it's not firewire, but hdmi. *grumbles*. screwed...

...except...

....i could in theory work out the crux of what i was working on by installing the pod drivers direct through usb.

and on that note, i've wanted to set up my other (half broken) laptop as a real-time sound processing device for a while. guitars, mostly, of course - but drums, too. see, the hard drive comes up and down. i was going to wait until i could replace it....

i also wanted to dual-boot it. that's something to keep me occupied as i'm waiting...

i'm just finding the idea of blowing this time reading to be depressing. i jumped through hoops to set this up. i'm pissed off that i'm dealing with broken hardware, and depressed that it's my own stupidity at the root of it.

the problem with the hard disk, btw, is physical. and the way the heads are aligned in the model is really tricky. i don't want to open this up, but i'm going to have to. however, i'm also only going to touch it under the precise circumstance that the arm is unaligned. anything else, and i'm screwing it back up and throwing it in the freezer, because it's pretty much hopelessly broken.

i didn't realize that my bus pirate was being shipped from asia. i'm pretty sure that the website was registered to chicago. i would have picked somewhere closer, if i realized that.

as far as i can tell, it's sitting in a boat off the coast of singapore, waiting to be filled up with mail.
and it could be there for weeks...

so, i'm considering converting the laptop, which is what i'll have to do if the bus pirate doesn't work anyways. i'm going to do some reading and decide in a few days.

i don't see any rational reason that this couldn't handle a firewire device. i just really don't like the idea of mixing with a laptop sound card. ugh...

but, at least if i get the tracks down, i can remix it later.

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

bass influence, on the track, especially in the bridge.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

i think it's a shame that corgan never fully explored his cyber-metal. i mean, there's some material out there, but he never did an opus and sort of ended up getting upstaged on it by bands like boris.

this was about as metal as i ever really got or ever wanted to get (not due to lack of looking, it's just that the genre becomes self-parody at nearly the moment it amps itself - through the course of my life, and since the 80s at least, it's been virtually impossible to do metal without sounding like an idiot), and informed my punchier outbursts on the track in question. i specifically remember thinking to myself "i want it to hit as hard as xyu". :).

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), liquify, first movement)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

guitars, and song structures. i haven't analyzed it, but this sets itself apart from a lot of fuzzy riff music by the fact that it's written in a weird modal key (rather than just building itself up on boring old fifths. those iommi riffs are fun, but they're fucking dead on any level of musicality. this isn't.). love the unexpected intervals that show up in the lead part near the end, but it's the way the riffs shift through the chorus underneath the fuzz like some kind of demented cello that really captured my attention and my imagination...

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), many others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

guitars, and song structures. this is one of corgan's guitar masterpieces and one of the corgan tracks that i took the time to teach myself how to play. during this brief period over '98, i was actually trying to keep the excessive soloing down, but the bridge in this track, specifically, was important in the writing of viewless.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless), many others)

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

song structuring. also, the jazz chords he's using (not just here but throughout the record).

again: i loved this record as a compromise between heavy riffage and melodic content. regardless of your views of his later work, you can't take this raw pop-punk classic away from the guy.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

anybody else pick up the similarity between this track and sdre's "8"?

i loved this disc - great compromise between the heavy and the melodic. it's truly a shame what's become of dave grohl, but it's not fair to take this first disc away from him.

(relevant track: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post.

it's always weird for me to cite sdre as an influence, given how oblivious i was to what they supposedly represented (i remain convinced that the history written around the band is mostly bullshit) and the reality that i only ever really liked lp2. but, i did love that record for a few years and do still come back to it

...and i did rip the riff to 8 off pretty blatantly in my tune viewless, which was first demoed in late '96.

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus (viewless))

obligatory "influential on song of the day" post. i used to listen to this on repeat for hours...

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus (epilag), jesus gets fucked on robitussin, others)

(i think this was a link to nurse with wound's spooky loop, from the foxtrot comp for jhon balance, which does not appear to be available on youtube)