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I purchased a pair of Cascade Fat Head II ribbon mics sometime in 2011. Some of the studios I had recorded in used ribbon mics on guitars and drum overheads. They always sounded pleasant and accurate. The Fat Heads I purchased came with a Blumlein stereo bar for mounting. I used the Fat Heads on a few drum recordings and a guitar recording or two. After their novelty wore off, I left them in their flight case for the better part of a decade. That is, until recently.

Back in December, I wrote 60 production prompts. The purpose of the prompts is to spark creativity. By limiting choices when working in a studio setting, new ideas emerge. At least, that’s the theory. One of the first prompts I drew was “record a song where everything must pass through a Fat Head II ribbon mic.” That type of limitation raised all kinds of questions for me. The first, and most relevant, was, exactly what is a ribbon mic and what does it do?

A ribbon microphone uses a ribbon of aluminum to capture sound. It serves as the microphone diaphragm, which captures changes in pressure. It’s also a transducer, which converts those changes into an electrical signal. By contrast, a dynamic microphone (think the regular stage mics that have a ball on the end), uses a metal coil as a transducer. The condenser microphone (think studio vocal mic that looks like a tube) uses a conductive membrane as a transducer. All three of these microphones have different general characteristics. A ribbon is usually warm, yet accurate. A dynamic mic is usually able to handle loud sources well. A condenser mic is usually bright and accurate–excellent for vocals, strings, and drum overheads.

Ribbon mics are delicate. If, for example, you accidentally leave the phantom power on when you plug in a ribbon mic, you may pop the ribbon from the energy in the line. Ribbon mics are not a panacea for recording ills, either. Sometimes, a ribbon mic is a bad choice on a given audio source, particularly if you don’t like the natural sound of what you are recording.

Using only a Fat Head II on a recording was a tremendous challenge. I look forward to eventually sharing songs that come from these creative prompts.

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As I took the stage at the Flat Iron on Friday, February 9th, the clock approached 10 pm. I thought I was going on too early. But, as it would play out, the crowd thinned out over the next hour. In the last few songs of my set, I played to ten people. Listening back to the performance, it wasn’t like I sucked or anything like that. I guess asking people in their 40s and 50s to stay out until midnight is a big ask. It’s like 10 pm is the new midnight.

My setlist was an expansion of what I performed in Hillsborough a few weeks prior. I added a few songs and a few covers.

In spite of the challenges, I enjoyed this particular set. I got to play my usual gig piano, which ended up sounding pretty good. My favorite song of the night was “Sailing to Byzantium,” one of the more difficult songs to play on the piano. I ended up cutting three songs, “Oceans,” “Dive,” and “Stumble.”

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On Friday, February 9th, 2024, at 8:00 pm, I’ll be returning to the Flat Iron. I’ll be performing a co-bill with Alan Peterson. Tickets are available here.

Coming off of a great set at the Eno House in Hillsborough, I look forward to playing a slightly longer piano set. Please join us if you can.

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On Thursday, January 25, 2024, at the Eno House Artist’s Den, I played my first show of the year. I opened for Nikki Meets the Hibachi and played for about 45 minutes.

I hadn’t ever performed at Eno House, so I had no idea of what to expect. I arrived straight from work. I caught a little rain on the way but had no stuffy traffic. Waze took me directly to the the venue without issue. I parked right in front. When I got there, John and Elaine from Nikki were finishing up their soundcheck. The club owner invited me to play the house Steinway piano, which I welcomed.

I checked a few songs and felt comfortable with how things sounded. Playing an unfamiliar piano comes with its own challenges. A real, live piano is a living, breathing thing. It has its own personality, its own temperament. My Yamaha travel piano has weighted keys but no personality and the temperament of a koala bear. The piano at Eno House was like a strong but delicate tree. Each key was weighted just a little differently from another.

After soundcheck, I enjoyed catching up with folks I hadn’t seen in ages. The last time I opened for Nikki was thirty years ago at the Skylight Exchange in Chapel Hill, NC. People arrived in twos and threes and mingled, talking of times past.

A piano/vocal set is something that would be difficult for me to play on the fly. I planned out my setlist a month in advance and had it in stone the week before. I’m new to piano as a performing instrument. It’s not like guitar for me, which I sometimes zone out on while playing. The set had a nice design, too. I put four familiar songs among the unfamiliar ones. I played two new songs, “Evangeline” and “Crashed on Neptune,” as well as “Satellites.”

I’ve missed playing out live. I haven’t been performing as much as I like to and I look forward to more shows this year. Recording is fun and all. Playing online venues has its place. But playing original songs live to a room full of people who are actually listening is sacred. Coincidentally, Eno House used to be a church.

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After uploading my latest podcast, the last thing I expected was a total website failure.

A 500 Internal Server Error occurs when a web browser can’t access a website because of a problem with the code. Apparently, gremlins ransacked my website. But how? I have two-factor authentication, or “2FA” as they call it. I get a code sent to me whenever I login to my site. I send the code back and it verifies to the server that it’s me who’s logging in.

Puzzled, I contacted tech support. They responded quickly. But, the solution they provided was even more baffling. They said I needed to comb through thousands of lines of code and delete the malicious data. But it was important that I didn’t delete code that I actually needed.

Um . . . Ok?

