Three years ago I took long service leave and spent a few weeks home recording for the solo album I’d been intending to make for a decade. It’s still half finished. In fact I’ve just started working on it again.

The important bit, however, is that I documented the process. It started with getting my tremolo pedal repaired, and finished with me putting the final touches on the seventh song. (That should be “‘final’ touches” because most of the recordings are still waiting for drums, backup vocals, final lead vocals and feature instruments to be added.) Along the way I took several photos of my vintage guitars and random recording gear, learned how to use a pro-level digital multitrack recording program (the very fine and pretty-much free open source package called Ardour), figured out microphone placement for different instruments, and learned a hell of a lot (through trial and error) about musical arranging and audio editing and production. And it was all summed up in seven blog posts on Posterous.

A year ago Posterous was bought by Twitter, and a month or so ago they anounced they were closing down their site. This spurred me into action, so today I imported my Posterous posts – which consisted entirely of the seven-part recording diary – into WordPress and now I have a blog. The blog I always meant to write.

On this blog I will crap on about some stuff and rant about other stuff. Those who are connected with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or app.net will know what to expect. I intend to:

• rant about politics and economics
• muse about life in general
• write about music and books that I find significant or inspiring or interesting
• talk about software and gadgets that I find useful
• probably share writings or songs that I am creating while in progress
• probably other stuff too.

I’m thinking I’ll work up to posting regularly but for now it will probably be a bit random.

Anyway, that’s all for now. The Recording Diaries posts will appear sometime soon, once the import is finished. In the meantime, if you’re interested in checking out the not-quite-completed songs from my home recording efforts, they’re on my music website at deanlombard.com.au.