Author: Nicholas Toone

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Your One, Short Life

Wow, it really has been a bit. I posted Gods, Prophets, or Slaves wayyy back in January 2023.

Here we are then. Enjoy “Your One, Short Life”

Click here for lyrics.

Song Notes (There’s a lot to say this time)

The main body of the tune is in F … something? I can’t remember F what. The only scale I know by heart is G (yeah, I’m looking at right at you post-solo Master Of Puppets). I stumbled on the main verse of this song while fucking around with the scales section of the All Guitar Chords site and it kinda just went from there. I just hit up that site, load up some different scales, play around with them, and piece together whatever sounds good.

This was one of those pieces that I worked on for an inordinate amount of time. I finished the composition and recorded the guitars in the mid summer of 2023; was still storing a friends axes, tube amp, and cab and used them to lay down the various heavy bits (the clean parts were played on my Ibanez).

Recording the drums was bittersweet because what you hear on this track is the very last recording of my kit before I sold it.

I laid the tracks down in about an hour, then put the kit up for sale on Kijiji. It was gone three days later.

I gave it all rough mix, had a listen was pleased and…

… then the tune just sat there. Yes, yes life was busy and all that, but the main issue was that I just could not come up with a melody for the verse sections. Everything I tried just plain sucked. Sometimes I’d listen to it on repeat in the car and nothing I tried clicked.

Late one night, at the beginning of October, I woke up with a start. Without even thinking about it, I picked up my phone, opened my mail, sent myself the following message:

… then put my phone down and went back to sleep.

As I talked about in my post from the middle of last week, I decided to rent a pro level mic and preamp and get the vocals done for some tunes I had lying around. This was the first one I tackled and I took my email to heart.

While it’s not a complete ripoff of Once In A Lifetime, you definitely hear the influence in there. As I moved deeper into the song, I stared jamming more words in there until the third verse is a near breathless block of words that pretty much sums up the overall subject. The choruses flowed naturally out of all this and took on a somewhat “marching” cadence with just a smattering of melody (and a whisper of harmonies).

The mixing didn’t take as long as normal; I’d been playing with the instrument mixes on and off over the past year and the vocals we not difficult at all. I attribute this to the SM7B/NV1 setup I employed this time around. After all my whining about “top of the line” and how you don’t really need it, I feel like I have to walk that back a little.

Yes, you can work with inexpensive, sometimes bargain basement equipment but there is a reason these expensive, top of the line options are so lauded: they do work as advertised. Now, top of the line equipment won’t compensate for a shitty performance. If anything it accentuates shitty performances. If you’re competent, however, top of the line equipment can make your recording effort a little bit easier.

Remember though, work with what you can afford. Rent what you can’t afford (if at all possible).

With all that being said, enjoy this new tune!

Note: The artwork for this track is a photograph I took of a stray dog Manzanillo, Mexico in January 2019. Text effects were added via Affinity Photo.

NoteNote: The drums are 90% the recorded kit. I did have to blend in samples for the kick and snare as my playing is not what you’d call consistent. Recording this track is probably some of the best drumming I’d done at that point, but I still qualify as an amateur.

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Your One, Short Life – Lyrics

Lyrics and Music by Nicholas Toone. ©2024.

I want to start this by asking you to sit down relax close your eyes and think back way back and try to remember a time where you could imagine anything really grand adventures played out maybe riding on horseback or maybe behind the wheel of a fast fast car that your could fly into space and float amongst the milky way when you felt like everything and anything was at your fingertips and you could just reach out and take it

And then your hand gets slapped,
You’re ordered to behave
They say they have the manual that covers cradle to grave
Study it front to back, there’ll be a test
Don’t you know they want to save you…
From the tsk tsk tsk’s and the finger wags
And the embarrassment that comes from being constantly nagged about
Your hopes and dreams, they’re for not
They’ll just serve to fail you

You tell yourself that you’re gonna do it this time you’ve learned your place you’re going to put on a fresh clean shirt and do it right and off you go into the world but along the way it starts to drift it all begins to go just a little bit sideways just a little bit off the grid and you just kinda let it happen you stop forcing it because it feels good dammit it feels right and you realize that you can choose where to place your feet in this one short life

But it’s a tight run ship
And with a crack of the whip
We all bow and pray for glory, yeah, but we ain’t shit
There’s no trophy at the end of this race
Yet we keep on running
With all the left-right-black-white
Sides of the coin
There’s no room for shades of grey
They tell us “Just get in line!”
Forget your hopes and dreams
Don’t you know? They’ll just serve to fail you

And here you are you’ve done your bit but you’re exhausted used up depleted keelhauled dragged under and across the barnacle encrusted hull of the glad-hands after you snapped back to the grid and slowly gave up everything for the promise of something what that something was you can’t remember maybe it was your forty two inch tee vee maybe it was your new phone maybe it was your new car but deep down you know it’s not the car from your first verse there’s no flying to space no stars there’s just the threadbare remnants of a daydream you only find at the bottom of a bottle

… this is not the end
… this is not my end

 

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Forthcoming

This is me most days: Oh I wanna do music! No, I’m gonna write! Actually, I think I’ll pick up a paint brush! You know what? Fuck it, I’m going to fire up a video game and lose myself for a few hours 1.