I opened up a code editor for kicks to see if finding malicious code was something I could do. Not surprised, I had no idea what I was doing. None. The next day, I found a web company that advertised being able to fix general WordPress issues. I signed up for their service. They fixed the problem in about two hours for a reasonable price. Thank you, fixed.net.

The problem, as I learned, was that some of my plugins hadn’t been updated in a while. Un-updated plugins aren’t compatible with current versions of WordPress. I don’t understand how un-updated plugins are vulnerable to hacking, but that’s what happened.

Lesson learned, I guess.

TL;DR – Update your website plugins. The site you save may be your own.

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Happy New Year! I hope 2024 treats you well.

One of my core values is creativity. One proven way to enhance one’s creativity is to read a lot.

This year, I plan to read eleven novels.

  1. The Guest List by Lucy Foley
  2. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
  3. Trust by Hernan Diaz
  4. Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James
  5. Wager by David Grann
  6. Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
  7. The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
  8. Holly by Stephen King
  9. Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
  10. The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
  11. Bee Sting by Paul Murray

I chose this list based on reviews, my personal taste, and whether the novel was part of a series. Trust, Wager, The Guest List and Bee Sting made the list solely from favorable reviews I read. Birnam Wood, Death on the Nile, and Holly made the list because I enjoy reading works by their authors. The remaining books made the list because they are second in a series in which I’ve read the first novel.

Do a Google search for “why reading is important” and you’ll find dozens of benefits to reading. For one, reading enhances creativity. Reading a dialog or a description of a setting requires imagination. The more you imagine, the better you are able to create things like art or solutions to problems. Secondly, reading improves analytical skills. All writing consists of patterns. Nonfiction requires a premise, supporting statements, and a conclusion. Spotting assumptions in an essay, for example, can reveal what unspoken values the author holds. Fiction works in a similar way. Every scene of a story consists of five parts: an inciting event, complications, crisis, climax, and resolution. Reflecting on narrative structure in fiction can reveal insights into human nature. Thirdly, reading is entertaining. Different genres provide different experiences. A whodunnit may be a page turner while an African sci-fi fantasy novel like Black Leopard, Red Wolf may cause me to pause and reflect.

The only drawback to reading is eyestrain.

I spend thirty minutes a day reading books from my reading list. For these brief sessions, I immersion read. I have the audiobook and the text before me and I take it all in simultaneously. I wish this were an option for me back in high school with some of the more difficult literature we read. I find immersive reading to help not only in comprehension, but also in getting subtext from a reader’s performance.

What are you reading nowadays? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on the socials.

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Works referenced:

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A well written novel quenches my thirst for a good story. In hunting high and low for tales of adventure and intrigue, I stumbled upon a mind-bending sci-fi saga. The Hyperion Cantos features challenging ideas about society, culture, and the future. It spans four novels over 2,000 plus pages. Recently, I read the first novel, Hyperion.

Written by Dan Simmons and published in 1989, Hyperion won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Hyperion weaves six novellas together to tell a larger narrative. In that way, Hyperion takes a note from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

800 years in the future, society consists of a network of hundreds of planets called the Hegemony of Man. Artificial intelligence has evolved into its own society called the TechnoCore. Mutated humans called the Ousters are at war with the Hegemony. The TechnoCore and the Hegemony live in an unstable symbiosis. One world that’s outside the network, Hyperion, has strange temporal qualities. There, edifices called Time Tombs run backwards in time. An atemporal monster called the Shrike guards the Tombs. All three factions want to use the Time Tombs for different ends. Seven pilgrims make a one-way trip to the Time Tombs, each to make a request of the Shrike. As they make their way, each tells his or her story about why he or she has decided to make such a risky journey.

A priest tells the first tale. He wants to return to Hyperion because a parasite causes him tremendous pain. The further he gets from Hyperion, the more he hurts. A soldier tells the second tale. He desires to return to Hyperion to kill the Shrike. The Shrike seduced him, manipulated him, and almost used him to cause an interstellar war. A poet tells the third tale. He wants to return to Hyperion so that he can finish his magnum opus–the Shrike is his muse. A professor tells the fourth tale. He desires to go to Hyperion because his daughter had an accident there and she’s aging backwards. The professor holds his infant daughter in his arms throughout the novel. A private investigator tells the fifth tale. She goes to Hyperion because the Shrike Church offered her asylum to do so. She’s also pregnant with the cybrid offspring of John Keats, the poet (Weird, right?). A politician tells the last tale. He wants to go to Hyperion because his ancestors fought against the Hegemony, and he is a spy.

The strength of Hyperion is its world building. Humankind left Old Earth becuase someone opened a small black hole there. Oops. Familiar sci-fi tropes like wormholes and time debt get a fresh treatment. The wealthy, for example, have mansions with rooms on many worlds. Time debt is inevitable in space travel. Traveling at light speed creates a shorter relative time frame for the traveler. What if the traveler was a sailor and came to port every 11 years? And to the sailor, that 11 years was only a few months? Fresh context creates fresh story.

Hyperion makes relevant social commentary as well. What are the implications for Christianity and Judaism in an interstellar society? What happens if artificial intelligence maxes out? Is connectedness true progress?

The two weaknesses of Hyperion are more practical concerns than story issues. Would seven people be this chatty when traveling to face certain doom? Probably not. And then, the novel just sort of ends without resolving the overarching narrative. But then again, there are three other novels in the series. In that light, Hyperion serves as a prelude of a larger story.