This blog entry is doubled off the Echoing Angels blog.
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My good friend Grayson Blanchette came over the other day to my home studio. If you don’t know him already, he is the towering, beast of a man that runs Swayze’s Venue in Marietta. He is normally found throwing hoodlums by their faces out the front door (security), but can also be seen playing guitar in the aggressive, melodic rock band “Have You Seen My Ghost”. He stopped by to talk over their next EP that will see the beginning of tracking in late February. That conversation led into several different topics, and this one which really caught my attention.

To reiterate the title, has social networking (via Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, etc.) made people incapable of comfortable personal interaction? If you are reading this, then I’m going to guess that a good part of your day may be spent interacting with others via these methods of communication. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not condemning this sort of networking. I’m on these things probably a good 70% of my day.

Grayson presented several examples of bands that would come play Swayzes that had an extreme lack of personal interaction with the fans that came out to see the show. Aside from sound check and their actual performance time slot, you could only find the members of the band sitting in their van watching TV or involved in “social networking”. When approached by fans directly after their performance, they seemed to be in an awkward situation as if this sort of personal interaction was never before experienced.

I’ve witnessed this numerous times in the Christian music industry as well. While the Echoing Angels’ guys can be spotted at any given time in random different locations around the venue, I’ve noticed that many times some of the other bands can only be found on their tour bus. Yeah, after the performance, you can find the band back at their merchandise table, meeting kids and signing autographs. In my personal experience/opinion, I’d much rather catch an artist in a candid environment so I can see what they are really about. I’d rather be around other artists when a spontaneous game of football breaks out or someone decides to get into some fireworks.

I could be way of base, but for me this really determines how much I follow and support a band or artist. Maybe for some people the act of waiting anxiously to see if a band is going to come out and sign autographs or not, could be why the fans continue to show up. It’s that chase, huh?

So let me know what you think!! Do you appreciate it when you run into an artist casually walking around the venue and they take the time to get on your level? Does it even matter? Would you be more apt to support their music because of that social interaction? Especially if you really weren’t familiar with their music before hand? Give us some input if you have time this week — We’d love to hear from you!

Be blessed.
Zak Jordan
Echoing Production Manager

Except I would so much rather have spicy mustard with horseradish.

So I just got back from a mini tour with Echoing Angels on Monday morning around 430am.  So yeah, I slept all day Monday.  I had a blast though.  It was my first time back out with the boys since my accident.  It was definitely a relief to get back out there with them.  The first couple of hours in the van was all laughs so I knew it was going to be a good week.  We spent the night at Trey’s family’s house Wednesday night, which was totally awesome due to Trey’s little brother.  He introduced us to plenty of YouTube videos that I had not been privy to beforehand.

For a great laugh

So then Colonial Heights, VA on Thursday which was the best part of the trip.  We played for about 600-800 at a YEC conference.  GREAT room for a concert.  Exceptional sound system but the best part was that I got to work on a Yamaha PM5D for the first time.  If you don’t know, it’s an amazing digital console that costs around 60g.  That’s right – a lot of cash.

Friday was an off day, so we spent it in the next town, Somerset, PA.  Went to the movies in their really small town.  The theater didn’t have fresh popped popcorn.  WTH?  But we saw A Perfect Getaway.  Great movie, a must see.  I think we scared the people in the theater because before the previews, our loud conversation consisted of gay jokes and old greg quotes.

The show in Somerset was alright.  The crowd was very small due to the extreme ticket prices.  But we really can’t control that, I guess. We played with a band called Revive.  They are from australia orginally but moved to Atlanta recently to broaden their career.  They toured with Third Day for a bit and their last album was produced by Mac Powell.  But currently, they do not have a travelling sound engineer, so they approached me afterwards about the possibility of taking me on tour with them.  So hopefully if they can afford it, that will happen in the next couple of months.  They have a mini-bus as well which is cool.  It won’t be Echoing Angels, but it will be a job.

If you want to see some good pictures from tour, go to the IMG section and peep my flickr.

So I’m home for this week.  Taking it easy sort of. I’ll either be at home working or I’ll be hanging out with people before I head back out for NC next week.  I will be spending the weekend at Kyle Troop’s place this weekend, which I am overly stoked about.  We are going to give Cartersville a run for its money.

