Puddleglum Music » Site News

Musical news in my world…

duane — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:58:46 +0000

First, Demon Hunter’s The World is a Thorn arrived in the mail last week. The album is great overall; interestingly enough, looking at Demon Hunter’s discography, I feel that The Triptych may be their weakest album overall (although it’s still a great album). I’m pretty evenly split on how I feel about the first two versus the last two, however. I got into Demon Hunter primarily because Jesse Sprinkle is one of my favorite drummers of all time, so I was disappointed when he left; while Yogi is a great drummer, his style isn’t as interesting as Jesse’s, but I feel he’s come into his own with the band, through the last two albums.

Second, Jen and I are going to see As I Lay Dying, with special guests Demon Hunter, at the Cactus Courtyard here in Lubbock on May 2. This will be the second time we’ve seen Demon Hunter (first was at the 2008 Red Letter Rock Fest in Snyder, TX; pictures here) and the first to see As I Lay Dying. Although I’m not super familiar with their music, I’ve started listening to them more and am pretty impressed.

Third, if you hop on over the the What I’m Listening To page, you’ll see updates to Last.fm. I’ve been using the Xbox 360 app again, and it’s been a pleasant experience. Now I just need to get my Zune Social and Pandora stuff onto the website, and I’ll be all set.

That’s it for now. Later!

Zao – Awake? Released and Mewithoutyou coming soon.

duane — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:51:01 +0000

Zao’s new album, Awake?, is out! I got my pre-ordered copy complete with a T-shirt from Interpunk. I’m going to commit to posting a review in the next day or so. Also, Mewithoutyou’s new album in coming later this month, and I’ve got that on pre-order as well. As soon as I get it, I’ll try to get a review up. Later!

“What If?” Rough Demo

duane — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 04:44:44 +0000

I recorded this demo some time ago and had it on the original site. I won’t go into a huge amount about it, but here’s just a little bit on how it came about.

I recently (well, last year) got an Epiphone Les Paul Special Bass guitar. Before getting the Epiphone, I would often record bass lines with my electric guitar (a 15-year-old Peavey Predator) and then pitch-shift it down 12 steps. While this is okay, the bass lines never had all of the low-end frequencies that I wanted; even with the pitch-shift, the sound wasn’t as solid as I wanted. Getting the Epiphone has helped a lot with that.

However, one thing that I didn’t anticipate about getting a bass would be how it would open up new song-writing avenues to me. Traditionally (and still for the most part), I write with either my electric or acoustic guitar as the first instrument, coming up with a riff or chord progression and then filling in the rest from there. With the bass, however, I can now write a bass line, and then fill in the guitar parts based on that.

That’s essentially how this song was written. I came up with the opening bassline first, and then built from there. Listening back at the demo, I’m not happy with the electric guitar that comes in at the beginning; I think it weakens the bass. The lead guitar part is really just noodling around, and I’m still learning lead, so it has it’s own issues.

The drums were recorded in a round-about way. I output my electric drums into a Creative X-Fi USB sound device; other methods didn’t yield a solid enough sound. Overall I was happy with the sound of the drums, but there are definitely times when I lost the metronome, and you can hear that on the demo.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy listening to this rather rough demo!

What If? by Duane Watson

Last.fm profile

duane — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:49:11 +0000

I’ve been recently using last.fm, primarily through Songbird to show people what I’m listening to. My profile is available at http://last.fm/user/starflyer3000. A current list of my top-ten tracks is listed on the What I’m Listening To page at the top.

Site is Back!!!

duane — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:04:04 +0000

I’m really excited to restart Puddleglum Music. After the compromising of the whole site by pro-Turkish hackers, security had been really bad, and I recently started getting error messages from AVG about a potentially harmful redirection exploit. Rather than endanger anyone, I decided to redo the security on the site and clear out everything, so here we are!