I Love My New Netbook!!!

I was so pleased to open one of my gifts from Jen, Patrick, and Kaycie. It was a Dell netbook (Inspiron Mini 10v, if you must know). Now, I do have a Toshiba laptop. It stopped working last year (come on, Toshiba, what's up with that?). I really missed the convenience of a laptop but, quite frankly, I didn't miss the weight and size. An iPhone is rather nice, but it wouldn't be as useful in entering the blog posting, for example. So, something perfect would be between a laptop and an iPhone. Enter the netbook.

I'm excited that I have most of the good stuff a laptop provides with a smaller, more easily portable size. This model from Dell came preloaded with Windows XP. OK, so that's an ancient operating system but it's rock solid and perfect for what I need. Mostly, it lets me run some of my music software to help with recordings and stuff like that. And, did I mention the size is perfect?

Really, I Can't Sing - My first ever, CD release party

Actually, it was Wigilia, the traditional Polish Christmas Eve Supper. The family was there and I handed out CD's as part of my holiday spirit gifting. They all accepted the CD graciously, not really sure what it was I was giving them...but, now I can can say I had had a legitimate CD release party.

I ended up with eleven songs. I could have fit more but I ran out of time. I wanted it all done by Christmas. Getting the individual songs to sound right was enough of a project. The last big push was adding some bass to songs that didn't start out that way. (Thanks to a trade with my friend, Dixon, I now have his Yamaha P80 piano and can add piano, bass, strings and a few other keyboard effects. Fun!)

I'm feeling much better about multi-track recording, now. It's still a bit tricky, especially when you're a lousy musician, to get everything perfect...but the technology isn't the problem. My friend, Mark's, recorder actually makes things a lot easier. I wish it had more than four tracks, though. It's an older cassette model so it's limited because of that. The newer digital recorders have many more tracks.

On the other hand, maybe four is enough. KISS applies.

I'm finishing up my first ever, full length album. (That's an LP in platter days, about 11 songs.) I'm putting it all on a CD, of course. I wanted to do one more song, but the newest one I wrote is a bit more tricky for me to play solo. I'd really like to do them it a band. (That would be my OGRB friends.) So, it'll have to wait for next year.

Got A New Phone Today

I was texting with my older Motorola RAZR and I just got tired of the multiple key presses for lettering. I guess the did about as much as they could for that interface but enough was enough. I was way overdue for a new phone and I started looking around. I would have just loved an iPhone, but they're too expensive (and fragile). I'm looking forward to what Google comes up with in their Android-based new phone. But, I'm sure that'll be expensive, too.

So, I looked at what AT&T had to offer and I liked some of what I saw. Many of the phones have keyboards that slide out and they seem OK, but in playing at the stores, I found I wasn't crazy about how the keys felt under my fingertips. I dunno...maybe I'd get used to them. When I came across some of the newer phones with onscreen keypads, there were mixed feelings, too. But I did find one phone that seemed to be OK...

I'm sitting here thinking about multi-track recording. That's where a musician can lay down different tracks of a song (guitar, vocal, rhythm, piano, bass, etc.) and mix them into a single work. I have been using my friend Mark's multi-track recorder but have had problems. Things aren't lining up properly and I'm guessing there are workflow issues that I have to resolve and tricks I have to discover. I thought I could find out about this on the Internet but, so far, to no avail.

I've got a album's worth of new material I'd like to produce - just to be able to say that I've done a music CD in my lifetime. It won't put me in the same league as the Beatles, but I'd be playing in the same general area even if only briefly...and that's just fine with me.

Now, back to the Internet to see what I can learn...

It's funny how things on the Internet work out. Google has been making some great strides lately and I thought I'l go back and see how their blogging software was keeping up. I've been doing so much with Wordpress (which is pretty goot) that I found myself ignoring alternatives. So, for my personal blog, we'll see what we can do with this!