Blue Blog

The Debut Record – Facts and Figures

bluebluesatellite — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:39:22 +0000

The Learning Days debut album from yours truly, Blue Blue Satellite, is trudging steadily to completion. So, I thought I’d throw out some fun facts….

Number of tracks: 14

Number of tracks less than a minute long: 2

Album length: 50:55

Longest track length: 5:24

Shortest track length: 0:38

Number of tracks with parentheses in the title: 4

Number of tracks with the king of all instruments, the pedal steel, on it: 4

Number of guitar solos: 2

Number of pick slides: 1

Number of “girl” – “world” rhymes: 0

Number of ooh sha la la la la la’s: 0

Number of ooh la la la la la la’s: 2

Weirdest instrument used: plastic screwdriver handle bouncing off guitar strings

Densest vocal harmonies: 9 layers

F-bombs edited out: 2

Number of guitars used: 5

Off-colour jokes told in the studio: 1,543,442

Time wasted in the studio: 1,543,442 minutes

Oldest song on the record: circa 2001 – Don’t Cry (Tonight)

Newest song on the record: circa 2011 – Melancholia

Best misheard lyric after listening to it too much: “Sister Rachel” = “Interracial”

Hearts worn on sleeve: 1

Singing on the debut record…or as cool people call it: “vocals”…or if you’re extra cool: “vox”

bluebluesatellite — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:26:47 +0000

Recording in a real studio was very enjoyable mostly because I got to experience what I’ve seen in movies, TV and magazines: Talking to the producer through soundproof glass over headphones, singing into a “plosive screen”, being surrounded by mounds of equipment for which I’d have a hard time finding the ‘on’ switch…

But it was enjoyable also because it brought out different aspects of me as a performer I never expected. Namely, the aspect of being a singer. Oh, I’m still a crappy singer but I was very proud of how few takes it took me to get a pretty acceptable performance. Sometimes we even settled on a “scratch track”(a placeholder take) as the final take. There is the theory, of course, that since my singing is weak to begin with, it doesn’t take that much effort to reach that bottom rung of the singing ladder. Nonetheless I also enjoyed doing the singing takes much more than anything else. When playing the instruments, I was very conscious about technique and precision. But with the singing, I felt very free and liberated to just pour as much mood and emotion as I could into the vocal performance.

That being said, whoever invented vocal correction technology is a life-saving genius.

Blue Blue Satellite

The Debut Record – Finality

bluebluesatellite — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:01:06 +0000

Inspiration hit this weekend and I wrote one last song for the record. It’s a little risky to put it on the record so soon after writing it, because I could just be suffering from the songwriting equivalent of beer goggles. But at the very least it’ll be a different kind of song. In fact, it’s different from any previous song I’ve written mainly due to one factor which I will leave for you to discover when the record comes out in who-knows-when. The song will probably be the album closer and I wrote it with that in mind and I do think it’ll give the album a nice sense of finality.

Anyhoo, after a brief African hiatus, I head back to the studio for a few sessions this week to hopefully turn the who-knows-when to Wen-knows-when. I’ll tell you this though…that original November 26th I hoped for was waaaay off. There’s much work to be done and now that I’ve got the new Coldplay on my mind, I’ll no doubt be asking my producer for the Enofication of my tracks. So, soaring choruses about skies and birds with tons of ambient effects and a lot of “whoo hoo”‘s and “whoa oh”‘s. I can just see him sadly shaking his head when I start singing in a falsetto.

Blue Blue Satellite

The debut record – Tracklist

bluebluesatellite — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:04:36 +0000

So my studio time has ended. We didn’t quite finish everything up so I’m going to have to go back in to record one last track. Then comes the editing, mixing, mastering and the most important part: running the entire record through the T-Pain Super AutoTune 5000™.

