mmd

Permit me if you will to rant and rave for a while, I believe I’m overdue a blog in that regard. Things need explaining.

A few months ago my partner and I decided, after nearly a year of discussing it, that we will pack up our lives in Armidale, NSW Australia, to move to Brisbane – Queensland’s capital city. Our reasons for this are numerous and the final decision was not made lightly. One of R’s reasons for moving is to find better opportunities to continue her Psychology Internship, possibly with affiliates of her old Brisbane employer. Seeing that she has grown up in that city she’s a little less excited than myself about going there, but we’re both looking forward to expanded opportunities with our career options as well as having better engagement with the rich and varied cultural events that go on in the city. The guts of my own personal reasons to move fall into three areas:

• My current employer, The University of New England is in administrative limbo with it’s approach to podcasting its semester teaching material. This has caused my job there to become one of manual monotonous mindless media capture on a growing scale of 820 lectures a semester. This epic and boring job in recent times wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for my assistant Michael Partridge. Michael is also a budding music producer who likes the desert rock sound, so it’s been fun talking production with him over the last year. Despite the help and friendly atmosphere at work I’ve grown tired of it all and feel like I’m stagnating. Upper management have refused to take the matter seriously and probably won’t implement an automated system (like Lectopia) until around 2011, best case scenario. Even if the uni made that positive step forward, the likelihood of my position to be made redundant or downscaled is a very real possibility post-automation. I’d hardly have decent job options in Armidale as an Audio Technician, so that makes for shaky ground if we had committed to a mortgage and buying or building a house here. If we’re not going to commit beyond renting here, and our career’s are limited, then we might as well take the first best opportunity to get out – and with the current lease expiring that time is now.
• I’ve been here for over 10 years now, and most if not all things about the ‘New England experience’ cease to interest me, or feel ‘new’ to me. You can only keep visiting the same National Parks and forests before you get the general idea and call the rest of the visits ‘bird watching’ (which I still do enjoy a lot). There’s limited cultural opportunities here, only so many bands and artists, only one decent live venue, and a demographic that’s fairly uninterested in the kind of music I do. Sure, I’ve had some great collaborations here over the years, most notably with Iain MacKay with our live dance music and doing music for his various film projects. I’ll miss so much about Armidale; the quiet; the clean air; One Bhat Thai, the mild weather durning spring and summer; plus quite a few nice people… But if I stay all I could possibly do to grow as an artist is to keep practicing at home and keep chipping away by myself on making my songs better. I don’t see why I couldn’t do the same in Brisbane, and then after such refinement I’d have an elaborate network of people and systems to help me grow and develop my work in healthy ways.
• 10 years worth of Armidale winters are starting to drag on me. Yes I know it’s brilliantly warm right here now and Brisbane’s humidity and heat will knock us for six in comparison, but the thought of enduring another cold and bleak Armidale winter seems depressing and an ultimately stressful experience. Something has changed in me – I used to romanticise the icy winter, the prospect of snow, and the gloomy atmosphere. Now I think the fantasy has worn off. The cold has become dispiriting and it’s become a metaphor for loss and bewilderment. I guess in some ways you can hold onto any fantasy for as long as it suits you, but… I can’t help but think that a lot of the people here defend the positive attributes of Armidale life while inside they still feel pretty bummed out by the weather between March and October. A generalisation, I know, but after the vibe starts to gnaw at you, and it won’t let you rest until you truly test whether or not the grass is actually greener on the other side. No place is perfect, but while we are young it seems slightly mad to stay in a regional town when we’re still free, uncommitted, and could really benefit from all the opportunities a city could provide.

