tabla

Weekend Cat Blogging with Luna: Homecoming

Luna and tablas

The recent New York trip officially came to an end when I brought Luna home on Thursday. Changing locations is always a bit disorienting for her, but she quickly readjusted to her familiar home surroundings. She has also been very attached, looking for every opportunity to cuddle in my lap or at least sit next to me.

Luna lap

Yes, I do need to finish unpacking. It’s actually been quite busy since I returned, including a late-night gig with Surplus 1980 on Thursday and a show tonight with Reconnaissance Fly in Sacramento. But after that things calm down quite a bit. So we will have a proper but belated celebration for Luna’s birthday next week. Meanwhile, she is getting all the comfort and cuddles I can provide.

tillie_2204Finally, a sad note. We were heartbroken last week to hear about the passing of our friend Tillie. Tillie was from the kitty clan in Nova Scotia that also shared Mickey with us, and their mom has been one of our big supporters here at CatSynth. We often noted back and forth how much Tillie and Luna looked alike. We send the whole family our deepest sympathies for their loss.

RPM 2007: First steps

Report from the first day on the RPM challenge:

The idea that I can spend a month, or even a fraction thereof, doing nothing but working on this album is laughable at best. There will be many distractions in the coming days, just as there have been today. Nonetheless, I made a point to take some first steps this evening..

Based on the “arc” and narrative form I am defining for the album, I went in search of samples to use for the introduction and some beats to use for the first full section. The intro should be an old clip from a big band or jazz recording from the 1940s/1950s – I discovered a really good collection of public-domain big-band radio recordings on The Internet Archive, and quickly settled on my intro.

Next up is selecting some initial beats for the beat-based / techo part of the album. I selected several drum-beat samples, and imported them into Emulator X. Using the beat-analysis (aka “Twistaloop” features), I created several seven-beat loops.

The initial rhythmic section will employ a 7-beat meter and combine drum loops and Proteus patterns inside Emulator X, as well as 7-beat/14-beat Indian thekas for tabla. This will probably also be the first opportunity to use the DSI evolver in a compositional setting (as oppose to live improvisation).

That will probably be all I get done tonite, as I take some time to relax while writing this blog entry and getting some “kitty love” from Luna (she's snuggling in on my chest as I write this).