But I can tell you the tracks that we recorded, thus officially revealing the tracklist for The Learning Days:

(in alphabetical order)
1. (Never) Let It Go
2. 30
3. Against the Northern Sky
4. Blues’ll Always Be the Blues
5. Do You Remember Me?
6. Don’t Cry (Tonight)
7. The Fair’s in Town Tonight
8. The Learning Days
9. Science and Progress
10. Sister Rachel (a.k.a.: “Inter-racial”)
11. Thieves

Going to take a little travel hiatus but it’s going to be nothing but The Learning Days, The Learning Days, The Learning Days once I’m back and hopefully the record will be finished just in time to cheer y’all out of the winter blues(…or drive you deeper into them, depending on which tracks you listen to).

Blue Blue Satellite

The debut record – Joes vs. Pros

bluebluesatellite — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 08:25:20 +0000

On Friday, a professional musician came in to the studio and played pedal steel on a few of my songs. Just hearing a professional touch playing an instrument I adore on a song that I wrote was an unforgettable moment. Goosebumps, chills, tears…bodily functions were at peak flow. And although that last sentence has a powerful lack of eloquence and subtlety, I can assure you that Anders Drerup’s touch on a handful of my songs was as eloquent and subtle as a Shakespearean ninja(i.e. very eloquent, very subtle).

And let’s not forget a few days prior when Tim Watson stopped by to add some drums to a track as well. I just watched the video footage I shot and as it started I thought to myself, “Weird, I don’t remember listening to a kickass rock song in the studio”…then it dawned on me that it was my song with Tim beating the hell out of the skins for the track. A monster on the kit making a monster out of the song…and again, let me assure you, that is a good thing.

I blogged awhile back that I’d probably cheap out and muddle through all the instruments myself in order to save a couple of bucks. Am I glad I didn’t, and that I got these two gentlemen in because once you have the real deal on the tracks it just kicks it up several notches. I can’t wait to hear it all mixed and mastered… It. will. be. EPIC.

Blue Blue Satellite

The debut record: It begins

bluebluesatellite — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 02:42:26 +0000

So tomorrow after I leave my day job for the day, I’ll be going all Clark Kent and will rush over to Gallery Recording Studios in the Glebe neighbourhood of Ottawa, transforming into Blue Blue Satellite on the way. There, I will start my first evening of “tracking”. Which, as I understand it, is just a cooler word for “recording”.

It’s tremendously exciting to be moving on from my bedroom “studio” with recording “equipment” that 11-year-olds doing Beiber webcam covers for YouTube wouldn’t even touch. And even though I probably should put all my focus on the music and nailing the performances, you can be sure I’ll have my camera to capture all those cool in-studio shots of me singing in front of mic spit guards and what-not.

So stay tuned, wish me luck, and probably most importantly, wish my producer luck as he’s about to find out the true meaning of “amateur”…

Blue Blue Satellite

The debut record: Album title

bluebluesatellite — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:01:55 +0000

My debut record will be called:

The Learning Days

I can say that with 95% certainty. “The Learning Days” is a title of one of my songs and I think it summarizes well where I’m at in certain aspects of my life right now. Also, most of the songs that I intend to put on the album kind of fit under that title one way or another. I also like the idea of titling my record after a song on said record. It’s one of those mysterious things the pros sometimes do that seems completely arbitrary to me. And just like the pros, the titular track tends to not be a single, but often one of the songs that’s a bit of a departure from the rest of the record. And “The Learning Days” is certainly that as well.

Also, I like having a title that starts with “The”. Makes it sound more like a title.

Blue Blue Satellite

The new record: The Sound

bluebluesatellite — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:28:08 +0000

I’m a songwriter. I’m not a guitarist, I’m not a drummer, I’m not a keyboardist, I’m not a bassist.

The good news: As I head into the studio in September there are such things as “session musicians” who will play all those instruments for you on your record!

The bad news: I’m too cheap to pay for session musicians.