So, for better or worse, with the commitment to move made and our resignation letters processed – our last day of work is November 27th. That day also happens to be my birthday. We’ve booked a local removalist to come collect the bulk of our stuffs on the 9th of December, for arrival in Brisbane on the 10th. For an undetermined and hopefully not too long time, we will be staying at R’s Mum’s house in Mitchelton, which is in a lovely north-west quarter of the city and has good access to the Ferny Grove train line. We’ll be unpacking and taking a little break to reflect on what we’re doing over the Christmas period, and then starting the new year with job seeking. I imagine R will get something excellent fairly quickly, but I’m not so sure about myself. I’m not even sure what sort of job I want. I do know one thing: I don’t want to end up in the same sort of job that I’m in now: bored, stuck in needless repetition, and under the weather of indecision of a large bureaucracy. I do want an ethical job too. In some ways I’m not sure if I even want to do an audio related job again. Perhaps I should try something new with the Education sector again with literacy teaching, or maybe something to do with youth social work. I’ll scope out my options once I get there. Something may just fall in my lap.

Once we both get decent work we hope to buy a house as soon as we can, possibly in the same area of Brisbane. Being without a landlord finally we’ll be able to modify that house to set up a new studio space for music production, and R can modify things for RSPCA and wildlife caring. Hopefully then I can start organising time to keep on with writing my music as well as finally develop a live act of some sort. I’m really looking forward to getting selectively involved with the music scene at Fortitude Valley, and like my 2BOB radio days I may also get involved with the community radio station up there, 4ZzZ.

It has been a slow process, but my work for clients doing mastering is finally coming to an end. A few months back I decided to limit the amount of clients I would take on because I knew once I moved house I wouldn’t have access to a studio space to do the work. Well, more realisations have occurred since that decision, in particular two very clear ones: 1. I don’t quite have the gear or the professional sensitivity to continue doing mastering on a commercial level. I don’t feel I can give an adequate professional guarantee that the end product will be as good as I’d like it to be. And to continue to improve that professional aspect I’d have to invest way more money and time than I can afford, just to compete with people out there who already do it fantastically. 2. I’m just not interested in doing mastering any more. My problem with mastering is that it is largely an objective and near-scientific sound editing process – so any personal emotional opinion I have of the music I’m working has to be put aside for the sake of the client. It’s been a real challenge to work on some music I’ve stylistically or sonically disliked, and there’s no creative or artistic opportunity in the process to get involve with ‘improving’ the music in that regard. Spending long hours on music I don’t like in a very cold and analytical process has made me think of all the time I could have been spending developing my own music.

I just don’t think mastering as a job suits my personality, and is maybe better suited to someone with an ultra keen ear and devotion to using esoteric audio equipment with perfectionist zeal. So, at this point I won’t be offering the service any more. I may in the future aim to get more involved with other artists as a ‘producer’ so I can explore that artistic side of things. And I think I’ll be aiming to work more with local Brisbane bands and artists on a personal level. But above all else I absolutely need to get back to pouring more energy into my own music, getting better at song writing, recording, guitar, vocals and mixing.

This has meant I’ve also been unsatisfied with how my own songs have been mastered. I must have re-mastered my last few releases 4-5 times now, and I still I haven’t nailed them. Getting very frustrated with things I suggested to Simon (who gives me a lot of continuing advice on audio production) that he could master the songs for me… Well, he was reluctant to do that for technical reasons and convinced me to keep at it by myself next year, making some improvements to my audio equipment. So let’s make a list of what I need:

