Celtic Music

Music

"The Kingdom of Summer" website will hopefully be moving to a website of it's own. Stay tuned for the URL addy!

LATEST NEWS!! (updated 06/25/03) As you can see, this site is not updated very often. Not that I don't care to update it, I just don't have a whole lot of time. Let's see what's been going on so far since my last entry.......

In December I was away for the holidays, so there wasn't a whole lot of time to work, and in January I had to pick up a new job, so that whole month was gone...

I resumed recording in February, but I was hititng a brick wall while trying to record on my hard drive. My 5200rpm Wester Digital IDE drive couldn't handle more than 2 reads with a simultaneous write without hiccups. In March I picked up a fibre channel card and a 10k rpm fibre channel drive off Ebay, but it took FOREVER to get the drive to work.......Apparently it was in a NetApp server, which likes to format their drives with 520-byte sectors, instead of 512. Had to get an scsi utility called scuon the net to edit the mode pages on the drive, then perform a low-level format. That took, hmm.........almost a month to get resolved. >:( Then my wife was having her last month of school before graduating, so the computer was occupied. Now she's graduated, so we are both done with school now! :D

May.....back to the drawing board. After ordering my new icepack linux distro, and installing all my recording goodies, lots of research, screwing up my linux distro........reinstalling.......we're back online to get some more tracks laid down

June.......Here we are. Just the other day I spent all night arranging some drum tracks on Sonic Foundry's Acid Music 2.0, which was very useful for that--too bad I had to resort to Windoze. Also, spent all day on a day off work recording the keys and drum tracks on ecasound. I was having some trouble with some digital "popping" sounds, so I had to figure out how to resolve that issue. Found out that the popping occurs when the signal begins or ends on a non-zero value on the y-axis (when looking at a scope). So......to get rid of that I just applied a fade-out envelope at the very last few milliseconds of the drum track to force the wave to end at zero. No pops! I used a utility called snd for that. Very nice!

So now, "John the Baptist" is almost done, I just have to play with the guitar part, get the vocals down, and I have some monologue of Scripture of sayings from our locust-eating hero, and that one will be done! Hopefully I'll have an mp3 up soon, but I will probably wait until I have copyrights secured on all the songs on the album.

10/17/02 I am currently writing and recording new songs. Stay tuned for some chewy soundbites of "John the Baptist," which has a very haunting melody, and a new piece I'm working on. In addition, I am gearing up and praying up for a new CD release in response to some of the recent troubles taking place in our world. The hard disk recording software I'm using is ecasound.

I am writing a song based on Stephen Lawhead's "Dream of Taliesin." I have recently secured permission from Mr. Lawhead to use these lyrics. He wants to have a contract written regarding royalty splits and whatnot. The song is almost ready to record, however I am working on a song about St. Brendan the Navigator at this moment.