Band poster and EP artwork!

Made a new band poster for a show and did the artwork for this EP by Manx. Rock and Roll Portland Peoples!

Just some upcoming shows.

Some recent quick and cheap band posters for upcoming shows.

The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound

It is cool how The Grateful Dead pretty much invented modern stadium sound systems. Cool little write up on some of the history of that.

“A vision during an LSD trip is what inspired Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer’s mammoth feat of technical engineering, “The Wall of Sound”, irreversibly changing live sound and engineering for the better.

It was a time when live sound problems plagued engineers, bands, and audiences equally. While rock concerts grew in size and scope throughout the 60s, audiences grew larger and louder, without the technical sophistication of amplification ever changing to meet this scenario. Screaming fans meant that low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard and without the help of monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. Things were so bad that the Beatles quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. It was after this era that the band, the Grateful Dead, became obsessed with their sound, largely thanks to their eccentric and dedicated sound engineer. Though incredibly frustrated with the noisy, feedback-laden, underpowered situation, they did not want to give up playing live, and the Dead had Owsley on board to help solve the sound situation.”

New Work in the Wild: At the Edge of the End

Some album art I did for We are Parasols just went live for their new album, “At the Edge of the End”. Fun abstract doodle using Luka noise for the ground.

Music Fridays

Hop in the way back machine for bit of The The from the Dusk album.

AI song mastering is a thing now.

Arstechnica does a write comparing Apple, OZone, LANDR and Bandlabs AI Mastering Assistants.

I liked most of the results I got. Mastering Assistant, Ozone, and LANDR were each clearly capable of pro-sounding results; the web-based services I tried, including Bandlab and Waves, were somewhat more variable.

Apple's Mastering Assistant offered a less compressed and more open sound on my demo track, which sounded very nice. (Indeed, on another track of mine, I preferred Apple's approach for precisely this reason.) LANDR was also great, though it offered a much more controlled sound. For this demo track, however, Ozone's compressed-but-not-completely-crushed sound and its excellent handling of the overall EQ (the highs were present but never sizzling, for instance, and it dealt with one or two moments of sibilance better) won me over.