so, i set up some thousand dollar string plugins beside some free ones...

i'll admit the thousand dollar plugins would be more applicable if i was writing film scores, but i'm not. i'm trying to construct a small chamber orchestra. given the price of these things, it's actually remarkable how inflexible they are.

the thing is that i understand i'm working against the purpose of the software. the idea is that if you buy the fancy sample set then you won't have to sit around and multitrack individual instruments anymore.

but, then how do you route each instrument through separate effects processes? generally, how do you be neurotic about over-producing everything?

i'm being a little self-deprecating, but i'm making a valid point. these are the details that composers and arrangers live their lives for. that hint of distortion on the trumpet, that reverb on the flute....oh!...

the free plugins are simply better able to give me what i want, and at a quarter of the ram usage, too.

there's probably some sample libraries for solo instruments, jazz bands, chamber music, etc. but i don't need them right now.

i stumbled upon this library of prepared instruments, though - inspired by john cage. it's not useful for anything i have lined up right now (maybe one thing) but it sounds like fun...

see, the thing is that it's a good idea...

but if they want to make this useful for musicians, they should separate the libraries into individual vst instruments, one for each real instrument. that's how people write and arrange and mix.

that way, if my mix has 2 violins, a viola and a cello (a standard chamber orchestra - and this is not my current mix, fwiw) then i can set each up to it's own channel and mix it individually with it's own character.

but, sure - give me every possible cello sound imaginable. let me fuck with the mic. let me determine how big the room is. and etc. these are good ideas.

it's the way the thing is formatted that isn't so hot.

deathtokoalas
i really wish plugin developers would focus more on modularity. this goes for soft synths, samplers, effects and everything else. i know, use something like reaktor, right? but, when every developer decides they're going to make the "ultimate synth" or "ultimate sampler", what you actually end up with is a huge array of synths and samplers that can do one or two things really well and are lacklustre at everything else. if there was an easily accessible interface within cubase where i could string filters and generators and specific libraries from different manufacturers together, i could take what i like out of synth x and connect it to what i like out of synth y - allowing me to create my own ultimate synth. and, ultimately that's what all us composers actually want, even if some of us don't have the clarity of thought to realize it. it makes it more like building your own modular system, or even like stringing guitar effects together.

it works with samplers, too. there's been this tendency recently to create these 50 gb libraries full of these ready-made samples. but, composers and arrangers and mixers and producers just don't think like that. the way we think is in terms of separating each track as much as possible. i've been sequencing some string sections recently and realizing that the best samplers are in kontakt, but you can't really separate them well without using 50 gb of ram. see, the flaw is that it's not designed to separate them, you're supposed to pick the ensemble you want out of the box. no real composer is going to want that, as it makes it impossible to isolate the tracks. i could, for example, want some bassy fuzz on the cello, a heavier distortion on the viola and a harmonic exciter on the violin. to do that in the kontakt sample libraries, you need to load the instance as many times as you have instruments - and it defeats the aim of the software. i'd rather see the sample libraries split into instruments. sell me 5 gb of cellos, 5 gb of violins, etc and let me load them as separate instruments with smaller footprints and mix it myself.

i know this is going to require a rethink and a new interface, but i think the developers have to come to the realization that they're using the wrong approach and go back to thinking in terms of modularity. ultimately, they're programmers - they get modularity, they're just ignoring it. perceived market demand for total solutions, or something. it's not actually what we want. what we want is control. these sample libraries - whether they're strings, horns or whatever else - are really largely useless to actually compose with.

OK
I wish everything worked more like Nexus tbh, yes it's simple and yes it's basic but damn that's how they should all work with added features instead of a new UI for everything and also having to have 49234932 different instances taking up 10x more ram that exists in your pc

deathtokoalas
the benefit of modularity is that it allows user control over the level of complexity. the way i would use a modular sampling system would be quite elaborate.

it's not like options don't exist, but they tend to be outdated and not really designed for modern daws - or they require a level of programming to build. when it comes to synthesis, that pre-requisite for programming is necessary. but, if i'm orchestrating something, i want to just do it, not write a program to do it. what they're selling is really the samples.

again, i think it's just a disconnect between what a composer is going to want and what the designers think they want. and i think it's sort of obvious that this standard approach is backwards for almost everybody, upon a moment's reflection. it's useful if you want to write film scores, i guess, but not very useful, otherwise.

i had to leave my browser window open last night, and it's generally a bad idea to try and record with it open due to ram issues. it's done now, mostly. i'll have to wait until after 2 am to get back to downloading the rest of the libraries i'm looking into - i'm looking at about a 50 gb download, and...

there was a court ruling last year that put usage based billing in place, meaning the isps can charge you based on your bandwidth. there's a really bad oligopoly in canada with internet, stemming from the way the infrastructure was built. somebody might correct me (i'm not old enough to remember, first hand) but i believe the telephone and cable companies in canada were previously state operated. honestly? that makes far more sense to me, and the reason is that it doesn't make sense to have multiple lines. you want one cable infrastructure and one phone infrastructure - anything else is just wasteful. but, the result of it moving from public to private ownership was that, in any given area, there's a monopoly on the cable and a monopoly on the phone based around who owns the lines. splitting the lines up to different companies in different areas didn't really have the effect of breaking up monopolistic practices, and why would it? if you live here in windsor, cogeco owns all the cable lines (and bell owns all the phone lines) so you're ultimately forced to go through one of them if you want to use the infrastructure.

so, reacting further to the monopoly, the court ruled that the companies that own the lines have to sell service to smaller isps. so, the way it works is that teksavvy buys bandwidth from cogeco, and i buy bandwidth from teksavvy. the capitalist relation should mean that's more expensive, because there's more managers.

but it isn't. it's less than half the price. but what i like about teksavvy is that they offer very basic rates. i'm on youtube all the time, and i download a bit of music, but i don't game or watch netflix or anything like that - and there's only one of me down here, rather than a family of 5 or 6. my average monthly usage is much less than 30 gb - and usually closer to 20. nor can i download faster than the internet will let me download. so, all i need is about a 5 mbps line with a 50 gb limit. what i have is a 6 mbps line with a 75 gb limit (for $25/month) - and 99 months out of 100, i'm not going to get close to it. even if i were to download 50 gb of libraries in peak hours, i'd still only be something like 73 gb for the month.

i don't want to push it, though.

teksavvy didn't like the ruling. so, what they've done is put the download limit down (and, like i say, 75 gb is usually way more than sufficient for me) and allow unlimited downloads over night, from 2-8 am. it's a good solution for gamers, i guess, who are usually up all night, anyways.

for me, waiting until after 2 to suck this down is an isolated thing to make sure i don't hit the limit...

but, i don't need a browser for that, so i should be able to work overnight. i've got a few things to play with, hopefully one of them gives me what i want right away....

i should point out that i have youtube defaulted to the lowest quality level, though. this isn't for bandwidth reasons, it's because my internet tv is a pIII that shipped with windows 98 on it, so i'm trying not to max it out. well, that and i just use it to watch lectures and news shows...

i don't need noam chomsky's wrinkles or paul jay's bald head beaming at me in crystal clear high definition or who-gives-a-fuck p.

it sounds like an organ because it's being played like an organ...

good idea. i wish you'd rock those low tuba notes a bit more, though. now that i've got one paying attention, what's with tuba players being so polite? your instrument sounds best when you blow into it like you're trying to knock the house down. why is that you all play such a powerful instrument so timidly?

yeah, the person doing this review is really doing the plugin a disfavour. not only does this person not understand what the instrument's ranges are, they're playing the keyboard like it's a piano and just randomly running through the presets...

the plugin woks best with a little bit of distortion to fatten it up. but it's a more raw sound than you see in most sample libraries, which seem to want to focus on a polished film score sound.

deathtokoalas
i wish you would have done staccato on the ewql. the truth is that even a roland juno can do decent sustain stuff. it's the staccato that requires a sampler...

