Weekly Rewind #69

Hello, hello (I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello). Hope you’re all well? I’m back with another rambling update on the recent events in my life. Including music, podcasting, geekry and talking. I do a lot of talking, to which many people can attest. I’m parked up on a comfy chair at home writing this because I seem to have done my back in a bit. It’ll be fine in a couple of days I’m sure. That hasn’t slowed my typing pace, so let’s talk about what’s been happening.

Last Monday I got an email off Ubuntu Community loving  heavy metal making Englishman Jono Bacon. I’d originally offered to master his first Severed Fifth album a couple of years back but nothing came of it for whatever reason. This time he contacted me so I guess my stature is increasing, my waistline certainly is. Jono sent me a track to have a go at and I fired up all the studio kit. When I heard his new stuff I got the idea of trying to go for that Metallica sound off the “Load” album. Mastering is still considered a black art by most people but it’s really not that complicated. You stick to some basic principals and use your ears to guide you. I used some multi-band compression, EQ and some other tools to maximize the sound. I then sent the results back to Jono and he seemed pretty pleased with it. So pleased in fact that he asked me to do the whole album, with only one small caveat…. he needed it all done in the next couple of days. So most of my Monday was spent polishing up this audio and listening to loud metal, before shipping it back over to California via the Interwebs. The album is due out on October 11th and I think people will be surprised by it, it’s a lot more accessible than the first one. The sound is great and I think it could be very successful for Jono and his new band, I hope so. I’ll let you know once it’s released.

Later that night with my ears fully cleaned out from all that metal, we got down to another live Linux Outlaws. It was about 2 hours long and probably the longest show we’ve done in a while. I processed the audio and sent it back to Fab for editing. That became episode 167 “On Her Majesty’s Secret Server” later in the week.

FLOSS Weekly Album Art with Tux and BSD logo
FLOSS Weekly

On Wednesday evening I joined Randal Schwartz on FLOSS Weekly to interview Alexander Limi about the Plone project. It was really interesting and fun. Alexander was a great guest and I’d done a fair bit of reading into the background of Plone, so I felt like I had some good questions. Plone is an Open Source content management system written in Python and build on top of Zope. Alexander also works for Mozilla and it was interesting to hear about that as well. You can download the finished podcast as FLOSS Weekly 137.

The rest of the week was fairly quiet and consisted of band practice on Thursday and seeing friends on Friday night. I also went to the Sugarhill Disco night at Mello Mello on Saturday with Adrian and some other friends. I hadn’t been in Mello for a year or two and last time they didn’t even have an alcohol license. It’s a great venue though, nice and cosy. I’m considering it for the next Rathole Radio gig in 2011. Speaking of Rathole Radio I spent most of Sunday listening through tracks and preparing for the show, you’d never know it from listening but it’s true. I broadcast the show in the evening and performed an acoustic version of “The Dark End Of The Street”. I released show number 36 today so check that out if you want to hear more. I was very pleased with how the live tune came out this time.

Upcoming:

Lots of interesting stuff coming up this week. It’s Liverpool LUG (LivLUG) tomorrow night, or probably tonight by the time this is published. Wednesday 6th of October. We’ll be meeting up at the Liverpool Social Centre on Bold St at 7pm, before moving to the pub afterwards. I’ll be playing some more with the band I expect and on the weekend there’s the PHP North West conference in Manchester. I got a ticket for this ages ago and forgot. It should be fun though and I know some other Drupal developers are going. I’ll report back on that next week. Till then take care of yourselves out there.

Dan

7 Comments

    • @Eric I hope I did. I never even really listened to that album. Metallica were already long dead to me by then. Load was the last album I paid any attention to.

  1. @jezra Hah, excellent comment! I know what you mean about Master but after discussing the sound Jono wanted it wasn’t right. He wants a more produced modern metal sound and I think Load is a good example of that. It’s what came to mind when I heard the raw tracks, and I suppose to use a massive pun I had to “obey my master… master!!!” 😀

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