Detroit Day 4

Last day of the actual convention...rather crazy day actually. Wife did more tattoo work and bought some supplies that she needed. Then we packed up and had some dinner said some goodbyes and just tried to get to bed as early as possible.

Detroit Day 3

Ah, felt much better today, though I stayed up in the hotel room most of the day passing the time by writing, watching Yojimbo and listening to Nadja and A Death Cinematic. I definitely dug the relaxing day.

The wife did get to do more tattoo work, so her day was successful.

On a side note, I did spend time in the convention hall watching someone get a neck tattoo and watching the Pneuma table with people using the pneumatic machines for tattooing. It was certainly a neat experience.

Detroit Day 2

Ah, the first day of the actual convention is here. It is still strange to go to these with my wife...a trip really seeing in the same company of tattoo artists that I have seen in magazines only. I bet it is a big thrill for her because it certainly would be a mind bender for me if I was in her situation.

She did get to do one tattoo today, which was great. If she can consistently get work here, it will be an accomplishment for a new artist (she only recently completed her apprenticeship (a belated congratulations by the way as far as this blog goes).

On my part, I ran errands for the wife and Craig, the only two artists from her shop participating at the convention. I also played some video games on my laptop and was knocked out for several hours due to a migraine (stupid genetics...thanks dad haha).

Detroit Day 1

...dear lord. Driving 10 hours to get somewhere is ridiculous; 3 stops at rest stops, one slight detour to get lunch and around 700 miles later, we pulled into the parking garage at the Detroit Marriott around 8, 8:30, and man were we hungry. Unluckily for us, all the restaurants in the place were closed???!!!!? Oh well, looks like we are going to bed hungry.

On a related note...thank the maker for iPods, mine kept us busy for the whole trip giving us good tunes the whole way (though struggling with our radio transmitter was a pain in the butt).

Detroit Rock City...

...Here we come (the wife and I that is). Tomorrow we drive the ridiculous 10 hour drive to Detroit for the Motor City Tattoo Expo. Color me excited to get to Detroit, but driving blows and I am not looking forward to that...

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Grad school is now complete. I have finished all of my work and now will just wait for my grade. Graduation should not be far behind. This is or rather was, 5 years in the making.

Recording Day 6

Yes, it has been quite a long gap in between recording sessions (daily life and grad school certainly can make such things difficult). Considering that this is my last weekend of Grad School, I am surprised that I was able to make this recording date.

In any case, today's agenda was vocals and possibly some acoustic guitar work for my ambient pieces on the album.

I tried to start vocals on "From Millions Of Miles Away", but my voice was not warmed up enough to attempt and the vocals just sounded so sour. So, I moved to "9000 Reasons", which is one of more straight forward songs. I was happy with my takes on this song and even recorded all of the background vocals as well.

From there, we moved back to "From Millions Of Miles Away". Recording this song was a surprising struggle because it is one of my favorite songs to play live, but we did get the main vocal tracking done for this. I will have to go back and fix a few things and add the background vocals later.

Lastly, I recorded roughly 10 minutes or so of acoustic guitar that I intend to incorporate into the ambient pieces that I have written for the record. I am definitely excited to work on those.

All in all this was a productive recording session.

Recording Day 5

Day 5 saw another exhaustive day of recording; this time John finally got to lay down the bass tracks. I actually missed this entire session, but it was certainly productive as he finished his tracking.

After day 5 we still have vocals and finishing or rather starting and finishing a great deal of the ambient pieces for the album.