About Me
hello all! i consider myself more than anything else, a recordist. is that even a real word? i guess it doesn't matter. what that means is i have had no disciplined training in, well, anything! i can set up a microphone and push the record button, or click on it these days. i realized my passion for music early in high school and got my first drum set when i was 15. since then i acquired a couple guitars, a bass, a couple old synth's, and other various instruments. i gradually became more interested in recording sounds. i played drums in a couple of bands, but all the other instruments were not taken so seriously. i really only played them to put together weird jams so i could practice recording. it was a lot of fun, and for a short period of time i really aspired to be a much better guitar player. however, i just couldn't suppress my passion for the production side of things. this myspace profile is set up to showcase the wide variety of work that i do and have done. there might be a song with me on drums playing with just a keyboard player. there might be some noisy shit with who knows where the sounds and samples came from. for that, i'll do my best to give credit where it's due. i played drums in an un-named band with sean hall and alan baumbush, all of us formerly of the band called la radio ment. there might be a song from either of those two bands. there are occasionally songs from bands i've recorded. and there are usually going to be songs written(??), performed, and recorded by me. there is an album of mine that has never really seen the light of day called the many moods of kenji. it's about a cat that my wife and i had who went crazy before he died young. he was very cool, and it was very sad. the recordings were made from about 2000 until about early 2007. kenji passed in december, 2003, he was 4 years old. there will be obvious differences in the quality of some of these recordings. i progressed from a boombox in the corner of the room to a cassette 4 track, to an adat recorder, and then more recently, a computer. i started buying nicer microphones, and finally, after all these years of scewing it up, learned how to use a compressor without being too heavy handed with it. so, i think in the last year i have improved on my skills very much. working on the atomic motel's album in 2005 right up to jason mullinax's no good for eyeballs record during the first half of 2008 has been a fine tuning of my education. i had the basic skills before all that, but during this time i learned the more intangible skills, like how to communicate with musicians in the studio, how to keep things simple, and how to keep myself in a positive frame of mind to help provide an atmosphere where the musicians feel comfortable enough to try something new and/or be able to focus on their music. so now, after all that, my wife and i have fallen from the western world and landed in china. she took a job here, just north of dalian, china. we sold our house, gave away our cars, and hit the road. it's been almost 2 months although it feels like it's been much longer. we never thought we would ever visit china, and now we're living here! i struggled while learning a little german and spanish in school. and here i am now, learning how to speak mandarin chinese! of course a 4 year old chinese kid has a better vocabulary than i do right now, but frankly, i'm amazed at how much i've learned already. immersion is the shit! so, my wife is a teacher, and i have taken a job at her school as a teacher's assistant. there's a blog entry about my job on the blogspot. you can search it as "ni hao our adventures in dalian city, china". i miss having a basement recording studio, but this is great. in the next month i'll have a modest enough set up so i can start producing my own music again. i miss recording bands but i also miss recording myself playing whatever undisciplined crap that comes from my twisted, sarcastic mind! i'm also looking forward to getting the weird remix thing going with some peoples' music. i plan on working with jason mullinax, the atomic motel, and maybe sean k. preston to start with. if anyone else is interested, let me know and we'll figure out how to get me some tracks here in china. ok everyone, i think that's enough for now, stay cool! Brian McCoubrey, september, 2008.
