Interview with Paul Reed Smith

Many famous guitars brands carry the name of their creators, and in the process becoming generic brand names. Like “Les Pauls” and “Paul Reed Smith”.

It shouldn’t surprise me to hear Mr. Paul Reed Smith talk about his PRS guitars.

But for some reason it does.

In a good way 🙂

“… These are tools to play music on, that’s all they are really.”

Yes.

But what beautiful tools.

What beautiful art.

To make more art with.

~ Ivan

Stroke of Midnight v2.0 (Crystal Tears and the Dream Nebula album)

Completed the sound level adjustments from this earlier version. Here’s version 2.0:
STROKE OF MIDNIGHT v2.0
Stroke Of Midnight (2009) by Starfish Stories :: The Band is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Singapore License.

What I did differently from version 1:

• Raised the lead guitar track levels.
• Created another layer from Adrian’s original riff, and adjusted the EQ settings to make his rhythm guitar part stronger.
• Around the 1min 10sec mark: Added a short lead and clean guitar pan effect, and a different beat.
• Miscellaneous adjustments along the track to avoid clipping.
• Imported the uncompressed file to Audacity, adding a compression effect (I was trying to see if it would help in normalising the track) and exporting it as a 24-bit WAV file. I think it does. Listen to the difference – here’s Version 1:

OK.

One down, eight more to go.

~ Ivan

new song: Our Heroes

A remix using a ccMixter sample.

This one is for all the heroes and heroines out there: Firemen, Teachers, Police, Doctors, Nurses, Army buddies, WWII Veterans, ccMixters, Social Workers, Librarians, Wives, Husbands, Mums, Dads.

Download page here. To credit the track, you can copy this block of text:

OUR HEROES by Ivan Chew [MyRightBrain.wordpress.com], featuring a backing track by Scomber [scomber.band-website.com]. 2009 – Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (3.0).

Recorded and mixed in GarageBand ’08.
Guitar: Epiphone Les Paul Standard.
Guitar effects: Line 6 Pod Farm.

This is my Pod Farm amp and effects settings:

Details are posted at MyRightBrain.

~ Ivan

Nana Kitade – Kibou no Kakera

Maybe Starfish Stories :: The Band should rebrand ourselves and perform ‘live’ exclusively in cute animal costumes.

Although I’ve no idea how the huge paws would be able to articulate the notes on the guitars.

Heh.

The song just grows on you, don’t you think?

More about Nana Kitade, here.

~ Ivan
p.s. I really won’t mind the pink bunny.

Oh I feel it burning

As you can tell from the absence of posts, Adrian and I have been busy.

With our day jobs and stuff.

Musically, I’m still keeping myself productive by hanging out at ccMixter.org.

Here’s the latest track that I remixed with my own guitars and arrangement, titled “Feel It Burning”. Technically not a
Starfish Stories track, but have a blast hopefully:

“Feel It Burning (ft. Snowflake)” by Ivan Chew, featuring vocal and piano tracks originally posted by Snowflake. 2009 – Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (3.0). Click here for how to give credit and other conditions.

Details here and here.

I think around end Sept, Adrian and I would have more time. I might get over my procrastination and work on tweaking the sounds for the rest of the Crystal Tears album.

~ Ivan