SnowGhost Music

Ah, a much-needed return to the world of writing. The last song I wrote was a song called Peace and Harmony, to be sung by a chorus of 4th to 6th graders at a school function. The theme was harmony. We nailed it. The last story I wrote was a two-paragraph number about a famous hobo. It was followed by five questions asking about main ideas and details and sequence of events and what not. These are the things I find myself writing these days because I am an elementary school teacher.

I still look at my guitar. I play it too sometimes. I recently performed even, in front of actual people other than students and parents. But mostly I wait. Oh, over the next break I’ll have time to record that piano track I’ve been... read more >

I haven’t bought music in two years. I did have a span where I would mail order some more obscure CDs from my ear-to-the-ground friends at Aquarius Records in San Francisco (thanks Jim and Andee!). I would also buy my classic CDs, Sam Cooke to The Stooges, from Amazon. I’d get the discs in the mail, load them into my server, and file them away for safe-keeping. It sounded better at full resolution, and overall was cheaper per CD, rather than $1 per song off of iTunes - $1, for a low quality mp3 that seamlessly loaded on my phone – I’ll do the extra steps thank you very much. I have never bought an mp3. Wait, I take that back – I did buy the mp3 version of “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus from Amazon a few years back, in a pinch. Remembe... read more >

This is the latest demo of my song ‘Leave It Alone’, which has been on the back-burner for a long time. It took two days for Producer Mike to pry it out of my hands and turn it into something I felt good about. I knew that there was a good song in there – it was always a favorite when I played it with my acoustic guitar. But as soon as I started mucking with a band feel, it almost always went cheesy…. at least I thought so. After some meandering in the drums and piano areas, I feel like I have made some peace with the song. Add the super-smooth backing double harmony vocals, panned left and right, and you’ve got a poor man’s Steely Dan. It also doesn't hurt that Garry Tallent from the E Street Band makes an appearance on bass.

It was always funny to me that the labels sold people on 44.1kHz CDs because of them being quiet and indestructible - really they were neither - their noise just lives in another frequency band, and they get dinged up pretty easily. In reality, as you may or may not know, it was the $.07 vs $7 production cost delta, while keeping the retail price the same.... I think Netflix just learned the same lesson about providing their customers a lesser product at a higher price, while further confusing them with two sites for their services. Talk about the classic example of adding insult to injury - now, I am paying more to Amazon to watch a la carte. The difference between the music industry and Netflix, you ask? Netflix learned their lesso... read more >

We just time traveled. It's guaranteed that History repeats itself, but in most cases with a new hair color. It is not all that common that History finds itself digging back into its closet to find an old turntable - I guess we never really bettered ourselves.

SnowGhost just bought a turntable for the studio, to showcase the wonders of the analog consumer medium, juxtaposed against a digital wallpapered world. In fact, this debate is not all that far off from comparing a nice plaster-textured wall to wallpaper. Wallpaper can get you there - or maybe it just keeps you from going crazy white-wall on everyone. There is something very soothing about textured walls. I don't know why, but it just feels like home.

Some of my fr... read more >