i actually bettered my weird al troll in terms of single day hits...

i needed three good, strategic ones to do it, though, and it's not going to have the same fallout. regardless, what i needed was just one outlier to match the outlier from last month, and i think i've got it. hopefully, hits are up enough month/month next month that i don't need the single hit like that to keep the curve going...

(that's over 230 views yesterday)

of course, i troll for social awareness. you already know that. mean people should be annihilated. i'm using the term lightly....

funny how things work out.

the expensive fake strings had too much reverb baked into the samples and no way to get it out. please, people - keep your samples dry. let me do the effects work myself. it's especially problematic for the staccato, which you don't want bleeding off between the notes.

the free fake strings initially seemed to have better staccato, but upon listening to them over and over they lacked a level of depth. i tried a few effects, but it was just a lack of character.

my machine can't really handle the expensive string plugin. it's bad programming - there's no reason, in theory, that i can't run a sampler on a dual core processor with over a gb of free ram but it's doing it over three application levels and a far-too-fancy gui. it's not the samples that's eating the ram, it's the sampler. but, hey, you've all got 16 gb of ram to waste, right? i've got 2 i can use...

what i can do is run each phrase one at a time through the sampler, dump them to wave and then mix them into the project as wave files. there's no loss in quality.

so, i ran all the expensive fake strings through and mixed them at roughly half the volume of the free fake strings, just to beef the free ones (which have a better staccato, but lack depth) up a bit.

i think it's finally sounding the way i want, but i'll have to confirm in a few hours.

it's really amazing, though, that i'm using a thousand dollar plugin as a secondary sound source to a free one. remember kids: markets don't work. you usually don't get what you pay for...

next song, i'm going to replace that fancy string set with one of the competitors that has a drier source. for now, this is working.

i should point out that upgrading this thing would not be expensive. the board can take 8 gb of ram. there's 4 in there, in 2 gb chunks. i have a 64-bit os from school (2, actually). so, i'd just have to get 2 sticks of 2 which would be relatively cheap nowadays...

it's the hassle. it's an nlited os with all kinds of scripting set up...

i haven't seen a reason to yet. this is the closest to a reason i've yet seen. but it's not convincing me.

contemplating travelling into michigan to see zorch

hrmmn. gotta give this a good listen, as they're hitting detroit tomorrow. well, a suburb of detroit. i really liked their demo back when it was doing the rounds, like a lot a lot, but i haven't heard this yet. if i could walk across the street, it wouldn't be a decision, but it's a two hour bus ride through detroit and it's going to mean i won't be able to get back across the border until the morning....

i'm a little concerned it's less psych and more pop. when i'm done mixing this string section...few hours...

yeah. it's a shame they decided to sound indistinguishable from the animal collective (i'm not a fan, too sappy/kitschy). that demo was really good, though. too far from downtown...

actually, it seems to have picked up starting about ten minutes in....

i guess it's sort of expected that they'd put that townshend-goes-kraut lizard song on here.

they should have cut the first ten minutes off, it's really just giving people the wrong idea.

this is a step down from the demos (two of the four substantial tracks were already released before the record was, and i really prefer the more experimental material they discarded on their demos to the trendy pop songs they tossed on to here), but there's just so much potential that i'd feel like i'm missing something if i don't go.

and i guess the band they're touring with is worth staying for.

i've actually never been that deep into michigan, the ride has it's up sides.

and, actually, it seems like those extra tracks are included in this file.