The beginning of another week...

Starting off another week here. The right way. Sort of. I pulled off a two hour nap after spending all of my morning and most of my afternoon at the church. It was our annual meeting today so I sat through that for two hours so I could vote on the budget at the end. After that, for the love of being outside after being cooped up for two hours, I walked with a friend one extra stop into downtown Brooklyn to Lawrence St./Metro Tech and then headed off to the co-op to pick up a few things. The 5th Avenue festival was apparently this afternoon, too, so I wandered through that for a few blocks, post co-op trip, until I couldn't stand being in the crowd anymore. Saw a band for half a minute but mostly just got grill smoke in my eyes and noted that everything there, all the food anyway, cost at least $5, more than I had in my pocket at the time.



By this point, the sun had come out and the humidity was on. So, I headed home and slept, but not before hashing out another quality to-do list for the week ahead. Items ticked off tonight other than napping: voice over! I submitted to another gig tonight (earlier, I had done one from my phone during the meeting because it didn't require a custom audition). I am potentialy meeting with a voice over friend sometime this week so we can pick each other's brains about our various processes. She's used voice123.com a lot more than I have and I come from an audio background so we should be able to help each other out a lot.

Beyond that, I'm diving into the score for Mohammad's picture tonight and the rest of this week. I'll be working mainly on the electronic part since the opening Oud solo will have to wait until our Oud player resurfaces or I can get my hands on an Oud of my own. I'm fully aware that I may be changing certain aspects of this piece to fit whatever I (or someone)end(s) up playing on the Oud. But probably no more than the key the piece is in. I have a slow, swung 4/4 beat running, with a low synth and cello playing an ominous ostinato and have been experimenting with layering samples of subway train sounds underneath (sounds awesome!). I have a sample of a call to prayer from a well known Muslim Imam that will signal the end of the animation and will segue into the electronic beat. So, it's mainly about placement of all those elements right now. The beat, I feel I need to work on choosing the sounds of my kit and the mix of everything. I may experiment with more parts other than the ostinato. Certainly the Oud will be in the mix but I'm also considering some clean delayed guitar. We shall see.

Saturday was another great open mic at Banjo Jim's. Lacy and I really rocked it out, bringing two songs that the crowd there had never heard, Vengeance is mine (which we only played once before at Pete's) and Silverback which was new for us this week. We arranged an acoustic version of the song last Wednesday at rehearsal that has a somewhat different feel than the album version which you can hear here.

Again, I love this crowd and the sense of community and camraderie they bring to the place. They have their regulars but are so supportive of newbies. Highlights were a Welsh girl getting up and singing with an electric uke and then reciting a poem she wrote, and then a brother and sister duo that covered I shall be released by Bob Dylan (the boy was 10 and sang and played piano).

The same 8 year old Asian girl came but we didn't get to hear her sing because I had to leave at 6pm. Lorraine Leckie came again (brought her dog into the bar) but we missed her performance, too. She was great last time.

The videos of our performance are here and here if you're interested.

Anyway, I had one of those stupid commutes tonight. It was just back and forth between good and bad train luck the whole time. First, I catch the R train right away at my station. Then I jump on the N train at Atlantic and before I know it, some urine smelling dude jumps on behind me and sits right next to me on a mostly empty train (I'm thinking, "thanks, dude!")...the next stop after Atlantic was over the bridge in Manhattan, too, so I'm pretty much stuck in this car until Canal St. Then I see the Q train on the next track over when we're in the tunnel and realize that our train has to stop to let that train go first over the bridge. If I had taken the R train one more stop to Dekalb Avenue, I might have been able to jump on that Q, go first and then bypass all the local stops and potentially not have to sit next to someone who smells like urine. Then when I get to Union Square, I just miss the L train and the next one won't come for 12 minutes according to the countdown clock. So, I try to grab the M14D bus but it's leaving once I get up into the street. The next one doesn't show and I figure, I might just have time to get back down into the subway before the next L train arrives. Sure enough, once I get downstairs, there's the L train rolling up. And I make it to work at 10:55. I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes it just doesn't matter what happens in between as long as you get where you're going on time. Even if you have to endure the smell of urine...which was what greeted me coming up the stars in the 8th avenue station.