• A better soundcard. The M-Audio Delta 10/10 has really shown it’s weaknesses in the last few years, and I’m tired of jitter problems, a crummy software interface and lack of support. I need better AD/DA conversion if I’m seriously recording guitar and vocals, and if I’m going out to tape for mastering, I need really good conversion. Simon has suggested E-MU cards, so it’s possible I might get two of those, one for in, one for out.
• More power filtering. If there is any line I can filter or lift off ground power then I’ll get better signal. Same goes for any audio cables.
• A second set of monitors. My Yamaha HS80M’s are great for certain aspects of work, but they don’t cover everything. I can currently A-B check with crappy speakers and hi-fi speakers, but another set of ‘pro-monitors’ that are softer sounding and have a more accurate dynamic representation. Suggestions? … Monitor stands wouldn’t go astray either.
• Some sort of large analog passive volume knob that has two balanced ins and two balanced outs – perfect for putting before the monitors so I can alter the playback volume without worrying if the sound is bit-perfect (which gets destroyed if you use the card’s software interface to adjust volume). I need a big knob!!!
• A Røde NT-5 microphone, or a pair if I get a good deal. I’m longing to record acoustic guitars properly and this is the mic to do it with.
• An electric guitar amplifier. I can’t believe how long I’ve gone without a decent guitar amplifier, especially when my ‘main instrument’ is electric guitar! It’s been holding me back from laying down some decent quality sounds in my songs, and I’ve been stuck in the mud using VST guitar amp emulators which we all know just don’t cut it. I’ve been doing a bit of research into what sort of amp I’d like and Michael Partridge has been helping me out with that. I think it’s obvious that I need a high gain tube amplifier and cabinet. Like a kid in a candy store I was initially attracted to the Mesa-Boogie Mark V, but the amazingly high price tag was a bit off putting. Michael has since directed me to the Blackstar Series 1 200W which has nice colour and an outstanding clean channel sound. I’m not sure yet, the range of choice out there is staggering, but I am sure it’s the first thing I’d like to buy when I can afford it. I so need to get into practicing seriously again. Assuming I’ll get one, I’ll have to get an appropriate condenser microphone to record it with.

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with local artist Rick Hatch, who makes and sells beautiful pottery with his wife Suzanne. Rick has just bought a shop space down town to take the business up a gear, and it has a wonderful creative vibe to it. I told Rick that I was envious of the space and would love to have my own space like it, and he replied saying “Well, I’m 30 years older than you”. That simple statement seemed to sum up so much of where I am at. To make any artistic work of inspirational quality you have to persist with years and years worth of work and refinement to achieve that level. This hits home the fact that I have still so much work to do in order to even begin a public exhibition of my music on a serious level beyond the pedestrian activity of internet sharing and web 2.0 promotion. For me this means less time spent noodling in front of a computer screen, and more time practicing guitar and vocals. Better musicianship means better recorded performances, and eventually better live performances. It feels like I have the ideas, but not quite yet the substance to back up those ideas.

Part of this is learning more patience. I have an album, The Paradox, I want to get done, but wanting it to get done fast isn’t the right attitude or approach. I’ve been working on it since 2004 anyway, so a year or two more shouldn’t really be a big deal. The album is now planned to have 16 tracks, all of which are already written and simply require the best guitar and vocals I muster to be recorded, mixed and mastered. I was thinking for a while that it would be great to release one track at a time as I finish each of them, but I think that could lead to inconsistency problems. I’ve already released First Impressions Always Count, and The Stormformer – so those can now act as ‘previews’. Once I get a better setup I’ll treat the whole album as one big consistent project, and do the mix and master after all the songs are done. I can then release every single track one by one over a period to culminate in an eventual formal release of the album complete. This covers both old and new approaches to sharing music: the old being the album ‘collection’, the new being web 2.0 savvy by releasing a constant stream of high quality media to sustain interest. It’ll be both free and something you can buy. I think this is the way to go for everything from now on. There’s two more albums in my mind after The Paradox, and another collaboration album with Mick Rippon. And who knows what else!

In less musing news, some other things have been going on:

JBL has been positively encouraging about me learning to use a video editor, and he’s been helpful in teaching me how to use Final Cut Express to edit digital video. I’ve been a bit shy about getting into video, much like photography – I can appreciate really good stuff done by pros and I’ve just got no time to get any good at it when I’m doing music so much. I’ve become interested in the idea of doing a simple music video for one of my songs, as well as the idea of doing ‘vlogs’ to get my name out there in the tubes. So, I used iMovie to capture some footage through my laptop camera, and did some rambling about myself and my studio (can’t you tell I’m procrastinating?). Well, some of it was OK, but it largely looked like a dork rambling without a script! Despite doing an edit, I’ve given up on the idea due to lack of time and having nothing really substantial to say. Nevertheless you’ll probably see me get into it after the move.

