time I missed.  Tomorrow night, I’ll go to the Habakkuk bible study, but then I get to go home.  I won’t have to stay for praise band rehearsal since I won’t be there on Sunday.  This actually helps, even though I hate to miss.  Not having to go to rehearsal will give me an extra couple of hours to get some things done.  One of those things being preparing for my PCG on Thursday night (and cleaning my apartment!).

Life at BADmedia

My goal by the end of this week is to have completely finished rough mixes for the Polston recording I did a couple of months ago.  I still need to get with a couple of groups to do overdubs, but I hope to have the project completed in the next few weeks.  With moving and everything else, it’s taken me longer than usual to get around to mixing, but I’ve finally found the time.  I hope to use my free time tomorrow evening to mix down a couple of the group’s performances.

On the website side of the business, I did a quick site update tonight.  My only real issue is The Point’s media site, which has been down for two weeks.  iPower is working on the issue, but it’s out of my hands – very frustrating!  I hope the issue is solved by the time I return from Seattle – hopefully sooner!

Other

I’m really excited about the Seattle trip.  It’s funny – a few weeks ago, we were all wishing it would hurry up and get here.  Now, it’s finally here and I wish I had another week!  A lot to do in very little time, it seems.

I finally got my internet up-and-running at my apartment tonight.  Since I have a wireless network, I went into my router settings and restricted access to only my computers.  This is my first time living in an apartment building, so I haven’t had the need to do this before.  But, I also don’t want people leeching off my connection.

In my quest to blog more often, I’m considering a schedule of some kind.  Like, Saturday would be YouTube video day, Sunday would be blog link day (linking to stories on other blogs – some people call this a blog carnival), Friday would be PCG Notes day…you get the idea.  I’m also considering have guest bloggers from time to time.  Anyone got any other ideas?