Andrew Chellman

I always thought it was the other way around, in my opinion. Staccato is short, there isn't much time to decide if it sounds realistic or not. EWQL has round robin which contributes to a nice staccato sound. 

deathtokoalas

it's short, but it's pretty complex when you think about it - a bow scraping a string, producing a sort of a broken waveform with fundamentals collapsing differently from note to note. staccato on a real string instrument consequently always sounds a little out of tune, which is difficult to create synthetically. the longer the notes get, the more easily a synthesizer can use the tools it has to shape them just because it conforms better to what a synthesizer does...

reali reddoot

the fundamental frequencies collapsing? elaborate 

deathtokoalas

you're scraping two tense objects together in short bursts. we usually think of modelling strings in terms of combining frequencies of sine waves because they're vibrating strings, but staccato is really more like scratching nails on a chalkboard in the sense that it's two rough objects rubbing against each other. so, there's a lot of friction in there (meaning the waveform is quite broken) and not much of the vibrating action we associate with string synthesis - meaning that the associated frequencies (fundamental and resonant, excuse my colloquialism) fall apart very quickly.

reali reddoot

very interesting, im very curious now and must conduct more research. Thanks for the insight!!

deathtokoalas

if you want to get something close to it, you're going to need to model the friction with a noise generator or random oscillator and do a lot of experimentation to "dial it in". you're also going to need a way to get the notes to spike out of tune a little as a result of the extra force on the string. i've played with a few abstract synthesis approaches that use physical modelling of things like springs to get around the limitations of traditional oscillation-based additive synthesis. with the tools we have available today, you're likely to be able to get something decent - but not with a traditional hardware synthesizer.

it might be fun as a project, but if you're serious about getting a good staccato for musical application, i'd really advise using a sampler.

commenting on an audiomulch video

your program looks a lot nicer nowadays than it did when i downloaded the demo back in 99, although it still seems to work in basically the same way. nice to see that doppler's still rocking it...

lyrics for to spin inside dull aberrations

so, while recognizing and upholding the necessity of empirical enquiry in physics,
let's think carefully about a few things for a few minutes.

acknowledging that all particles have an associated wave function,
if a phenomena demonstrates particle behaviour
then it must mean that the particle is massive. (and what is a massless particle, anyways?)
otherwise the wave function wouldn't even exist. right?
COLLAPSE!   

now, uncertainty refers to measurement,
(not in the sense of the observer effect, but as the nature of what uncertainty is)
so, it provides no information about causality or a lack thereof.
(it is merely a model that is useful in predicting results)
and it seems to me that the nature of space is an important thing to determine empirically
(and we can't even answer questions related to the number of dimensions it might have)
so the proofs of uncertainty are consequently as valid as the assumptions about the nature of space that underLIE them
(this actually pulls the rug out from underneath bell's feet)
and
now
it
all
falls
apart

COLLAPSE!
COLLAPSE!
COLLAPSE! COLLAPSE! COLLAPSE!
RIGHT?!

COLLAPSE!
COLLAPSE!
COLLAPSE! COLLAPSE! COLLAPSE!
RIGHT?! RIGHT!?

it's not that i'm claiming anything is wrong, per se
(it's more like i'm arguing that it's not even wrong at all)
but the question of whether space is continuous or discrete needs to be resolved
(in order to unite relativity with quantum mechanics)
platonic idealism as applied to mathematics is an oversimplification
(this is what godel has truly taught us)
the math itself is merely a model to imperfectly describe physical space
(one look at the banach-tarski paradox is enough to give up)

so light one up.

no empirical concept
of the underlying geometry
so, no, you CANNOT see,
the overgeneralized orthogonality

(perpendicular delusions
give arise to false conclusions)

so, i finally got around to updating kontakt from v1.0 for this. yeah. v 1.0. you can see how often i've used it since i downloaded it in like 1998 or something.

i've just never really been the sampler type, i guess, and i've always found a scaled down solution. but i need good strings for this...

...and there's a few other things i've had on my to-check-out list that i'm going to find while i'm at it.

i can't download everything, these libraries are enormous...

it turns out there's actually been a recent push to make better string libraries. i stopped recording for a few years; this is just more evidence that the technology has jumped dramatically since then.

i'm going to download all of them, and mess with them until i get it right.

i gotta say this, though: it's nice to have a problem, google it and find there's an answer.

that wasn't true five years ago. and it was a dream 13 years ago, when i was scorewriter-focused.

i'd pick up a variax if it was cheap enough. my pod has the in. but the way they built it wasn't really offering a whole lot. most guitarists that would want to switch between the classic models have a way to get the sound of the classic models already. like, i have an sg sounding thing and a fat strat sounding thing and that's enough to get me what i need. i wouldn't mind picking up a single coil guitar, but i don't have much use for the too-thick paul sound (the sg is the thicker metal/punk sound i really want, because it's thicker but not too thick). so, they were really selling a guitar that can sound like a banjo. it's a shame it all got discontinued, but i have to wonder if there are people out there creating models and uploading them somewhere....

yesterday wasn't as absolutely productive as i hoped, but i did get a guitar part and a string part down, and i think i've found a way to make the violins sound better. it's the staccato that's hard to get with the right force. i think the problem is that the people writing the plugins are listening to too much rossini and not enough beethoven. so, you can get a nice schmarmy bourgeois sound, but it's harder to get that overly-serious rockin' the bows to a satanic hymn overture sound - which is weird, because that should be much easier to reproduce in a wavetable based synthesis. regardless, i think i got it. if i'm not satisfied, that'll be the focus the rest of the night. i think i've found a great general string solution, i'm just not completely sold yet. but finding one will actually open up a lot of possibilities. in the past, i've used e-bows and i actually picked up a cheap electric violin a while back that i've never played because it needs a setup. doing this over midi is the best answer that's going to give me the flexibility i need and want, it's just a question of getting it done.

i've also got it tactically worked out. this is necessary sometimes when i get too many ideas to try and cram into one space. i've oversaturated some mixes in the past and have learned that it's better to be a bit more subtle in how ideas come in and out. so, if i'm listening to something and i get this it needs a piano! and eight guitars! and a kazoo! type response, i need to be careful about overloading. i think i've got it worked down to focusing mostly on a crescendo...

it's really just scattered parts to finish before i add the bass, which is a more substantial project. it should be mostly done by the morning, but i keep saying that....

i will one day take a few months of violin lessons, just to get the bow fundamentals down. beyond that, it's just another string instrument, and, from a string player's perspective, it's just a question of teaching one's self the geometry of the thing.

i know that pisses some people off. i think it was peter buck that pointed it out. he was all like "listen. a mandolin's not just a funny sounding guitar. it's it's own thing.". i get where he's coming from, but sometimes you just want a funny sounding guitar...

now i'm remembering that my mandolin disappeared. grrr.

what i'd actually like to see thrown out there some day is a midi guitar with the electronics built into the guitar (you could do it with an iphone chip, and things much cheaper than it) that has a switch selector on the side that allows the player to switch instruments: guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, ukelele, violin, cello, etc. i know there's tuning issues, but that's actually easy to fix with a midi system. you throw in a usb out, and you should be able to actually set the tuning in the software. the strings will sound differently than the out, but that's of little importance if used correctly.

i think line6 has something like that (called "variax") but it's designed to model different guitars, and it's hooked up to the box. having the selector on the guitar itself would make the signal path cleaner.

but i should get back to work.

yeah. the pressure knocked the valve off. wrench fixed it. for now, anyways. hey, tearing the pipes up is neither trivial nor cheap. but the idea that it was the pressure got through, at least. this is good.

so, things are back to being idyllic in my little basement hideaway, here...

now that i understand the plumbing a bit better, i'll have to be a bit more aggressive. that (and any pipe damage) could have been prevented by unclogging the clog when i first saw it. but i just didn't understand the system. it was just a basic empirical "if rain, then slow drain. should report issue.". which is what i did and should have done. it was really the "rainwater cannot cause slow drains" response that really cost him his pipes, if there's damage....

there may be an upside to it.

the roaches are in the subfloor somewhere. the only one i've seen since may has been out in the laundry area. it's a good guess that their nest was where the flooding was. if i'm lucky, it drowned the bulk of them and washed away a lot of eggs when it flowed through.

it's ok, i'm used to this.

there was a meme in my group of friends when i was in high school. "fuck. shoulda listened to j.".

as applied seriously:

i failed my french assignment because the teacher said i didn't understand the question. it's actually what j said. fuck. shoulda listened to j.

as applied ironically:

it's raining and i forgot my umbrella. fuck. shoulda listened to j.

(in such ironic usage, j would not have offered an opinion on the umbrella, and would probably not even be present.)

there were other usages. but there's a point. shoulda listened to j!

releasing inri000 in the alter-reality

time is moving forward in the alternate reality...

at midnight, it will be 17 years and 242 days ago that i finished my first demo recordings, in the basement of an upper middle class suburb of ottawa, canada called "sawmill creek".

my dad had built me a recording studio in the basement, and put a drum kit along with a bass and a 4-track recorder in there. i think he had plans to use it himself, and the idea of building it for me was basically a ploy to get it past the wife. that happened more than once before i turned 20...

