Hippo, birdies, two ewes...

... to another set of birthday twins, adamselzer and wcg. Having been born on the 13^th myself, I was always told that 13 was a lucky number for me, and that Friday the 13^th is particularly lucky. So here's wishing you the best of luck, and a great year ahead.

Tracks and status

Cleanup on 6 more tracks: "Cicero", "Silk and Steel", "Demon Lover", "TEOTW", "Vampire Megabyte", "World Inside the Crystal". That leaves only the four tracks that might still need a little actual work: "High Barratry", which needs to have the .wav file copied out of the concert directory; "Daddy's World", where I still feel there's some work to be done; and "Little Computing Machine" and "Someplace in the Net", both of where I want to go back and compare the last two of my vocal parts to see which is better on which verse. "Daddy's World" has a lot of clicks where my fingernails hit the pick-guard when I strum; not clear whether to try again or leave them in. I've never managed to play that one without clicks, so it might be a lot of frustrating work for nothing.

There are some developments in the non-audio status, too. I've been making notes on the graphics, and decided to ship them off to artbeco to be turned into real Photoshop files by a real artist. The other possibility was to download a trial copy of CS3, struggle through the layout on my own, and come up with something that looks like it was done by a programmer pretending to be a graphic designer. Or throw money at Oasis; their designers are good and professional, but they don't know me and don't have a history with the project.

The remaining tasks are to give the cleaned-up tracks another couple of rounds of listen-and-tweak, get some additional text and logo graphics to artbeco, and to cook up a permission-to-publish form for the performers to sign.

( I could use some advice on that... )

The state of things

I listened to the album twice today -- once in the car, and once on my computer at work (through both headphones and a set of cheap earbuds). It's sounding ok. Levels are pretty good. Nothing that sends me out of the room screaming. I'll do a couple more checks tomorrow.

The artwork's going slower than I'd like, but it's my own damned stupid fault. It should be heading out to Oasis by the end of the month, I think. With luck, I might have some disks in hand by ConChord.

( Depressed whining. Don't bother. )