I’ve been meaning to pitch a few more magazine articles, and finally did so over the last week or two. And much to my delight Sound on Sound are willing to have me again So I’ll be researching and writing that one for the next little while.

Music is coming along nicely – we’ve had a few in-person T3E get togethers since the last update, and broke the back of a couple of our more troublesome compositions. I’m getting to the point where I’m starting to see the finish line on the horizon, although it’s very much shrouded in mist and we’ll probably encounter a roadblock or two along the way. And with that, I retire this metaphor.

I’ve also got another little morsel of entrepreneurialism that I’m toying with, but I’m not going to jinx it by actually talking about it in any detail. Suffice it to say that it involves samplers, and going “laaaa” into a Sennheiser MD421 about four thousand times.

Clare & I jetted off to Melbourne this weekend to see the delightful miss Kate Miller-Heidke play at the Forum. It was a lot better than I expected. I knew she was talented and had a great band, plus I’m automatically predisposed to like anyone who sings a song called “ducks don’t need satellites”, but I didn’t realise quite how seasoned the whole group were as performers and entertainers. A pleasant surprise, and at only $50 for the ticket, a very reasonably priced one (plane trip notwithstanding).

Line-up wise, it was a pretty standard rock-show. Drums, bass, two guitars, piano, every one but the drummer sang, and not a hint of a backing track so far as I could tell. Stylistically, it was harder to pin down. I suppose you could broadly describe it as “pop”, but only if you’re comfortable with that definition encompassing liberal doses of operatic singing and shades of live theatre alongside moments of head banging, all executed with a healthy sense of humour, but not the the extent of undermining its sincerity.

OK, so I sound a bit like that old advertisement with the art critics (“an existentialist hurdy gurdy spinning around and around in a double negative reinversion”) but my point is that it wasn’t trying to be anything in particular. It was just being – very convincingly and unabashedly – itself.

I was struck by the contrast with some of the lyrics and music I’ve been trying to write lately, and realising how contrived I’m driving myself to be. Philosophical and overly wordy, and “deep and sensitive”, and it’s all just, frankly, a bit pants. Earnest and insightful lyrics are great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s all too easy to pick a topic which has the patina of “meaningfulness” (politics, war, addiction, mental illness) and then find yourself writing unbelievably trite, sophomoric, codpiece wearing “one foot on the foldback wedge” lyrics about it. Do I really have to rail on in painfully forced verse about the estranging denouement that our reliance on media and technology are conveying us toward, when I could just say “ducks don’t need satellites”? It’s the same message, but that song is pretty, whimsical, and makes me smile a little bit, at the same time as gently suggesting that it’s possible to be content without the trappings of modern life. Yeah yeah, ducks are silly and boring and not worthy metaphors for our lofty subject matters, but… you know what… arseholes to all that. I think I’d rather aim to be authentic – perhaps even insightful – about the mundane, than to end up like this guy:

"Hey guys, I think I just figured out a rhyme for 'disaffectation'. Can you get me a pen?"

I certainly don’t mean to say that weighty lyrics are always bad, or that irreverent, personal writing is prima-facie good. But I do know that I’ve been censoring myself without even realising it. And I’m going to stop. Because I don’t much care about being cool, or about fitting into  a specific and arbitrary sub-category of a genre. Bring on the real

A very small cover image indeed

It is with great pleasure that I unveil my debut as a kinda-sorta music tech journalist. Sort of

Yes, the good folks at Sound on Sound were silly enough to publish my article on VST plugin authoring environments. They’re even going to pay me for it. I’m almost a little disappointed to be honest – I’ve read SOS for years, and I always saw them as a reasonable source of knowledge and authority on recording equipment and techniques. Now they’ve let me put something in their hallowed pages, they don’t seem quite so infallible as they once did.

Anyway, it’s in the September issue, or you can read the first coupe of paragraphs here. You need an Esub to go any further at this point, but I believe it becomes free after a few months, so depending on when you’re reading this, it might let you read the whole thing, you lucky devils. I tried to pick up a copy of the mag, but we’re only up to July down here, so I’m in something of a holding pattern.

I’d also like to mark that it was my first wedding anniversary this weekend just gone. Clare and I went away up the east coast for a very pleasant weekend, the specifics of which are none of your business

I’m supposedly starting a new contract with the cartoon people this month, but the last nine weeks of inactivity have made me a little cautious when it comes to signing up for things that hinge on so many external factors. Government grants, distribution agreements… if any one of them goes belly-up, then so does my job for the next 12 months. And even if not, presuming all goes well, I still find myself in the same career purgatory after the next series is done. It’s not just the finances either (although that is becoming more and more of a consideration as the weeks drag by), but the self-esteem takes a bit of a knock when you’re not actually really doing anything useful with your days.