...but i also think he was hoping i'd stop sitting in my room by myself with my guitar. i'd been playing for around five years at that point, working on a combination of original songwriting, semi-formal blues training and informally teaching myself how to play the alternative rock of the period. people didn't really interest me. it was a bit of a problem, one that's only gotten worse as i've aged. if he could build a studio with some gears, maybe i'd meet some friends and start a band...

the thing is, that isn't how i interpreted it. my favourite artists at the time were billy corgan and trent reznor, so it just sort of struck me as natural to lay the parts down myself. bass is very intuitive for a guitarist, and keyboards are intuitive for everybody, but a big part of this demo is about me teaching myself how to play drums - and at times it's quite obvious, although i should temper that with an explanation that the drum parts are quite purposefully off-kilter in many places.

what can you say about a 17.5 year old demo written by a 15 year-old? there's a few interesting moments on the disc, which i've pulled out as highlights and uploaded to youtube. the bulk of it, however, is exactly what it is - an exceedingly awkward and mildly ostracized teenager working out various day-to-day issues that only a teenager can really understand, while displaying overwhelming influence from overwhelming influences. hey, at least i wasn't writing "mmmmbop". this isn't as polished as frogstomp, but it's arguably more interesting and certainly more original. if i could go back in time, i'd take the influences off my sleeves just a little.

i've come to understand what i was doing as a part of the then contemporary emo-punk movement, albeit on the fringes of it, as it existed in disconnected basements across north america. i had no understanding of that at the time. i'd guess most people a part of it didn't either. it's been defined in a revisionist manner.

i stopped recording for a little while after this. it's partly because i was naive, and was expecting some kind of response, but it's mostly because i was grounded for a substantial period in early 1997. i've cut out a period of 66 days, and will consequently start pushing tracks from the second tape demo (recorded in the same place) on the 29th of october. over this period, i'll be cycling the 11 tracks from the first demo that i have up on youtube in 6 day periods (with boogeyman consisting of three tracks from this demo, and teenage jesus consisting of two), but i will not be posting those updates here.

so, this is the last youtube switch update for a bit over two months. the song i'm working on has been slow, but i'd be lying if i'd say i wasn't expecting that. in two months, though, i should hopefully have plowed through from the summer of 2001 to sometime in 2003.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-cassette-demo-1

basement toilet fixed, waiting on upstairs toilet

hi.

i learned a lot about plumbing from this exercise. it's not something i'd looked into before...

the eel fixed the drain. but, for future reference, this is what happened:

- your sump pump is connected to outside
- your floor drain is connected to the sanitary.
- there was a partial blockage deep in the sanitary, meaning the floor drain was emptying the basement water very slowly. this caused the sump pump to be running all the time to compensate.
- so, when it rained the basement got full of water and that water blocked the sanitary completely, causing the slow flush, sink gurgles, etc. given enough of a dry spell, it would have come down on it's own through a combination of slow floor drainage and sump pump action, but it's of course better to clear the plug.

so, the systems are not entirely separate. your pump is pumping excess water to the street, but most of the rain water is in fact flowing through the floor drain and into the sanitary, and if you were to block that off your pump probably wouldn't be able to keep up.

so, in the future, if you see a slow toilet after the rain, it means your basement is slowly flooding due to a blocked sanitary.

j

RAW SEWAGE LEAK FROM UPSTAIRS

the toilet from upstairs is leaking brown water from the ceiling in two places.

it's hard to think this is unrelated to recent concerns.

...and the sump pump is still running from thursday's mild rains...

(pause)

i noticed it stopped...

did you get my email and turn a pipe off? if not, it must be flush related because it's not constant.

uploading to spin inside dull aberrations to the scratchpad

so, i've updated the temp file with the final guitar proportions.

excluding the bass, i'm really heading into post-production with this. lots of work to do still, but it's mostly flourishes on the existing track. this is the core of the track, the way it was always meant to sound...

i'll get most of this done today. i keep saying that. but, today i really will.

http://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

it's always nice when you have your own songs stuck in your head :)

fuck. just gotta laugh.

i'm pretty sure the high pressure from the rainwater backup/clog issue burst or dislodged something in the toilet upstairs, leading to a leaky pipe. by the end of it, an upstairs toilet flush was making the dishes in my sink rattle. there was clearly a substantial force of air feeding back...

now, the fact that the snake fixed the problem isn't going to help my case. "i told you there was a clog". and i agreed there was probably a clog, but i pointed out that it wasn't the clog causing the backup, it was the rain. and, i was right. had we not got all that rain, the clog wouldn't have been a problem.....until spring. it's good it was found. but, that doesn't change the fact that i was right about the rain. had he not convinced me that the sump pump is more powerful than it is and that the systems are completely separate, i wouldn't have emailed the fire department in a desperate attempt to figure out where the rain was getting in. it makes absolute sense now, but (dammit jim!) i'm a nerd with a creative streak and an ability to think outside the box (i think i proved my worth on that basis with this), not a plumber. leave it to an artist to come up with the most ridiculous way possible to explain water seepage into the system, right?

that's not going to get through. what's going to get through is "i told you there was a clog".

so, i'm going to be told it's the seal on the toilet and they're going to replace the seal. in the end, replacing the seal might make the connection tight again, and it might fix it. but could it be a coincidence? is the leak unrelated to the backup? i can't prove it one way or the other, but i think it's at least likely that the air pressure broke something and hoping it's just the seal is pretty risky...

"a camouflaged pelican of immense girth must be transporting water from the river to the sewer."

so, i've actually spent most of the last two days doing dental work on my headphones....

some time back in the mid 80s when they were made (by dad bought these phones for himself when i was a young child. they're very old sennheisers, constructed at a level of quality that simply does not exist anymore. made in ireland. yeah, ireland. i think it's the only thing i've ever seen that was made in ireland.), they came with dust protectors on the side. but, over the years the dust protectors have faded to the point that they are now dust themselves. so, i'm trying to clean it all out with a set of tweezers. it's time consuming...

but the good news is that i've finally got the guitars mixed the way i want. i had to split it into three separate combinations over three different types of fuzz and then tweak the eq on each separately. it's a total of 8 different parts, sent and morphed differently. i wanted it to be dirty and crunchy and bassy and trebly and harmonic all at the same time, which is a lot to ask out of a couple of power chords. but....finally...

tonight, i should hopefully get done what i wanted to get done yesterday. i've decided i want a piano-sounding guitar in the middle of the track. i've always wanted one of those little stompboxes. but i'll have to see what i can pull together into terms of plugins...

i also finally found that one stupid hair i knew was in there but couldn't get out...

the sturdy design is a tragic flaw, really. i can swap out the cords, but i can't get to the drivers - which is great, except when you've got a hair in there.

i admit defeat, with tweezers. i need to find a vacuum...

so, the fire chief tells me there's no sump pump in the building.

to begin with, how would the fire chief know if there's a sump pump in the building? is there a master list of sump pumps in city records?

well, maybe there is. who knows. but, there was a tenant in the basement - the lights were often on late into the night - and there's a spout on the side of the building. clearly, there was a sump pump.

it may have been an illegal sump pump. an illegal sump pump? well, maybe there was an illegal unit in the basement. it's not uncommon, actually. but, like i'm supposed to get sad about accidentally reporting it. i need the drain fixed, bob the bourgie across the street that fucked off on his property rights responsibilities can fuck off if he doesn't like it...

i mean, if you're just going to sit there and let the drain back up into the neighbourhood's toilets, you deserve what you get.

i just realized the fire chief (yes, i cced it to the fire chief. i'll call the fucking mayor if i have to.) is going to read this and go "what is she, some kind of anarchist or something?".

ordered solutions are preferable. but if nothing happens, i WILL smash through the windows and fix it myself...

cced to pretty much the entire management of the windsor fire department:

hi.

sorry to be aggressive about this, but i know that the response rate on email communication with public employees can be a little slow due to high volume, so i'm hoping you can advise on what is actually a fairly unfortunate situation.

i'm renting an apartment at marion & cataraqui. about a month ago, there was a fire in a large property across the street (also marion & cataraqui, but technically on cataraqui). since then, the rain has been overwhelming the sanitary on the street (several houses are getting slow toilets and backups) and i'm fairly convinced the cause has to be the rainwater draining through the floor drain. the property is abandoned, and the electricity is off, so the sump pump is not working. additionally, this seems to be causing additional stress on neighbouring sump pumps.

it's unfortunate that there was a fire on the street, but there needs to be a drainage solution developed before the spring. this is a large property and it simply can't be left to drain into the sanitary like this.

i've been informed that the fire department probably turned the power off, and i certainly understand the reasons why. but, there needs to be a pump in the property, or the drain needs to be plugged, or something else - otherwise the toilets on the street are going to back up badly in the spring.

so, i really ultimately need to know who deals with this. the city? the fire department? the property owner? neighbours smashing through the windows and doing it themselves?

j

i'll smash the place up with a baseball bat, and then cram the bat right down the floor drain.

yeah? just watch me...

it'll have to overflow through the windows, out to the storm sewer.

gah...

so, a few weeks ago, a heavy rainstorm came through here and the toilet started flushing slowly. at the time, i had no idea what that meant - i didn't even know if i was on city or a septic (i'm on city). but, some back and forth with the landlord and a lot of googling have led me to believe that something is broken with the piping.

the upside is i've learned a bit about how this works. it's something i've never had to think about before. but the way it's supposed to work is that the rain water goes into the storm drain and down a separate pipe to the river, where it dumps in untreated. the toilet water goes into a separate sanitary line and out to the treatment plant. so, rainfall should never back up the toilet.

