Blog

Happy New Year

Finn Arild Aasheim — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 22:02:37 +0100

Hope it's been a great 2011 and all the best wishes for 2012. I'm betting on no acopalypses this year either - it would be a shame since I'm very busy making a new album. In the meantime, here's a christmas song I wrote a couple of years ago that you might not have heard yet.

Happy New Year!

Summer update

Finn Arild Aasheim — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:47:12 +0200

Hey - new webpages! A new look was overdue and here it is. I have added a way for you to get a free preview of both my albums - press the play button to listen, the buttons on each side of it to skip tracks and the buttons on the top of the album cover to swap albums.

Reviews are still coming in, and the album is selling steadily both in CDs and downloadable. To the right of the player there are links for the different services providing my music. Check it out!

Two more weeks of dayjob now, and then the wife and I are off for a couple of weeks of R&R. First up to northern Norway, then a Baltic Cruise - looking forward to it!

I am still looking for a keyboard player, please contact me if you know of someone who are interested.

I wish you all a very nice summer!

Spring update

Finn Arild Aasheim — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:14:00 +0200

In the pine right outside my balcony two magpies has started building their spiky nest. Last year they had 3 little ones, and I wonder if these are the same ones - they probably are - but more importantly: it's a sure sign spring is just around the corner. An especially long, cold and snowy winter looses it's grip, and to celebrate me and my wife will be off tomorrow for a week of R&R in lovely Prague.

If you have followed me on my Facebook or Twitter pages you will have known that I have been featured on many radio shows throughout the world lately. Tomorrow (April 4) I will be featured with a longish interview on the Oslo based Rock FM from 23:00 Norwegian time. I can also recommend Progulus on-line radio where you can easily preview my album by requesting tracks. Reviews are continuing to come in - check out the review page.

Between PR work and day job I am also getting together a band - we are still short of someone on keyboard, so anyone interested should just contact me.

That's all for now - I'll be back soon with more info about the band!

Finn Arild

A February Update

Finn Arild Aasheim — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 23:32:59 +0100

The interview I was supposed to be having with Mark Deren on Radio Heemskerk today was postponed due to problems with their radio streaming, so I thought I'd get some blogging done instead. Reviews are coming in and I have set up a new web page linking to those here. Most of them are not in a language I read though - so I've had some good laughs reading what google translate make of them. I'd be happy for any help in translating them.

If you want to have a listen to Testament you can request tracks on Progulus Radio if you become a member. It's an online radio station which plays lots of great progrock. If you're into progrock you should definitely check it out.

I have hired TSM promotion to do promotion for me now, so I will have more time to get a band starting and maybe writing some more music - there's some ideas brewing again :) ...

Finally - some press photos that my talented photographer-wife took this week:

Selling Testament

Finn Arild Aasheim — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0100

It's hard for a creative musician to be a salesman, but it is very fun when interest is stirred and the reviews and radioplay starts coming online - which is starting to happen now. Last week I was featured on Italian "Radio Città" and today I will be featured on Radio Heemskerk - which has a progressive rock show every Sunday 21:00-23:00 hosted by "Mark from Holland".

Scream magazine will be reviewing me in their February issue and I got a pretty nice review by Donato Zoppo at Movimentiprog (in Italian). More reviews are on way.

Now to some bad news: I have been pirated. Several pirate sites (and sites which claims no responsibility for it's content) links to downloads of Testament - and they even link to my site on the same page they link to the pirated copy. Making an album is really hard work and has cost me loads of time and money, so I have an appeal: If you have downloaded my album and are listening to it - please spend the few quids it is to purchase it. Chances are you'll even get a much better quality copy than the one you have now, and chances are that I then will make another album for you to enjoy.

That's all for now folks.

Finn Arild.

Blog in the new year

Finn Arild Aasheim — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:03:02 +0100

I am very busy promoting Testament these days, doing all those things I really don't enjoy so much - like writing my own bio, sending mails everywhere to try to get my album reviewed, distributed, played on radio and so on. It's hard work, I'm telling ya! When I finally get in touch with people it is always very nice, and most people seem to be very interested in my latest album.

So far it is looking pretty good, Progrock.no, Progress Records, Record Heaven and CD Baby now stocks (or will stock very soon) my album. You can also buy it in lossless formats from my webshop - which soon also will include even more lossless formats and special-edition single tracks which you won't get anywhere else.

After being done with my album I have also upgraded my DAW to Windows 7 and Cubase 5. I am playing around with it jotting down some new ideas, and it looks pretty nice.

I am now also trying to get a band on the road to do some of my music, so if you know a bassist or keyboardist - let me know.

That's all from me for now - you'll be hearing from me again.

Testament available

Finn Arild Aasheim — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:20:39 +0100

Finally Testament is available for purchase (downloadable mp3/flac) or pre-order (CD).

I expect have the CDs in hand this week, and then I will be very busy starting on the promotion - getting this CD out. Hopefully there will be some concerts next year too; I will come back to you on that. So - just a quick note telling you this, now I need to get back to promo-work again.

Mix - "check", Master - "check"

Finn Arild Aasheim — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:37:00 +0100

A couple of weeks ago I was in Strype Audios mastering studio together with Tom Kvålsvoll to put the last hand on Testament. As you may know the whole album is one piece where the songs either fade over in each-other or is separated by other effects. It turns out he was the absolute right guy to master it, and after some re-work on the fade-overs to get it just right, I got the final master last Wednesday.

I am now only waiting on the cover art, before sending it to the printers. Then I will start working on these web-pages which are way overdue some rework.

You can be sure I'll let you know when Testament is ready for purchase :) ...

The final mix

Finn Arild Aasheim — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 22:05:25 +0200

So - since January, I have been recording the final bits & pieces while learning to mix while mixing the album. Now it is really getting there! I also did a re-recording of several tracks - the curse of perfection!

