hey, i knew i was walking into the collapse of western civilization. no surprises. no drama. this is what i knew was here.

this one i really like, actually.

i'm putting this one aside for future album art.

http://s.imwx.com/dru/2014/05/771b8d59-bb90-4091-8cf6-cf6b2a9b8ead_650x366.jpg
 

this is a recent picture of the pontiac silverdome, which was once the continent's biggest, state-of-the-art multi-purpose entertainment complex. pontiac is considered a suburb of detroit, but it's almost the distance from ottawa to montreal. i'll have to find my way out there eventually....

the main tenant was the detroit lions (an american football team), but they also set several records for largest indoor rock concerts in the 70s (first the who, then led zeppelin, both in the 70,000s).

the stadium was sold off to private management a little over ten years ago and has been abandoned, now, for several years.

but a shot like that makes you wonder if there's a way in there to reclaim the space.

http://s.imwx.com/dru/2014/05/f264f804-530a-4a59-8a77-5672fe28844a_650x366.jpg

getting there. as you can see there's quite a bit of empty space in there, still. i'll be heading to shows tonight and probably tomorrow, so it won't be until the beginning of the week, probably, but next up to add to the track is a string section with synth pads and a choir of one.

for now, i've got the temp mix with the tubas, clarinet and flute up. they'll probably appear again a little later in the track, but with a little help from one of those too-intense-to-exist-outside-of-a-cartoon satanic-type cellists.

yeah, that fixed it.

actually, no. that's a pain in the ass. i just froze the track. if it loads feeding back, i'll take it out and paste the wav file in. that puts the problem off.

i'm sort of convinced it's just got a bad handle due to some sloppy programming, that it's basically a random error and that reinstalling it might not even really fix it without really comprehensively wiping it out.

wait. no. it came back when i reopened the program.

it has to be a program error. i'm going to reinstall cubase.

the other soundfont was crappy.

aha!

i decided to swap out the vsti for another and realized the midi program information was missing from the track. readding it eliminated the hum, which is really what the disaster was.

weird error solved...

no, i'm getting the same error, but it's only on the one vsti. let me try replacing the vsti, then...

thankfully, that seems to have been a relatively simple fix - i just had to copy the vst folder somewhere else, open the file, delete the vstis, save the file under a new name, put the vst folder back and rebuild the vstis. if that holds it reduces to a minor annoyance.

i'm not going to get much else done this morning. i have a cd sale to head to for around noon, and i need to back here by around 6 at the latest so i can head to boris for 8.

well, boris won't be on at 8...

there's some trendy opening acts that i won't cry about missing, but i kind of want to check out, anyways.

actually, i'm not.

there's no reasonable reason to deduce i'm out of memory. i've had no other indication my ram might be bad. if it's hardware, i'm thinking it's drive related, and i'm kind of scared to ask questions about it.

i ran a keygen for the midi guitar program this morning. i'm wondering about that. but cubase errors is a weird way for it to show up.

the file might just be corrupt, in which case i'm going to have to find a way to slowly copy over 60 very carefully put together and spliced apart files. i could try exporting it to omf, maybe.

the precise error is connected to the vst instruments. it's sending a dead signal to the quadrafuzz, which is feeding back like mad, and if i try and shut it off it gives me a memory error and refuses to let me save the file. so, i could also try the uninstall/reinstall trick. or maybe try and go back to a point in the history before i added the tuba, clarinet and flute parts.

it's not drivers, because the same error is happening across all four sound devices.

that being said, i've also had the machine off for an hour, and i'm hoping that's enough to clear some registers. i could try a pagefile flush.

*deep breath*

time to turn it back on and see what happens.

that tuba part sounds awesome, though, it's a shame i couldn't get a temp mix up.

and, of course, now cubase starts throwing weird errors at me....

memory errors.

could be just about anything at all. right now, i'm getting some sleep...

so, i actually realized that playing the tuba without the microtones (i.e. in normal western tuning) helps add to the dirty tone i want, because, by being in tune, it sounds out of tune. happy coincidence.

i ended up getting it to sound how i wanted by typing it into the scorewriter, doubling it over multiple octaves and running it through a little fuzz.

i'm still wide awake, so i'm going to get started on the next section, which will include some strings, some synths and a choir (consisting of myself).

yeah. i got the line down, anyways. the guitar part sounds good, now let's see if i can convert it to midi - with the microtones.

there's also a flute part in this section, but it's nothing exotic.

it's not that it's impossible to dial in the right tuning, it's that figuring it out is going to take a long time. and, then getting the dynamics right isn't really going to be realistic, unless i use a sampler.

i think i'm better off recording a tom morello style guitar part and then morphing it - maybe vocoding it. but that has to be the actual basis of it...

that didn't work out as i was hoping it would. the value of using the midi guitar approach is the guitar dynamics, but i'm not picking much up. i'm able to get good dynamics on some plugins and none at all on others, which tells me that it has something to do with the way they're communicating.

it's not that i want the dynamics to change much, i just want a raunchy tuba sound running through. i thought smacking the strings would be good for that but i actually suspect the software may actually be limiting the kind of distortion i'm looking for. so, i'm going to play with the midi a bit and see if i can get the right sound first...

one of the problems with midi guitar tracking software has always been the way it picks up volume. it's very reasonable to think that there may be a built in limiter that's specifically designed to eliminate the sound i'm looking for, and i'd even agree that, in 99% of circumstances, it IS a feature. but it means i'm trying to break the software...

i'm sure i can get it to raunch out some other way.

i'd love to learn how the play the tuba one day, just to get some of those cracked out bass lines down. it's not socially acceptable, though, so i'd basically have to move to a cave.

maybe that's what i'm missing out on in life. should i sell all my possessions to buy a tuba then find a cave and just sit around playing cracked out bass lines?

"dude, where's that weird sound coming from?"
"oh. it's just jess in her cave, playing her cracked out bass lines. you'll get used to it."
"not sure about that...."

maybe i should ease into it by sequencing some cracked out parts, first, before making any drastic decisions. i hope i can get the computer to pull it off convincingly...

now, how am i going to do this? i don't know what tempo it's in, and i need to get the computer to play back something microtonal.

i'm gong to try and riff something out and see how melodyne interprets it. i remember reading something about melodyne being able to handle microtones. i guess i'll have to do a little research on that first.

if i can get the basic tones down, i should be able to fix it up in a scorewriter from there.

if that doesn't work, i could try feeding it into a synth using the midiguitar route, but i don't know if it'll handle the microtones or snap into the nearest proper tone...

actually, i think i have a better chance at getting really raw, cracked out tuba like dynamics by using a pick.

midi guitar's my best choice...