I’ve recently been inspired by Xerxes to start my very own bandcamp page. So far I’ve only tested one track, and I’ve found that it’s a really impressive system! I might use it in the future as an e-commerce method to sell my music. Speaking of websites, I’ve been working out some ideas with Pilot 7 for a new mmd website. We’re still not sure how it’s going to shape up, but we should have something new next year sometime.

OK, I’ve ranted and raved long enough! Back to packing…

A quick remix/remodel of a Hunz song “Soon Soon” I whipped up in a few days of chipping about on the laptop with Renoise.

>>> Pleading With Ghosts

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Who knows, maybe the spooks like 4 part chip harmonies with a detuned Hunz as a wobbly bassline?

Download: First Impressions Always Count

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I hide in warm clothes
You hide in your briefcase
I guess we can call off
Our little battle of truth (game set match!)
We sit here and hope
That the birds don’t come down, down
And pick apart our stale bread offerings
We of the infantile narratives

Slay people with lasers of truth
Yet cower in the soft warm glow of TV.
Worry about the garden -
Don’t worry about the lasers!

I’m snug and warm
And you’re financially sound
Don’t push it.

First Impressions Always Count was first composed in Renoise during late 2004. Therefore, it has taken nearly 5 years of chipping away to finally get this song finished – all for a measly three and a half minutes of music! Talk about inefficiency! The reality of the situation was more to do with being very fussy about the quality of the vocal takes, and working the strength of my voice up to a point where I could easily do what the melody required of me. It’s still not perfect, but it’s at a level where I can walk away from it and live with the result. I don’t regard myself as much of a singer, but hopefully the musical ideas here are strong enough to hold the whole experience together and pass as good music. That’s for you to decide.

This song is the first track off an album I am working on called The Paradox. The songs off this work in progress are in a much similar stasis that First Impressions was in for a long time – the music is complete but the vocals have yet to be set in stone. With some luck, the whole project will be finished off sometime in 2010. The music will be much the same style as this piece, dramatic dark pop with a whole range of electronica influences. These songs have been some of my most personal and introspective music I’ve ever done, but done with the aim of being ‘open’ enough for people to have their own interpretation. Explaining the words anymore than that would miss the point and would hamper your imagination conjuring up all sorts of cool images and stories for the music.

So, download and listen to First Impressions Always Count, and let me know your impressions!

EDIT 09-10-28:

After some feedback and reflection I decided that my mastering approach to this song was way, way off and too clouded in digital exciters and saturation. I’ve went for a more organic approach and eventually ended up with results I’m most happy with. If you’ve downloaded the file previous to this for your collection I recommend that you download the file again to get the new version, the best version. Sorry for not getting it right in the first place! I hope you find, like I do, that this version is “correctly devastating”.

After nearly 10 years since its creation, I’ve finally accepted what is will be and released my album Puddles free on the web:

mr_mark_dollin – Puddles

Personally, I find it somewhat hard to avoid cringing when listening to these songs, perhaps in some places more than others. It’s like looking at a reflection of yourself when you’re 18 and all you can see are the faults. That personal cringe factor has prevented me from putting this music out there, keeping it filed in the ‘embarrassing journey-man years’ category. It’s a drama of me awkwardly finding my own creative voice against the odds of immaturity, lo-fi equipment, and being just a little too under the influence of other popular music at the time. I haven’t really been able to share this music without being apologetic for it, and even now despite it being from an entirely different phase of my life I still feel awkwardly responsible for it. Still, you can’t pre-judge your own work on behalf of an audience – it’s up to them to like it or not for themselves. So it’s time to set it free, and to move on.