and, yet it was clear from the beginning that rainwater is in fact slowing down the toilet's drainage. it's not quite backing up. yet.

but, of course the response i'm getting is "that's impossible, it's not how the system works".

there's since been two rainfalls that have caused the toilet to slow down at levels that are proportional to the amount of rain that fell. small rainfalls mean small issue. big rainfalls mean big issue. so, we've got correlation and proportionality. the scientific method tells me we have a causal relationship, here. but science has been less powerful than faith. my scientific reasoning was met with an offer to use the landlord's plunger.

but, what the causal relationship i developed demonstrates is that there's either a break in the local line (which would be expensive for the property owner to fix) or a break on the city line. so, i asked the guy next door...

yup. he's getting backups from the rain, too.

now, i need to convince them that they need to get the city in here to fix something before the snow melts in the spring. as the relationship is proportional, things could get messy down here if nothing happens before then.

there's some construction on the main street a few blocks away to replace old sewer lines.

i'm *hoping* that what's going on is that they have the rainwater temporarily routed to the sanitary, and it will be corrected within a few weeks. but, i have no evidence of this.

my other suspicion is connected to the house across the street. there was a fire there about a month ago, which is about when things started backing up. the property's been completely shut down. if they shut the sump pump off, the rainwater could be pooling in the basement and heading down the floor drain - which is usually connected to the sanitary. that would explain it. the problem is that it's hard to understand how that could be generating *enough* water to back shit up without there being significant blockage somewhere. but, then you need to ask the question: what else has been flowing through the floor drain since then?

i've done all i can do, though. i've proven to them that something is crossed, and it's probably a city issue. now i just have to hope they do something about it...

i'm honestly expecting a more positive response from the main property owner than the guy upstairs. i THINK i've got enough evidence to convince him. he mentioned calling the city a few emails ago, so i think he'll get it.

but i can't risk this backing up in the spring and am going to have to call the city myself if i don't get a good response.

i mean, it's crystal clear that rainwater is flooding the sanitary somewhere, even if it's not supposed to.

what was weird about the rain today, though, is that the sump pump didn't come on until like an hour after it stopped raining, indicating it's draining from somewhere - like the house across the street, maybe.

i've convinced myself it's the abandoned property next door.

so, i've sent an email off to the windsor engineering department, asking them about the sewer replacement (is the storm going through the sanitary?) and what the procedure is for dealing with an abandoned property that's not draining properly...

slow toilet drains from the rain, questions about an unmaintained property

To: engineeringdept@city.windsor.on.ca

jessica
hi....

i'm hoping this is a good email address, but maybe you could forward this somewhere more appropriate if it isn't?

i'm renting a basement apartment at cataraqui and marion and am getting a few problems and am just trying to determine the cause. my landlord claims there are separate storm and sanitary lines, and i have no reason to doubt him. his logic is that rainfall should not cause the toilet to drain slowly, and he's consequently not taking me seriously. i understand his argument and why it shouldn't happen.

however, i'm a scientifically minded person and i've been able to demonstrate the following:

1) the slow down is correlated with the rain. that is, the toilet drains slowly after a rain and drains normally once the rain has dried up. so, while a block might exist, it's not the primary cause of the slow down.

2) the amount of slow down is proportional to the amount of rain. that is, when it rains a little, it slows down a little. when it rains a lot, it slows down a lot.

despite understanding that these systems ought to be separated, my brief and aborted training as a physicist tells me that when you have things that are correlated in a proportional manner, it is very likely that there is a causal relationship between them. that is, i have a high degree of certainty that the rain is causing the toilet to drain slowly in a manner that is proportional to how much rain is falling.

while it's august right now, the proportionality has me concerned about spring runoff, which is of course substantial in canada. i have every reason to think that that a lot of snow melting could back up the toilet and cause a horrible mess.

now, i've talked to the neighbour next door and he's confirmed that he's actual dealing with back ups through the pipes, which is a worse problem than i have. he's convinced that the problem is related to sewer replacement on wyandotte down the road. this only makes sense to me if they might have put the storm through the sanitary as a temporary measure. is that something the construction team has done in the short run?

i'm leaning towards a different cause. at roughly the same time that the problem started, the house across the street experienced a significant fire. the property has been completely shut down. i suspect the sump pump is not running, the basement is flooding and it's draining into the floor, which is connected to the sanitary and this is causing the backup. the issue i'm running into in having this make sense is related to the volume of water running through the floor drain. it's a pretty big property - it was an apartment before the fire, but it would have been a five or six bedroom house some time in the middle of the last century, and it has a very big backyard. so, there's a potential for a large volume of water to be coming into the floor drain. how likely do you think it is that this could be the root of the problem? how big a problem do you think this is going to cause in the spring, if it's not addressed now? and what is the better solution for this - running a sump pump on an abandoned property, or closing the drains off? how does the city deal with something like this, if it's determined to be the cause?

city of windsor, engineering department
I would like to clear up a few points in your email.

While your landlord may be correct in that the house may be serviced by separate storm and sanitary connections (I can't confirm that), both these connections would outlet to the same combined sewer in the road. There is only one sewer Cataraqui and one on Marion, and they are both combined sewers meaning that they accept both rain water and sewage.

With respect to the Wyandotte project, there is no sewer work being undertaken as part of that project. Windsor Utilities is replacing the watermain and services and the City will reconstruct the pavement following that work. This project would have no impact on the sewers servicing your property.

You are most likely correct in that there is a correlation between rainfall and the slow running plumbing in your house. This is due to the combined nature of the sewer that services your property. During rain events, combined sewers fill with rainwater and therefore have limited capacity to accept flows from buildings.

With respect to the apartment building across the street from you, all rainfall runoff from this property would have entered the sewer system via foundation drains prior to the fire, so the fact that the basement may have flooded and the water is now entering the floor drain would change the drainage pattern very little. In fact, rainwater entering the sewers from this property would be very small in proportion to that coming from the catchbasins draining the roads in the area.

With respect to abandonment of the connections servicing the apartment building, that would be addressed when the building is demolished by the Building Department. If you have concerns regarding the state of
the building, please contact the Building Department via 311.

Hopefully, this answers some of your questions. Please contact me if you want to discuss this matter further.

Sincerely;
----------------, P.Eng.
A/Contracts Co-ordinator

further update...

jessica
we got very little rain today, and the effect was consequently much less, but still noticeable. what that demonstrates is two-fold:

1) that the slow down is proportional to the amount of rain. we now have correlation and proportionality, demonstrating causality.

2) if a very small amount has a noticeable effect, a very large amount would have a very large effect.

i don't think it's likely we're ever going to get enough rain for a big problem, and i can deal with a slow toilet, but i'm worried about run-off in the spring. the proportionality that is now demonstrated indicates that the run-off could be a gigantic problem.

none of this was happening before, so something has changed in the last month, something that needs to be determined is if other people in the neighbourhood are having the same problem or not. a back-up like this should only affect the lowest lying fixtures, so i need to find somebody else with fixtures in the basement to ask. i've identified the basement tenant next door, i'm now waiting for him to come outside for a smoke to ask him. if he's dealing with the same thing, well know it's a city problem. if he's not, i'm not sure what to say other than that something is probably busted...

(pause)

alright...

so, i talked to the tenant next door and he IS getting back-ups from the rain, meaning it's a city thing. he thinks the pipes in the area are bad and it's the construction.

at this point, i've reached what i can do: i've identified there's a problem with the city piping and reported it to the property owner.

it's now in your hands as to what to do...

