It looks like I’m establishing a common practice when it comes to naming my songs when they’re done. I browse my flickr collection for photos I like and let them suggest a title. This time I found this one which is of my dog Leo. It’s one of the rare photos that I had liked enough to title already, so I just re-purposed the title for this song.

What a pain in the ass this thing tuned out to be. I had some bits floating around from when I was first playing with Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro soft synth. I liked the sax patch and I was able to get some pretty cool riffs that sounded more like a sax and less like a synth. February is a short month so I thought it would be a good idea to start with a solid base. I laid out the parts I had with some rough sketches of connecting material and then let like 3 weeks go by.

When I got back to it this week expecting to just polish it up, I started to feel the pieces didn’t really work together and I had to go heavily into re-compose/re-arrange mode. I almost put it aside for another month for something that I didn’t like as much but felt closer to done.

And then I ran into technical problems. Last night my keyboard stopped working as I was editing. After about 20 minutes of fiddling I realized the keyboard was fine it was my KVM switch. After about another 20 minutes rebooting both computers and generally trying to avoid reconfiguring my system not to need a KVM switch I found the the KVM switch just needed to be rebooted. Who knew you could do that? Anyway, better part of an hour gone from my evening.

By 12:30 I was tired but happy with what I had so I went to bed. I’m glad I didn’t take the time to post it though because the next morning I heard a bunch of stuff I wanted to change. Lesson: always listen with fresh ears.

Thank God For Leap Years. I had an extra day to make the changes.

Oh, and btw, can I say that Project5 is a pig? I kind of liked Project5. I mainly use Sonar but it’s fun to go into into Project5 now and then to force myself to work a little differently. This is not the first project I’ve done in Project5 but it’s the largest and it was slow. Stuttering and with high latency, especially when I added some mastering plugins from Sonar7. Luckily it rendered clean.

That’s the last time I try to do a complete project in P5. It’s strictly a rewire synth for me now.

This song was my first attempt to sequence a sax part but I like the result and I might use it again. To me it sounds pretty good but god knows what an actual sax player might think.

But now it’s done and I can go on to think about what I want to do for March, but not until I get back from this leap-day party, whatever that is:

Happy Listening: Hipster Hound Dog on Lee Rd.