Nicholas Toone

  • 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.

  • What Social Media Exists For

    Here’s what I think Social Media exists for: Social Media exists for people to remind you what they won’t forgive you for.

    – Jon Stewart – NYT Podcasts 11/4/2024

  • 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).

  • 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!

  • It’s Been A Fucking Year?

    Early in the morning last week, I made a cup of coffee and opened this up:

    After having a quick listen and scrolling through the tracks I realized that other than strumming my guitar here and there, I haven’t touched anything music-wise since around this time last year.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Outlook, Part Four

    I can find the info you need. Lemme query the catabase!

  • Ess Em Are Tee

    I’m just gonna leave this here.

  • This Just Sucks.

    Steve Albini 1962 – 2024

    While I’m not a fan of a good chunk of the bands he’s recorded, I admire them for what they were (and still are) and I greatly admired Albini’s outlook on recording and music in general. The Problem With Music is still one of the most important things you can read if you’re a musician of any kind.

    (There’s also this gem on his studio’s website)

  • Teams, Just Nailing It.

    … currently during ensuring… 

    Really.