Now I am looking at sending this to mastering sometime during October - all though I have stopped making promises to anyone :) ...

You probably also have noticed that I am a pretty rotten blogger - there I will have to improve now that that I am entering the phase of marketing Testament. Well - that's all for now, I need to get back to mixing.

Classical guitar down

Finn Arild Aasheim — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:55:04 +0100

I got the house for myself this weekend, so I figured it would be a good time to do the remaining instrument recordings - classical guitar. It got very well until I came upon a bit more delicate part where I noticed one of the mics had a rather high hiss to it. I tried switching the cable but the hiss remained, so I ended up doing that part with the guitar microphone + studio microphone. All in all it worked out fine and I can check one more thing off the list.

Today - just while I waited for Elin to get home with some shawarmas, I also did another guitar solo - hopefully next week we can tick off quite a lot!

One down, nineteen to go

Finn Arild Aasheim — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:09:30 +0100

As you can see on the tracker, one solo down - planning on doing the rest this week. Some more piano should be done next week, and every day I am working on getting the sound I want in the mix. The mixing will in earnest start when all tracking is done, and you should also be able to follow the progress on the tracker.

The guitars are finally up on the wall - here's the pictures I promised (click for larger images).

Working those fingers

Finn Arild Aasheim — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:01:23 +0100

It's been a while since I did some serious bends on the guitar, so these days I am preparing my fingers a bit for a recording session for the missing solos sometime next week. I also packed up my Hagstrøm Viking for the first time since I got back into my home studio again.

Coming Saturday a friend of mine will come and help me get some shelves up in the studio, and then I can finally get my guitars up on the walls. The previous week I made 2 neat racks from some IKEA nightstands and set up the computer in a holder (also from IKEA - as most of the other studio furniture) to get it off the floor. All in all it's getting to be a really nice home studio! When the guitars are up next week, I'll have a picture taken (there's only one photograph in this house) and show you all.

Also, you'll be able to follow the recording and mixing progress directly in the tool I have started to use for handling the project: Redmine.

Here is the link to the tracker: http://tracker.finnarild.com/ - currently it contains the missing recordings, but it will also contain the mixing progress and the countless other tasks involving an album release.

Fixing Kupu in deliverance configuration

Finn Arild Aasheim — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:20:00 +0100

I am running some websites, which is helping to pay for the rent of the dedicated server I am running this website on. The system I am running is Plone, and I have been asked by people in the Plone community to blog about the solutions I frequently find.

For my newest customer, Ignarbakke (Not quite finished, so disregard the shabby design) - I have for the first time set up a deliverance solution. Deliverance is a brilliantly smart concept, both separating design from logic and giving you some neat possibilities of seamlessly combining several types of backend web applications into a frontend.

However, I have been having some problems in making it play nicely - both with issues in my Varnish cache frontend, and problems with the Kupu editor in Plone. Firstly, I had problems logging in to the site since my Varnish cache kept caching my pages even if I was logged in. This turned out to be a problem with all my sites, but since I usually log in with https which bypasses my cache, I hadn't noticed. The issue was easily solved by adding the following lines to vcl_fetch in the Varnish config:

    } elsif (req.http.cookie ~ "__ac" || obj.http.set-cookie ~ "__ac") {
        set obj.http.Cache-Control = "max-age=0, s-maxage=0, no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate";
        set obj.ttl = 0s;
        set obj.http.X-Finns-Varnish-Rule = "Plone logged in - do not cache";
    }

(This is one of several conditions in vcl_fetch - hence the "elsif")

The other problem was that editing pages with the Kupu editor just didn't work. This was a bit more puzzling to me, and I googled my way until I found this page which shed some light on the mystery - however without solving it. I understood that Kupu depended on a pristine /emptypage - so I modified the Deliverance configuration in the example to the following:

    <!-- RULES FOR MAKING KUPU WORK -->
    <match  path="contains:emptypage" class="emptypage">                                                             
        <dest href="http://localhost:8080/VirtualHostBase/http/www.ignar.no:80/ignar/www/VirtualHostRoot" />         
    </match>    
    <rule class="emptypage">
        <replace content="element:/html/head"  theme="element:/html/head"  />                                        
        <replace content="element:/html/body"  theme="element:/html/body"  />                                        
    </rule>

Basically I used a match instead of a proxy - and that solved my problems nicely. Hopefully this will help others with the same problems.

Getting there!

Finn Arild Aasheim — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:08:05 +0100

So - things have been very, very busy - and a lot of it not concerning my next release: Testament, so I have regrettably not written much in this blog this year. But - now we are getting to an end with both the redecoration and tracking Testament. My wife was graceful enough to let me finish the home studio room first, so that is up now - if not quite there yet.

I have also been in studio and done all the vocals for Testament, so all that remains now is some background vocals, some guitars and piano (which my good friend Reidar Wiik will do) - and we should be ready to mix.

Talking about mixing: I'll be doing that myself too, on this one - with some guidance from Tor Øyvind Quille which mixed my last album. I have purchased some neat mixing tools (UAD-2) and currently experimenting with the equipment and the songs that are all but done now. I will start posting up teasers before soon, so: Keep watching this space - things are happening, at last!

I wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Still redecorating

Finn Arild Aasheim — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:28:28 +0100

Guess what - redecorating took much longer than I expected. I guess I should not be surprised, it is probably a law or something. Anyway - starting to see the end now, and I'm also getting some recording done where I've moved some of my equipment to my mum and dads' place. One of these equipments is my Marshall 8100 amp with cabinet, doing the guitar on Testament I want to sound like it's moving air around.

Anyway - it's looking like there will ready for some paint on the walls here soon - I will of course let you know how it goes.