Ryan Houlette, Singer/Songwriter, Original Folk-Rock

Lots o' tracks up!

2009-01-13T08:45:00.002-05:00

I've updated the tracks on the various social networking sites so you can now stream Save What You Can in its entirety. You can also, if you are so inclined, now purchase high-quality versions of any or all tracks from any of my albums on Bandcamp - just follow the Music link.

Save What You Can

2008-12-18T09:24:00.004-05:00

That's the title of the new album, and it looks like this:

Head over to the Music page to hear some samples!

IT IS DONE!

2008-12-15T13:40:00.002-05:00

The bits are on the disc and the art is at the printer. Expect to see sample tracks up here in the next couple of days (and some of you out there can look for packages in the mail).

The end is nigh

2008-12-09T09:24:00.002-05:00

Just one song left to mix down tonight, and a final mastering session tomorrow to fix any remaining glitches, and I'll be done. How do professional recording engineers do this day in and day out? Even doing it a couple of hours a day my head sometimes feels like it's about to explode. At this point I'm starting to wonder if everything I'm doing is just making it all sound worse.

And there's always the unpleasant surprises, like the clipping on that vocal that somehow didn't get noticed during any of the preceding stages, and now it's too late to fix. Or wait, did I introduce that somehow with something I just did? *crawls back into mixing hell*

One week...

2008-12-01T09:04:00.002-05:00

...give or take. After some long sessions over the Thanksgiving break, I'm now halfway done with mastering. The album also now officially has a title, and Drey just sent me a first look at the cover art last week as well -- and it's fantastic!

So, five songs left to master, and final artwork, and then album #4 will be unveiled. Or unleashed. Or releashed?

Recording is finished!

2008-11-18T07:41:00.002-05:00

I wrapped up the last bit of recording for the last track "The World" this past weekend. I can hardly believe it. Now I just need to remix and master all of the tracks over the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile my good friend Drey is working on the album cover, as he has for all of my previous CDs. If all goes well, this thing should be finally, finally done before Christmas.

For the want of a title the album was lost

2008-10-27T08:17:00.002-04:00

I spent several hours in the studio working on "Four Colors" yesterday, and that reggae song extraordinaire, and more importantly, track nine of ten, is now complete! One to go, plus a little remixing and mastering, and this project will be finished at long last.

Except that it lacks a title still. So far, inspiration has failed to strike. When you've spent four years on an album, the pressure is pretty high to come up with a worthy name for it. If I don't think of something good soon, I may have to resort to Internet random name generators.

Looking beyond this unnamed album

2008-09-09T09:02:00.002-04:00

I'm starting to see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel with this album now. What will it be like to actually be done with it? What will I work on next? It'll be the first time in years that I don't have a backlog of already-written songs to record. Seems like a great opportunity to try something new and different, though what exactly that will be I haven't a clue yet.

I finished laying down the infrastructure (drums, bass, rhythm guitar) for "Grinding the Mill" last weekend, so now on to the really fun part: layering in electric guitar and vocals. And after that, just two songs to go!

Dauntless!

2008-07-02T13:56:00.002-04:00

Yes, another song is in the can, more or less. The nice thing about picking up the pace of recording is that when I hit the inevitable "I have no idea where to go with this song" roadblock, the fact that I hit the same roadblock on the previous song is still fresh in my mind. Knowing that I've successfully overcome it in the past makes it easier to just bulldoze through that roadblock.

All of these tracks will still need another remix. It's amazing how something that sounds great on my mp3 player and on my studio reference speakers sounds muddy and gross on my home stereo system. I haven't figured out how those real mixing engineers pull off the trick of sounding good everywhere.

I was listening to a K.T. Tunstall track the other day, and I was struck by what a difference great mixing and mastering makes. It just... popped. It made me want to listen to the track right from the outset. That's a pretty neat trick. Not an easy one, either, unfortunately.

Picking up the pace

2008-06-17T12:43:00.004-04:00

I finished a very rough mix of another track - "This Life" - on Sunday. I'm rather pleased with it. I tried out a few new tricks that I think worked out well (thanks, Gomez). It's good to feel like you're actually getting better at something with practice.

And it's only been a few weeks since the last track. Maybe this CD is finally gathering some momentum....

And another one falls into place

2008-05-22T10:23:00.005-04:00

I finished a rough mix of "Small Screen" the other day. I'm now officially at the halfway mark for this CD, and it's only taken three and a half years to get here. Wow.

The other interesting thing about this track is that it's one of the oldest songs on the album. I wrote it back in 1995, so it's taken 13 years for me to record it. Nobody ever said I was fast.

Scratch Trax

2008-03-03T08:12:00.003-05:00

I bit the bullet yesterday and laid down scratch tracks for all of the remaining songs on CD IV. Here's the tentative track list (unordered):

Lullaby
Grinding the Mill
Four Colors
Pieces
Dauntless
2000 Gods
More Than Meets the Eye
Alice
This Life
Small Screen

Jumping on the blogwagon

2008-03-02T08:59:00.002-05:00

For centuries I've dreamed of putting up a real blog on this site. Now my dream has finally come true. Look what a nice organized place this has become -- links over there on the side, a site feed, and you can even leave comments. Woohoo!

Elsewhere on the Interwebs

2008-02-08T21:38:00.000-05:00

I've now got a presence on iLike, last.fm, and Facebook, along with some streaming music.

More Than Meets the Eye

2007-03-23T21:24:00.000-04:00

I just finished recording the third track on my next CD. I wrote this years before Michael Bay even thought of doing a Transformers movie, I swear. (You can hear the streaming version on my MySpace page.)