To explain what this album is all about I have to go back to where it all began – 1996 was the year I started to write music on Fast Tracker II and a lot of that music was written with or alongside Warwick Newell, a good musical buddy from high school. Warwick and I learned a lot of our early studio and composing chops emulating electronic dance music that was exploding and mutating throughout the 90s. I think deep down it was initially my hope that Warwick and I would be a dual producer act much like Itch-e and Sratch-e or maybe even like the Chemical Brothers. Our act name was ‘Audiophonica’, although that meant squat to anyone else in suburban Taree – just two more computer dorks who loved techno. Life as a tennage student and life in general doesn’t favor these sorts of ambitions and despite a few projects we finished most of the time we had false starts. Upon leaving my hometown going to University I was stuck on my own and not too sure what to do with all these ideas. Eventually (I’m always slow with these realisations) I knew I had to do a solo album and put together something that best showcased all the different styles I liked to do and something the really flowed well as a long-play listen. It was my half of Audiophonica,  but striving to be better.

Part of the naivety of this album is that a lot of my musical influences were worn on my sleeve, loud and proud – that’s generally something you try to avoid as a composer with a more mature intention. So as a result, a lot of this music seems oddly dated or like bad photocopies of not-so-strong popular musical ideas. Genre wise its a mix of techno, trance, breaks, metal, ambient, pop, industrial, indie rock and prog, and it has it’s fair share of 90s style genre-hopping within the one song. The vocals don’t have confidence, and often I awkwardly took on voices other than my own due to not even knowing what my own voice was or how to use it. Sometimes I think I’d like to re-do it all, but I’d change the songs so much they wouldn’t resemble the originals any more. Again, it’s better to just leave these as they are, representative of that time and who I was. It was a much darker time for me as a person, and all that aggression, sadness and weirdness went straight into the music. If it sounds awkward, it is because I was awkward.

Technically speaking the odds were stacked against me in terms of trying to pull off an ambitious sounding sonic presentation with very limited equipment and skill. The bulk of the work was made on a primitive bit of DOS software called Fast Tracker II or FT2. With a stereo field of about 80%, zero sample interpolation, 16bit processing, 32 channels of mono-polyphony, and no modern bells and whistles like DSP processing or recording synchronization – FT2 was the beastly lo-fi software used to make all these songs happen. To get anything more fancy beyond panning and volume settings there was tracker-esq trickery going (pattern effect commands) but a lot of effecting was done with sample pre-production: pre-rendering down effects like reverb, filtering and other treatments. The lack of recording sync made the vocal tracking a nightmare. I had to guess the relative pitch and timing, recording blind to silence hoping that the take would match up to the song. I think I even dropped some backing track parts to cassette just to get a sense of what I was doing. On a student budget I could only afford a very basic $30 desk-stand small diaphragm condenser microphone plugged straight into cheap as chips soundcard. My monitors were either low end Philips headphones, or these no-name ‘multi-media’ speakers that came with a lot of computers in the 90s. Talk about low fidelity! It’s a miracle that any of this music sounds even half decent. But somehow, if you listen past all the sludgy bass, noise and general mix shambles – these songs still hold together as music to be enjoyed. Just turn your volume down a little in case you’re sent deaf or your speakers blow up.

So all apologies aside, I hope you enjoy Puddles, or at least find it as an interesting primitative precursor to where I am now. Maybe I got it right in the first place – I still get people saying their favourite songs are off this album, or of even earlier work. Ah, what can you do? Put it out there!

MMD Mastering will be temporarily closing up shop by December and as of now will not be accepting any new clients. I’ve four existing clients right now that will take time to finish. Also, I have to think about packing the studio up before December for relocation. After that point I will be without a studio space for an unknown time and therefore unable to do any client work (or even my own mastering!). I foresee that things will be back up and established again sometime in 2010, so if you’re looking for production work I hope to hear from you then.