The magic 40 ms, imminent collage

This is the me you won't like so much -- the just waking up, thirsty, headachey, sore-necky, no directiony me. Hopefully a little later I can come back with good stuff to report on, in spite of the tension that comes with knowing my whole life is one big overdue library book.

A couple of cool things I've done over the past few days: more work on the remixes for the first two songs from TFBD. It seemed like song #1 was going pretty well and song #2 was going to need a lot of work, but now I've kind of reversed it where I'm really happy with song #2 where it's at. I got it to that point -- the holy grail of anything I'm working on -- where I found myself saying "okay, I'm just going to listen back one more time", and I wind up playing it "just one more time" after that, and so on and so on.

I don't even think I did anything drastic to it, mostly compressed and EQ'ed the bass, EQ'ed the drums, and did some nitpicky things with a few notes that sounded a hair off, either nudging their pitch or their time. 40 milliseconds seems to be the perfect amount to nudge something by when it's on the right beat, but just feels a little too loose or draggy. Yes, being this picky can make a difference, because it impacts feel. I think the reason it works is because, to my ears, 20 ms is just small enough to be rhythmically imperceptible -- so if you go in increments of twice that (40 ms), you're bound to get within 20 (the "happy zone") pretty quickly, usually within one nudge for that matter.

Another thing I did yesterday was to go through all of my photos (prints, not digital) -- I have few enough that they all fit in one of those envelopes that you'd get your photos in when they came back from the "de-vel-o-per", that is if you were shooting pictures back in my day -- to find a few reasonable likenesses of myself to put on my bio page. I have a few more than I need, and they range from semi-flattering to ridiculous, so I'm trying to figure out how I might arrange them into some sort of collage.