daveryder.com [the official dave ryder website]

Ok in the last couple of days I’ve got these pages up: Photos, Studio, Electric Man and Pirate Me

The photo galleries are powered by simple viewer, and since this website is powered by WordPress, we found a really neat plugin called (amazingly enough) wp-simpleviewer plugin. Even though I’ve only got a few pics up in the studio gallery, it’s seems to be working fine and is a very clean layout. Nice job, fuggi.

Electric Man was my first album, recorded on a used 8 track Tascam 38 with some very weak (sometimes pitiful) equipment. For all that it still sounds pretty damn good, even 14+ years later (it was released in ‘94, but some of the songs were recorded in’92 and ‘93. In fact, I did the final mixes during the Great Flood of ‘93 in Pacific, Mo and the house I was renting at the time was completely surrounded by water - the only way in or out was via canoe and the water filled up the basement to 6 inches below the first floor. What I always thought was incredible was that the fuse box was in the basement completely submerged, yet I never lost power. It still doesn’t seem possible. And the album was titled Electric Man? Too freaky).

Here’s a graphic representation of that Tascam 38 I made with Paint Shop Pro, click it to see the full size wallpaper:

(BTW, I still have that tape recorder, but it hasn’t worked for over 12 years - I recorded so much with it, the tape heads wore down to the point that you could see the circuitry underneath).

And finally the pirate me page just has to do with our philosophy of copyright - our songs are there for the taking - download, burn, share, do derivative works, spit on, snort up whatever the hell you want to do with them AS LONG AS YOU DON’T TRY TO SELL THEM OR MAKE MONEY OFF OF THEM. Just give us credit for them. This is our creative commons license.

So go ahead and pirate me. I’m cool with it. It’s all good. Whoa, someone must’ve slipped some valium in my coffee.

Oh one final thing about Electric Man - the really cool artwork was done by Paul Becker who does a lot of my album art - you can check out more of his work at Digitalmist.com

I’ve been listening a lot to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot lately. It’s a great CD, but not SO great as to account for all the critical raves. So part of the listening has to do with trying to figure out WHY it was so well received, and why I like it so much.

And I think I’m on to something:

It’s warm. Very warm.

What I mean by that is that it seems during the recording and mixing they made a conscious effort to roll off some of the high end and they ended up with something that is a joy to listen to, instead of what I find so often (even in my own music occasionally): that there is only so much you can endure before your ears become fatigued. Lesson learned.

You shouldn’t have to endure music, it should be something that flows into your ears like candy mixed with morphine that produces a feeling of euphoria.

EDIT 4-3-2008:  ok I’m wrong. It is that great. The more I listen to it, the better it gets. Damn that’s some laid back bad ass shit.

This year daveryder.com has been up in some form or another for 10 tears.

10 years. Wow.

So the decision was made to bring it up to date, which of course means that for a while it’s gonna be all screwy with fucked up links and 404 errors - you know all the usual “this site is under construction” BS.

We think it’ll be worth it in the long run, so please bear with us during this time of re-vamping (get it? re-VAMPing? oh well, nevermind…) and we’ll post progress reports as we go along.