Journal: News & Comment

The vast Penmachine Studio Complex

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In the 14 months since I started posting my free original instrumentals here on this site (now the Penmachine Podcast), I've released 11 of them, which, at a rate of 0.8 songs per month, is decent, but nothing spectacular. (Better than Peter Gabriel, but still.)

I'm hoping that, now that the kids are settling into school, I can take some of slivers of free time I have at home by myself and record new material more frequently. I'm also inspired to do that by the large number of podcasters who have begun using my music for background tracks and theme songs. Having people actually listening to the material wants me to make more of it. If you're interested in the massive recording rig I've used for all my tunes, here are two views of it:

That's a corner of our den/TV room, and most of the time the kids are sitting on the couch nearby—so I tend to record when they're away or at night when everyone's asleep. (That's another reason that nearly everything's been instrumental-only so far.) There's another guitar and a bass that aren't in the photo, but otherwise that is everything I use in my recording process.

Finally, even though I give away the songs through a Creative Commons license, I decided that I may as well register them with SOCAN, the Canadian music-royalty organization to which I've belonged since the early 1990s. That way, if by some chance they ever do get played on commercial radio, I might get a cheque for six bucks or something.

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