To start with, I’m going to define Higher Education.  Oh yeah.

Higher Education is defined as “Ca-cow bitch- this is a stick up.  Give me all your money.”  But the only difference in this case is that you go home not realizing you have been robbed.

I have an art institute student over here tracking a band right now.  He rented my place to track a band for a class project.

Now let me set the premise.  He is into broadcasting NOT recording, but uses Protools on a daily basis for editing.  Even though he is wanting to get in the broadcasting field, his degree requires him to take classes that involve recording bands in the studio and in live situations.

This is the first time he has been in my studio, so I TOTALLY understand if he doesn’t get how all my gear works because not everyone has the same gear.  But for more than a good percentage of the day, myself and the band have had to show him how to work in Protools.  The guys in the band don’t even record for a living or go to school for it.  But they have picked up things here or there at their friends studios.

THIS IS NOT HIS FAULT… or at least I don’t think it is.  I don’t know what his GPA is. <EDIT> He has an A.

The things that we are having to show him are beginner level!  These are the things he should have learned in his first or second semester.  What are they teaching these kids?  Are they just sitting in class and talking about flowers and bumblebees?  It’s totally retarded.  Now I know that when this kid graduates, he won’t pursue recording.  But SOMEONE in his class is going to graduate not knowing his ass from a hole in the ground.

<END RANT><EDIT>

So he and I had a discussion about all of it at the end of the night after the band had finished and left.  He seemed more frustrated than I at the situation.  He told me that half the time the professors bitch about the music industry rather than teaching them the cirriculum.  Why buy amazing studio gear for a college if the professors aren’t going to use it?!? I’ll take it off your stupid hands!

The scary thing is that I’m talking about music production.  Could this be happening for other professions?  Like government related jobs or worse… doctors and nurses?  It’s extremely scary what education in our country has become.

So I tried to give him some encouragement as to what he did right and what he could have done differently.  It’s really hard to teach a lot to one person in one day so I don’t expect him to be a pro after the session.  On the lighter side, he is an artist manager and wants to start bringing his clients to me for engineering/tracking.  I think it will be good for the both of us all around.  The obvious for me: pay bills and expand portfolio.  For him: he’ll be helping his clients get valuable studio time for cheap and he will also get to sit in on the sessions and learn some things here or there.

But here’s my biggest statement about what I saw in his situation.  If you are not receiving the information you want from the school you attend… get off your ass and go get the information yourself.  It’s out there somewhere.  Higher learning is not just about the school you attend, but the head knowledge you get along the road.

The title really has nothing to do with the blog.  I’m sitting at the 8 ball venue and Frank Sinatra is playing.  It’s jazz night.  A slow night to say the least. Tony brought me out since I really had nothing to do and wanted to see the venue.  I installed the lighting system before my accident and had not even had the chance to see it open.  Looks/sounds good.

So I’ve realized recently that one of the reasons I haven’t been moving forward with my ‘career’ (other than my jeep accident) is that I keep wanting to work on things in the past.  I reformatted my G5 this past week and now it’s running sweet.  I have a great software drum sampler called Strike that I wanted to use on some past projects I still had sitting around.  I spent an entire day working on ONE song.  Sampling, mixing, mastering.  Then realized these guys aren’t even a band anymore.  Why am I working on music that doesn’t exist anymore.  No one is going to care but me.  So decided to delete a bunch of sessions that are already ‘done’.  That’s old shit.  Doesn’t matter how good it sounds.  Those tones were then.

I did decide to keep two sessions for good reason.  I keep a band called ‘I Create’ because I actually really like their music.  The main vocals were aweful, so I dumped those.  But I’m going to remix it and sample the drums so that they sound huge.  Then I’ll keep it for my listening pleasure.  Then I kept Cami Leblanc’s session.

Here’s the reason.  The tone’s are solid.  The session was real good thanks to some real good players.  It was hastily tracked but nothing that some editing can’t fix.  But I feel cheated… in a way.  I engineered it but didn’t have time to mix.  I worked it out to get it mixed at Nickle and Dime and then we were going to have it mastered with Glen Shick.  Oh yeah, it would have sounded prime.  INSTEAD, they went with some random friend of a friend to do the mix and master.  Now to his credit, he did engineer for Stone Temple Pilots and a bunch of other big names.  But here’s the kicker.

