Oh Brother / My NY Restos Top 10

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Quick shoutout to my one regular reader (unless I have more?!?). My friend messaged me saying they’d read my last post and I felt very:

:’)

I do this for my fan(s?)

This week flew by. Definitely a bit of a special occasion since my brother came up to visit. Didn’t get much time to work on music but we had a pretty good time overall. I realized during rona there just generally isn’t that much to do. Neither of us are big drinkers and most of everything else is closed so we pretty much just ended up eating out and watching movies.

In non chronological order we went to

  1. Momo ramen for ramen and dumplings. The ramen got the job done. Wasn’t the best I’ve ever had but scratched that ramen itch

  2. Homeslice Pizza. Faithful reader(s?) will recognize this as my favorite pizza spot in my home neighborhood. So far I’ve had the margherita, regular cheese, meat lovers, square slice and loved them all except for the square slice. Shout out to the cashier lady who’s nice to me everytime :’) and is potentially starting to recognize me as a regular (I blame the mask if she isn’t)

  3. The local bodega for a BEC and halal chicken over rice. Man that halal chicken came out of nowhere. Was skeptical when I saw how they were cooking the chicken. Was annoyed that they were charging $8. But was pleasantly surprised when I tasted it. Good job guys. Also for the record I’m definitely recognized as a regular at my local bodega. Indisputable

    1. The BEC was good too. $4.

  4. hanon for udon. Mentioned this place before as well. We ended up driving here after Home Depot and eating out in their patio. Udon was bomb as usual but when they first served us they forgot the chopsticks. Ended up eating a lil with my hands cuz I’m a bad boy B). Besides that we got udon chips with tofu cream cheese (first time having tofu cream cheese! Pretty airy and almost more like whip cream than cream cheese. Pretty good dish overall). They also gave us free karaage. I still like them and would go back.

  5. Chuko for ramen (my brother loves his ramen. He wanted to get ramen a third time at ramen danbo but I vetoed). I had their kimchi ramen and it was great. Almost tasted like dukbokki (maybe a brothier version of it). Heavy. Had to walk it off but the taste was worth it.

  6. Calexico for nachos. These nachos are the best nachos I’ve had since I moved to Brooklyn. Expensive but delicious. Most restaurants just slop together a buncha salsa, chips, protein and call it nachos but these guys created layers. Different flavors too. Sour, sweet, tangy. All the good stuff. Will be back but this meal was hard to walk off as well.

Besides the food we watched the new Bill and Ted movie (stupid but in a likable way) and some Dexter episodes. We also went to Home Depot to pick up some PVC so I can build a new recording booth. Excited to see how that turns out.

Yeah great week overall but I’m excited to get back into my normal routine as well. Going back on my media purge. Also have the next two days PTO so that should be nice readjusting back to my normal flow.

Last thing—I have a first date tomorrow! Pretty excited about this one. We’ve been texting back and forth (a lot more than I usually do tbh) for the past week. Expectations have been heightened (then purposely lowered after we both agreed to lower them). Pretty excited tho… I think it’ll go great but if it doesn’t I’ll just write a real angsty song about it like I might have done in my high school days if I wrote songs back then :’)

Actually one last thing (as requested by my regular reader)—here’s my current top ten list of favorite restaurants in New York so far. The order does not mean anything and I’ve included my favorite dish from the restaurant.

  • Tatsu Ramen: Chicken ramen

    • This dish will keep you very warm in the cold winter. Helped me get through some lonely nights

  • Mala Project: Custom dry pot

    • This one’s definitely a love/hate for me but I cannot think of New York without thinking of this dish. I ate a ton of it when I first came to New York but as time goes on even the slightest bite of Szechuan food is enough to send my stomach into panic mode. My usual bowl is tofu pocket, sliced eye of round and funsize sausage… yeah maybe not the healthiest bowl :\

  • Los Tacos No 1: Pork tacos and corn cheese

    • I’m sure most people who live in NY knows about these tacos. They’re great, relatively cheap. Idk how many people try the corn cheese when they go but I really liked it. Tangy, creamy, fatty. Ooh baby

  • Homeslice Pizza: Regular cheese slice

    • Gotta shout out the neighborhood pizzeria. May not be the best slice in New York but it’s the best slice for me at this time in my life

  • Samba Kitchen: Stroganoff

    • To be clear I’d never had stroganoff before I tried it here but I was really blown away by how tasty it was. Yeah maybe my expectations were lowered because the first time I had it was after a long day of work ordering Uber Eats to my office and I didn’t really care about anything and was just generally hungry. BUT it was delicious

Intermission: I think I’m running out steam. The first five were definitely top of mind. The next five I’m starting to wrack my brain a lil. Does not mean that I love these restaurants any less… just means they’re not as memorable to me :’)

  • Pelicana Chicken: Korean Fried Chicken

    • I just have fun pre rona memories of coming here with my work friends after stressful days of work and just chilllllllling. Korean fried chicken is the best fried chicken imo

  • Mr. Taka: Ramen (don’t remember exactly what I got)

    • I don’t remember exactly what I got here but the ramen was great. Would definitely have gone back if corona hadn’t happened and made it hard to get around.