(pause)

i've thought about this a bit and i think it's worth being careful about. apparently, the neighbour next door is actually getting backups, not just slow drains. i may have a block of some sort, but i'd hazard a guess that most plumbing is at least mildly blocked. what if the reason i'm NOT backing up is because there IS a block?

i think there's enough evidence at this point to conclude that rainwater is somehow getting into the city's sanitary. i think it's better to focus on that.

the landlord
THE City WILL BE HERE MONDAY DURING THE DAY TO RUN THE EEL THROUGH THE LINE:

jessica
ok.

i still don't feel that i'm getting across what the problem is.

the problem is not that the line is blocked all the time. it is not. the problem is that the line is ONLY blocked when it RAINS.

in general, i'm an advocate of ruling out possibilities. the only way to find out is to try. but i've developed what is a pretty strong causal relationship between the drain and the rain. it seems to be that it will continue to drain slowly until the sump pump turns off, then get back to normal. the sump pump continues to run 12 hours after a mild rain storm, and i need to reiterate that this seems unusual. but considering the separation, i think what the connection between your sump pump and the toilet down here is is that the water drainage in the basement across the street is going to level at about the same time the sump pump stops. that is, i think that the reason they seem connected is because the floor drain across the street should stop draining at roughly the same time that the sump pump down here stops.

i'd just request that the three of us spend a few minutes over the weekend brainstorming other ways that the rainwater might be overwhelming the sanitary on the street.

that abandoned house is the only thing i can think of that really makes sense...and it would probably be better if one of you can get a hold of him to turn the pump back on and/or plug the drain somehow, if you know him, because if i do it it's going to be through city bylaw.

ok, all that messing around is done, now - i have an answer as to how to get the sound out of cubase and into a wave file in the way i want it, and the mix is actually even almost done. so, i'm back to it tonight (and am going to need a lot of coffee to avoid passing out, because i'm at a low in the manic cycle). there'll be minor fixes, dubs and tweaks over night; hopefully, i can do the choir part tomorrow morning, and then all that will be left for the weekend is the bass and post-production. i want this done soon...

you're always learning things when you're recording on your own like this. i'm a guitarist, really. but i need to play the role of arranger, engineer, mixer, producer....a lot of it reduces to figuring stuff out on the fly....but once you learn it, you can keep going.

i've been having weird issues with this mix, so i've sat down over the last two days and done a very careful a/b test on the real-time v regular rendering out of cubase. this is an old version of cubase, fwiw - sx3.

my analytical understanding of the situation is that there's going to be a few trade-offs. intuitively, the regular render ought to be the superior render, because it makes the calculation more specific. however, i've studied a little bit of floating point arithmetic and i know the error can become quite substantial when you're dealing with big numbers. so, i had some concern that it may end up overloading the plugins with too much information, just producing more error. this is maybe a little counter-intuitive - you'd think the more specific you are, the better it would be, but when you get to the nitty gritty of the way matrix arithmetic works in a computer it actually works the other way around - the more specific you are, the greater the error. there's no philosophical conclusions to draw from this, it's a user error. but i'm the user, here, and need to try and understand whether i'm making that error or not. based on what i'd learned about modifying the latency, it seemed to me that the plugins i'm using are optimized in real time playback, but i wanted to be sure of it.

starting with the a/b, i could definitely tell a difference in the reverb in one of the first sections, but i intuitively realized it was probably mostly randomness in the plugin. i kept going with it and couldn't tell a difference anywhere else in the song, except that the distortion sounded a little less defined in the regular render. but, it was extremely subtle. this confused me a little.

i ended up doing a null test and it came back flat - except that reverb (and the flange over the reverb, especially). i was using that plugin elsewhere and it nulled. why didn't it null there?

a little research proved my intuition correct - most modulation and time-based effects are engineered to be random, so that each render is a little different. that means i'm going to get neurotic in mixing this thing down, surely.

i then amplified what looked like a flat signal up 48 db (which is a lot) and it came back with a lot of fuzz and a very defined difference in the fuzz on the cello. the conclusion is that the distortion is definitely rendering differently, and i was able to hear it on the a/b. but it's extremely minimal, and not likely to be noticed by anybody but the composer.

regardless, i've got enough evidence in front of me to stick with the real-time. the real-time is supposed to sound the way you're mixing it, and i think it's pretty accurate (now that it's at the right latency). asking the plugin to render offline seems to be asking it to be more specific than it was engineered to be, thereby producing error in the wavetable calculation. it's minimal, but it should be avoided on principle.

this weird fear of swallowing is back.

it has to be psychological as opposed to something like, say, ms, which i've seen various symptoms of come and go since i was a little kid. if i get a jug of juice, it goes right down. if i try and take a swig of coffee, i start blowing into the cup. so, i have to take a small sip, swallow, wait and repeat.

i'm pretty sure i'm afraid of choking myself. it goes away after a while....

update...

jessica
hi again.

the toilet did the same thing after the storm today, so it's really obvious, now.

further, i checked the back room and it seems to be flooding out of the storage area beside the laundry room, which my ears tell me is where the sump pump is.

i noticed when i went out for a smoke that it was dumping water on the front lawn at a startling rate. like, it looks like somebody left a faucet running, sort of thing.

again: i have no idea what this means, only that something is flooding and it seems to be connected to the sump pump.

(pause)

actually, the water in the basement seemed to be coming from a little hole in the foundation. but if i were to guess, i'd think the cause of it seeping through would be the massive amount of water coming out of the sump pump directly above it. i might be concerned that it's producing some water damage, but it's sort of secondary to the plumbing issue itself.

it's hard to believe it 's coming from the rain because the puddles on the rest of the street have already dried up. why is this unit getting a thousand times more water than the one next door? so, it has to be feeding back from somewhere.

i just want to be clear about the flow rate. you know the "outdoor taps" that units used to have? i haven't seen once since i was a kid, but you'd attach a hose or a sprinkler to it out of your backyard. it looks like that faucet is on FULL BLAST. and it's been running like that for an hour. there's absolutely no way it's just the rain, it didn't even rain that much, that water has a different source...

with that much water, i thought maybe it was coming from a pipe that could be turned off, but it was suggested to me that that doesn't make sense. see, maybe it doesn't. but the toilet thing doesn't seem to make sense either.

i don't know what the options on the sanitary line are, or how they could get mixed up with the storm drain, but something seems to be crossed.

so i need to ask: did the furnace guys connect any pipes together? might it have crossed something up, through back pressure?

(pause)

sorry for the long email, but, just to finish the thought, it seems like the water was coming out of the sump pump and back into the basement. so it was recycling itself, creating the impression that it was coming out at a steady flow. he put a device in that acts as an inclined plane, to get the water out from the house and each pump is consequently decreasing in volume. so, it seems like it's not backed up, after all, it's just that the ground is really saturated. it might be a good idea to try and make that permanent to prevent further water damage...

it doesn't explain the toilets, but i do think the logic extrapolates. if the water is too saturated in the front of the house, it stands to reason that the city system is possibly backed up.

i'm still a little skeptical about possible flow issues somewhere, but that's an easy line of thinking to stick with for now.

(or it could have been a coincidence that the pump started slowing when the device was installed)

the landlord
Again the pump, pumps storm water, it does not pump sewage. If the sewer, sewage line is backing up we will call the city and report this. Speak to Paul and explain what you are experiencing so that he can look for himself when it rains again. This will give him first hand knowledge of the problem when he speaks to the City.  I will speak to Paul and have him call this to the Public works. This is not are doing this will be a city correction. If you notice around our building that they have had us divert the water from the eves draughs out of the storm pipes at the side of the building. This is so the storms are not overloading, delaying the run off into the storm sewers from the road surfaces. Paul you are seeing  this e-mail, call me when you get this.

jessica
i guess that explains where the extra water is coming from. ok. i just couldn't understand why there was so much on this property, and so little elsewhere without the water backing up from somewhere. i was thinking that if a stormwater pipe had broken, it could be flooding both the sump pit and the sanitary at the same time. but if you're doing it on purpose, that explains that.

i did a bunch of googling and i'm still working with a weak understanding of toilet plumbing but i think it has to be the case that water is pooling somewhere. it might be a blockage, but if it's a blockage it would have to be somewhere that water can pool where it rains - through a manhole or something. this is then killing the air pressure on the flush. otherwise, it would be slow to drain all the time.

the other thing i was thinking was about the air vent coming up from the toilet. if something had been rerouted with the furnace, could it not possibly have a different reaction to rainwater, and conceivably produce a lack of flush pressure? but, i did an experiment early in the morning and i think i've ruled it out. what i did was let the water in the sink run and then flush. the water was flowing right out through the sink before i flushed, but as it was flushing it started to fill up a little. if i understand correctly, this rules out a vent issue by demonstrating a restriction of the flow rate.

i have to admit that i'm not entirely convinced it isn't construction. if they're temporarily down to one pipe somewhere instead of two, that could be where the water is pooling. i know everybody else in the neighbourhood would have to experience this, but how many have toilets that are low enough for it to be an issue?

i'll bring paul down here next time we get a lot of rain...

(pause)

the only other thing i can think of is that maybe one of the neighbours recently installed a sump pump to the sanitary and it's exaggerating an existing block...you're not supposed to that, but people do that...

whether it's via leak, construction, bad install or whatever else i think the flow restriction happening only when it rains, and stopping when it's dried out, demonstrates that there just has to be rainwater blocking the sanitary at some point, somewhere, somehow - even though that's not supposed to happen.

but, like i say, i'll get paul down here to see it next time it happens.

