Progress and Celebrations

Well I think it's time for a random update, so where to start?
Lets start with 'celebration' in the sense of the website celebration we had last week. TH.com reached 1 year of official status, woo. Really weird considering I didn't build it with the aim to go for official when I started all those 3 years ago....wow time flies! From a simple promo/fan site aimed at UK fans to over a million visitors, what can I say? It's genuinely unexpected and a bit strange to be honest. How can 1 band member site be bigger and more popular than official full band sites? It just makes no logical sense to me.
But hey am I complaining? Hell no! Is Tuomas complaining? Hell no! He's the same as me, he cannot get his head around it all and so fast too. So what better way to celebrate than have this celebration week for the fans which went so well. I think we were all a bit nervous about the chat room raffle for the Tuomas chat, but bloody hell we were shocked. Pretty much everyone out of the 157 people online behaved. The OP's barely did a thing. Very proud of our community!
Tuomas will be online on the 2nd to come chat with the winners and I'll throw the poster competition at him (he doesn't know he's picking the winner yet hehe).

So where does that leave us? Oh yes the "progress" part of our title.
Well this refers the birthday project the site is doing. We now have the draft fully complete and Anthony has started to orchestrate it using the nice expensive sample program now he has this super computer. We have the bass completed by Plamen and Joonas, I'm just waiting for the CD to arrive to take a listen and get it to Anthony to mix with the orchestrations. Niklas has completed the guitars and Anthony is pretty much happy with them, just a couple of changes and they will be recorded next week. Clare started doing her vocals eventually. Now I don't type eventually in the sense I've been waiting for her, it's just we had some funny technical difficulties. She recorded and tried sending us the sample and it was distorted and we couldn't figure out why. I was about ready to somehow find the money to send her to a studio to record, but as a desperate last attempt she got her engineer friend round who realised the issue..her voice was causing the distortion, not the hardware as it was doing the same to his ears! So some matresses and acoustic screens later...tada! It worked. So now we are just waiting for the rest of Clares recordings.
We sent Nico to the studio last week to sing his sections and I got them a few days ago and I'm well pleased with the result, and they are not mixed yet and they sound cool!

 

(Nico and Anthony at work- Images borrowed from Seventh Dimension who Nico was signing for day after ours)

So we decided to also do a "making of" kind of DVD. Most of us are recording us working or taking images and with a slight interview. I have some questions to answer on camera which I think I'll film tomorrow.

Feel a bit stupid talking to a camera alone in the house but once we get all the footage edited together with vocal recordings and interviews from Anthony etc I think it will be a cool little addition.

The draft to the song can be heard here

Of course this is the demo and not the super cool samples, I've heard the verses Anthony has done so far and they are sounding awesome. No way Tuomas will keep dry eyes when he hears this in December.

Though at the moment I have no idea how to afford the flight. Anyone want to give me a loan till January? Hah I'm serious :)

I should be getting more shifts at work from next month which will be too late for flight to Helsinki, but in time for my currently plan of Paris, Helsinki and Tampere Nightwish shows.

I'll update again soon.

Life's full of obstacles

I don't have a huge amount to update, most of this will be random rambling. Well the last couple of weeks have been a mixture of ups and downs, yet mostly downs. The main 'down' which looms over my head at the moment like a dark gloomy storm cloud is kinda private so it's only a need to know basis. Although I will say I have an operation on Friday and will be out of action for an unknown period of time. However to switch it around, finally getting closer to organising visiting Tuomas. We are slowly narrowing on a date... Now it's a concern of money for the flight with only 1 pay in between now and booking flights. But it will be fun to go over with the gifts and just see his face. He was excited and curious in London so I'll have to make sure I have plenty tissues with me. Just need to find guitarist to help with the song which is stressing me out to no end. We did/do have one, but I'm not convinced of their dedication to it and if we will actually get some material which will leave us with yet less time. It sucks how much composers let us down on this project not informing us till the last minute...hello stressed enough here! You know we do a lot for fans on the site etc and we just asked for something quite small in return yet now I've had to throw more and more work onto Anthony's shoulders and he is already snowed under with his degree course. But fingers crossed it all comes together. So I'm sat here at work hoping all the residents behave while having a cup of tea. Pretty bored hence the blog update. I'm sure I had more to say when I contemplated writing this. Oh well I guess if it comes back to me I can always edit this :)