Nicholas Toone

  • Oh! What A Time To Be Alive

    “Oh! What A Time To Be Alive” is this thing in completed form. It took a bit (especially for a two minute song) but it was worth it in the end :)

    Click here for lyrics.


    Oh! What A Time To Be Alive ©2024 Nicholas Toone

    Song Notes

    A long, long time ago, early in the mystical year of 2020, I found myself messing around on my hi-hats. I was trying to mimic that style one hears in trap/pop/hip hop by doing quick buzz rolls on 1 and 4 and filling in the 2 and 3 with simple 8th note single strokes – all on top of a simple four on the floor kick. I eventually settled into the pattern you hear on the song and decided to record it in Reaper, and save it with the working title “Cidada Hats” 1.

    I would come back to it a few times over the years. At some point I came up with that funky bass line (recorded via my Ampeg PF-350 before I sold it) and added some basic, clean, delayed guitar and even some shakers and a tambourine. And… it sat on my drive.

    I came back to it this summer in a big way. I was going through my folders, doing a cleanup and saw the silly Cidada Hats directory and decided to see if there was anything there and, as the post from August details, I ended up doing some surgery:

    1. Deleted the clean/delayed guitar outright.
    2. Deleted the shakers and tambourine.
    3. Edited the fuck out of the composition. The original had three verse sections (each verse double what they are now) and four choruses and running about five minutes. It basically followed a pattern I was stuck on for my last two releases. It was too much. So I cut/moved/rearranged the drums and bass into the structure you hear now. Short, simple, to the point. The track is now just a shade over two minutes.

    Once the editing was done, I added heavy guitars to the choruses via  my Ibanez played through ToneLib GFX. Again, nice and simple. The final bit was some synths using SURGE XT presets. One of these was a preset that I tacked on to the back end of the verses as a goof but I wound up enjoying it so much that I figured out how to play on guitar to add as a double to the synth. The guitar double is not super obvious in the final mix, but if you listen carefully, it’s there.

    A more recent thing I fixed up was sound of the kick. It was lifeless. Hollow. Of course it was recorded using the old Intex kit I talked about here. I didn’t even try to EQ it into something. I just replaced it with a sample. Sometimes it’s the best and/or only option. I then added the snare, toms, and splash in the chorus using the SSD5 Free plugin played manually via a midi controller 2.

    The hi-hat, on the other hand, is the original I put down way back in 2020. Thankfully I’d direct mic’d it with a GLS ES-57 3. It was easy to compress and ratchet up the high end to give it that crisp, trap like buzz right where I wanted it to.

    The lyrics and vocals were the easiest of the three I recorded on the rented equipment.  I’d had vocal pattern nailed down and the lyrics about 90% complete since the early summer 4.

    Note: The artwork is a heavily edited stock photo by Pavlofox on Pixabay. The logo font is DymoFontInvers by Manfred Klein and [smartphone] by woodcutter Manero – both downloaded from FontFreak, my go to site for wacky fonts of all shapes and sizes.

    1: I chose the working title of “Cicada Hats” because of this stupid fucking video where Rick Beato whines about the sounds of the hi-hats in an Ariana Grande song and compares them to the sound cicadas make.

    2: I managed to snag a used M-Audio Oxygen 25 Third Gen from Kijiji for like twenty-five bucks.

    3: I did record overheads as well, but they were shitcanned even before I’d started to edit the song structure. They were really serving no real purpose at all.

    4: It all started when the “heaping dose of shit” line came to me one day during a company all-hands that was, well, not fun. It took me maybe a day and a half to come up with the rest. From there it was simply tweaking and editing in the name of cadence.

  • Warms My Heart

    I’ve been keeping an eye on site statistics lately mostly because I’m curious to see if anyone actually reads what I post here. Seems that there are people out there who drop in from time to time.

    The surprising thing I found was that the number one page on this here blog is Linux Tip #1: Max Amount of Locked Memory. It really warms my heart that there are people out there in this big, crazy world who are trying different things. That Max Amount post was me stitching together what I learned after spending half a day gathering information from a few different websites and putting it all in a simple to understand format in case I ever needed it again.

    At the end of the day, even though I moved back to the world of Windows, it warms my heart that other people are taking a run at making Linux work and I hope I’ve saved them even just a little bit of hassle :)

  • Big, Stupid Car

    “Here’s the problem. We’re accelerating, at speed into a wall in a big, stupid car that cost too much money”

  • Your One, Short Life Being Remixed

    Yeah, the more I listen to Your One, Short Life on any speakers that are not my monitors, I don’t like the mix at all.  The snare is too buried. The heavy guitars are thin. The bass in the outro is almost non existent. The verse vocals sink into being near inaudible in spots, especially in the second verse.

    So fuck it. I’m in the process of remixing the whole thing. I’ll probably replace the “official” version with whatever I’m doing now, but I may still make the first attempt available just as a reminder to myself that while sometimes pulling the trigger is better than fussing, sometimes it has the opposite outcome.

  • 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.


    Your One, Short Life ©2024 Nicholas Toone

    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 major (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.

    NoteNoteNote: I remixed this song on 1/1/2025. You can find the original mix over here.

  • 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…)