Bajkowski.com

When my dad gets into town, home improvement just happens at a crazy pace. I wish I would have such a drive when it comes to getting things done around the house, although in which case my house would probably resemble more of a palace than a house, which might look ever so slightly out of place in the current neighborhood. Anyhow, here are just a few things that we got knocked out of the way. And by we, I mean mostly my dad with my help that probably was less than stellar at times, but every little bit helps when it comes to home improvement. Anyhow, first we tackled the back side of my house where recently I had some repairs done around the chimney and roof. Plenty of painting had to be done, but with good weather on our side we knocked that out rather quickly. Next we tackled the patio door, which was quite a project. We replaced several rotten wood pieces, fixed up the insulation, fixed rusted areas on the door, and did quite a bit of caulking. This was all in addition to the middle part of the French door that we set out to fix initially, but that’s how it goes sometimes. When you set out do something, do it right and do it all the way, that was the mantra. But wait, there was more: We also finished up the upstairs guest bathroom. All the wall painting was done; all the towel hangers and toilet paper holders were installed, caulking around the vanity and bathtub was done, and finally a repaint of the baseboard and door finished it all. I have to say it looks very nice and modern; the only thing needed is maybe an accent shelf or pictures to make it come alive a little bit. Of the four rooms upstairs, two are now completely renewed. Finishing the studio is next on the agenda. The studio requires mostly some more paint and definitely new blinds since the current ones are absolutely hideous. Finally, in a spectacular one day effort, my dad managed to replace all the trim around the chimney, which was in a rather sad state. Overall, I think that by now we have addresses just about all the issues that were noted by the inspector when I purchased the house a little more than a year ago. Now don’t get me wrong, with a house there are always a million more things to do, but at least we got some of the major ones out of the way.

I’ve been adding quite a few finishing touches over the last few weeks to this track. Mainly, I’ve been reading up on the mastering process, track levels, compression, side chaining and the like. It’s actually quite a complicated and difficult process, and I have to admit that after reading about it extensively I would be pushing it if I said that I comprehended more than 5% of all I read. But, with the knowledge gained I did the best I could for now. The levels on this latest version should be significantly better than on the initial one, meaning that the beat is much punchier and meatier, and the baseline no longer interferes with the beat and the rest of the song. All the different instruments are also better balanced, so there should be nothing overly quiet or loud and distracting in the track. As a result of all the above, the track should be much closer in volume to commercial releases, although it still is not quite as loud, but at least it is within a reasonable decibel level. I’ve tested it on several speaker configurations and it sound pretty good on anything but laptop speakers which simply don’t have the range to reproduce the beats and the bass line properly – so if you’re using a laptop, please plug in some decent headphones. Anyhow, enjoy and hit me back with comments and suggestions.

If anyone has a good alternative for SoundCloud I would really appreciate if you could share it with me. When the service is up it is a great for exploring and sharing music, but the key here is, when it is up. Over the last few weeks it has been down on several occasions. And during the times it was up it was slow as hell, where things such as editing and saving track information was taking forever. Currently the service is down again, so I figured I would just upload the track to my own site, where at least the uptime is a little more predictable. The is the first track I've ever produced and a lot of feedback is defnitely appreciated. It was supposed to be more on the Deep House side of things, but it ended up being much more of a Tech House track. This just shows you that in music you never know where your creative ideas will take you. Keep in mind that I don't really have a music production background or anything like that, so this track is more or less based on my DJing experience. I tend to be knob happy when DJing and I like to mess with tracks, which seems to transcend into the production, although I tried to keep it to a minimum. Also it is more of a rough cut in that this was the first time in a long long time that I played around with a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), especially one that I've never used before. A lot of the things in the track are experiments that somehow worked out better than expected. Anyhow, give it a listen and let me know what you think, and hopefully enjoy it at least a little bit.