Happy holidays! / 2024 recap
Happy holidays, readers!
I hope you’re doing great and will soon be spending time with people you care about.
I have a lot to be grateful for this year.
I made horror music and commercial music, indulged in fun accordion & microphone rabbit holes, and started rehearsing with an eccentric band on the weekends. I hope to talk about the results of all that in 2025.
I avoided having a The Bear style meltdown while sous-chef-ing Thanksgiving, but decidedly did not avoid several emotional meltdowns (in the best way possible) watching Six Feet Under for the first time. 🤯😭
Anyways, some photo highlights are below if you're curious.
I'd love to hear what you've been up this year to as well, and in any case wish you a very nice 2025!
♥
Carl
I met the fascinating Dave Caballero, who started an Atwater Village accordion school in the 70’s which was open for 50 years! He also repairs accordions for everyone from Danny Elfman to Weird Al to The Pogues.
He gave me a lesson and completely re-tuned mine — a tedious process involving hand-filing hundreds of metal reeds, one at a time! This was necessary because the entire instrument was intentionally tuned sharp when it was made in 1960's Italy. Apparently, European instruments (and orchestras) sometimes tune differently than our usual western A=440 Hz, especially before things were standardized.
By the way... you know that stereotypical French café accordion sound that's kind of "wobbly"? I hadn’t put 2 and 2 together before, but I learned that comes from having two or more reeds per note intentionally out of tune with each other. The amount of wobble / de-tuning in a given accordion varies by genre from none (classical music) to an absolutely unhinged amount (I'm looking at you, Scotland!)
Dave’s back wall. At 78 years young, he's "retired", but it seems this is one of those niches you never truly escape.
Another cool thing this year was scoring a horror feature (deets next year 🤞). As the film spends a lot of time stuck in the protagonist’s head, I wanted the piano to sound borderline claustrophobic, so I bought these tiny Danish microphones. They're small enough to fit inside the piano with the lid mostly closed! Then I draped a comforter over the outside to complete the “in bed with a piano” effect.
Tiny mics were also helpful for accordion — an unruly thing to record because half the instrument is constantly in motion! Normally, finding the perfect microphone position can come down to nudging it a centimeter this way or that. Having mountable mics (you can see one near the bottom right) solves that problem.
For the non-moving (piano-like) part of the accordion, my full-grown mics worked great.
Big milestone: Nicole and I have been together 10 years! Here she is on her birthday, doing what she loves: getting totally jacked on iced tea refills.
Another highlight was visiting my sister Ann and niece Adalyn (pictured) on the beach in La Jolla.
And doing some important excavation with my nephew Axel (left).
Finally, interrupted this 🐿️ during a hike (sry bro).