***New Website Under Construction***

It's been a long few years, and blogger and I have had a good run. But all good things must come to an end.

The translation literally reads: May blogger find peace in knowing that despite being defunct and irrelevant, someone still kind of cares.

As I've committed more time and resources to not only the development of my originals, but my technical education in sound design and videography, better web design has also made its way into the repertoire. Blogspots will always have a soft place in my heart and I'll probably keep this active for limited use, but it nevertheless a fact that my gaze has been drawn to the vastly superior, more easily customized websites of my peers.

I like WordPress, but who would wear these? Seriously?

Therefore it is hereby decreed in characteristically nebulous fashion that at some undetermined, wishy-washy date during this up and coming July, the grandhighmusicoverlord blog will graduate to HendersonRoofing.org, my band's official namesake, as the new, slick corner of the internets that will be home to all my new recordings, downloads, tour calendar, and general updates. It will ultimately be accompanied by a youtube partner channel for original videos as well, especially now that I'm being graciously permitted to use cameras that excel above mine in every conceivable way.

Yeah yeah, I know some of you think this is an over-the-top way of excusing myself from writing twice a week and posting new music while I upgrade. And you'd be right. But seriously, this is a time-consuming process amidst a time-consuming career. You remember how I wrote and recorded Dance That Noise Away in less than twelve hours over two days? That like, never happens. And even if it did regularly I still wouldn't have time for it alongside everything else.

So bear with me, and in a few weeks I'll have the new website posted.

For all the good old lean years, and all the in-between years. <3

And blogger, I feel like I was just getting to know you finally when it came time to move on. Our typically tawdry romance was unexpectedly blossoming when the winds of change blew away the petals of our love and like a drifter with a wayward heart I left for the next best thing I saw. I hope you'll forgive me. I hope this doesn't tarnish the sweet times we had together. If it's any consolation, I still like you better than facebook.








photo attributions:

(the rose) By Eike Sauer (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(wordpress buttons) By Lisa Risager from Denmark (WordPress 10th anniversary  Uploaded by palnatoke) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(blogger tombstone) By Corpse Reviver - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7229483

Correction of dates

So, as hard as this may be for some of you to believe, it's time I confessed the truth- I have erred.

No, I didn't 'overstay' in Vegas, nor have I lost all my savings in one of my airports ten thousand slot machines.

I have, however, failed to schedule properly. You see I promised perhaps a little carelessly in the last blog post that my music would be up today, so certain was I that there was adequate time. Which, under normal circumstances would be true.

Alas, as some of you may remember, my little brother is getting married. I'm happy for him of course, his fiancé is nothing short of lovely, but it's inconvenient timing to be a best man at a Mormon wedding ceremony two states away while writing in a very time-consuming style of music.

I'm not bitter of course! No no no, not in the slightest. As I piddle away the time on my phone here, I genuinely look forward to raising my glass of orange juice or overly chlorinated city water in an over-the-top toast to mini-me and his wife to be.

But seriously Stephen, I'm all for short engagements but couldn't you have at least given me one more week before getting married so I could've kept to my word that I now won't be able to keep because of this event you warned me about three months in advance?!

Short story- next Saturday's the day. It's lovely visiting family. I need to manage my schedule more effectively, and it is so weird how I feel like I'm in a prologue to Fallout New Vegas. Cheers!

Podcasts, Choral Pieces, and Barometric Headaches.

I think that's the only thing I don't like about living next to a mountain. I have no clue when the next lightning storm is going to come and bring on the weird feeling that every sensitive part of my body is slowly being squeezed to death. It feels like that one girl from Golden Eye is getting a thigh workout on your cranium.

It's so lovely until it strikes...your nervous system.

It's the first time in my life I've considered the possibility of using painkillers long-term . Sounds like a familiar story prologue eh? Especially in this prozac-loving state. No worries though, I haven't taken an addictive substance that actually left me dependent yet, so I don't foresee any problems (though admittedly I've never had alcohol, or anything aside from stuff for a couple surgeries). Besides, now that I'm being forced to take the stuff, maybe I'll finally get around to easing the inflammation in my jaw! But onto more relevant things. Musical things even.

I'm trying to be all this, and the organ. It's a pain finding tie-dye pants my size.

I'm trying my hand at a choral piece. Again. I don't know if you've ever tried to write, sing all the parts for, record, mix and master your own choral works without the use of auto-tune, but it's frustrating as hell. Especially when halfway through editing a freak storm appears out of nowhere and begins an all-out assault on all those places that will forever cause you to regret the months you dedicated to cartilage-reducing sports growing up. However, I think I've figured out the worst of my problems.


