the Cocker Spaniels kicks your ass!!!

wow. the music of Sean Padilla, aka the Cocker Spaniels, is a shit-hot ball of ferocious beauty. the dude rocked. he didn't even have his backing tapes. just him and his guitar, and he burnt down half of America, with love, all by hisself.

damn!

the audience i thought kind of sucked a little. my pal Tony flaked on me last minute. Ohioans are just [a]pathetic. but it was so exciting to finally meet this guy whose album i adore because it speaks in so many tongues to so many topics and does it so well and so originally. i was kind of nervous and shy, feeling stupid because of my regular LJ tirades and rants against everything must make me look like a total jackass above all else; and because he's like this great big damn shining star and i'm oddly starstruck by this guy who probably only a couple of thousand other people in the world have ever even heard of (THAT will change over time, trust me).

his between-song banter is deft and skillful, people. and he's only 24. for crying out loud, THAT should be enough to convince the world that a star is born. but his songs, and his playing and singing... crimony! like i said, ferocious beauty. nobody that young is that good.

and about the most likable fella you could ever meet.

i weep! i weeeeeeeeep!

[special thanks go to Holly, who not only let me go although she was deathly ill, but even came with me, although she was about ten seconds from the grave by the time we left]

and in other music news...

i'm finally starting to mix down the songs that i have recorded so i can leave them behind for others and start on new things once more. it's going okay so far, but i really have some nasty clipping on my least awful bass take on "Ten Silver Needles". i might have to redo it. i think i probably either didn't route the signal through the compressor/limiter when i tracked it, or i didn't use enough limiter. you'd be surprised how out of control a bass can get without heaps of compression.

also, i found that i really do need to have 2 tracks of harmony acoustic guitar, which means i now have to have 9 tracks on an 8 track machine. and i hate bouncing when i hadn't intended to from the get-go. it leaves me less space to fool around. for instance, there's a part where the lyric goes "one lonely guitar, one lonely string..." and i wanted to pull down the rhythm guitars and just leave the harmony parts up (yes, i know it's neither one guitar nor less than 12 strings in total - at least it's apreggiated); now i'll have to print it with level changes - which means i'd be better off doing effects in one sweep, since this is the last time i'll be able to control them individually. still, i can do this.