NOTE TO BANDS: You get what you pay for.  This guy was only charging us like 300 bucks to mix and master.  Here’s why.  He thought he was getting sessions that were already bounced down to like 5-10 tracks, not 3 sessions containing about 40 tracks each.  So what happened?  He did a real quick, crap job.  The mix was off and the master was quiet.  And there was nothing I could say or do, because we got what we paid for.

So I decided that I’m going to mix those 3 tracks and make them sound like they should.  As soon as I finish those 2 sessions, it’s all eyes forward.

I have a session this tuesday, supposedly.  A broadcasting student is paying me to let him record a band at my house for his class project.  I’ll get to use it for my portfolio as well though because I’m sure I’ll end up producing the session.  Then I have a hip hop weekend at Atrain’s apt on the 29th.  I’m expecting that to be a good weekend/session.

I’ll be posting up tracks very soon so you know what I’m working on.

Ok so maybe it wasn’t the saddest of all weeks, it was more just a play on words with a converge song (the saddest day).

So Ed McMahon passes away.  Sad but understandable.  Kind of like when George Burns passed away, we all excepted it because after all the man was like 100.  But still Ed McMahon was a cultural icon.

Farrah Fawcett passed as well.  Sad cancer story (if you watched her 2hr special on dateline).  But she wasn’t really a focal point in my generation so as sad as it sounds, it really didn’t affect me much.

Now what did affect me pretty hard was Michael Jackson’s passing.  I didn’t cry if you’re wondering.  But it did strike me that he was one of the and if not THE greatest pop icon in my lifetime.  When I was kid, I listened to his music non-stop.  Somewhere in growing up, I lost track of my love for his music and I’m really bummed that it took his passing for me to appreciate again, what he contributed to music and video industries.

I really blows my mind how much influence that man had over the people of the world.  We (EC, Speezy, and I) watched all the live videos and just couldn’t believe how insane people went for him.  They showed a live video from Japan where Michael enters the stage by exploding out from underneath the stage.  He stands statue still for about 2 minutes and then proceeds to slowly take his glasses off and put them away in his pocket.  The entire time, the crowd is going batshit crazy.  Kids are crying, pulling their hair out, passing out, and having to be crowd surfed and carried away by security.  I can only think of two other artists that had that sort of influence and that would be the Beatles and Elvis.

I know to a lot of people his music might seem cheesy on the surface, but seriously sit down, get blazed if you prefer, and listen to the Bad album from front to back. Off the Wall and Thiller are amazing albums had down, but I think Michael and Quincy really got it together on the Bad album.  Some of the instrumentation used are some of the same things you hear in current popular hip hop and rap albums.  It was almost like a bridge connecting the funk of stevie wonder and motown to 50 cent and Ludacris.

I do think it’s sad how Michael spent the last 10 years of his life.  I’m not agreeing with the way he conducted himself in certain parts of his personal life, but at the same point, I do believe people took advantage of him and drove him to insanity.  I read a blog today that stated that one of the ‘molested’ children admitted to lying about their accusations of Michael.  For 20 million dollars they just ‘got over it’ but now with his passing they can’t take the guilt anymore?  We truly live in sick, dark world.

On the real though, I’m trying to find some MJ vinyls and CD’s. I have all of them on MP3 but I really would love to have hard copies.  God willing, if I ever have kids, I would totally want to pass them down to my children as classics.  Just to note: an MP3 will never sound as good as a CD or vinyl.  So if you’re going to hand music down to your kids and say that it means the world to you, the quality of it better mean just as much.

So yeah Michael will be missed by a shit load of people, but I think it was probably for the best.  I think the man will finally get some rest from all the chaos.  RIP

… and then Billy Mays dies?? What the crap?? That’s a lot of commercials I’m going to miss.  Although he did drink a LOT so who knows.