This is why I have a pile of half finished/not quite finished stuff lying around, I’m like a fucking ping pong ball.

Anyway, I recently got a bug up my ass to finish the three songs I have sitting around. The only thing they needed was vocals. I mean, I’m not going to die if I didn’t get them done but I just wanted to get them moving, y’know? Figured there was no time like the present. It’s always good to take care of something as soon as you get a bug up your ass about it.

My issue this time was pure ego. I did try adding vocals to one of these tracks at various times over the past couple of years using what equipment I had on hand, but was just never happy with the results. I tried my SM-57s, the SM58, the GLS-ES57’s, the Behringer C-1… all of these have served well in the past but now I just could not get them to do what I needed.  

After hmming and hawing over it, I decided to rent an SM7B and a Great River ME-NV1.

If you’re on the internet, you know what an SM7B is. All I have to say is “those big, microphones that all the podcasters use”. Yeah, you know.

The ME-NV1, for those who don’t know is a mic preamp that I’ve seen talked about in many a YouTube video (and audio recording forums) and the general consensus is that these two combined can make for a killer vocal sound, spoken or sung 2.

I’m never going to buy either of these items. I’ve no real need to have an SM7B on hand, let alone a top of the line preamp. Both are expensive (the NV itself will run you fourteen hundred bucks before tax) and both hold their value on the used market, so rental it is!

Heh, you know what? I got so into what I was doing that didn’t even take a pic of the mic/pre setup so instead here’s the rental receipt:

I set up everything when i got home (SM7B > ME-NV1 > Focusrite Scarlett > PC/MixBus 32c), did some quick tests and wow. The vocal sound I was getting surprised me. Like, really surprised me. I don’t know if I would call it major label studio quality, but it was far beyond anything I’d done in the past.

My main problem was that out of the three songs, only one of them had any semblance of lyrics; just very rough idea sloppily written down. The other two? Pffft. Nothing. Nadda. Jack fucking shit.

So here I was with a good mic, a good mic pre, three songs, no lyrics, and maybe two and a half days.

Fuck it.

I pulled out some blank paper, took a deep breath and started to write.

And goddammit, I did it.

I just steamrolled my way through it all, scribbling down words while the tracks played; scratching out mistakes and trying again. Testing out ideas in real time. There was one point where I got stuck and had a mild freak out. “There is no way I was going to pull this off, I said to myself. “It normally take me days to write a single verse”. This didn’t last long though and I managed to push through.

Here’s the pile of in progress sheets.

My pen started acting up at one point so I had to stop and figure that out.

With thanks, as always, to the unsung low subscriber hero’s of YouTube, I was able to fix my pen and move on until finally I had three full sets of lyrics written and the vocals recorded:

Now it’s on to mixing which I don’t anticipate taking too long as I’d been editing and playing with the mixes of all three songs over the past while.

So, sit tight and over the course of the next few weeks there’ll be three new tunes appearing both here and in Bandcamp.

1: Oh. My. God. The Witcher 3 is soooooo fucking good. I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was the best video game I’ve ever played but there’s something about The Witcher 3 that hits just right.

2: Yes, yes there is also the famous Neumann U 87, but the rental on those beasts are prohibitive. While the monthly rate for the SM7B was $46, the U 87 would cost $300 for the same time frame.

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For The Love Of Email

For as long as anyone remembers, email gets a ton of shit for a variety of reasons:

Spam. Bad organization. Spam. Search that can never really find what you’re looking for. Spam. Ridiculous unread counts (which led to this supremely weird need to achieve Inbox Zero). Spam.

People seem to dislike email. Like, really dislike it.

A lot of things have been blamed, most notably the email clients themselves, which, to be fair …

… email clients can be pretty horrendous. Whoever designed the Gmail interface needs a stern talking to 1. And who gave the green light to stupid shit like Focused Inbox and Conversation thread view? It’s email, not chat.

All of this spawns “articles” (which are really ads) for more email clients that do it better (they never do), and companies that claim they’ve re-imagined email (they haven’t, but will happily charge you for it) but, in the end, it’s still. just. email.