  • Medusa Tavern: Zucchini chips

    • I hesitate a lil to put this on the list since I’ve only had them once recently but the zucchini chips were great. Will definitely go back again since it’s close to my apt

  • Veselka: Pierogies

    • Coming here with a friend. Coming here at 2AM when I couldn’t fall asleep. Ordering delicious fried pierogies (no no to the boiled ones), hot apple cider. Good times

  • Lions Tigers and Squares: Square pizza

    • Best square pizza for me in NY

Honorable mentions:

  • Benemon

  • Baba’s Pierogies

  • Eataly

  • Halal Guys (back off haters)

  • Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao

  • 886

  • Katsu Hama

  • Jeju Noodle Bar

Yeah that’s about it. Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments below (aka messaging me directly bc comments are disabled)

Weather [week 4]

Damn it’s already been a bit more than a month since I got to New York. This past week was same old same old. Highlights include:

  • Riding from DUMBO to Red Hook. I went with a friend and we tried getting Hometown BBQ but the wait was too long. We ended up going to Four and Twenty Blackbirds for pie. Got the coffee custard slice and a plum slice. Was not the biggest fan…

  • Went to Ise in East Village for Soba. That was pretty good. Not as good as hanon (udon) from last week but it was tasty. Would probably go back but stick to the noodles

  • My brother came up to visit from Pennsylvania! He just arrived today and we ended up getting ramen at Momo Ramen

Yeah keeping it short because I’m tired af from biking all over this city. Ended up recording vocals and trying to mix them. Was a huge pain in the ass. Ahh man I feel so lazy but I think I’ll punt the mixing to my friend. For next week I just plan on rerecording the vocals as well as wrapping up the production work and I’ll send the stems over to my friend.

Anyways, here’s this week’s version:

Weather [week 3]

What a doozy of a week. Highlights:

  • Actually went on a date!

  • Saw a buncha friends and tried some nice restaurants for outdoor dining. Went to hanon (really good udon), andante for ramen and nom wah for dim sum

  • Rode my bike a ton. Prospect Heights, Chinatown, Williamsburg

  • Went to a farmers market for the first time in years. Got a small watermelon, apple cider, two peaches, and a package of andouille sausage. Honestly a bit more expensive than I expected

Anyways—straight to the point:

This week was spent on vocals. Really got my hands dirty trying to record everything. A number of different factors came into play here but the two main things I tried to tackle were

  • Recording environment

  • Feeling/feasibility

Recording environment

I’ve been trying to use a new condenser mic I bought recently (WA87). The thing with this mic (and condenser mics in general) is that they’re super sensitive. This is great in studio settings because you want the vocal to be picked up with as much clarity as possible. The issue comes about if you’re recording in a non treated room i.e. a room that might have a lot of reflective walls that generate reverb and other unwanted elements that end up in the final recording. You generally want the vocal to be as dry as possible for 1. clarity and 2. manipulability.

So the first issue I had to handle was recording environment. I asked around to a few friends and I had the following options:

  • Switch to a dynamic mic (less sensitive to sound so the idea was it wouldn’t pick up the room reflections much)

  • Record under a bunch of blankets

I was kinda wtf when I heard about the blanket idea but apparently there’s a precedent.

I set up the blankets and switched out to the dynamic mic (Shure SM58) and it sounded a bit drier but I ended up preferring the tone of the WA87 so I switched back to that.

I like to think the blanket recording helped. It gets super hot recording under the blanket booth (especially with the NY weather heating up again—damn you fickle new york weather) but great art takes sacrifice bud. I literally end up sweating through my clothes and have to shower after every recording session but I think (and greatly hope and wonder if) this blanket recording booth is worth it.

Feeling/feasibility

My ears are more ambitious than my voice. I always seem to produce the song higher than my voice can handle. Even after I got my recording environment more in check I found I wasn’t able to get the high notes in the original key.

I tried recording in the original key a few times but my voice kept pinching up towards the high end. After a few sessions I figured I should just pitch it down. I pitched the entire song a whole step down. At that point the song was significantly easier to sing but there were two issues. First the EQ/tone I had in mind when producing was kinda thrown out the window. A whole step is too much of a change to preserve the tonal feel imo. Second the feeling wasn’t there as much. The high notes may be harder to sing but I do think they produce that feeeeeeliiing. If the vocal doesn’t preserve the feeling it’s gonna be hard to carry.

