Inauguration Day Thoughts
As with — I assume — most of the country, I was very excited to see Barack Obama sworn in as 44th President of the United States today. And I’m keeping an open offer to President Obama: Mr. President, when you’re ready to upgrade the sound system in the White House, I’m happy to come [...]
Concept Is King
I rattle on here about how it’s the song that matters. That you don’t need the world’s most expensive equipment to make art that moves people or makes an impact. Case-in-point: my favorite TV show of all time, Arrested Development. Wikipedia describes the show as utilizing, “a pseudo-documentary format, incorporating hand-held camera work, narration, archival [...]
God Bless Pete Seeger
I was playing Scrabble last night (poorly, I might add) while watching the We Are One Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial. I almost dropped all my tiles when I saw Pete Seeger get up on stage at the finale to play banjo and lead the crowd in the verses of Woody Guthrie’s This Land [...]
Good, Cheap Eats
In any town’s weekly newspaper, there’s usually a once-a-year spotlight on “good, cheap eats”. I guess it’s because 1) people are interested and 2) there’s not always a correlation between price and quality. IMO, it’s the same with software. There are a lot of fantastically useful (and powerful) pieces of software that I use which [...]
A Note to WordPress
I use WordPress to write this blog. Seems like a good program, but I have a note for the WordPress folks: find an easier way for users upgrade your software. I’m a pretty software-savvy person. But, for the life of me, the upgrade procedure for WordPress (maybe it’s common to all blog software) seems unduly [...]
Too Good to Be True
The world’s current economic fiasco can be summed up in this phrase: it was too good to be true. For years, people we basically gambling on investments (stocks and properties) they didn’t really understand and the markets became artificially inflated. We’re now seeing the results of people making uniformed decisions based on hyped promises. I [...]
Luck vs. Skill
There’s a saying: “It’s better to be lucky than good.” What we call luck (whether there is such a thing…or circumstances just appear lucky — or unlucky — from each of our limited perspectives) factors heavily into the fortune of our lives. Obviously, it’s in each of our best interests to be as skillful as [...]
41
Damnit…41. I wasn’t all that keen on turning 31, and 21 doesn’t seem that far away. It’s hard to say how things got so out of hand. I’m not a guy who wastes a lot of time, so I can’t figure out where so much of it went. I guess my saving grace is that [...]
Sometimes “Ouch” Is Your Mantra
I was in yoga class today and I could hear the teacher trying to adjust a student into a difficult asana (posture). I heard her say “ouch”, and the teacher said, “sometimes ouch is your mantra”. It may sound like a flip response, but the point is that sometimes you just have to realize where [...]
Isn’t It Ironic?
In 1998, as a musician morphing into a mastering engineer, one of the things that really drove me to open ZenMastering was the simple fact that San Diego had no dedicated mastering facility. There were (and still are) a handful of recording studios who offered “mastering”…mainly as a side-way to make some extra money. But [...]
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From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
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