Winter Is For Writing
Most of you know I thrive on projects. The more ambitious, the more I toss and turn over it, the better. Sometimes I remember projects with more fondness than I honestly had for them at the time. Writing projects can be like that, but I remind myself that this could just be important practice, training for a career in who-knows-what. This winter I’m revisiting music reviews, and trying to review one new release a week and maybe one of my favorite albums weekly or bi-weekly too. The good news is I put much more work into the details first this time, and I feel like I can make a more objective statement about the music itself than with my prior setup. I’m using a rubric much like written compositions are scored against, which you can see here. I created the rubric to cover the things I find most important, and also make it a point to reward innovation, originality, and creativity.
I’m also using high-quality headphones instead of my 5.1 surround sound system. The Sennheiser HD25-1 II is known for being neutral and true to the source, with tighter bass than other models I tried while deciding. I justify this by my experience as a music producer, and referenced the headphones with several songs I created and found the bass to be heavy but true to the sound I was trying to achieve in my work. They’re being fed into a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card, and all equalizer settings between software and hardware are set to flat. With my end of things sussed I had to decide on a source. I can’t sink 10 bucks a week into a new release every week so I chose to use a music streaming service, and decided on MOG.com for their 320kbps CBR MP3 streaming. That’s going to have to be good enough given that I’m not going to buy the discs every week and I don’t even know how critics get review copies of CDs, and honestly I’m hard-pressed to notice a difference between an MP3 at 320 and a CD.
MOG is also writer friendly and has a section for blogs and reviews, and I plan to embrace that community and see where it leads. Like most of my best projects there’s a fair amount of making it up on the fly, but the only way to get it right is to find out how to do it wrong.
The first review should go up either tonight or tomorrow. Haven’t decided on an album, or whether I want to write reviews day-and-date with the release, but we shall see.