So I know I’ve been “doing soooo good” and I’m sure it’s not THAT much longer, but seriously this is getting old.  I just want to be able to walk up the stairs and record all day.  Video games and TV is great, but I don’t think I’m going to want any more of these things once I’m walking and able to work.  Oh man, I never thought I’d miss working this much.  I definitely have been blessed with a few good friends that come by and keep me sane.  Kyle is my lunch bitch.  He comes by like every day for lunch, what a dude!  And Kara has been such a sweetheart to come over frequently and watch horror movies.

Rehab has been going well though, although I feel like it’s going to be years until I’m walking good again.  Alright maybe I’m exaggerating.  I’m walking around really good in the pool, which is a start.  So the next step is walking well with the bars.  If my stupid R knee wasn’t bustin me up so much, I’m sure I’d already be walking. BOO.

Luckily, I do get to have some fun this week.  I’ll be engineering at ATLfest this week.  Load in on Wednesday and then performances on Thursday and Friday.  The last day is Saturday but Josh can take over for me, so I’m going to go home and sleep.  I’m also going to try to hustle records of the talent search bands.  There’s like 30 bands playing a song each.  If I can hustle it right at $25 a song, I could make some real good money.  Which I could pay off some of my hospital bills with! Right?

So when I started writing this blog, I had a lot I wanted to say, and now I really don’t.  I think it’s because I’m totally tuned into the NatGeo channel right now.  Its been 3 hours of LockDown.  Man I love prison shows!!

And remember, Be happy for what you have! assholes.

Here are 5 things that I’ve really been stoked about this week, in no particular order.  Chime in if you’d like with your top 5.

1. New Daily Show/Colbert Report Episodes
2. Biz Markie’s “The Best of Cold Chillin” Feat. ‘He’s Just a Friend’
3. Himsa – Curseworship
4. New Season of WEEDS! starts in the next couple of days.
5. www.southparkzone.com (random episode button)

No I wasn’t having sex… sinners.  It was my first day at rehab.

It went significantly better than I thought.  The rehab center is literally a block away from my house, which is great because it makes it extremely hard to be tardy.  The place is huge and the ladies are real nice.  Yeah ladies.  There wasn’t even one male working at the center.  That’s a little weird to me.

The appointment started like any other, medical Q&A, exercises/stretches, etc.  But here’s the cool part.  I got to stand up for like 3 whole minutes.  Hey ass, it was awesome to me… But extremely odd.  I obviously had to use the parallel beams to support my weight being that I’m only allowed partial weight bearing.  The odd part was that when I looked down, I felt as if I wasn’t controlling my legs.  Almost as if I was looking down at someone else’s.  Even moving my leg forward a little, took me a good minute and didn’t feel like I was really doing it.  I do know that my arms are going to be extremely strong after rehab is over.

So I’ll be doing 3 days a week at rehab.  2 days will be spent in their indoor pool and the other day will be focusing on land walking.  I’m looking forward to it but on the down side, I feel like it’s going to be a good long while before I’m walking again.

I never realized how great things are until I wasn’t able to do them anymore.  I love hugs and honestly, hugs are worthless if you are sitting down.  My good friend Dani told me today that she can’t wait till I’m walking so she can actually get a good hug from me.  We started hanging out again right after my accident, so it’s been about 2 years since I’ve given her a real hug.  I’ve never wanted a hug so bad after she brought this to my attention.  Also, playing guitar is way better standing up than sitting down.  It’s just not the same sitting in front of a bunch of guitar cabs.  You can’t feel the vibrations throughout your legs as much.

So moral of the story, if you can walk: go out and do as many things as you can, that you might not be able to do if your legs didn’t function.  Be excited about everything you have.

So if you’ve navigated here from Facebook to read this post, I apologize in advance.  It’s only been 2 days and I’m really done with talking about my healing progress.  The doctor really didn’t give me much hope/confidence.  I left the hospital feeling very confused and upset.  So I’m to the point where I don’t want to talk about my legs and instead find continous activities to keep me occupied like none of this is happening.