But that’s actually still good news because I’m something of a multi-instrumentalist which means I’m familiar with the mechanics of several instruments despite sucking at them individually. The good news being, for the tracks that will have a fuller production I’ll be forced to come up with creative ways to record these instruments without betraying the fact that I’m actually quite lousy at them. And the way I’ll do this is to use them in non-traditional ways(i.e. cheat) that can only give the songs a fresher, unique, less-is-more feel to them…

So it’s win-win: I save money and you, the potential listener, will get a feast for your ears! But be forewarned for what you’re in for…I emailed my producer today asking if his studio had an accordion, melodica or Moog I could tinker with…which should be extra interesting seeing as I don’t know what a Moog is…

Blue Blue Satellite

The new record: tracklist and trackorder

bluebluesatellite — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 06:09:13 +0000

So I’m rushing this post out so that Technorati.com can verify the following code: 2T6EWHYJTWW5. Did you get that Technorati robot blog crawler? I said 2T6EWHYJTWW5.

Moving right along…

Of all the songs I’ve written, there are about 40 songs that would be album-worthy. The rest…well let’s say I’ve written my share of songs that were all kinds of suck. Probably worth putting on display as cautionary tales as to why you don’t want to short-change the songwriting process. But of the 40 keepers, the challenge I now face is which ones I’ll include on my first album(probably 10 or so).

Without knowing it, many of you have already helped me in this task. Etched in my brain(read:ego) are the many positive comments people have made on my songs. Whether polite offhand congratulations or soul-baring cockle-touchers, these comments give me a good idea of which songs pack the goods. So I already do have something of a shortlist.

From there I’ll need to figure out if any of the songs just don’t belong thematically or musically. Whenever I would prepare a setlist for a live show I’d always try to have a nice, smooth musical trajectory so that the audience is taken on a musical journey rather than yanked from one song to another. Same with the tracklist…need to make sure they all fit together both as a whole and as a sequence.

Have you ever watched those deleted scenes with the directory’s commentary on a DVD and they’re like “I really loved this scene but I had to cut it for the sake of the pacing”? My next thought is usually “man, how do I turn off this pretentious jackass’ commentary?” but now I kinda understand it. I already know I won’t be putting in some songs on this record that I’d really love to record. I’ll reveal the final tracklist once it’s finalized but for now I’ll end this pretentious jackass commentary with a few tracks that won’t be making the cut…or will they?

Let the Pieces Fall (i.e. Dr. Snuggles)
Reckless and the Gun
Let Heaven Come Down
La Danse (i.e. the French song)

Blue Blue Satellite

10 years in the making: recording my first CD.

bluebluesatellite — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:27:19 +0000

…or to use the correct terminology I recently learned: “making my first record”. Which is weird, because I will be essentially recording my first CD. Regardless, allow me formally announce it:

Dear friends, in the next few months I will be making my first record. Although I am still very much an independent artist, my intention is to do this in as professional a manner as I am able. I have spoken to a local Ottawa producer, Dean Watson, who is well respected, connected and has a good track record and we have agreed to proceed with this project in the September time-frame. I have budgeted a significant amount of money for the entire initiative and even if this record turns out to go nowhere, I feel a need to do this now and to do it seriously and to do it right. And so, I am going to do it.

I’ve tried to be pretty low key in the past about pushing all things Blue Blue Satellite(that’s my stage name, for the uninitiated) but as part of my commitment to doing this project right, alas, I’m going to have to step up the self-promotion. I promise I won’t just cram it down your throats and be like “buy my CD, buy my CD, buy my CD, buy my CD, buy my CD.” I will try to offer something engaging and insightful that will hopefully keep you rockin’ along with me as I strike out on this endeavour.

I know I’m making a big deal out of this. And I know that most of you probably know people who have put out records of their own so it’s kinda like: “meh”. Still, I hope you’ll be willing to share in my excitement and be interested in joining me as I take this little journey. Or rather “continue this journey”…a journey many of you have been on at the important moments so please stick with me a little longer…at least until I can garner more than dozen YouTube hits.

Blue Blue Satellite

(buy my CD, buy my CD, buy my CD, buy my CD, buy my CD….when it comes out)