(pause)

actually, there's one more hypothesis i have. i know this is a little bit of a long shot, but the culmination of what you're telling me and what i'm reading and what i'm seeing indicates that something very strange is happening.

the house across the street had a fire last month. it seems like it's been completely shut down since. if they shut the sump pump off, the basement could be flooding in the rain, and the flooding could be finding it's way into the sanitary, slowing the drain down.

it's just a guess, but something weird like that MUST be happening. i don't known if you know those guys or could call them and ask, but i think the sump pump in that basement ought to be working, regardless, for the benefit of the rest of the neighbourhood....

another thing to take note of...

every video in the first grid, sorted by popularity, now has over 100 views.

it might seem silly to note this on first thought, but it has psychological implications for some people that won't watch something unless it has x amount of hits. now, they don't have to see any videos with two digit view counts. these kinds of people maybe aren't a natural demographic for me, but it's an additive thing...

i uploaded like 70 videos over about three months, which wasn't done with much thought about view count. but what it means is that a lot of the songs are climbing at roughly the same rate, and the rate is relatively slow compared to the overall channel rate. i mean, instead of having those 10,000 hits focused on one or two tracks, they're spread over 70. so, i wouldn't expect that number to hit 200 for at least two more months, and 300 until the end of the year. having that number go from 100 to 300 is 6000 total views, though.

i'm focusing on long term distribution potential, not short term virality, so it's a better argument for me to spread it out. but it takes time...

so, maybe not.

i left my broom to dry in the back room a few weeks ago and forgot about it. i was going to clean today, but not without a broom...

if it doesn't show up by tomorrow, i'll go buy a new broom, i guess. i mean, it's the landlord's broom. but that gives me a few hours to listen to mixes.

uploading to spin inside dull aberrations to the scratchpad

i'm going to let this simmer for a day before i get back to it, and spend tomorrow doing other things.

i feel obligated to warn you that the mix is floored with distortion ala loveless or siamese dream, but without any safety precautions that professional mixers might use to prevent hearing damage. you need a substantial amount of volume to get it to sound as i've mixed it, but please don't go overboard for now. i don't want you to damage your hearing.

as for the mix itself, i think i've finally got something close to what i want, but many tweaks are still coming.

i also still need to add some more synth, choir, bass, ebow and possibly some more strings.

http://googledrive.com/host/0B5JfVE9XTZikMS1zek9ER0xSU1E/scratchpad/

the absolute best tonal combination possible would have to be chamber music for cracked out tuba and fuzz box cello.

*filed away for the future.

with guitar, of course. that goes without saying...

so, it turns out turning the latency down corrects the problem between the render and the playback on the device. this only makes sense if the render is occurring at a lower latency level than the playback. what it means is that i was rendering without full use of the plugins. but, oddly, the plugins sound better that way on playback, too. i'm kind of left to conclude that the plugins must have been engineered to work at a lower latency level, and the logic i was using (more cpu power = better quality plugins) is not correct. rather, i seem to have been sort of overloading them, asking them to calculate more accurately than they were meant to and getting a weird result out of it.

realizing this makes the process a lot easier, although i'm going to have to deal with the odd crackle and pop when i'm mixing that will go away on the render.

well, i just passed 100 tracks for this song, which isn't even seven minutes long, yet. yet because i'm going to add a little section to the end that'll take it past 7, and plausibly take the track count past 150.

so, you can imagine mixing it is time consuming. there's still a ton to do, but getting past 100 components is a good place to pause and post a temp mix, so there'll be something up before bed time.

fwiw, the vast majority is guitars, but there's also what is becoming close to a full orchestra notated out along side them all.

i'm looking for

a) somebody born sept 1, 1996 and
b) somebody born may 1, 2014

these two people would be separated by exactly the 17 years and 242 days between the reality i lived and the alter-reality i'm presenting. it would be interesting to sync them together through the music.
please let me know if you can help.

so, i've brought back my favourite roland analog synth sound for the track. it's been retired for years to overuse, but if i'm trying to get into my headspace c 2001...

ok, so i found a way to make sense of this without a conspiracy or a change in metrics or incompetence and i'll stop whining about it. i'm going to pin it on the autoplay and flashblock.

i'm clearly getting more traffic than is being recorded, but i think that must be something that was true all along and i'm only noticing it now because traffic spiked really high and then faded off a bit. if i take out that one 238 hit day as an anomaly, traffic for august is still up a bit (88 hits a day vs 86 hits a day in july). and if i take out some of the 180 hit days, it's up even more. i'm a mathematician, i know i should do that, and i'm getting ahead of myself in not doing it. jumping from 75 hits a day to 88 hits a day is actually still a big jump, once i've controlled for that.

but what that means is that i must have got something like 400 hits the day that 238 was recorded, if i'm working with a rough scaling factor of 200% on the lead track. that is, i'm thinking that roughly 40% of users are blocking autoplay in some way. on firefox, you can use flashblock. there's a similar built-in fix with both chrome and explorer, and an html5 fix if you're not using flash at all.

so, i'm no longer thinking they changed it or that i'm being throttled or anything of the sort, i'm concluding that i've been being undercounted the whole time and that the number of people using flash blocking software is highly variable. so, i can stop moaning about it, now - it's been constant the whole time, and applicable to everybody equally.

the takeaway is to encourage people to use some kind of flash-blocking software to disable the autoplay. this will help anybody with a trailer up on their page, but it will especially help musicians that have converted youtube into an advertising platform get an accurate hit count.

to be honest, i couldn't imagine trying to browse without a flash-blocker. it would drive me nuts. ads popping up, videos playing everywhere - total mayhem. if you're not using one, it will make browsing immensely more enjoyable...

it would be great if youtube would just count the autoplays, but they have a policy against embedding files. again, it's this strange cultural weirdness at youtube, concerned people are inflating their hit counts by embedding them in autoplay scripts. i don't know how paranoid that is, but it's reasonable enough, on some level.

but, there's obviously a difference between autoplaying a track on your channel and embedding it on an ad server. when somebody clicks on your channel, they're obviously interested in your videos. it clearly meets the definition of a "view", and is being discarded on a technicality. it really *should* count.

regardless, i'm still getting more views on any particular track by putting it on the front page with a big button (and because i use flashblock, i didn't even realize it was autplaying when i started doing this, i just thought it was a big button - and a big button is exactly what it is for flashblock users) than i would otherwise, so i'm still coming out ahead with this. i've considered maybe putting a single video in the top spot instead, but i can't get such a big button or that nice article like format with the writing, so it will look really goofy. now that this is more clear in my head, though, i should look at it more closely, maybe i can mess with it...

but the ideal solution would be either:

a) youtube counts the autoplays on the front page of a channel (but not the other autoplays) or
b) youtube allows the user to turn off the autoplay on their trailer.

the workaround is to use flashblock...

yeah, a single video there doesn't look good at all. i'm going to have to just eat it and hope the chorus of people pushing for the reversal of autoplay is loud enough to have an effect.

but, i was thinking it's been undercounted by a few hundred hits, most fairly recently...

it's actually probably a few thousand, going back to may.

but, it's certainly annoying, even if i'm content with it. from a musician's standpoint, a featured track is a really great feature - whether it autoplays or not. i mean, i have to think a good 80%+ of people are going to click the button if they make it to the channel. it's a giant button. people like to click giant buttons! but, instead it just plays, denying people the opportunity to make the conscious choice to purposefully view the video with intent. i mean, if they're going to be so strict about it, it's kind of dumb to deny somebody the opportunity to click the button then claim they didn't really want to watch the video. in reality, the vast majority actually probably really did want to watch the video...

now, i'd expect to see a dramatic drop in people that are interested in clicking a second video, which is what i'm seeing, absolutely. but i'd expect almost everybody legitimately wants to click the first one.

the more i think about it, i'm almost upset about it solely because it denies people the opportunity to click the button. there's a special kind of joy in clicking the button, especially one of such girth.

so, install flashblock - you'll get the button.

the flip side of it is that the whole channel marketing thing isn't really catching on. i've posted several videos with well over 100 subscribers to see basically none of them watch it. i really have no idea why they subscribed at all, but the conclusion seems to be that very few people are reading their youtube feeds. and, really, it's hard to blame them. you can check your facebook feed on the bus. you've gotta be sitting down by yourself to check your youtube feed. it's kind of destined to be a niche thing without much real value in terms of reach. i'd hazard a guess that most of the people with lots of subscribers aren't really interacting with viewers that way, it's probably more people going to the site directly to check for new videos (and partly because they don't want to wade through their feed). personally, that's how i deal with vice news. i don't check my feed for updates on the ukraine thing, i go right to the channel and look for new videos.

so, like, as somebody that's running a channel, do i really want them to subscribe? it's not my priority, in terms of trying to get across to people. the priority is getting them to listen to something as soon as they get to the page, whether that means clicking a button or having it recorded as a view or not....

but, honestly, i couldn't see why somebody doing a video blog would want you to subscribe as their top priority, either. the top priority for anybody at all should always be directing people to content while they're there, right at that point, not bookmarking the site for later. you're going to be looking at an incredibly low return rate in just about any context. you want people to engage while they're there in the moment, not at some undetermined point in the future that chances are low will even happen at all.

for a company that focuses so much on advertising, they seem to be rather dense in terms of what they're forcing their users to focus on.