But here’s the main jist of what happened.  My appointment was at 1045.  The day took forever as seems to be the norm at Grady.  Once back to the examining room, the doctor showed up looking and acting like maybe he snorted just a little too much blow before entering my waiting room.  Seemed to have the jitters if you dig.  He proceeded to start our relationship off by asking me all sorts of questions that are normally written in my file such as, “When was your accident? What all (bones) did you break? Why haven’t you been walking yet? Did they take x-rays of both legs or just your right leg?”  After I answered the questions and explained to him that the last doctor (6 weeks prior) had informed me that my legs were not healed enough and if I tried to stand up, I would most likely break my legs again.  His response was, “Well I think we need to get you out of that wheelchair and start walking.  I DON’T CARE WHAT THE X-RAYS SAY, we need to get you in physical therapy.  My mind interprets that sentence the same as “I don’t care what the x-ray says regarding your terminal brain cancer, but you’re going to live to a 100.”

So I reitterated what the previous doctor said, but more in a question form as to see his opinion regarding the possibility of me breaking my legs again.  I wish I could show you the face he made, but that added to what he said was basically ‘I mean we do run that chance.’  Of which I was thinking, “This ISN’T a game of CRAPS!”  He then scared the crap out of me for the next 5 minutes.  He talked about how my right leg may never heal itself on its own.  There’s a good chance they would have to do another surgery to do bone graphs to fully heal the leg.  Then talked about another surgery situation that would have to happen if there was any mechanical failure.  That would be relating to the plate bending because of pressure or a possibility of a screw breaking.  But for both of these situations, he didn’t give me a time frame.  So I don’t know if this is in 5 m0nths or 20 years.  What was the big kicker was he talked about us being in a ‘race.’  Apparently a race to see what breaks first, my left leg or the rod.  Funny thing is, it’s a titanium rod.  Pretty sure I’d have to be run over by a Panzer Tank for that to break?

So he wrote me a prescription to start rehab tomorrow for partial weight bearing.  They will work with me on using crutches to walk so I’m not putting all my weight on my legs.  I’ll be doing rehab three days a week.  I go back to the hospital in 4 weeks and luckily will be seeing a different doctor.  I’m going to tell this wonderful story to the doctor at the rehab in hopes maybe they can pull my x-rays and give me a more descriptive and informative diagnosis.  Hopefully they can actually show me the x-rays this time, as this doctor didn’t.  For all I know, he could have been looking at the x-rays for Bob Sonofabitch down the hall in room 4b.

It looks like I’ll be kicking it at home for a good while.  I’m getting a GAMEFLY account and will try to rent and beat as many video games as possible during this period. I’ll hopefully start recording soon as well, once I get up on the crutches.  But I’m always here, so feel free to come by.  The lovely Kyle Troop comes by for lunch almost everyday, what a cutiepie.

Moral of the story.  Don’t stay out till 3am playing pool, you will get in a bad car accident and have to deal with idiots that somehow got a job at Grady Hospital.

It blows my mind when I see adults that act as immature as a 14 year old girl.

I’m some where in North GA with Echoing Angels. We are at a church that was described as a Bapti-Costal church. I’m not really sure what that means. What I have observed about these people is that they like to hoot and holler during the service (pentacostal) but they don’t like their service music loud (baptist). It’s odd. But they have a 50+ year old sound guy. He knows what he is talking about for the most part, when it comes to sound. Although I think he might have lost a good bit of his high end because his mixes are really tinty. But anyways, the man is just extremely demanding. He complains about us having to repatch channels but insisted on us using their aviom system. How inconvenient. I told me that they were out of mic stands. No biggie. During the morning services we used their house drum kit which was in a sound damped shield/cage. For the afternoon and nighttime services, we were using our drum set which would be set up in the middle of the stage. When i went to take the mics off the first drum kit to put on the secondary kit, he got in my face and told me not to touch his mics (please). When I made a comment later about him being rude to me about the mics, he stormed off like a child. And later, he makes a comment to me about me picking on him??

I’m just going to shake my head on this one and listen to my ipod. Never been treated this rudely by another sound guy. Hope I never have to again, either.

Other than that, yesterday’s fest near Tallahassee was a great time. The weather was great. One of the other bands paid me 25 bucks to engineer their set. I really didn’t care about the money but definitely thought it to be humorous. On a good note, they are interested in taking me on the road some this summer. Note: They have a huge bus with 8 bunks and a big screen TV. OH YEAH.