It's not so bad once you get into the swing of it and nail the melody and first two harmonies, though figuring out alto lines is about the dullest job imaginable. The hardest part for me is creating repeated tracks to mimic the sound of a full choir without cloning. Every time I do it I seem to find myself a little flat, or grating, or off in tone and color. That happens when I try to blend my sound with pre-existing tracks while listening to said tracks. I'm saying tracks a lot. Kind of a fun word don't you think? Tracks. Tracks tracks tracks. If you want it's also fun to imagine some stodgy old fool with an aristocratic accent repeating it over and over again for several mintues as he makes the weighty decision whether or not to make it a part of the latest and greatest in cutting edge linguistic evolution. "Tracks.." he said for the twenty-millionth time, knowing each utterance brought his language closer to its new destiny, one whose history and origins virtually no one outside his field of expertise would care to study...and rightfully so, because that's boring as all get-out. It's not even that important a word."

Anyway, in experimenting with solutions to the problem of choir imitation quality, I've noticed that if I memorize the line and sing it as a solo track (hehe) where I can hear only myself (and if necessary the main melody) then the quality tends to be considerably better. I think the reason for that lies in the fact that mistakes and oddities in the sound are immediately apparent and corrected when I'm hearing only my voice and the main melody in playback, whereas if I pretend to be merely another voice in a throng it's easy for me to get distracted by the voices 'around' me and lose track of maintaining my own quality. Probably one of the many reasons I couldn't stay longer than a year in Rosalind Hall's Men's Chorus.

My favorite thing to do when she walked by was stiffen and yell out, "ALL HAIL
HER MOST ROYAL HIGHNESS, QUEEN ROZ!" She's quite the fan of the nickname.

Finally, the podcast. I've never done podcasting and neither had the author of the podcast. There's aren't podcast courses in college, No podcast trade school. It's such a recent invention of the evil financial empire in disguise as a benign, inventive computer company named Mac (like some silly, innocent Pixar character), that academic circles have yet to write a formula for classes that'll justify the addition of another 5000 page, $2000 book (without binding or holes, you'll have to pay extra to get the hole-puncher and a binder large enough to cram Professor know-it-all's ego into it) to their racket in school libraries.

So we struck out into largely uncharted waters with a rather different approach to the structure of the podcast. No spoilers here, sorry. Trade secrets. The audio was simple enough. My bedroom is more of an office space than living quarters, so I casually removed my bedding, dusted everything, vacuumed the floor and prepared some beverages and snacks for my inevitably stressed-out visitors, and went to town. I had three different mics ready, all facing each other in a circle so we could send and receive facial cues, keep things lively. I had two computers running Sonar X2 simultaneously to meet processing needs, got the audio about where it needed to be to prevent peaking, and then post-edits were pretty easy. Cut out all the white-noise in the background, shift the position of the voices so there's no uncomfortable overlap, and shwalla. The first Space-Cast podcast was born. If you'd like to listen in to Dan's take on some interesting modern board games, the link is here: MDH studios-hosted SB! podcast. 

Retired visual description of the 'Space-Biff!', aptly represented by professional cheek-muscle-tenderizer Adam Jensen.

And finally, new song this Saturday! I'm uploading one of the four projects I've been working on to my sound cloud, adding it to the store, and linking it on my fake facebook business page, haven't decided which one officially, but it will be there, so await with baited breath for the pretentious, life-altering music that will transcend the notion of genre!

Photo attributions:

-lightning: By original data: Sebastien D'ARCO, animate: Koba-chan - original source is Image:Lightnings sequence 2.jpg, animated by me., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1044915

Two Blog Posts a Week? The Overlord Blog brings a dream-come-true to billions by upping the weekly dosage.

It's been brought to my attention more than once now that some tiny fraction of a fraction of humanity actually enjoys the whimsical nonsense I throw up here on a sporadic basis, one friend just yesterday even going so far as to suggest that an increase in articles is in order.

    "Looking heaven-ward from the cold stones of Brooklyn, from the ashes of his life, he swore a                                                       mad oath of vengeance, knowing surely his day would come."


Reacting in much the opposite way I normally do to the overly common internet meme above, I was surprised. This blog, once intended to be an advertising platform, has been reduced to the state of pseudo public journal over the years, and I've rather enjoyed the lackadaisical feel of it all. Since I don't put more than an occasional post on facebook or anywhere else, the expectation is that one or two email subscribers will read, not comment or really take interest, and I'll take some small satisfaction in the process of writing an article. Then that's it. The buck stops there. The drums roll, the curtains fall, and I completely forget I have a blog until the next time I get a hankering to jot a piece down.

In short, I believe the following photograph, courtesy of Jerzy Opioła, aptly highlights the direction I take the blog, an approach often used by vloggers and youtubers in hot pursuit of the almighty dollar.

C'mon, vacation isn't supposed to be *more* exhausting. Why would you go to Mincol or Zdiare with much more promising destinations available just 1080 meters away?

However in lieu of recent comments and at the suggestion of my more successful blogging peers, I've agreed to hold myself to two blog entries per week, One on Tuesday, another on Saturday. But that's it. No more than that. And I reserve the right to ramble about any kind of impertinent, unrelated crap I want to in each of them. That being said, on a relevant, even close to pertinent note, my intention with the majority of future articles will be to keep things tied to music, specifically what I write and record, but also related commentary grounded in national conversation, present events, etc etc.

You might not like to think so, but my toiletry is a consistently relevant conversation.

PEACE! Until Tuesday that is. <3