There are two very basic things you can do to make email easy:

      1. Manually organize; create a few custom folders.
      2. Learn the very basics of setting up filters and make use of them.

That’s it. These two things take hardly any time at all and once you learn/do them, you’ll rarely have issues going forward.

The one thing that all the detractors fail to recognize is that while so very much has changed online in the past few decades, Email has been the one constant.

The dot com craze came and went. The MySpace and Napster generation had its time in the sun. Whatever the fuck Web 2.0 was had its moment. Then the iPhone showed up and now and now we have to do everything via apps. Don’t forget the Internet of Things and all the stupid smart devices. And there’s steaming and subscription plans. Right now, AI is the new shiny.

And yet, quietly in the background, one of the things keeping everything together is email. It still uses SMTP and the only real change I can think of was the move to IMAP from POP (allowing for full synchronization between clients/devices). As far as clients go, the only difference between then and now is that the message list in most email apps moved to the left of the preview pane as opposed to above it.  Sure, companies have screwed around here and there by implementing pretty templates and other bits of fluff (like goddamned Conversation view!) but, at its core, email is still email.

Is email really making us miserable? It’s not making me miserable. What makes me miserable is having to navigate a phone tree menu that tells me there is all kinds of good information on the website even though I was just at the website and it has nothing but a half baked knowledge base and/or an AI Chatbot masquerading as “live support”. Oh, and I can’t find an email address anywhere on your site. And now I’m sitting on the phone because I managed to find your companies number on page four of a Reddit thread complaining about how hard it is to get a hold of anyone at this company.

What makes me miserable is the fact we have to install a mobile app and sign up if we want to do anything from travel to banking to rewards cards from coffee shops.

Apps will save us! Apps will make things easier! Oh, and they’ll provide you with a never ending barrage of notifications and, you guessed it, emails! All turned on by default! You’re welcome!

You need an email to sign up for an account on the app. You need an email to sign up for an account anywhere.

I really don’t understand how email sets people off. I’ve seen people share their screen where there is a red bubble on Outlook with a 20K unread badge and I wonder what the hell is the matter. Then again, these are the same people who have browsers that look like this:

And/or taskbars that look like this:

Look, email is not difficult. Like everything else in this world, people just make it difficult. Email is simply one more thing to be upset at and complain about.

Who knows what the online world will look like in another couple of decades. For some reason I feel AI will settle down within the next five years and become something pretty tame. I really hope that VR/AR/Spatial Computing2 will crash and burn. I don’t know what the next real 3 life altering tech will be or what it will look like, but  I will bet cash money that you’ll need to sign up and sign in with your email address.

1: I mean. Googles “design” team isn’t what I’d call top notch. Most of Googles software products are perfect examples of what happens when you let engineers design interfaces: either overly cluttered or obtusely sparse.

2: “Spatial Computing” is fucking dumb. Yes yes, 360 degree videos are neat but the idea of looking at websites or watching movies with a giant thing on your face is just plain fucking stupid. The Internet and TV are two dimensional. No matter if your looking at a 6″ phone screen, a 24″ computer monitor, a 65″ TV or some giant, virtual browser that eye screens in the HelmetMask has hovering over your coffee table, the content is still two dimensional.

3: The idea of VR is neat and it always has been. Its problem is that it’s so  limited no one really seems to know what to do with it. I don’t really see VR going anywhere fast.

AR is definitely cooler and will have its uses. For example, the idea of having instructions on how to fix an engine overlaid on your vision while you’re fixing an engine is a fantastic idea. The issue is that 1: this will take a huge amount of hardware shrunk down into something the size of reading glasses, and 2:  people will need to get over the idea of computer glasses being awkward (which they are and will be for a long time yet).

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Outlook, Part Five

Um, Outlook… I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but you do know the R key is literally right beside the E key, don’t you?

Good Moaning!

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Painting

Before music took over my life, the Visual Arts were my thing.

I can’t remember exactly when (who can) but there was a point in my childhood, somewhere around grade four or five, where I realized that, yes I could draw, but also that I could draw really, really well.

I worked to learn what I could from elementary teachers who were good at encouragement but for whom arts and crafts was a minor concern in the curricula they had to teach. Past that, I fumbled around trying to teach myself what I could; copying comics (I got really good at drawing Garfield) and flipping through the “How to draw…” books I’d check out from the school library.

At first, I never really focused on painting. Sure, I did a little here and there but colour for me was pencil crayons and, sometimes, cheap, water based tempera.

Then there were two things that changed all of this.

Continue reading “Painting”