Never been one to let the carrier drop

You all may remember a track from 2016, Pride & Conviction. Me and Tory got together and gave it a new coat of paint and I like the result a lot better – Bunne as usual was consulting audio engineer and probably consulted more than average in ways that helped this be a better track – anyway, here it is:

Pride And Conviction

The old track is here if anyone wants to compare – we can debate later the question about whether both sides of our polarized electorate have kernels of truth or not.

For those of you who have been missing my orchestral-movie-soundtrack stuff, here is a little bit I did today just to make sure I haven’t forgotten how: Maypole

And slowly we accumulate the 10,000 😉

The videos for the two twitch broadcasts I did are now available for any who want to see them.

Show #1 – 2/15/21 – Setlist:
Sheer-Solo-TwitchBroadcast-021521.mp4

John’s Song (Original / M.Mesford/Sheer)
City Of New Orleans (Cover, Arlo Guthrie)
This City (Cover, Steve Earle)
America (Cover, Simon & Garfunkel)
Black Velvet (Cover, Alannah Miles)
Me and Bobby McGee (Cover, Kris Kristofferson)
Comfortably Numb (Cover, Pink Floyd)
Blackbird (Cover, J. Lennon)
House of the rising sun (Cover, traditional)
Closer To Fine (Cover, Indigo Girls)
A few of my favorite things (From “The Sound Of Music”)
One Tree Hill (Cover, U2)

Show #2: 2/20/21 – Setlist:
Sheer-Solo-TwitchBroadcast-022021.mp4

1% (Original, Sheer/M.Mesford)
Don’t Dream It’s Over (Cover, Crowded House)
The original broadcast included Dry County (Cover, Bon Jovi) which has been omitted due to technical issues
Us And Them (Cover, Pink Floyd)
Still Alive (Cover, Jonathan Coulton)
Tis Of Thee (Cover, Ani Difranco)
One (Cover, U2)
Lost Angeles (Original, Sheer/T.True/Alex)
Puff the Magic Dragon (Cover, Peter,Paul&Mary)
The Way It Is (Cover, Bruce Hornsby)
Will The Circle Be Unbroken (Cover, Traditional)
Imagine (Cover, J.Lennon)
Don’t You Forget About Me (Cover, Simple Minds)

Encores: Angel From Montgomery (Cover, J. Prine) / The Promise (When In Rome)

I’ve been having tons of fun with OBS and setting up scenes, filters, and the like. Most of the bugs are out. My twitch channel is https://twitch.tv/sheerpanic_. (note the underscore)

Planning a “official” transmission for Feb 15 at 6 PM. In the meantime, I’m doing test transmissions – I will delete the truly horrid ones and leave the rest up until they time out.

So, I have gotten a twitch account at SheerPanic_ (note the underscore at the end). I will be setting up over the next few weeks to do a show in late Feb – I did my first test transmission today, and while there were a few minor warts it went better overall than I had any right to expect. I apparently need to get over yet another type of stage fright.. (it’s so bizarre. I’m over the “stage fright when multitrack deck is running” and I’ve put a pretty good dent in the “stage fright while performing IRL” but apparently video broadcasting is yet another thing.

It’s also never going to be beautiful – I don’t anticipate millions of viewers or anything like that, so I’m not going to build a set or set up special lighting for it. I will arrange to have multiple camera angles, and I will hard-mount them so they don’t get in the way when I’m doing other things in the studio. I’m going to see if I can set up rules in OBS to switch randomly between cameras as well.

Sheer covers Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy”

As per usual, Arthur St James was the associate audio engineer, and I was everything else.

http://sheer.us/stuff/2020/SheerCoversIndigoGirls-DeadMansHill.mp3

If anyone is wondering what’s up with the music, well, I’ve been woodshedding my paws off. I’ve discovered that the 12 bar blues are a very effective framework for shedding improvising around, and I’m working on being able to do that comfortably and effortlessly in every key. I recently added a hour meter to my mixer so I could keep track of how much time I’m putting in and it looks like it’s between 1 and 2 hours a day.

I’ve also been working on my guitar skills, and while they are still meager, they are getting to be steadily less so.

So, the general overshot of all this is, good things are coming. I’m not recording because I’m working on upgrading my nervous system, although I will try to still kick out the odd cover so you all know I’m still there. I’ve also had a couple of recording attempts that I felt like went extremely poorly so I didn’t publish them. But I’m still working at it and we’ll be publishing more soon.

One side note – I do still occasionally broadcast on WSHR (http://icecast.sheer.us:8080/wshr) and I also have set up a automatic archiver for it. If anyone wants to have a account so they can look at those, send me a message. Note that if you get in now it’s free, but probably starting in about six months from now I’ll require people to toss a buck in the patreon hat 😉