So after a number of wasted sessions I ended up pitching the song one half step lower than the original key. A good balance between singability and feeling.

Final thoughts

Yeah that’s about it for this week. I kind of want to not write on Sundays because I end up cramming the music in during the day and writing late into the night. But if I don’t do Sundays will I even have time on Mondays during the workweek? I don’t know. Who cares hahahah.

Yeah next steps:

I have a big a list of todos ongoing but the main thing I need to focus on continues to be vocals. Some EQ stuff, compression for clarity/focus. Beyond that I also have a bunch of backing vocals and harmonies that I have recorded that I have to comp and produce. Man comping vocals is such a pain sometimes. Vocalign is definitely a huge time saver though. Definitely wish someone had told me about it earlier.

I think if I get the vocals down the song the track will be in a pretty good place. I’m still debating whether to mix it myself or send it off for mixing and just focus on my next track. Probably send it out because I’m lazy but also because it might be a great learning experience to see how a professional might mix it (but also mostly because I’m lazy and want to save time).

Weather [week 2]

Well well well well well…

It’s been a great week overall but haven’t worked as much on Weather as I wanted to. No really good excuses. Just got busy with other projects and/or living my life. This past week I ended up writing a birthday card song for Dad’s 56th birthday. He’d been asking me (jokingly I think) to finish a song for his birthday so I figured I’d put something together. Took the melody from an old song I’d been working on and added some extra elements. Also added a few vocals and a birthday message at the end [I took the message out here because it’s private—in case ANYONE ever ends up reading this blog. So far I’ve only told my brother but I’m not sure he even reads it haha. It’s ok I write not for the reads but for the LOVE OF THE GAME].

Anyways here’s the instrumental version of the birthday card song I made:

Beyond that I also really tried to cram in my submission for HER’s songwriting competition but I didn’t get have enough time. I was so sleep deprived towards the end of it so I decided to just relax.

Besides the music ended up biking a lot this week. Saturday I rode from Red Hook to DUMBO. That ride was super nice. By the water—going through Brooklyn Bridge park. DUMBO was crazy packed. You’d think there wasn’t a pandemic going on. My friend and I ended up just weaving through the crowd as fast as we could and got tacos at the end of the ride at Los Tacos. I ended up getting the corn there. Pretty good. I think it was elotes inspired. Had a lot of similar flavors. They basically threw some corn kernels in a cup, topped it with this citrusy sour cream(?) and cheese and some spices. Super refreshing and a taste I’m not that familiar with. 10/10 would definitely try again.

Today I ended up riding from Park Slope to Chinatown to Chelsea to hang at my friends’ apartment. We ended up getting Wah Fung (which I always confused with Nom Wah). Wasn’t super in the mood to eat that much meat but damn the pork over rice I got was great. They stack on a pile of Chinese barbecued pork on some fried cabbage atop rice and they drizzle some of the pork fat sauce on top of the rice. ooooooh wheee. After we ate we played some Throw Throw Burrito and played an escape room game (pretty much an escape room experience out of a box).

At this point I wonder if I’m writing too much about my day to day. Is this a music blog? Is it a blog about my life? Well guess what bud. It’s both.

Oh last piece of news is I’m going on a date this coming Saturday. Romance in Autumn in New York. The DREAM.

Ok back to the music. I didn’t make many production changes but I did end up rethinking the score of the song. Kind of taking inspiration from my acting days where we’d score out each scene. Where great scenes were comprised of very specific individual beats where every beat was designed to fulfill a larger movement and would be imbued with some essential action. The more specific you made your actions, the more nuanced you designed your scene the better it’d become. That crosses over kind of nicely to music right?

So I wanted every beat in the song to be imbued with some meaning/context/action. And I realized that I wanted to rework the opening verse specifically. I originally designed it for danceability. I wanted to get the heads bobbing right away (mostly carried by the kick). But the intention there didn’t seem to fit. The intro (which I’m happy with) plays with a gentle piano with a lot of reverb. Kind of dreamy, willowy. And then it immediately drops into the kick drum? No way jose.

So I reworked the verse so it’s a bit gentler. I wanted to evoke a kind of wistful tenderness. You’re kind of searching around. I thought that’d juxtapose well with the brighter passion of the next section.

Also added some more high end to the prechorus (“what else could I do”). Not sure if that’s enough but I’m planning on adding more vocals to fill out the rest.

Also played around with the lyrics for the second verse. That is still tbd.

Here’s this week’s version:

Yes not the biggest update but I promise next week’s update will be beefier.

Weather [week 1]

Back in New York. The three weeks I planned to be in California ended up being 3 months. Felt like it was time to come home and also figure out some housing stuff. Also wanted to do three specific things:

  • Make some music in the privacy of my own home

  • Enjoy Autumn in New York

  • Go on dates

As of this writing the first has been accomplished. The second thing hasn’t even happened yet. It’s just barely starting to cool down and the weather is no longer unbearably humid/hot. The third thing kinda barely happened if you can count a single virtual date via Hinge as going on a date. Not as awkward as I thought and I even wanted to do it again and got her number but I think we mutually lost interest over the second week.

