Greetings.

As I'm in the process of re-designing the Talbot Sound site, and as my Facebook activity has more or less re-shaped my casual online communication, this site will be a dedicated container for occasional writings about studio adventures, and will likely not feature anything else. (Like my personal life is so fascinating anyway.)

I've put a Facebook link under "Externals" on this page (see it, over there to the left), so if you "friend" me there, you'll find most any info you want.

So in the near future, entries on this site (rare as they are already) will likely be precluded by a notice on Facebook, and you can continue to check in here every couple of months.

Different things going on here at Le Studio.

Scored a TV spot for the upcoming Nashville Film Festival. The visuals have clips from all two-hundred fifty-six films, three of which last two to three seconds, the rest time-compressed down to a seizure-inducing pace. First priority was tempo. I sort of hummed along while watching the edit clip, and realized that their hit points felt consistent with an actual bpm value. I set up a click track, fudged a bit with the setting, and 140 bpm did the trick. Acoustic bass and all percussion via Structure, except the kick from Xpand. I tried the piano part with a couple of Structure patches, but went back to the trusty Motif, as I often do. Synth arpeggiator and lounge organ from the Virus. To invoke a multiple movie clip vibe, I imported a variety of sound effect snippets - ambiences, male narrator - and chopped them up into sixteenth-note bits. I then assembled them into rhythmic patterns that repeat a couple of times. It's mostly a burst of hyper-staccato noise, but it conveys the point. See and hear a Quicktime clip of it here.

Completed and re-mixed a few of my pieces for a mix sample reel. Most have been posted before - here's a newer one. It was started some time last summer, after a couple of late-night hours in the gardens.

Writing some - in my case, this means two things: putting music to someone else's lyrics, and my own electro stuff. Two actual songs resulted from the lyric/music adventure. The process for this one was sort of interesting. Writer Tina Caveness had done a demo of it with someone else that was quite a bit slower, just a guitar riff and simple rhythm pattern. I mimicked the riff with hammer(ed) dulcimer, and augmented that with a dulcimer patch in Structure (surprise - didn't know it was in there). It had been several years since I played the hammer dulcimer, and it took a couple of hours in loop-record to get it right. All percussion was done with Structure with a percussion loop from Xpand; piano and synths were Motif and Virus. Vocal processing via the H8000.

Recorded a set of voice prompts for a healthcare company's on-hold message bank. They wanted 8-bit, 8k µ-law files. After some searching, I happened upon some inexpensive Mac software that would make the conversions, which was a great relief as I was initially faced with taking the 16bit wav files to the wife unit's studio, purchasing/downloading Goldwave (PC-only) and using that...a hassle at best, a potential nightmare at worst. The only issue was that I had to change the resulting file extensions from ".au" (a Sun Systems file) to ".wav" as the company's telephone system is particular about it.

I've placed two ads looking for a musically like-minded female writer-singer person to compose with, and have received one reply that may or may not pan out. To anyone who isn't familiar with my stuff, this is a very specific request. I find myself saying things like "I know you're out there...where are you..." But, it is Nashville, so.........