Hello!

 Now that the CD is released I am working on promoting it. I’ll try to document some of the things that I am doing in the hope of helping others.  The first step is building a digital promo pack. This will be online and will consist of downloadable music, a promo picture, cover artwork, a bio, album info, and other pictures. Once I have this completed I will be able to contact webzines and bloggers to request that they download and review the CD.

 I’m also in the process of having T-shirts made. Jan for Darkgrove.net completed the t-shirt design and it is awesome. My buddy Jim Riddle will be making the t-shirts (Jim has his own t-shirt company).

 I am currently distributing my CD on CDBaby, but I have a lead on European Distribution. The CD should be up on ITunes soon as well. I would like to find distribution in Asia and South America as well. Currently I have sold the new release in Belgium, Brazil, and Canada so that is encouraging.

 Some new sites that I will be checking into are: Dropbox – for providing downloads of my music, Sound Cloud, and Band Camp. I just started looking at Band Camp and I like what I see. Band Camp is used to distribute and sell your music.

 I also submitted press releases to Blabbermouth.net, metalsucks.net, and Metalinjection.net. So far they have not posted it. I’m thinking they may not post for independent artists. I guess that is understandable.

 Guitar Rig 5

I recently installed Native Audio’s Guitar Rig 5 on my recording PC. I’m actually pretty impressed with the software. It interfaces well with Protools and runs as a plugin. I have noticed that when I run Session Drummer and Guitar Rig that the actual Protools application can get a little squirrely. For example you intermittently my have to hit the play button twice for it to work. Without the plugins it seems to work fine.

 I really like the guitar tones that are in guitar rig 5. The first thing that I did was to compare my normal recorded sound to some of the guitar rig sounds. In some cases I actually liked the guitar rig sound better. Guitar Rig has a wide range of guitar tones and effects and there presets sound pretty genuine. For example there are various tones tailored for specific genres of music (metal, thrash, zeppelin, AC/DC, etc..)

 So this sent me on a mission to see if I could capture a better sound via a speaker cabinet and mic and have it sound better than guitar rig. I pretty much focused on recording a distorted rhythm track. For the test I set up a protools session and using session drummer created the drum track for the Judas Priest song Living After Midnight. I picked this song because it is so easy. Then I recorded a rhythm track using a couple of presets in guitar rig. After that I mic’d up my Marshall 30^th amp. The Guitar Rig software was a great reference tool! It gave me a reference of what a good tone should sound like, by using the GR software as a reference I was able to adjust the mic and the tone settings on the Marshall to obtain an even better sound that Guitar Rig.

 So then I went through the process of checking all of my amps to see what sounded the best. I checked my Marshal 30^th, Marshall JCM 800, Marshall JVM410, Mesa Dual Rectifier, and Peavy 6505. The two amps that sounded the best to me are the Marshall 30^th and the Marshall JCM800.

 So my next step will be to perform the same tests on lead or solo tones. I’ll probably play with the tone controls and maybe adjust the mids to obtain a fatter solo tone. Once again I will be able to use Guitar Rig as a reference tone to compare with.

 To sum things up, Guitar Rig is pretty awesome and it may actually end up being used on my next CD. My current plan for recording the next CD is to run my guitar into the Radial Tone Bone to split my signal into two paths. One path will go directly into Protools and be recorded clean to use with the Guitar Rig software. The other path will be ran into an amp and mic’d up. I will double track the rhythms using the Marshal 30^th and JCM800.

 Check back for more updates!

Hey! So a lot has been going on.

First off the new CD “Silent Assassin” has been mixed and mastered. I have ordered 1000 CDs and they should arrive around January 15. Once I get the CDs I still have to go through the copyright process and also send them off to the distributer.  I use CD Baby for distribution and they also handle the digital distribution which includes I Tunes, Rhapsody, etc..

 Since I finished the CD, I thought it is a good time to do some upgrades for my recording studio PC.  So I started with upgrading XP to service pack 3. Then since I had a 8 gig hard drive for my system drive, I needed to upgrade to a larger drive (even though I have two other drives for data). So I used something called “Shadow Copy” to basically clone my 8 gig hard drive onto a 64 gig hard drive.

 I also upgraded my recording software (protools 7 to 7.4). I actually have the software to upgrade to protools 8, but for some reason the DVD did not work on my system. I tried a lot of stuff to try to get it to work, but it did not. So when I tried to get support for protools (Avid) I found out that to contact support it would cost $39. This really pissed me off. I have bought their product and received a DVD that does not work, I don’t think I should have to pay to get this resolved.  When you call the support number, there is no way to proceed without paying. They also do not have an email. I tried to fax them my dilemma and they never replied. So I would say my loyalty to Avid/protools has gone down a bit. I also am a little bummed that Avid has decided to discontinue the Digi003 line. This was the perfect system for a mid-range studio. So in the future when I upgrade, I will really have to consider other hardware alternatives.

 I also installed Tontracks “EZ Drummer”. It is a pretty cool program that has sampled drum sounds and also has a library of sound clips of actual drummers.  You can drag and drop these midi files directly into protools to compile the drums for a whole song. So once I installed EZ Drummer, I was so impressed that I am now in the process of upgrading EZ Drummer to Toontracks “Superior Drummer”. I also ordered an expansion pack for Superior Drummer called “Metal Foundry”. The expansion pack contains better sound samples (24 bit) and also has drum performances by some kick ass metal drummers. I’m really feeling the urge to write some heavier stuff and I think this software will help.

 I also got my hands on a free sample of Native Audio's “Guitar Rig 3 LE”. This software lets you plug a clean guitar into your recording PC and the software emulates a guitar amplifier. I was actually impressed by the software.  So I will be upgrading to “Guitar Rig 5” soon. I don’t know if I will actually track with this software, but I might..

 I also wanted to state that I got all of this software at a reasonable cost by shopping around online. I got the protools software for $40 off of ebay. I got the drumming software upgrades and expansion pack for @ 150, normally it would have cost around 300 (check Amazon, they have some good prices). For guitar rig, I started out with a free version of 3 LE, but when I registered it, it now allows me to upgrade to 5 for only 99, 5 normally costs around 200. So it pays to shop around!

 So with having the CD completed, I decided it was a great time to actually clean out my studio. So I did that and now it looks completely different. It’s a little too clean, I’ll have to junk it up again so that I feel comfortable.

 I’m also completely rebuilding my “Curt Shaw” web site.

 On another note, I had to stop selling my CD on Amazon. The yearly cost to sell on Amazon was just too high to support the sales. The sales did not justify the cost and I was starting to feel like Amazon was just pimping me out. I also will not be selling on a site called Guitar9. I am kind of bummed about this. Guitar 9 is going out of business. Guitar 9 was a site that was tailored to selling instrumental guitar CDs. The owner stated that sales are too low to support the site. I hate to see this site go.

My cover band 15 Minutes played on New Years Eve. We had a blast. Thanks to everyone that came out!

 Happy New Year!