I’ve been coding a LOT this past week to finish a website I was commissioned to do. I was up until 5 last night coding. But I do want to blog about my musical exploits of the past couple months. A lot has been going on in this area.

First, I joined a band a few months ago called Overshine. I was languishing since I wasn’t playing in anything, looked online, and found a local band that needed (oh joy!) a lead guitarist! Since then, I’ve gotten to know these guys a bit better and played some good music with them. Recently, we recorded a couple of our tunes in a studio. It was expensive, but overall I think a good use of $800 (fortunately most of which I didn’t have to pay). The guy that did our sound engineering has done sound for Stryper, a well-known 80’s Christian metal/hair band, as well as many other bands. He was very friendly and very professional. Our songs sound *great*, much more so than our basement practice sessions.

You can visit our band’s website here. Our two recorded songs are on there (albeit compressed a bit for myspace requirements). Let me know what you think.

We also recently had a semi-professional photographer take pictures of us at practice. We had to pose a lot without looking like we were posing. That kind of thing. She took a lot of pictures, but below are a few of my favorites:

We will be playing some shows in the Fall. Our bassist is having a child any day now, so he’ll be busy and we need to book some gigs. I’ll try to keep y’all posted when our first gig is.

I also recently played in my sister’s wedding (see previous blog post). Here’s a pic from that:

Finally, during the past month I’ve been upgrading/changing my guitar effects around. I just sold my POD XT Live (for more than I bought it for) and changed to a rack-mounted system. My units so far are a Tech 21 PSA-1 preamp, a Rocktron Xpression effects unit, and a DBX 266XL Compressor/Gate (this is the keyboardist’s, I’m borrowing it for now until I can afford my own). So far, I’m happy with the sound. A rack mounted system requires a lot of knowledge and customization to make the best use of it. I’ve spent a few hours tweaking sounds for each individual unit, and I’m far from done. There’s also different ways to route the sound - effect loops or direct - and the order the units are placed in the signal path. I’m learning! My band members said the sound was great last practice, so I’m doing ok so far. Here’s some pics of the new system:

First I must apologize for not updating my faithful readers more often. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here! I’ll have to throw everything in at once in one huge super-blog post.

Summer is going great here at the Holt household. I just finished reading Jill “The Last of the Mohicans”. We pick blackberries from our backyard almost every day. We take hikes and bike rides. Jill is on reduced hours in the summer (around 10 per week) while making the same salary as during the year. I work about this much during the summer as well, so we have a LOT of time together. Other couples might go bonkers spending this much time together, but I love this arrangement. We are keeping “busy” in other ways as well…

We started a house church recently! Just a few friends from the area have agreed to embark upon this venture with us. I have been thinking about small churches for around two years; it was time to try it out. There are pros and cons, but so far it has been going great. We meet for a potluck dinner that we call “communion”, which is just a communal meal we share while remembering God in our conversation. Then we are presented with a short lesson or discussion or study from a different person each week. We have also done a few songs. Tonight is our third week, and we’re expecting around ten people!

One of the GREAT things about a small church is that each person has so much to offer and contribute - and we can cater to everyone! Many of us like to pray silently instead of out loud, and we can pray as a small group any way that we want! We can adopt ideas and be more flexible than a bigger church in how we “run” things.

Also, I recently got a web design job for a client in Texas. It’s quite an involved site, and I’m hoping I can deliver a professional-looking product. It’s a database-driven site that will sell real estate like hotels and restaurants. This week I’ll be brushing up my PHP and SQL skills for this big project.

I’ve been playing music with Hannah Daman and Jill. Tonight we played at an open mic in Framingham at a coffee shop. We were invited by my friend Jeff who likes to play out a lot. Jill has great rhythm skills and Hannah sings very nicely. Together we played some acoustic type covers and original songs. The audience seemed to love us and we got a lot of comments. The manager also asked us to come back next month and play a longer set!

On the geek end of things, I’ve been tweaking my backup scripts. I bought another hard drive to use as a Time Machine backup. However, I also run rsync via SSH to the very server where this website resides. These are Linux servers that happen to have rsync and SSH available to clients, which is great! Rsync is great for incremental backups rather than uploading everything each time an update is made. The only problem is that the Linux servers mess up my executables - all my applications are not usable if I download them from the server. Therefore I’ve been using disk images or tarballs to package up my applications before syncing. It’s tedious but at least it works.

Finally, tonight I learned how to use ipfw to “shape” my bandwidth. My SSH backup was eating up all my bandwidth uploading at top speed. Fortunately in OSX you can control your bandwidth for any individual protocol. I set port 22 (SSH) to 100 kb/s max, and it’s chugging away in the background leaving bandwidth for my more important stuff!

Next week is my sister’s wedding! I have to start practicing as I’m playing in it.

My band (Overshine) has also been practicing hard and recording. We recently recorded a couple of songs (which took all weekend) with this amazing engineer. He’s a solid guy who recorded most of Stryper’s albums and tours with them and other bands as a sound tech. He did our project in his home studio, and it was a good time. We’ll probably be playing at clubs and bars in the near future!

I think that will do for now so as not to bore you, dear readers. Thanks for indulging in my long update!

I was listening to the WERS a cappella radio show, and there was a very funny song about Star Wars. The name of the group turned out to be Moose Butter, and man are they funny! Check out some of their songs! My favorite so far is the one about mosquitoes.

I haven’t posted anything to my music page in a while! I have been recording (especially since I got Logic Express) and may finish more eventually. I just haven’t been really happy with what I’ve made or haven’t finished songs completely - lots of ideas but then didn’t see them through.

I will post several now from the past several months that I’ve recorded. The usual disclaimer applies about not being totally finished and not that good in the first place, blah blah blah. I’m not very confident about my work

Another reason I haven’t posted recently is I had designs on a collection of tunes - an album of sorts - that I could make a CD of and sell on this site. Good idea or bad?

Yipee! School vacation is here. Ben and I have been having fun playing lots of volleyball, watching movies, biking, reading, and here’s my little photo collage of some of the things I’ve been up to!