Just another slut for music

[CharliMansonsEvlTwin]

Hey, fellow linux fans, here's my A440+2cents worth. (Koala right now that it's stable again, but I like Puppy, Mandriva, PCLos, and a couple of others more)- skip to the end if you don't care about the personal stuff, I actually have a point to this ramble also.

I'll do pretty much anything to play music, keep my radio on in the music store 24/7 ( West Virginia's NPR, mostly classical, but great jazz on the weekend, Mountain Stage, World Cafe, Joe Flynn's show, Side Tracks, Music From the Mountains, etc.) where I am 80-100 hrs. every week. I'm familiar with a large segment of the local contemporary music scene (mainly 'cause of the store), and although I'm not a raving country/bluegrass fan (I'm 20 miles away from the Jamboree In The Hills, 10 from the Wheeling Jamboree, and I can here the townsfolk grabbing their pitchforks, guns, and torches to come burn another heretic) play in anywhere from 3 to 8 bands at any time (although there's been a real slump in things the past 4 months), country, folk, jazz, hardcore, alt-rock, progressive rock, rock bhajan/kirtan; you name it, I'll try it (I would love to do a polka-only Weird Al tribute band). I will admit my classical and sight-reading chops are horrendous. When I'm go in solo on the local jam scene (and that is my primary enthusiasm, live ensemble jams), I'm "Charlie Manson's Evil Twin" (he grew up 3 miles away, and a friend of mine is hoping to record him from prison on some of his music, I looked a lot like him when we both were a lot younger). I've done a few year's stint in the Wheeling Symphony chorus, played on the Victoria Theater staff band for a few months, played a lot of the local showcase things like the Wheeling Jamboree, Artworks About Town, Vineyard Cafe, etc.) and started a website to list local jams (http://www.musicmusicmusic.us), open mics, and such that I'm perpetually behind on site admin...

Last night, since the band booked for New Year's Eve splayed out the logistics and canceled with almost no notice, I went and did sound for a drums & bass duo (Xombee, look 'em up on myspace) of young, enormously talented musicians I've known for 10 years, got some stuff recorded on Bobby Xombee's laptop; however, the rest of the day was an incredible grind for me, so my energy was pretty low and I just couldn't render props like I wanted and didn't do very good recording (hey, I'll be 60 soon, this meat machine aging just plain sucks!)- I did have a really good time, anyway (had I not done that, I would have gone to my neighbors' non-alcohol feast/party/birthday as in many year's past, played 'til my fingers bleed, chanted and sang 'til the voice gave out, and emerged a little earlier, even more blissed-out).

I haven't done much recording of my own stuff, because I usually hack my own stuff to such small pieces in post that it winds up pretty much useless- I have a couple of friends I'll trade engineering time, and they usually do a much better job at it, so I do have about 5 or 6 hours of solo keyboard stuff and maybe 2 hrs of guitar recorded; but I've been working on the same 3 projects for about 5 years now, and last year I finally found the bunch of musicians I've been looking for for 35 years to do the ensemble stuff (we've all played with some of us before, but never the full band- way different interests and influences, but we're all unintimidated at trying anything), so maybe I'll get done before I die. I will post fragments as things progress.

On the Linus side, I started looking at cli-only in 2000, but my coding chops were too rusty to get far (30 years in the faded distance of the past at that point), when I got a copy of Suse in '03, I started to shift my business over but life derailed my efforts for a few more years, and when I got back to it in '07, the DEs had really progressed to the point of almost complete usability (better than Windows for me) for all my computing needs.

Which brings me to the crux of the biscuit, I have been doing very stripped-down recording work for years, but I am now in a position to really put together a 1st-class studio if I am very attentive about the financial and engineering development. I would like to see a hardware forum topic like a database from various members (so maybe data entry doesn't take any great length of time, maybe a dozen tech specs and half a dozen practical/financial ones) that might quanitfy your experience or proposed studio plans- for instance, I know I'll need about 4000 man-hours for site development for this project, but a large portion of that is in the other uses for the building- I'll move the retail store in the largest portion, office space, etc. so I'll probably need 5-600 man hrs for the studio, 25K for gear, and I know it won't be done for 4 years, so taxes, insurance, etc. will dramatically increase but in a predictable progression, etc. ( I could design the DB, but I'm horribly slow, just a heads-up). I myself am going to be mostly software-based on the engineering side to keep the capital costs down, any recommendations? I'm looking at firewire stuff for expandability, but don't know enough yet about the mixer/ hardware side of that to make the appropriate cost-benefit analysis- I'm confident that with focused attention, clear thinking, and careful planning (hint, I've been straight-edge for decades, so I don't toke up or have a drink before I start recording, engineering or editing anything, but I still make a lot of stupid mistakes if I'm not completely focused) I can do an excellent job of setting this up; with the level of musical talent and technical ability locally (I see great musicians every week in an area with a relatively low population density, perhaps 300, 000 people in a 100 mile radius, some of them world-class; seems to me we need a world-class facility here, and given that there was going to be one built right across the street last year but those drug-addled idjits let it fall apart, I guess I get saddled with that project (just like the retail store, the computer repairs, the engineering consulting, the beginner music instruction, etc...