STP back on the road...

Yeah. I am pretty excited. There web site was down the day I heard the announcement. I had originally thought that they were only going to play a few dates and then back to their other projects - but alas! A new album is scheduled for next year!
I know there are a lot of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden etc. fans out there, but, for me, Stone Temple Pilots were the best of the bunch - especially the later albums. "Tiny Music" and "Shangri La Dee Da" were my personal favs. I can see the front man argument, that is really a matter of personal taste - you can't go wrong with any of front men of for mentioned bands (Cobain, Vedder etc.), but STP were a lot smarter musically and really just wrote better songs, the DeLeo brothers never failed to keep my attention - especially later on. Well, that's my 2 cents. I am very happy to see them back together and will be buying tickets for the Cleveland show shortly.

-M

Checkin' In...

It has been a busy last couple of weeks to say the least. I took a trip out Denver, CO for some St. Paddy's Day madness. I, once again, took part in the doorfromhellradio.com Hooley-Cast broadcast live from the Irish Snug in Denver. There are links to the pics, the audio and everything else over there, just check it out already. The ride out from Cleveland to CO was long, but Karaoke Bob and me kept ourselves quite busy with a disc full of Karaoke tunes to sing too and my newly installed SIRIUS satellite radio. The ride back was another story - 4 states of rain, rain, rain...and it's still raining!
I finally got the first audio promo script for Podcamp Ohio completed and approved - I will cut it tomorrow night so that there is something out there peeps can throw in their podcasts to help promote this cool "unconference". I have a two more donut spots to write and record too...I wish I had more time to work on this stuff.
My boss decided to have her first child while I was in Denver, so no usual boss for the next 12 weeks...that will end being a double edged sword, I will keep everyone posted on that one.
My bands are doing 'OK'. I played with the cover band on Saturday night to a generally young, unresponsive crowd. At one point a guy asked when we were playing some "Metallica or Disturbed or Creed or..." I had no response for him at that moment - I should have just said "Ummm...never". The original band is getting together tonight for practice.
So that's the skinny...Fun!

For all the TV guys out there...Enjoy.

Pandora, my new online music friend...

I am always on the lookout for new ways to listen to music at work. I am a Yahoo Music subscriber, but I am not able to download and install the jukebox on my work computer (surprise). A friend introduced me to finetune last year and I was pretty excited about the prospect of building playlists and filling them with my favorite tunes to listen to at work at my leisure. The problem with finetune is that the audio quality, well, sucks. I understand the bandwidth restrictions imposed by being a 'free' service, but I am a borderline audiophile and audio at, I'm guessing, around 24-32kbps just doesn't cut it. So embarked on an adventure to find some thing else with higher audio quality and a price point of zero. My discovery? Pandora. The downside to Pandora is that you don't build playlists, rather, you tell it what type of music you like and it plays what it thinks you will dig. My experience so far has been fabulous. I gave it 6 artists that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other and it plays great songs! Even the artists that I have never heard before seem to fit my musical tastes. Now, it's not 100% on all of the time, so I just give the songs I don't like a 'thumbs down' and it no longer plays them. Along those lines, if you think that you hear a song too often you can tell your 'station' to not play the song for a month - brilliant! You can build as many stations as you wish and assign different artists to each for whatever mood you may be in. You can bookmark songs, artists, etc. Now if it only worked for my Wii I would be golden! So kudos to Pandora. Thanks for keeping music free and semi-controllable for the listening masses!

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Fun, Fun, Fun

Hey everyone!

I haven't had a chance to blog in a while - so here goes:

Since I last posted there has been some big news everywhere. Yahoo may, and most likely will, become infected by Microsoft. I say why not, Google needs a real competitor anyways, and did you think that once Google started entering into Microsoft's territory (google docs etc.) that they would really stand for that? Fair competition, nothing wrong with that.

In other news, Stone Temple Pilots will touring this summer! Yep, Scott Weiland will be back in the fold after a semi-aborted attempt at another band (Army of Anyone). The album wasn't too bad, but there is some thing about that line-up with Scott. And to all of those who think Nirvana was the best of that era, guess again. Welcome back STP!

I will check back later with more news and stuff. I gotta get back to my day job...

Fun.

-M

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A New Year and even less time...

I thought I would wait a week or so after the holidays before posting another entry. I seem to be as busy as usual. I've had 5 gig's with 2 different bands over the last 2 weeks, I sometimes forget how intense shows can be or how lifeless (I was 4 for 5 in the 'intense' category during this stretch). Other projects I have going on are as follows: Produce audio promos for Podcamp Ohio, produce training videos for a utilities company (solo I might add), complete the tagging of 15,000 mp3's for my online radio station (coming soon!), purchasing new server space for my new station, Fubar podcast, recreating sites for each of those, etc. I have also been writing a few new songs, finding the time even put down a rough mix of those has been difficult. Now for the less important stuff: doing my first post on Seesmic, trying to make it to the i1002 and Fallout shelter podcasts, seeing a movie or anything not work related would be great - NO TIME LEFT FOR ME! lol...

-M

Stone Temple Pilots Studio Outtake

I miss the Stone Temple Pilots. I was, and still am, a huge fan. In my humble opinion, each album got better as they progressed. Dean DeLeo was one of the last guitarists to truly bring a new style of guitar playing, phrasing to the forefront of of Rock music. All that being said, I ran across some unreleased demos and outtakes a couple of years back on some random message board. I decided, for now particular reason, to post one of the standout tracks called "About A Fool". It is the easy going - layered - ballad STP that I love so much. I hope you enjoy!

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