Anyways…

It’s my second week in New York. I spent the first week readjusting to quarantine and digging up an old song I’d made a few years ago. The second week was spent really getting into the thick of it and making progress on the production of the song.

Here’s the very first draft of this song from a couple of years ago:

This song was inspired by a few different things

1. A girl

Kept thinking about her. Couldn’t fall asleep.

2. Midsummer Night’s Dream

In my college acting class I was assigned to play Lysander in the Midsummer Night’s Dream scene where he says

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

I just thought the language here was so damn cool. And it makes sense.

3. Weather

One night in college it started pouring like crazy. Like heavens-open-up kind of pouring like crazy. Went outside (couldn’t fall asleep anyways) and felt it fall down all around me and felt ALIVE! SO ALIVE! What a feeling.

In the few years since I finished the first draft of this song I’ve been learning how to mix and I like to think that knowledge has helped hone craft as a producer as well. I liked the base of the song but definitely needed a little bit of shaping up to be a real banger.

Most notably:

  • Too thin—not enough bass

  • Doesn’t make me want to move. A song like this should have some kind of head bobbing that feels entirely missing during some parts of the song

  • I wanted each section to feel more distinct. I wanted each section to have a distinct feel/environment and evoke different feelings from the listener. The way I organized it:

    • Intro (piano @ beginning)

      • A little haunting. Kinda sleepy vibe

    • Verse (“Hands tied no getting out of this one…”)

      • Sort of searching for something. Meandering

    • Prechorus (“What else could I do?”)

      • Starting to feel lifted. The rain really starting to pour

    • Rap verse (effectively acting as the chorus as the emotional crux)

      • Big space. In the heavens.

So this week I did the following:

  • Added bass (thinking back it’s crazy that I didn’t add bass in the first version). I distinctly remember thinking to myself “I’ll be a producer that doesn’t use bass.” I guess I just didn’t like songs that are too bass heavy. Even to this day I don’t love super bass heavy songs but it really adds a lot of fullness to the mix imo

  • Revamped the rhythm section. I love the sound of the snare I added. Drenched it in reverb (used Valhalla Vintage Verb’s Drum Plate preset). I also added some toms that I may remove because they seem to be swallowed by the bass—probably need something a bit higher pitched.

  • Revamped the start of the prechorus by adding some piano plucks (yes, simulating raindrops). I added some panning to the piano plucks via the Soundtoys Panman plugin because rain, after all, falls down all over the place.

  • Switched out the intro piano and the verse electric keys. Ended up using Serum for the new verse keys—man I didn’t use Serum that much but I recently found some great presets on Splice and I am LOVING them.

Anyways here’s this week’s updated song (left out the second verse because I didn’t get to work on it much). Definitely have a number of things left to work through but I’m pretty sure I know what I want out of the song and I have a decent idea of how to get it:

Next steps

Schedule wise—Week 1 was meant for Producing and Lyrics. I was considering rewriting the lyrics for the second verse but did not get time. I’ll aim to get to it next week. Week 2 is scheduled for Producing and Recording so I’ll squeeze in the lyrics before I start recording.

In terms of production moves:

  • Really accentuate the transition from the prechorus to the rap verse. I want to evoke the glory of rolling thunder and bright lightning hitting the listener so suddenly out of the blue. That is the basis of the lightning’s power. You can never expect it so when it does hit you’re caught off guard.

  • Add some movement to the verses

  • Add some garnish to the rap parts. Maybe an arp or something.

Fix of the Week
For the first part of the prechorus “What else could I do?” I wanted to evoke the feeling of being lifted. Kind of like you’re being lifted above the clouds (a sense of clarity/hopefulness). To that end I added a (custom!) pad with a bit of airiness.

I took a piano plugin (Spitfire Lab’s Soft Piano honestly I love this piano and use it a lot. It’s free too) and sent it to a huge reverb (Valhalla Supermassive’s Cygnus preset) and bounced it t audio. Once I had that I rolled off a lot of the bottom end using EQ (Fabfilter Pro Q3—seems like EVERYONE uses this and I personally love it as well). From there I compressed it a little bit so the tail could be heard a bit better since the sound naturally decays with the reverb. I also used Soundtoys Decapitator and Izotope Trash to give it a bit of saturation. Lastly I used the piano plucks as a sidechain to compress the pad to duck out whenever the plucks were playing.

I added the names of all the plugins I used because I definitely wish someone had told me when I first started producing. Obviously just knowing what plugins I used won’t get you that far but at least it’s a start.