or, as i've pointed out repeatedly, lost in a corporate culture that has lost touch with reality. perhaps the company has this aloof, abstract idea of turning youtube into a subscriber-based site. but, a youtube channel is not a tv channel. a computer is not a television set. surfing habits are fundamentally, inherently different than viewing habits, because the options are unlimited and user-initiated. if you put a search box in a tv set, nobody would watch nbc or fox. so, it just doesn't reflect the reality of how anybody is going to actually interact with the content.

i guess it's a common problem in how people think, generally. people seem to want to project the reality they wish would exist, rather than analyze the reality that actually does exist and adjust themselves to it.

see, the thing is you'd *expect* an irrational creature to build a social system centered around that creature's inherent rationality - as a consequence of that inherent irrationality, which would blind it to it's own nature. if such a creature were to have the capacity to come to terms with it's inherent irrationality, it wouldn't truly be irrational. that is to say, it would be an impossibility, rather than that it would state anything about the creature's nature. a rational creature may understand it's rationality, but an irrational creature could only confuse it's irrationality for rationality. and, i may have just proven what i have suspected all these years - that i am not a member of the species i ought to be a member of.

as i've stated previously, i'm content with sharing a genus with homo sapiens (sapiens) but i need a new species categorization for myself. sorry.

actually, they say that the person that discovers the species gets to name it, so i guess that's my responsibility.

this should surprise nobody that knows me: i am hereby homo j.

i'm half-considering putting the application in to the academy, just to see what happens.

if a god actually did exist, could it even begin to understand our inherent irrationality?

or might we just perplex it to such an extreme point of confusion that it would just give up on us?

i'm kind of leaning towards the latter, really. i couldn't imagine any supremely rational being being able to get it's head around us. it would just be too much for it.

"they're pointing nuclear weapons at...don't they know what...da fuck...?"

then, we wonder why the bastard seems like such a vengeful asshole. well, shit, what other response is there?

you can only frustrate a supremely rational being so long before it gets to a breaking point and is just like "fuck it.".

so, i've been spending the last few days playing with mixes. part of the problem is that the song sounds very different out of my mixing devices (alesis mixer, pod amp simulator), out of my soundcard (m-audio audiophile) and out of my laptop (some cheap integrated hd chip). every time i change something to sound better on one, something breaks on the other. i've come to the conclusion that i'm going to need to compromise a little...

i want to put that aside for the day and get most of the parts finished.

i think it's ultimately a render issue. for some reason, the out through cubase sounds differently than the playback in real time. i mean, different hardware is going to produce different results, but the changes are largely in the guitar tone and that's beyond natural playback differences. i'm thinking it might have to do with the way it's calculating some filters. that may actually mean that the out i'm getting is the more technically accurate version, but i want it to sound the way i'm mixing it, not as some abstract ideal i can't monitor.

i had this problem once before, years ago, and fixed it by hooking an out from the mixer into the in on the soundcard and just recording it in real time. but, i'm not sure i'm going to be able to do that with this piece because of the vstis. that other track was just all wave files.

but i'm not worrying about this for today, i'm finishing the recording as much as i can. the last thing i'm going to want to add is a bass, and i need to give myself a few days for it to get the tone right. i find bass to be a very difficult instrument to record. it's partly because i don't have any di cords. although, maybe i should take the opportunity to invest in one...

it's the primary reason i use so much synth bass. luckily, it tends to fit the style i'm writing in. but this track needs a bass guitar. the core of it was actually written on a bass guitar...

i actually did a huge amount of experimenting the last time i got to a bass part, which was way back in '08. yeah. well, i haven't done a lot of recording at all since then, and the bit i've done has worked fine with synths or sequencers. i went and picked up a separate bass limiter (boss lmb-3) and compressor (digitech dual band bass compressor) in stompbox format. the compressor actually has an amp simulator in it as well, so the two of these things together are fairly versatile. iirc, i need to connect it to a noise gate, though.

anyways, i think i have what i need this time to get it pretty good directly in, but i know i'm going to need a few days to play with it, too.

i actually ended up converting an old dod fx53 into a bass distortion, too. it was a $5 pickup somewhere, and i didn't know what i was going to do with it when i got it. as a guitar distortion, it's not what i want - i like really fuzzy stompboxes that push sustain and high gain. this is a weaker distortion. but it works well with a bass for exactly that reason - it's subtle enough that it doesn't kill the note clarity.

the bass (it's a mid 80s ibanez roadstar II, black pearl burst) also has active pickups, which is hugely important for recording, and why i bought it. well, that and the neck is small, which helps with my tiny fingers. the pickups in the early roadstars were designed so they could switch between p-bass and j-bass type sounds, but this one has two low impedance active soapbars in it. they're really the bass to look for if you want a playable, versatile and relatively cheap bass, although that factor may have boosted their price a little over the last decade.

actually, i have a mild hypothesis with this and it flips it around.

perhaps they're only counting featured track (they call it a "trailer" and promote it as "increasing subscribers", but subscribers are useless because nobody reads their feed - it's a featured track) plays if the user does run an adblock or flashblock type program. that way, the user is physically initiating the play.

that would explain why i'm only getting 30-50% of the actual hits - the rest of it is autoplaying. you can't turn the autoplay off, unfortunately.

therefore, you should install adblock.

although, i just tested one of the tracks under 300 with an embed (meaning i'm not signed in through it) and it didn't increment immediately like it ought to, indicating there's something deeper happening.

you'll see me on the street corner in five years yelling:

"i got 100,000 views but they didn't count them!"

while people toss quarters at me and tell me to shut up.

but, seriously. there's something really seriously wrong with the counter. i haven't seen hits on hardly anything in three or four days, but i know i'm getting upwards of a hundred visitors a day. it's not adding up...

if i were to get conspiratorial, i wouldn't blame it on my politics. there's no logical connection between my hit count and my rambling. that is, decreasing my hit count isn't going to stop me from rambling, and it has nothing to do with the reach of the videos i'm rambling on. if somebody is trying to shut me up by cutting out my hit count, they're completely incompetent.

if i was to get conspiratorial, it would have more to do with the fact that i'm NOT buying hits or paying for advertising. i have a hypothesis that it's ultimately google that's selling the hits, not some script kiddies. being able to generate traffic without buying into their system (via buying ads or buying hits) threatens their business model. i may have been flagged when i crossed some threshold, like 10,000 hits, maybe. i wouldn't put it above them.

but i can't shake occam's razor, and it's just that the counters are programmed badly. no matter how enticing the second conspiratorial option is, and no matter how much the circumstantial evidence leans that way, incompetence is simply a simpler explanation.

as mentioned, i can't let that get to me, no matter how irritating it is. i know i'm generating traffic. there's nothing for sale on youtube - that traffic needs to be routed to bandcamp for me to get anywhere with it. there's no chance i'm going to force somebody to watch an ad to listen to the song; the whole point is *i'm* advertising something, i don't want to give somebody else the space, that would defeat the purpose. and, i'm not going to generate this kind of traffic much of anywhere else. if they're going to throttle me, it just means it'll take longer to get to where i need the hit counts to be to generate that distribution interest. but, my argument relies on the hits eventually adding up, anyways. requiring six months rather than three is relatively irrelevant - i need total hits. so, i just need to forget about it and be patient....

i just hope it *is* incompetence - because if it's not, it still is.

and that's far more frightening than a bunch of bad programming.

as i mentioned before, though, i'm going to be pissed if i get a negative growth curve from july to august as a result of this, considering i know that i'm generating increased traffic. i had a nice curve going on there.

and, what if it's a ploy? a sales trick? see, i bet google has an army of psychiatrists working for them...

what if they key on users that are generating hits, then take those hits away in the hopes that it will coerce them into buying advertising? what if they even inflate the hit counts with the desire of building a sort of addiction to the metrics? the first hit's free, then we start charging.

i've been clear in the past that i can't buy advertising. the music is far too abstract. i mean, i probably wouldn't anyways - i'm both remarkably cheap and far too idealistic. but, i know it's not going to work. what i'm doing is far more effective.

but, that's kind of the point. i'm breaking their system...

see, i might be breaking their system, but it's not the case that just anybody could do this. i don't really pose them a threat.

first of all, this is a full time job. the sheer amount of posting i'm doing is not really feasible for most people. second, it requires some serious talent, which in this case reduces to intelligence. i'm a realist, and it's the truth of it - you need a brain to troll like this. it's an art. so, if you put those two things together, you're looking at a pay rate considerably over minimum wage and a difficult and expensive recruiting process attached to it. nike or coca cola or whatever can't just hire some high school kids to do this. they'd really have to headhunt.

it's consequently not feasible to adopt as a model. could some other individuals pull it off? sure. and you can't stop them, either. but i'm not a threat to ad revenue.

so, like, back off.

but, on a larger scale, i think the world needs to get ready for something: the trolls will inherit the earth. in the last generation, it was the nerds. everybody hated them and looked down on them, but they became the most successful gen xers. in the future, expect the trolls to overcome.

wait for it.

in that sense, maybe i'm blazing a path....

