This week: Music meets Sci-fi. The problem with opining endlessly is with every opination you're bound to offend someone. The more inarticulate and ramblingly drivelesque it is the more opportunity to offend potential clients. I've certainly offended spelling nazi potential clients with things like "opination". The wise course of course would be to advertise using vague promises of competence and magic tech sprinkles like the other studios. So, with that in mind I should probably promote the studio. Here, I'll start with a bio: Rick was born at an early age and quickly sucked at guitar. Throughout the eighties Rick played played badly and got steadily worse through the nineties. His horrid playing catapulted him to the bottom of the C list bars where nobody liked him at all. He then started a recording studio and ruined many CD's. Now in the twilight of his unremarkable career, Rick can be found pop and lock dancing for change in front of liquor stores. Ever thusly do I walk the line between supercilious pompous superiority and total abject despondency. This always happens when you start a sentence with "Ever thusly". Unless it's like, "Ever thusly doth mine weenie leap with glee." Then it's fine. As you may have surmised, I have trouble with promo. I play guitar, and record stuff. You, as a potential client, would probably like to have confidence in my skills. Tough titty. Your job as Mr. or Mrs. Potential Client is to weed through reems of endless claims of competence and success, then figure out if any of the claims are real, or, as is usually the case, total bullshit. From birth we're blasted every waking moment by people trying to convince you to buy something or believe something. Reality is adjusted by belief. If you believe your cel phone is the best phone ever invented by mankind, then it is. Just don't drop it in water. And ain't it funny how they make the outside cases out of the slipperiest material known to mankind. It's so pervasive we adjust reality and suffer through everything from water absorbent slippery cel phones to prescriptions that make you sick. At the end of the day we're all just monkeys trying to grind each other for bananas. We tune it out but media has insistent little hooks constantly dragging through our brains. Insidious little catch phrases droning on in the background when you're not paying attention. They have universities and armies of psychologists and PhD think tanks whose entire lives are focused on creating new and improved ways to grind them bananas. I personally believe it's what you do, not what you say. Studios are the same dealio as any other advertising entity attempting to pry open your banana vault. In order to get your money we promise to sprinkle it with magic tech sparkles that will make your music successful. We'll do or say any old thing to get your money. But really, all we are is what we've done. Studio ads shouldn't even be in the musicians community section. I tried the proper section for a while but had no response because all the local studios are advertising here. So here I be. Hopefully my foaming blather is enough to justify my existence here. Hey an idea: a challenge to all the other studios advertising in the musicians community section: say something. So here's the vague. I'm a 54 year old guitar player who drank the digital koolaid, bought the gear and tried to record my own CD about 17 years ago. After many years of playing aural whack-a-mole I got better at it. The last few years I'm getting pretty good at it. I'm working on a website, but as previously ranted about, it's not gonna be awesome. Being good at websites is a whole nuther ballgame. I'd post some pics of the studio setup but it's a tad cluttered at the moment. The stuff that's online is ancient and I don't live there anymore. My current setup sounds good but I have bunkbeds built into the wall on one side, and a goofy foyer setup where I have a sound booth. Sounds are great but the setup isn't all pro looking. No glass for people to stare at you while you try to stuff your soul into a microphone. No hushed lighting. Not many blinky lights. I do have two lava lamps though. I've recorded heavy dudes who work as session players at all the big expensive studios around town. They say I get as good and often better sounds from my little setup as many of the staff engineers at the big studios. That's true that they said that, whether they were just being nice is another story. They all said they wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. I've heard more than a few tracks from the heavy studios that I thought I could have done better on. I don't think that counts though. It's human nature to think you can do a better job in any given eandeavor, especially where money and success are involved. I would have done it THIS way. Also, quite often it's the clients wishes that screw up the sound. It's your money, and if you want a clicky metal kick in your country tune well by golly you shall have it. So, to sum up: I'm as good as anybody, not as good as some, possibly better than most in my price range, but I don't have magic tech sparkles. Listen to what I've done. That's really all that matters. But hey, for shits and giggles I just checked out the other studios advertising in here. I don't want to shoot down other studios, but... Well that's all I should say. Yup.... that's all I should say. Wait...... nope. That's it. Let's just quietly move on to the next paragraph shall we? Now to the sci-fi portion of this wandering diatribe. Hey... Wandering Diatribe.... dibs on the band name. John The Revelator was written by Blind Willie Johnson. He was blinded at 7 when his stepmom threw lye in his face. Played on the streets mostly and died broke in 1945. A tune of his is on the gold record attached to Voyager. In 40,000 years it'll be close to another planetary system. How cool is that? There's an entire universe of music out there. Anyhoo... I'm off to the liquor store to make some money.
cosmictunes7