 ....but this is too specialized to replace traditional advertising, and it's not what consumers want, either. it may generate traffic, but it would hurt sales, for most companies.

i mean, the crux of what i'm doing is three-fold :

1) piss people off. then they have to listen - and in an agitated state, where they're likely to respond. companies won't want to do this, obviously.
2) say something controversial that pisses off most people but is exactly what somebody else wants to say and is afraid to say because it will piss off most people. that works for obscure artists that are going to build fan bases off the solidarity, but it's almost always a bad idea for a company to take a stand like this.
3) provoke thought. which is again counter-intuitive for selling a product, but good for distributing art.

so, even if the odd company can find a trolling genius, and is willing to pay her, what she can actually do for the company is quite limited. and consumers will quickly grow tired of it.

there's also a saturation point inherent to the process of trolling that trolls need to be wary of. i can troll at will right now because nobody knows who i am. even a company that might be willing to be antagonistic with it's product, like sony or nintendo, can't do that. if the logo is visible, it's just an ad. if it isn't, it's deceptive - and will backfire.

so, you have to go back to the determined individual. with enough time and hard work some other person with the smarts could do this, maybe better than me. but we're rare. 1 in some big number, anyways.

....and not a threat.

i don't like that i'm constantly bitching about youtube metrics, either, but i wish they'd be more clear in documenting rejected hits. i ultimately remain convinced that their algorithms are broken, but i'm wondering if i'm being throttled in some way.

i've had 94 hits a day - exactly - for almost a week, now. that's one less than 95. or < 95.

i mean, i watched the hit count rocket to 301 from 133 over about 36 hours, from thursday night to friday afternoon. i was averaging close to five hits an hour - just on the track on the front page. that's quite a few hits when you think about it, about one every 12 minutes.

the number on the top track clearly increased by well over a hundred hits over the course of thursday. yet, only 40 of those were counted.

so, what was the problem with the other 60-80 hits, exactly? wrong country of origin? did they not watch long enough? were they using a proxy? tor? adblock?

the counter increased by close to 120. i could see up to a quarter of those (30) being bad hits. but 50-67% of them? it just strikes me as unlikely, and i again have to conclude bad programming....

the flip side of this is that it seems like i'm getting 250-300% more traffic than is being recorded, based on what i observed yesterday and how much of it youtube actually picked up. so, that's positive.

i guess that whatever's broken for me must be broken for everybody else, too.

in the end, the basic relationship of more hits ----> more views remains in tact.

but the numbers are not remotely accurate....

i just wish more of those hits were translating to bandcamp views, because that's the actual point of the exercise. well, sort of. if i end up with a youtube profile with 500,000 hits a year or two from now, i'm thinking that should generate distribution requests. but it would help a lot if i could say "x people actually bought something", and x>0.

it's going to be another full year before i can say "look, my introductory demos generated 20,000 hits, why don't we talk about distributing some of the newer stuff?" and that's really just about all that youtube has the potential to be useful for. for an established artist, it's absolutely useless...

i mean, i wouldn't even consider burning copies of these first two demos. they're only available as mp3 downloads for $6 (the first is a double) and $3, respectively. but i couldn't imagine anybody buying them unless they're fans of the later stuff. they're not very good, really.

what i'm trying to do is demonstrate i can build an audience. it's the whole emulating a natural process of the past thing...

that's why everything's ready to print.

(or in the process of being ready to print)

which reminds me: i'm expecting a nasty surprise in the mail soon, and should make some calls on monday.

uploading nothing to say to youtube

so, i decided to throw this up after all. it's the last track on the second demo tape (1997), cut up mildly.

it's just that most of the material from the second tape is going to link to redone versions. there were previously 6 tracks up, 3 of which were reversions. this at least takes it up over 50%, putting a bigger emphasis on the tape itself.

there's also a little bit of foreshadowing in terms of genre. most of the stuff i was doing at the time of the first tape (96) could be roughly categorized as 90s emo. this is a little revisionist, in that i didn't know what emo was, but if you listen to 90s emo (i'm talking about the post-hardcore genre) the reality is that it's really mostly footnotes on nirvana, anyways, and that's largely what i was doing. i actually think the bulk of it stands up relatively well in comparison to most 90s emo, which isn't known for it's high level of quality. these early tapes are a little proggier and a little more abstract than the norm; i was a better guitarist, basically, so i had the ability to delve deeper into grunge guitar playing and pull out more technical influences. there's also a more developed industrial aspect, coming mostly from nin. but, it's been an interesting experience realizing that i was connecting to some kind of zeitgeist in my basement by myself without having any remote awareness of it - as was probably the case with the other kids (maybe roughly five years older than i was) doing roughly the same thing i was. so, i can look back at the first tape and, despite having reservations as to the total quality of the material, realize i was legitimately on the forefront of something.

the second tape was a little more expansive in terms of sound, tilting a little more towards the electronic. i didn't have a computer yet, but i started sneaking into my sister's room when she wasn't there to use her keyboard a bit more regularly (there's some minimal keyboard on the first tape). doing so gave me a bit more flexibility in terms of writing and allowed me to explore a few different genres. there's some foreshadowing of the kind of post-rock that exploded about '98 in screwed up (97). i'm also reaching towards the post-punk revival rather substantially.

but the interesting thing about this particular track is that it's _very_ mid 00s indie rock - think man man or maybe xiu xiu as the artier expanses of something that's seen countless mostly forgotten purveyors over the last ten years. i was thinking in terms of modernizing some kind of billy joel or elton john track, which is probably exactly what man man was thinking a few years later. well, man man has major beefheart tendencies, too, and i wasn't quite into that yet. my dad was pushing it, but beefheart took me a bit more maturity to get my head around.

so, i feel i should post this for that reason, as well: this is something that sounds very much like a lot of 00s indie rock, and it's certainly the most "indie rock" thing i've ever done, but it was recorded back in early '97.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ37S6tpDJ4

well, that and i like the guitar solo :)

townies. ugh.

i expected those, though. it's a miracle it took this long, really. best to avoid them....

"you know, you should open up the advertising a little bit so people know the shows are going on."

"but it's a tight knit scene."

"that's why you should open up the advertising, so people outside the scene know what's going on."

"if you want to join the scene, you should come down. it's very tight knit."

"but, that's why you should open it up and make it less exclusive."

"but, it's a very tight-knit scene."

ugh...

fuck tight knit scenes, i want radical inclusion.

somebody shows up and offers suggestions on ways to open it, and all they get is a lot of attitude and an almost violent desire to maintain a small, incestual clique-y group. that's not something i want anything to do with. it's radical inclusion, or fuck off.

i mean, the bottom line is i haven't seen much of anything that's interesting in terms of local music over the year i've been here. it's all very generic and boring takes on different styles of punk, or equally boring folk music. my conclusion is that there's really not very much interesting music happening in the area at all.

but there's a specific bar that doesn't have a show calendar online. now, i really have little reason to think the bar is booking anything that's worth going to. i think the reverse logic is pretty applicable - if anybody worth watching was playing the bar, the bar would be updating it's listings. but, i'm the type of person that wants to know what's going on at all the bars i can get to, anyways, just in case there's that one rare act that seems interesting....

having idiosyncratic tastes requires this kind of meticulousness.

you wouldn't think a suggestion for a bar owner to update a web page would set off such a defensive reaction, but that it did says a lot about the area and the people that inhabit it. it demonstrates a very clique-y mentality that is suspicious of outsiders and wants to "vet" people before they're allowed to integrate.

going to a bar to watch a show doesn't imply a desire to join a club. and i definitely have zero desire to join a club....

this is why i prefer big cities to small towns. when i go out somewhere, i don't want to meet up with a group of people that i know, i want to fade into the crowd. i don't want everybody to know my name; i don't want *anybody* to know my name! i cherish that level of anonymity.

so, detroit's a good fit for me. windsor, less so...

in the end, if the local bands in the area just want to play to the same group of friends every show then that's their choice. i'll go hang out in detroit and watch some more interesting acts in the process...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoCfiZnOplY

obligatory "influential on the track of the week" post.

i'd graduated to bigger epics by this point, and this was a track that knocked me over. there's a lot to get lost in, here, and i did. you can hear some structural similarities.

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus, all symphonies)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwMkSvKoeUo

there's a three minute drum introduction to this on the cd that is really key.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZq_ropDPsU

obligatory "influential on the track of the week" post.

the drum machine - and the guitar work, as well. kids nowadays are going to hear the mars volta in it, but in/casino/out hadn't even been released yet. i could cite santana, but i'd be lying. it was i mother earth....

the live version of this on earth, sky, and everything in between is also killer.

(relevant tracks: teenage jesus, to spin inside dull aberrations, various tracks in the guitar solo playlist)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGlQHpnvMc