uploading guitar demo from 2008 to soundcloud

going through my lo-fi demoes a few days ago, i realized that i'd already released most of them in the form of two existing demos.

the first was entitled "impressionist jazz punk" and was mid 2005. i'll be uploading it as is to bandcamp when i get there (i'm currently doing stuff from '01 and moving forward chronologically) and then deciding what should be redone. the second was a six track proverbs demo that was supposed to act as a plan for the proverbs symphony. it still will, if mildly modified. so, the bulk of the tracks won't go to the lo-fi site.

i kind of forgot about the rest. this is a jam from early '08 that i put aside for further work and forgot about.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/2008-02-16a

yeah, this thing is playable. i'll give you a live vid of it on my mini nylon guitar, just give me a few days to polish it up.

i'm heading out to get this score printed...

thankfully, it's formatted well, unlike the last one. i'm hoping i can get a proper guitar version, however i idm it up in the end.

the time machine (midi piano mix)

this is the next 2001 period piece i'll be working on. my memory is blurry; yet, i have a vivid recollection of playing parts of it for my guitar teacher on a sunny day, where there was still snow on the ground.

it's funny how we remember seemingly irrelevant details, but i guess the atmosphere of the performance is important because the performance is. that would date it to roughly march, 2001.

i switched the piece from classical guitar to piano halfway through writing it, and vaguely remember thinking that an impossible interval had something to do with it. yet, that doesn't change the fact that it's guitar music. the counterpoint is very guitar.

i'll have to analyse the score and determine whether it's actually playable or not, or if i can get it close enough. but this one is an open palette right now in the sense that it needs to be filled out, so the early instrumentation choices are really just a suggestion.

one possible idea is that i may split it into a guitar piece to start and a piano piece to finish. i'm thinking of adding sequenced drums and a more defined, squelchy bass part.

written in early 2001. rendered june 9, 2014.

youtube's a weird system. i'm up to 90 subscribers, but i don't know anything about any of them. stranger, it seems like virtually none of them checked out my new song. i'm sending the information to almost 100 people and i'm not convinced that any of them are in my 12 hits - it seems like they're all random hits. so, why subscribe to the channel? i dunno, maybe it'll change in the next few days, but it seem to me like a youtube subscribe is some kind of act of solidarity or something.

i do suspect people are mildly confused and what they should be doing is following me on google+ if they want to follow my ranting, but i can't correct that.

i think my initial observation that youtube users have a longer attention span than bandcamp users is still valid, overall, but the average view length on those 12 views is still less than a minute meaning that the few subscribers that did check it out, if there were any, weren't actually interested, compounding my confusion.

i'm also at 5000 hits, though, which is a bit of a milestone. i just wish i knew more about people following me to understand what they're looking for.

i'm not collecting ad information, i'm just trying to build a small fan base. i don't work through a label or anything. there's no chance i'm going to play your town - even if i could get a basic band together, i couldn't really reproduce most of this stuff (which doesn't mean it can't happen, just that the live product would be drastically different. but it's not likely, and i'm not really interested in pushing for it at the moment.). there's really no wall of separation between you and i. so, if you're following me here, and you want to tell me a little about yourself and why you're following me if it's not to hear some tunes....

i think i've figured out that some of it is an implied market operation: people will subscribe with the expectation that i'll subscribe back. which is to what aim? a lot of inflated stats that prioritize networking skills over genuine interest? i'm not going to play that game. it's not about some kind of opposition to market collusion (i fully understand that 'free market' is an oxymoron), it's just that i don't see the use in having 1000 subscribers or likes or followers or whatever if they're not actually interested. it's a lie that doesn't build a real listening base. and, as a user, i don't want to sort through a cluttered feed of shit i'm not actually interested in.

some of it is obvious, and it's worst when it makes no sense. like, i got a subscribe from some bullshit trendy americana-indie band from new york that i've never heard of. nothing i do is anywhere near the genre, and i'm actually not even a fan of the style. at all. what's the use in pretending? i guess if i got the request from something i legitimately liked and respected, i'd reciprocate, but it seems outrageously contrived to do it to inflate stats. in the end, if everybody does that, we're just running on a treadmill, anyways. i want real likes, real followers, real subscribers, real views. and if the number is lower than it would be if i played the game of market collusion, that just reflects the reality of the situation - i'm not a pop artist.

anyways, i'm not going to prod. but i'd like to know what your interest in me is, if you're willing to share.

now that the song is done, i'm going to take a quick break to finish reading leviathan and then start the process of shifting off facebook to my own site, over here:

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/

i'll be using the network to check show listings, but i won't be posting here further. one of the things i'll want to do, shifting over, is set up various rss feeds.

the reason i'm shifting off is that i don't like facebook's decision to push the ui down from above. i want control over how my site looks. i want the ads removed. i'm sorry they don't agree with that.

but, there's lots of good reasons to get the data off facebook, too.

the best way to reach me is by email. if you don't have my email, i probably don't want you to have it. if you think i do want you to have it, msg me to find out if your intuition is correct.

i have several pages up, so it's going to take some time to transfer things. i'll be following a scorched-earth policy: delete everything as i transfer it to my own site. if there's something here you want saved, now's the time to save it.

what will remain will be a collection of rss dumps, because so long as people continue to use facebook it's kind of necessary to have something.

i think the long run solution has to be some kind of feed aggregator that works at the rss level. i think people are going to end up reading their twitter and facebook and youtube feeds all at the same time. it's probably actually a "woah. you can do that?" type thing. i'd guess almost everybody would switch to it if they knew it was possible. the idea was catching on for people merging msn, icq and etc right before facebook took over.

an interface that could cross-link the comments systems would be really ideal, especially if it could run standalone. and, it could conceivably kill a few sites off that don't want to play by the rules (facebook being the worst).

so, i also want greater control over the serving mechanism. right now, it sounds a little crazy, but wait for it.

i'm actually surprised that what i'm looking for doesn't exist in any kind of stable form. the idea has certainly been experimented with, but it's all for profit companies that fall apart when they realize there's no money in it. further development seems to be geared towards ipad type apps (which i'm never going to go for) and smart phones, which i'll never really get used to. i want a desktop product. fuck the trends...

i only use a handful of social media sites. if i were to build it myself, it would be very basic and never updated. but i'd be happy to throw the software out, open source, for further development.
one thing at a time. i don't even know how to get appspot to send out rss yet.

specifically: i don't want a ticker on a website, or multiple feeds on one page. just a simple, aggregated feed that i can interact with - and preferably through a standalone program that blocks ads and scripts.

it's the most basic, least visual, low return thing you could imagine.

and something like it is going to define how this shit works five years from now.

uploading stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides to youtube

and, it's up at youtube, too.

i was considering doing a screenshot capture of me running through the 83 cubase tracks that come together in this track and slowly collapsing the tree into an organized collection of ten group tracks to the main out because i thought it would be sort of epic to run through that level of complexity, but i decided in the end that it would just be an ad for the software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9cIRP7ml5c

note that that is in addition to the compilation of midi/vst tracks, which should otherwise have a similar tracklisting to the jjjjjjjjjjjjj record.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/thru

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (final album mix)

this completed live version will also front the 2001 "serious period" album. i was filing the serious shit under jjjjjjjjj (there's nine there) at the time. it's a sort of tongue-in-cheek self parody at the idea of writing serious music. 'cause if i was ever going to commission a piece, i'd have to get rid of surnames and superfluous syllables and just shorten it to the basic "j", just to get the point across about rejecting anything formal. i was tripping out into some rather silly number theory...

anyways, that's the opening track. the second will be some fun to try and put together, but the others should be done fairly quick now that i have some hardware/software that can deal with it.

written late 2000 & early 2001. minor instrumentation changes to facilitate a small wind section were implemented in late april, 2014. live guitars were layered into the final version over may 2014. completed on june 6, 2014.

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (final single mix)

this is the final mix, without as many lead parts as i was thinking at one point, and without the vocals i considered adding, but with more than enough atmospheric additions to make the live recording worthwhile. it will end up opening the ep of remixes of this track that i posted to jan 10, 2001 and also end up opening the front of this compilation of material written over 2001, which will be the main album of the period.

i had some bad luck recording this. hopefully, the other stuff gets out a little faster.

written late 2000 & early 2001. minor instrumentation changes to facilitate a small wind section were implemented in late april, 2014. live guitars were layered into the final version over may 2014. completed on june 6, 2014.

publishing stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (inri043)

this is one of the tracks that i can't date well. i do, however, remember working on it during the winter, which means it must have been late '00 or early '01. i'm going to consequently deduce that it must have been what i was working on over the 2000 christmas break and date it coming out right after it.

actually, i have another reason to date it in early '01 rather than late '00: the introductory piano part was recorded live into my notation program on my dx100, which i was given over christmas (maybe a little before; it was a cheap garage sale pickup) to act as a controller for my recently broken jx-8p, that i had tried to take apart over the summer to clean a sticky key (a common problem with mid-80s roland analog synths) but failed and left keyless. it's still keyless. yet, the dx still drives it....

that introductory piano part formed the basis of the track, which built itself up fairly quickly. somewhere, i lost the nwc file by saving it as midi, which ruined all the formatting. it's been sitting on my drive ever since.

why put together seven different midi versions of the same track, and sequence them after a polished recorded version? well, this was never actually meant to be computer music. i was just composing something the old fashioned way with the intent of later giving it to some musicians to play. that never happened. what did happen was that i found myself playing it back on multiple sound cards over many years, trying to make it sound as good as possible in the short run - until i could finally get the chance to sit down and actually record it. while each of the different renders has it's strong and weak points, i ultimately don't feel that they form a total order. something i thought about doing was recording tracks independently on different cards and then pasting them together, but that would have just created another dozen incomparable mixes. rather than arbitrarily pick one, i decided to just upload all of them.

in hindsight, i think the format is interesting in itself in terms of it being a psychological experiment with sound. the differences from track to track are sometimes inaudible and sometimes extremely noticeable. stringing it all together in a row like this is challenging to any listener in the sense that it rips apart the process of becoming familiar with a piece. it means listening to exactly the same song through multiple different sound libraries. i think your brain would have to interpret that as a sort of a trip, especially when it comes to trying to build associations in sound within tracks that are both similar and different sounding, soundcard wise. i think that might be part of the reason i had so much difficulty isolating tracks in the first place.

so, listening to the ep through all the way is likely to be a bit disorienting and might ultimately be a strange experience. however, if you like the track for what it is as a collection of overlapping sequences of notes then i hope you get something out of the process of comparing and contrasting the renders together.

i have included the original midi file as a bonus item in the download, if you want to play with it on your own. the added guitar sections in the final version are recent additions and have not been written out.

written late 2000 & early 2001. the renders present here are all from the early months of 2014. minor instrumentation changes to facilitate a small wind section were implemented in late april, 2014. live guitars were layered into the final version over may 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - electric piano, programming, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, vocals, vocoders, digital effects & treatments, digital wave editing, composition.

the rendered electronic orchestras variously include piano, bass, synth bass, distorted electric guitar, clean electric guitar, steel string acoustic guitar, nylon string classical guitar, sitar, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, french horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, oboe, english horn, bassoon, synthesizers, clarinet, flute, piccolo, xylophone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, jazz drum kit, hand drums and electronic drum kit.

released january 10, 2001

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/stuck-in-the-middle-of-an-alley-closing-in-on-all-sides

...or do i want vocals after all?

the track wasn't written with any. i didn't have plans to specifically include or exclude, but my work in the period was generally instrumental.

pretty much everything else on this midi music disc is going to be instrumental.

i was just thinking that some vocals would carry the piece, but it came out of humming a part. hence the melodyne thing. that extrapolated itself outwards into an idea about urban decay.

but this is cliched.

....and i don't think i have enough words to carry the length of the track, and the end is striking me as vocally daunting, because i am not a singer and do not generally sing. it's just these big power chords that would need "real singing" if any at all. leaving it empty negates the purpose.

i guess i was thinking of saturating it with guitars, but i'm avoiding that, too.

i'm going to listen to it 100 more times. sporadically, perhaps.

i'm getting the feeling, though, that this is done.

lyrics for stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides

whisper:
claus
ter
phob
bic
lies (life)  (1/5) - delay/decay - switching pan

centre - descending - vocals
to run and to hide and to
in a ball on the floor

descending countermelody:
how to be alive,
when it's all collapsing on all sides

WATCH IT FALL NOW
(HORNS KICK IN)

(background:
the falling debris feels like fear/love/pain/hope)

yeah, that's the last version of this. it'll be coming down in the next few hours, as i get the vocal melody in.

so, i need to figure out how to use melodyne, next. i've never pitch shifted my own voice (i've never had to), but i did use some more crude methods to modify sean's voice back in the day. that's not really the goal, though...

what i want to do is convert the vocal melody line into a synthesizer part, then vocode it back into the vocal part. i suppose i could write it out, but because i'm not the best singer i'm hoping it will let me microtone it precisely. that is to say, that i'm really looking for the audio to midi capability in order to ensure the vocoder is NOT in tune. i know, i'm always overcomplicating things, but i wouldn't be me if i just did it the easy way.

right now, the goal is to leave the synthesized section in the instrumental version.

first, i need to actually get the vocal melody in...

i'm going to have to play with this, but i think it should be possible to convert it to raw frequency.

yeah, i'm noticing it. what i'm experiencing is that hits from certain countries in the former soviet union and east asia especially (but countries outside the "first world" in general) get erased by some kind of software that is probably designed to prevent hit buying. i can't speak for you but i'm certainly not buying hits, i just get a lot of traffic from international news agencies (and a flip through my public google+ profile will make it obvious why).

basically, it seems like what youtube is doing is saying "if you have a high amount of traffic from outside of europe and north america then you must be buying hits, and those hits will be erased.". which is heavy-handed and counterproductive. i can get behind schemes designed to prevent view buying, but the algorithm seems to be making things worse by hyper-americanizing the site. i mean, i don't even live in the united states...

that being said, i can get my head around some bad implementation. bugs. fine. but, it seems to be getting worse and not better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d09EwcYc5k

this is close to a final mix. there may be some minor mix adjustments, and there will be a central vocal part, and there might be a guitar solo at the end, but if you want to say something that i'll almost certainly ignore, your time window is almost closed.

uploading stuck.. to the scratchpad

i'll probably update this several times over the next few hours. the edits are localized to within the first 1:30. the thing is i'm at the point with the track where it requires so much processor speed real time that i simply can't reproduce without bouncing (which i hate doing), so i'm forced to mix it down just to listen to it....

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

i just gotta say it one more time...

i don't care if you like bland, repetitive techno. i don't. really.

just stop deluding yourself into thinking it's futuristic or defines a generation or something. it hit it's peak of creativity about 1993 and has been cycling in circles ever since.

techno, today, is a *retro* fashion. k?

there's a number of rock forms that only make sense when placed after techno, as fusion only makes sense when positioned after jazz (but in a real sense was also both the end and high point of jazz). where we're standing in 2014, we've even managed to exhaust just about any kind of interesting electronic hybrids, which happened some time in the mid 00s.

so, it's like.....sorry, kids, but techno is something that already happened, and you missed it. why don't you take some time to explore some more contemporary forms, instead of getting lost in a concept of the future that is properly dated to c. 1983?

here lies techno. while there was initially much promise, and many victories, the end was meandering and dull.

rip.

techno.
(1975-2005)

yeah. i've decided i'm not going to find the remaining furniture i need in here, so i'm going to wait until the beginning of august and take a shopping cart of wood home with me. i'll need to varnish it. and i'll probably get a drill, too.

i'm hoping i can find a coffee table before then, but i'm looking for something that's roughly 14x40 and they're just not out there. people want these gross square coffee tables. or glass ones. yuck. if not, it should cost me something like $6 to build one and polyurethane over it.

there's this kind of enclave that i wanted to put shelving into but my initial plan isn't the best one. there's a window in the corner. i was just going to put shelving in square over the window, which would eliminate the need for curtains and make it harder to break in here. i mean, there's bars, but that's merely a disincentive. i've learned over the spring that access to this window is important, due to the air upstairs. so, i'm going to frame around it, instead, and get some curtains after all. that's three walls of framing that has to go around the window. i'm thinking i could probably do it for around $50, which is considerably cheaper than trying to cram a dozen oddly shaped bookcases in - and better because there's no wasted space. i suppose it's sort of a gift to the unit, in the end, because i couldn't really take it with me. but i plan on staying for a while...

similarly for the corner shelving. i posted some pictures. the easiest thing to do will probably be to get some studs and just screw the shelves in, but it's going to depend on scrap wood from the other projects.

i want to build a simple three story desk to put near my bed to put a speaker unit up top, the laptop in the middle and various documents underneath. i've been hoping i can find something, but the space is only thirteen inches across.

the last thing is a cd shelf. the big problem has been "how do i get that much wood here". if i do it at once, i'll take the home depot cart back for the hour walk....

i'll just have to measure it all up in a few weeks.

which means i'm under budget for the first time since february and may be able to go catch a show, if an interesting one is happening this side of the river. actually, i'm still hoping i can catch swans in a few weeks. depends on customs. it'll be a few days one way or another. should put the cash aside for that....

so, i'm used to losing a few days around the start of the month. wish i didn't lose a few around the end of it, too.

i'm back on this track. i want it done soon, but i don't want to push it out prematurely. i had given myself the first, but that's off. hopefully, it's a by the end of the week thing.

mods are going to be minor, though. it's weird how you can have an idea, then listen to it over and over in your head, until you realize that it's already there in the first place. i guess it's sort of like listening to a complicated piece of music until you get it. it's just weird when it's your own. but the mix you make is not the mix you imagine, so you need to get used to it just the same.

it happens a lot with drums. i'll imagine it with a deep bass, listen to it 100 times asking "do i need to deepen the bass?" and eventually conclude the bass is pretty deep, so long as the listener has listened to it enough to be conditioned to it. meaning that the random listener out there with random co-ordinates may not get the deep bass on first listen, but the proportions will make sense after the 50th. which is what the mixing aim needs to be.

....because i have no choice to condition myself as well, because i'm ultimately listening to the mix the first time as well, regardless of how much time i've spent imagining the track in my mind. i wouldn't suppose that most people would envision the process that way...

rap news 25

i live in canada, where there's more or less a monopoly on lines in any given area. when i was in ottawa, it was rogers for cable and bell for dsl. i'm now in windsor, across the river from detroit, where cogeco owns all the cable lines.

it's kind of wasteful and stupid to suggest running competing lines side by side. but, our regulators have agreed that a monopoly is anti-competitive, so they've forced the line owners to rent the lines out to smaller companies. there are a few quirks to going with a smaller company, but one of the things they offer is cheaper access rates at lower speeds. ultimately, it just exposes how much of a rip-off the major carriers are: how else could a smaller company turn a profit by buying bandwidth from them, then undercutting them on it?

the process of moving down here and switching had me think a lot about it. is an internet line a public good? the analogy that keeps coming through my mind is public roads. we even have the language of an "information superhighway". there are some fringe opinions that disagree, but we mostly all agree that roads should be owned by the public and maintained collectively through taxation. one of the reasons we mostly all believe this is that it provides equal access for everybody. the idea that large companies could take over our roads and start charging us whatever they want for whatever access they advertise is inconceivably backwards to most of us.

it's one thing to stand up against this and argue that things are fine as they are, but the machinery of private property laws is staggered against us. should we not change our perception of what the internet is, it's inevitable that these sorts of changes will take place. what that means is that it's necessary to articulate an alternate vision of how internet lines are owned in order to maintain net neutrality.

lol. my youtube monthly stats increases are approaching the golden mean. :o.

i hit 4500 views over the night. that's not bad for 5 months and no promo outside of posting to youtube itself. if i maintain a modest growth ratio of 1.2 per month (less than the golden mean), i'll be at 30,000 hits by year end and be averaging about 1721 hits a day by the end of next year. that would be a startling 50000+ hits in dec, 2015 alone.

i know better than to think i can expect unending growth. i'm not some kind of delusional liberal capitalist, or something. and i'll state again that i don't really care about racking up hit stats.

but i'm at least succeeding in generating traffic.

i'm not sure what's going on outside. when i was out there, it sounded like a race track around the corner. air show? several lawn mowers? don't know. but, sitting inside, the waveforms of the different motors are expanding and overlapping with each other and harmonizing, and it sounds like an ambient noise festival.

maybe i just wish i was at an ambient noise festival.

it's nice out.

hurry up, customs.

nice walk yesterday, although it knocked me out. i guess i needed a good night's worth of sleep. it's been a long time since i can remember a good 9 hours in one stretch.

those cheap shoes aren't working out. i suppose i shouldn't be surprised, although i also think i'm abusing them. they probably would have lasted the summer if i didn't take them on these periodic six or eight hour walks. as it is, they're already softening up on the bottom. i did pick up a pair of skate shoes a few months ago, but wanted to save them until the spring rains stopped. the whole purpose of the cheap shoes was really to wear in spring and fall. so, i guess it's time to switch over. the cheapies were two for one, so i guess i have another pair for the fall. looking at them now, it's pretty obvious they weren't really made for walking.

i got this rare craving for a burger last night. it's something that hits every few months. raw meat is not allowed in the house, so it's not something that's in my regular diet. the few times a year i want a burger, i go buy one. i remembered seeing a local burger place, so i took a walk around the corner....

"motor burger". well, i'm in detroit. sounds like a good place for what i imagine a local detroit burger should be: greasy and messy, with a side of transmission fluid, but that's kind of what i wanted.

it turns out it was actually a sort of bourgeois gourmet burger palace, which makes these weird upper class burgers out of goat cheese and gluten-free buns, then charges upwards of $15 for them. i was tired, and jonesing hard, so i forked out the $22 for a bacon cheeseburger and a non-hydrogenated, baked, organically grown poutine.

i gotta say it was good.

and i guess that's the new detroit.

hi

a while back when i was in ottawa i sent you something for the afterburners 2 comp. i'm actually happy it's up there, but i'm wondering if you could do two things for me.

1) the artist name is jessica murray, not jason parent. technically jason and jessica are the same person, but i'm transgendered so i'd rather the female identifier.

2) it'd be great if you just tossed a link to jasonparent.bandcamp.com (i know it's confusing, but i don't think bandcamp has the right redirects to update the domain if i change it so i'm sticking with it) on the track page so people know where to find me.

i'm in windsor now, but good luck with bruised tongue moving forwards.

j

ugh. this new "facebook for iphone" shit is just horrific. it was bad enough losing 50% of the page to ads, now we just lost another 25% to a sneaky ploy by facebook to get pages to prominently display likes as ads along the sides.

i think this is sort of facebook admitting that people don't actually click on likes, meaning the medium really isn't useful to advertisers, meaning their entire reason to exist is up in the air. the increasingly aggressive nature of facebook advertising is a function of the inefficacy of advertising on social media. but, facebook seems to be run by legitimate Corporate Idiots, and it's consequently likely to get worse. i do predict that the ads are going to be what turns facebook into a ghost site in the end. if it's not already halfway there.

i like the rss capabilities. i repeat that it was the rss, not the people, that dragged me in - and late at that, not until 2010. and, so long as "content generators" (which in my case mostly means show promoters in the detroit/windsor area) continue to use facebook, i'll continue to use it as well. the corollary of that is that so long as people go looking for these sorts of sites, i feel i should maintain it.

but, cutting me down to 25% of the screen for my actual content is too much. to me, that makes the site unusable. i'm going to be converting this page (and the rest of my facebook pages, too) into an rss dump over the next few weeks, by emulating the timeline page at my appspot site.

there's another benefit to getting off these scripted sites, which is that they badly waste hardware resources. i shouldn't need 500 mb of ram to fully load this page back to 1981. it can be easily reproduced with an html table and an iframe in a way that could be loaded easily on a 386.

i'm going to leave the rss dump because people are going to keep checking the site for these sorts of things for the near future, but also because facebook could still turn things around. but, for right now, the future of facebook seems to be a dead zone of advertising scripts, where corporate servers communicate to each other across a barren landscape.

don't look for a replacement, either. the era of a centralized internet was thankfully short lived. the initial nature of the internet as decentralized and targeted to specific interests seems to be reasserting itself. that's something to be excited about.

for me, as a musician, that means the replacement ought to be something like spotify. it's not clear yet which network is going to win out. but note that there's a paywall there, which means i'm not interested. soundcloud is awful. so, i'd like to see bandcamp increase it's networking aspect. however it stabilizes, that's where the future is. and, likewise, expect a gamer network and a fashion network and a ...

the model to look towards is something like youtube, which will probably not be supplanted as the video networking site (unless it fucks up like facebook has). in the end, i think google did get it right, but not the way it meant to.

so, i'm not signing off, but i'm mutating outwards; i'm realizing this host is dead, discarding the exoskeleton and growing into a new one.

the time machine (midi nylon guitar mix)

this is the next 2001 period piece i'll be working on, hopefully starting early next week. my memory is blurry; yet, i have a vivid recollection of playing parts of it for my guitar teacher on a sunny day, where there was still snow on the ground.

it's funny how we remember seemingly irrelevant details, but i guess the atmosphere of the performance is important because the performance is. that would date it to roughly march, 2001.

i switched the piece from classical guitar to piano halfway through writing it, and vaguely remember thinking that an impossible interval had something to do with it. yet, that doesn't change the fact that it's guitar music. the counterpoint is very guitar.

i'll have to analyse the score and determine whether it's actually playable or not, or if i can get it close enough. but this one is an open palette right now in the sense that it needs to be filled out, so the early instrumentation choices are really just a suggestion.

one possible idea is that i may split it into a guitar piece to start and a piano piece to finish. i'm thinking of adding sequenced drums and a more defined, squelchy bass part.

for now, this is what the track sounded like as i was writing it. i've been careful to use the same scorewriter and same soundcard as i was using at the time of writing.

written in early 2001. rendered may 29, 2014.

my song of the next two weeks might initially come off as a young teenager emulating a nirvana deconstruction, but it's actually closer to pearl jam's punk rock underbelly. the best pearl jam tracks were always the punk tracks, and this record is the better of the early ones when it comes to that. looking back, i point to yield as their high point, but it wasn't out yet in 1996.

(relevant tracks: my very first impression specifically, but the lead guitar style in the early demos is drawn partially from mccready as a minor but noticeable influence (as well as some of mccready's influences, most obviously hendrix, and maybe a touch of page, although i was never much of a zeppelin fan) and this continues moving forwards quite a ways. there's also the flowing bass style, that i'll actually draw a primary influence from jim creeggan (who?) in relation to but that drew me to ament by similarity and is noticeable in the early demos and for years afterwards.)

alter-reality update:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-3WJVCvsk&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbslW9qCBKT_nEcwUt1DY0aN

i've recently received several requests for collaboration, which i've turned down because i'm a control freak. it's just a legitimate lack of interest in the idea of collaboration. i need to be in control of my art. sorry.

but i'm going to try to work with the idea. maybe i'm teasing you. but, if we're having fun that's what's important, right?

i'm going to start uploading rough ideas to my google drive space. those ideas will disappear as they mutate. but, i'm going to post them here and ask for input on them, and ideas that you think could better them.

i need to be up front: i'm probably going to ignore you. so, it's just like the democracy we have in real life. i mean, don't start thinking you have any kind of actual power, but it's always fun to pretend you do.

so, this is my messy industrial jazz catastrophe that i've been playing with for the last month and is about to go into what i call "post-production". what that means, to me, is that i'm going to listen to it dozens and dozens of times - until my mind starts to mutate it. then, i'm going to start trying to find ways to synthesize those mutated sounds my brain creates.

put another way, this is when the track goes through it's atmospheric industrial phase, and picks up car doors slamming and hammers hitting glass windows and noise generators squelching out strange pitches and weird scifi effects and etc.

i've got some ideas, i just need my brain to solidify them for me. but if it were up to you, how would you warp the fuck out of this?

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

also, the temp mix is done, i'm into building overdubs and doing post-production.

i just want to get the point across, so the word gets out.

i need to reiterate that i post a lot at rt, al jazeera and other global intersections. that's how i'm getting traffic from across the world.

unfortunately, the google algorithms are interpreting that as bought views, and while, again, i'll state that buying views wouldn't get me anything besides a lot of confused sheep, it's obvious that i'm not buying 4 views from south korea or whatever else.

what's setting the trigger off is the ratio. less than half of my views over the year are from the united states (although us + uk + can make up a bit more than half). according to google's filters, that's impossible without buying views.

and i claim that's blatantly racist.

what's going to happen over time is that google is going to slowly delete most of these views - most zealously the ones from southeast asia, russia, the middle east and africa.

what has to happen is that youtube needs to change how it tries to catch bought views, because what it's doing right now is just erasing 80% of the planet from it's watch stats.

more to the point, i guess, is that i'm *not* advertising to an american-centric audience, but largely to one outside the united states. my views would not be popular in that country.

....and, i mean, i'm not even from the united states. it's sort of ridiculous to expect me to get mostly american traffic when i neither live there nor am interested in their culture, but rather rant a whole lot about how evil they are.

google is notoriously difficult to contact, but they do react to negative information when they hear it, so talk amongst yourselves. it'll get back to them.

the reality is that a canadian news analyst commenting heavily over global news sources should expect to generate a global audience, and google has their head in their ass about it if their algorithm interprets that as fraudulent due to the views being less than 50% american.

i need to stop thinking about it, though. it really doesn't matter. it's just pissing me off on the principle of it.

i always have a helluva time mixing down power chords because i want a wall of sound through a complicated mess of multiple distortions, each mixed to hone in on it's own frequency. i can usually settle for a basic bass/mid/treble split, through three differently equalized distortions.

it took me all night to get those three tracks set up, but i think it's done. i'll have to double check in the morning. needs time to set.

so, i'm done for the night. i should hopefully be able to start on some final overdubs tomorrow.

getting there.

i'm going to try a different approach in the mix. i spent years and years working in cool edit. not audition. and not the multitrack version. just basic, audacity style cool edit. what i'd do is i'd just paste tracks on top of each other. it's a subtle difference in algorithm between "mixing" and "synthesizing". it's this production trick that makes some of my ambient pieces sound so thick and lush through a set of good headphones.

the reality is just that it was a function of what i had available. i couldn't run multitrack software well with the hardware i had, and my four-track tape recorder was just too noisy for me. so, if i wanted 8 or 16 or more tracks, that was the only way to really do it.

when i finally pried myself away from this and forced myself to figure out a modern recording interface, i kind of lost the open intuition of the wave editor. when you use the recording studio as a creative tool, the linear nature of recording into a wave editor v building tracks up in the normal way affects the construction process. there's this absolute free reign in overdubs, because you're zooming in to a specific time coordinate and pasting it over, rather than dealing with this structure broken into bars and notes. and, if an idea extends beyond it's bounds, the bounds merely extend the idea; that's how six minute tracks became half hour ones.

i'll probably never break with that entirely. if you listen to the segues in the first movement of the proverbs symphony, you can hear that they're cut up and fucked with. i'm likely to get more freaky with this, not less freaky with it.

the drawback of working in linear editors is that it's mostly destructive, in the sense that it's difficult to go back to a previous point in time unless you take very close notes and are sort of neurotic about putting everything aside, incrementally. that's the reason i forced myself to get out of it.

so, i don't really want to go back to that, but i do want to implement some open editing strategies into the standard multitrack recording approach. all the time i spent listening to the old stuff over the last few months has me remembering how useful it can be in getting certain raw sounds and effects across.

so, i'm going to start taking some of the sounds out, warping them in editors, and pasting them back in where they were. that will allow me to utilize some of those synthesis techniques without losing the flexibility of cubase.

i just hope it actually sounds the way i expect it to. if not, the good old wave editor could get a bit of a return to heavier and more central usage.

that being said, i'm not dealing with 8s or 16s or even 32s anymore. i just passed 70 tracks. it'll be over 100 when i'm done, i'm sure. that's on a piece under ten minutes and is about average over the last little while.

and it's not hard to understand why it takes so long, when i explain it like that i guess. that's not five people doing 100 tracks in parallel, it's one person slowly building up 100 tracks over ten minutes. and, in a longer piece of 20-30 minutes, that's pushing more like 300.

the older editor-based stuff would rarely get over 100 tracks on a half hour piece, although i'd bet a few got close to it. i had real limitations on hard drive space. remember when 20 gb was a big hard drive? it didn't seem so big, not even then. but, now there's really no limits...and i'm not about to impose artificial ones.

i lost a few days due to a nasty neck ache that required a lot of sleeping. i'm still not really clear on what happened, but i've narrowed it down to either:

a) i picked up a virus from not using soap to wash my hands while making eggs. we all do this, because we're all lazy. i need to be more careful.

b) multiple sclerosis. this isn't random. i've been hearing about being high risk since i was a toddler, and i do get weird facial tics and random muscle spasms rather regularly. where the pain is (where my spine meets my brain) could very well be a lesion. but, if true, existing medical science couldn't actually do anything about it except waste a lot of my time. so, whatever. it's mostly gone away. good enough for now....

i'm feeling alert enough at this point to get back to it tonight. i think i'm still on course to finish the track by the first.

you know, something else that happened right before my back went up in flames was that i switched from folgers to maxwell house. and i drink around a pot of extremely strong coffee a day, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. pot two is coming up, we'll have to see how that works out...

but, what i wanted to post was this:

<phil hartman>

MAXWELL HOUSE! COFFEE SO STRONG, IT WILL MAKE YOUR NECK HURT SO BADLY, THAT YOU'LL BE COMPLETELY CONVINCED YOU HAVE M.S.

</phil hartman>

also, why isn't there a "bill clinton killed phil hartman" conspiracy theory?

weird that i can hear this tonight but couldn't hear it last night or the night before. it's richie hawtin, specifically. he'll be on another hour.

at first, i thought it was a house party, so i took a walk around the neighbourhood planning to crash it. yeah, i'll do that. well, listen, if you're going to turn the music up loud enough that i can hear it in my apartment, i'll interpret that as an invite; if i'm listening to your music anyways, i'd like to come in and dance, thank you.

but, as i started walking around, i started realizing it was coming from a rather large distance away because i could hear cheering in the background. it was the cheering that dissuaded me; must be a hefty cover. the bass seemed rather close, though. i guess it was roaring in between the houses...

i also realized that the dj actually wasn't very interesting, and it wasn't worth stumbling around trying to find.

i assumed it was probably the casino in downtown windsor, not across the river in detroit. that is really ridiculously loud....

http://www.movement.us/

yeah. i'll be ok. hopefully it goes away soon, though.

it hasn't really improved, but i've gotten used to it. also, i'm developing a sore throat, which leads me to conclude that i've picked up a virus. this is pretty intense for the flu, though....

...and the truth is the only vector i can conceive of over the last week would be those eggs. so, bird flu? maybe....

i'll see what i feel like when the sun comes up.

my neck needs rest, but my brain is wide awake. so, read.

i'm finding myself in far greater agreement with hobbes than i ever thought i would be, and am actually seeing him produce a lot of the same sorts of arguments i'm always throwing at ancaps. hobbes would agree that a society based around markets and contracts would require a state to enforce those markets and contracts, rendering the vision of classical liberalism (today pushed by anarcho-capitalists) a sort of contradiction in terms - precisely agreeing with myself and other anarchists, who don't think anarchy and capitalism are compatible with each other.

of course, hobbes would not conclude that markets and contracts (and property and currency) should be abolished, as i would. instead, he'd argue in favour of a totalitarian state that forces actors to carry out their promises.

but i'm a little surprised how much i'm actually identifying with somebody that's always been presented to me as the exact opposite of everything i've ever believed in or stood for.

these are the existing stats on my top video. i've pointed out repeatedly that buying views would not help me, due to the fact that i'm an abstract artist and have no commercial potential or potential to herd a flock. but these stats make it clear they aren't bought. you'd think it would make more sense to run it against poisson or something (perhaps some research is necessary to get the right distribution, poisson strikes me as useful in finding the rare event of a full play) to determine if the data fits a reasonable shape, rather than to just be all racist about it.

it's that one algerian hit i want, not the hundreds of dumb americans that get confused after 0:07. i'd rather they delete the american hits, and let me keep the algerian one.

we'll have to see what they do or don't do with this, but it seems like all those hits outside of the first world - in turkey and south africa and elsewhere - will be declared fake.

because they don't actually exist.

i'm noticing that the youtube algorithm is basically racist, in that it rejects any hits from outside of the "first world".

sorry, white men from california. i post regularly on videos discussing global affairs. those hits from russia are legit.

in your world, nobody in russia actually uses the internet, i guess.

i ultimately don't really care. youtube views are not a meaningful currency to an obscure artist that is about substance over style. like anybody else, it makes sense for me to maximize the potential audience. but, i'd rather have one quality hit than ten thousand people that listen for five seconds. see, the unfortunate reality, though, is that the latter is necessary to get the former.

but, people should be aware that youtube isn't actually really cracking down on fake hits, it's just applying a type of racial profiling, and it's going to negatively affect people with an actual global reach, by turning audiences outside of the first world into non-entities.

in a sense, it's sort of what we all already knew: the tech industry doesn't think the rest of the world actually exists.

ouch.

neck is very stiff. has me paranoid about paralysis. but i'm hoping i just leaned on it the wrong way. will give it a few hours to heal before i freak out.

i took a break from mixing this morning to make some eggs, which gave me some heartburn and forced me to lie down. i woke up a few hours later barely able to move, with difficulty swallowing & etc.

see, it's been suggested to me more than once that i'm high risk for developing MS. i've had these periodic facial tics for as long as i can remember, but it's on the other side of the neck. i'm a little worried that something "broke" on the other side.

for now, i'm going to try to breathe slowly and just basically not move for a few hours.

so, i've become convinced that i will eventually snap my own sternum in the process of stretching, the blood splinters will travel to my heart and i'll die on the floor in a pool of my own blood. things are constantly snapping in there. it's just a matter of time.

but i can't just not stretch. no, really. try it some time. nobody can accomplish this task.

so, i've resigned myself to my own frailty, and patiently await the outcome.

hey, i always said i wouldn't make it to 25.

i was shocked when i made it to 30.

i suppose my track record on this prediction is not good, but i consider it exceedingly unlikely that i'll get to 40.

in some imaginary state of nature that never actually existed, i would have been eaten by lions before i turned ten. no, really, i would have. so, i'm already way ahead, thanks to the technology.

better to quit when i'm ahead. wait.

uploading first movement (demo) to soundcloud

this is the guitar run through of the first movement of the proverbs symphony, as it was initially written (and demoed in early 2007). note that this version is less than seven minutes and is written to be performed live, whereas the completed movement is over seventeen minutes and would be impossible to reproduce without an orchestra of guitarists.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/proverbs-symphony-movement-1-winter-2007

...and the memories come back: it was written as a synth-guitar part, in the sense of being meant to be played over a keyboard. so, i'll have to put the sequencer section back in.

that means i'm moving to a temporary mixing stage for the day. the remainder of the track is basically production & vocals. that may mean adding some extra tracks, but it's flourishes.

i might have it done by the weekend. the 1st, for sure. the next track is going to be a process as well, before i rapidly shoot through the rest of '01.

the last prewritten section isn't playable. i'd have to split it into multiple tracks, then use weird tunings on all of them.

the awkward moment when you realize you read your own sheet music wrong.

hey, it was 15 years ago.

uploading the lost symphony to soundcloud

when finally completed, the trivial group sequence will consist of a 2-cd arranged in four thematically linked "symphonies", of which two are currently complete and one is partly complete. this is a live play through of the second half of the third piece and the entirety of the fourth.

this was written over 2004 and yet has not been recorded in any significant form. i went through a long period from '04 to '07 where i was convinced this piece (and some others i was writing at the time) required a drummer and refused to record until i could find one. i couldn't find one, which put me into a fit of depression and led to writers block & etc. eventually, i just bought an electronic kit with the goal of playing it myself.

however, i then skipped over it because i felt i was dragging on the relationship it was about on just a bit too far. time to move on, kind of thing. it had outlived it's relevance, without making it to track.

i'll be recording this (finally) over the upcoming months. for now, here's a messy demo of it.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/the-lost-symphony

done for the night.

day.

what is time?

the rhythm parts are now almost done. i've been bouncing around between all these weird tunings...

...but the last rhythm sections are connected to some acoustic parts, which should be done tomorrow.

will have to change the strings and etc in the morning.

afternoon.

i also need to record some live drums, somehow. then: leads, vocals, production. getting there...

seems like somebody had an urge to do a townsend impersonation

i'm not picky about acoustics. it's the percussive sound i want, i can always put some reverb on it. so i'll get a cheap one...

i could always try to reglue it, but the split looks messy.

gah. on second thought, it looks like the head has been glued back together.

which may provide an answer to the question of where my uncased guitars went.

the glue job was weak, neck is going to crack in time so i should get these tracks down immediately...

my acoustic works! yay!

i was worried about it for a long time, because it seemed like i had just demoed the intonation by dragging it across the country in a canadian spring. going from ottawa to new brunswick to manitoba to alberta to bc to alberta and back to ontario, across rainforests and deserts and mountains, from cold to hot, from dry to damp, and in a little nylon gig case the whole time, and in a short amount of time, seemed to have left it in an unplayable state. it was in the unfortunate state of being unable to produce an E that sounded the same across different strings, no matter how closely i tuned it.

but, i changed the nut on it and left it in a weird string configuration - i had a heavy gauge in the D position, and a light gauge in the G position - and then got evicted and completely forgot about it, as it sat in a basement, alone, for two years.

i don't remember exactly what i was thinking, but whatever intuition i had about warping it back into shape seems to have worked, because it's as good as new now.

i really missed having a playable acoustic. things are all slowly coming into place...

another weird thing: i cut the strings off with a pair of electrical pliers that are probably older than i am and, for all i know, may have even belonged to my grandfather. what's weird about it is that it's the same set of pliers i used to use to cut the strings on the first acoustics i played with when i was roughly ten years old.

uploading proverbs demos to soundcloud

this is a very early (july 31, 2005), no effects demo of the second & third movements (reversed). there are a few flourishes, both gained & lost.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/proverbs-symphony-movements-3-2-summer-2005 

i think we've all heard rumours of just how widespread the "buy fans" industry is on social media, but on soundcloud they've taken it to a different level. i'm actually getting spammed to buy likes, and i can't believe that's possible without some help from soundcloud.

well, the business models on these sites are notoriously bad. could they make money by selling likes? it might be the only way they're making money.

as mentioned, i've really tried to avoid soundcloud. i'm using it to hold lo-fi demos. i'd never upload anything finished there...

this is what i got spammed with:

https://soundcloud.com/jake_pk

open spamming suggests to me that the industry is working in plain view.

i mean, i'd never buy likes. it's pathetic. a non-starter. but it's actually not something that would help me either, as i'm more interesting when i'm obscure. if we want to talk venn diagrams, my intersection with popular culture is pretty much zero. it doesn't really matter how much i spend on buying likes or other kind of bullshit promo because what i'm creating is inherently revolting to anybody with a follower mindset. to me, buying likes is like trying to market tampons to teenage boys......it's floating a product that is entirely useless to that market.

i'd go so far as to argue that the type of person that is going to listen to my art is almost certainly going to use ad blocking software.

second section of guitar overdubs is done. after all the fucking around, i stuck with less is more, but i'm going to convert one of the counter-melodies into a vocal part, instead.

vocals? yeah. i think i'm going to get back to them, but generally release the material in instrumental form, as well. i know what it's like to enjoy a piece of music and despise the singer, so i'll provide that option.

i do consider myself handy enough with words, but i'm not a poet and have never aspired to be one. for all my rambling about the sanctity of art for art's sake, i'm pretty harsh on poetry as being pretty much useless. see, it strikes me either as a pretty base and unimaginative form of expression or as the height of pretension, with almost no middle ground. i'm more interested in observational writing.

but, maybe observational writing is sort of like poetry and i'm just being semantic. maybe it's actually the middle ground i seek. this could go around in circles for a while, so i'll be clear on the line i'm drawing; you can attach that line to different concepts as you see fit. the difference is in getting an idea across vs mentally masturbating around the language of a turn of phrase. the more obfuscated and layered your statement is, the less valuable the statement becomes. development is key in getting a point across, but the point is getting across the point, and i like to be as clear and straight to it as i can be. if you need a book to explain your poem, you've failed at communicating a message and might as well be just jerking off in the corner by yourself.

to me, this whole dialogue is a big part of what punk rock is really about.

it's not really a break. i've always used vocals, i've just jumped from using them liberally to using them sporadically, and it was mostly because i just didn't have anything i wanted to get across in the medium. if i had something to say, i would - and did. i actually think i can trace this decision back to about '06 or so, meaning it was only really in the early mid 00s that i mostly shunned vocals (although, again, it was never total). it's just that i have very little completed work to show for myself since '05.

anyways.

systems collapse is being stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides. so, let the factories turn to rust and let the buildings fall apart. if you need me, i'll be rocking out with the horn section...

deathtokoalas
i still remember sitting hunched over on my bed when i was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, transcribing soundgarden tabs to standard tuning and wrenching my hands inside out actually playing them. this one's in standard tuning. burden in my hand was one i remember being particularly weird to play. that might be the best practice you can give a kid to get their hands going around.

with fell on black days, it was that off the wall solo (and those harmonies at the end) that was fun to play along with, because the chemistry between kim and chris on the track is so deep that it gets across through a mass manufactured tape played on a cheap ghettoblaster. there's only maybe two or three songs that i know of like this, where you can really channel the emotion of the track just by playing along with it.

the guitar just turns into this electrified monster, and the guitar trance suddenly takes over.

(deleted post) 

deathtokoalas
kim's stuff isn't that hard to learn, really, if you're coming into it with enough dexterity. it's a specific style, you just need to get your fingers and mind into it and most of it comes out pretty naturally because it's mostly just all tremoloing through pentatonics. i always wondered if that wonky guild of his was initially a way to get a zappaesque sg thing going on.

but it's a lot of fun to play.

(deleted post) 

deathtokoalas
something i used to do back in the day was just run chromatically up and down the neck. i spent a brief period trying to be an impressionist jazz punk guitar teacher by just throwing all the theory out the window and teaching kids to work directly with semitone intervals. the idea was to warp their brains into rejecting western tonality and understanding the instrument as a kind of matrix of notes, in which they could build their own patterns.

none of the kids lasted long, but they did get their fingers moving quickly. see, to me, that's the important thing - being able to move your fingers with enough control to be able to create what you hear in your head.

so, that helps. it's dry, though. kim would throw his beer at me, call me a wanker and tell me to go listen to steve vai. of course, i agree with him to a large extent. i kind of don't feel like soundgarden was meant to be studied.

but it does work.

Huzaifa Ahmed
dude what's wrong with koalas?

deathtokoalas
koalas need to be destroyed due to their cuteness.

J.C. Gleason
Aren't the majority of Soundgarden songs in drop D? I know that Black Hole Sun,  Birth Ritual and Outshined are but I don't know.

deathtokoalas
soundgarden used alternate tunings in general, not just dropped d, although the low e was in fact often dropped down a little (sometimes down to c). a lot of the interesting voicings they came up with came from using open tunings.

J.C. Gleason
Really? Huh, you learn something new everyday.

deathtokoalas
yeah. the open tunings were a genre marker of alt rock in the 80s, but are really pretty standard through the history of folk rock.

Jackson P.
Black Hole Sun isn't in drop D....

deathtokoalas
i'm pretty sure it is, actually. it's been a long time, though.

this song isn't, though.

Jackson P.
Yeah you're right. But it's harder to play in drop d than whatever I originally learned IMO.

And yes, this is just in standard. Rather easy song as well.

Could've very well done without that last guitar solo though :/

deathtokoalas
bah. it's the solo that's the fun part to play....

J.C. Gleason
Not necessarily.

deathtokoalas
iirc, black hole sun is in drop-d specifically because it uses the lower two notes. you'd have to transpose it up at least a full tone (unless you're down a half step anyway, then a semi tone) to play it in standard tuning.

at that age, i couldn't be bothered to fuck with tunings. i had one of those ibanezes with the locking bridges and the thumb screws, which means i would have had to unlock the thing to take it in and out of dropped-d or open c or whatever else. that's why i retabbed all the weird tunings for standard tuning. i mentioned it's good for the hands, but it was also good for getting to know the fretboard.

Mathews Barbosa
true story

Djalma Reis
You....damn, you could stay in silence, but no!, you wrote this. You've shared this with us; gold we find through the night on the internet. Thank you very much.

Grease Munkee
why wouldnt you just tune to the song?

deathtokoalas
well, it was the ibanez. i didn't know what it was when i bought it (well, my dad bought it), i was like 12 at the time. i don't know if they still make these things or not, but they lock the tuning in place near the nut and then give you thumb screws near the bridge to tune with. the thumb screws only let you go up or down about a tone or so, then you need to unlock the system at the nut. it's an annoying process. and, if you want to play four or five songs in a row in an alternate tuning, you're going to be spending more time fiddling around with the guitar's hardware than actually playing.

the purpose of the system is to prevent tremolo/whammy players from going out of tune. it's the kind of thing people like steve vai, who use a lot of whammy bar, need to get through a set on stage; not the best guitar for kids playing with tunings.

when i was about 15, my aunt gave me a $20 gift certificate at a local music store. it's the thought that counts, but the truth is she really had no idea that $20 doesn't go very far in a guitar store, and i didn't really need any more strings.

so, i took a look through the tab books. it was the mid 90s. i didn't need anybody to teach me how to play nirvana songs, that was easy enough. i'd already taught myself most of siamese dream (with a little help), and the best parts of superunknown, but would have probably jumped on either if they were there. they weren't. so, i grabbed the tab book for the first candlebox disc...

this one was a lot of fun to work through.

it's funny sometimes how you're playing a harmony over a chord change and it sounds familiar and you can't figure it out and then you do. :).

"you're sharper these days, roll on security."

have to blame hendrix for this in the end, though. plausibly through srv as an intermediate.

but, here's the thing: 6s, 7s, 9s, whatever - even 3s - rock music just needs to get beyond the 5s. don't tell me you can't punk up a major 7th. i've got a list for you. i do. that's what really made 90s rock sound so much more interesting - the simple fact that, harmonically, it really actually was more interesting.

also, why did they have to cut the track? it's jarring.

uploading me, myself & the time i thought this was a good idea (acoustic demo) to soundcloud

so, here's today's track.

=============

this was never meant to be released as it is, although i had some ideas about putting together an acoustic ep of tour material. neither touring nor the accompanying ep followed. but this is hanging out on the old hard drive, and it has some fucking charm to it, if i might say so myself. so, it gets to be the first up to my little lo-fi side site.

at the time (early 2002), i was working on some psychedelic pop demos with a friend of mine. i was loading the tracks up with all kinds of overdubs and effects and other fun things, but the possibility of performing the material live with just the two of us (without stooping to the level of backing tapes or, worse, those fucking horrid loop pedals that make everything sound like steve reich after a fucking lobotomy), was pretty much completely impossible. these songs were solid - they could hold their own on an acoustic. i also realized that acoustic music was on it's way up, so doing a little tour as a two-person harmonized folk duo was the way to go. this track, however, was written in a bit of a post-punk style and needed to be rearranged for acoustic guitar in order to have that idea work itself out.

so, i just demoed this up for the other guy (the vocals are just there to drive the track along; the other guy wrote them, not me) to get the point across. he didn't like any of this - not the touring as an acoustic folk duo idea, not the rearrangement on the track, nothing. in 2002. oops? it's the story of my musical career....

the track is full of messy playing, because i'm trying to sing at the same time and the vocals are rhythmically contrasted against the guitars - but mostly because nobody was supposed to hear this. i'll be re-recording this over the next few months, as i clean up my writing from the period.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/me-myself-and-the-time-i-tried-to-convince-the-other-guy-it-was-a-good-idea

wow, soundcloud. unique usernames? what is it, 1997?

and, it's beyond surreal that they're forcing artists to pay to turn off comments. i remember back when that was soundcloud's gimmick. comments! at the precise point you're thinking them! because the world gives a fuck!

it's even the reason i've avoided it all these years.

so, fuck these guys.

but trendy people are trendy. it's the right place for these "lo-fi" demos.

https://soundcloud.com/deathtokoalas/

actually, maybe its one of those things i should do daily ups for. yeah.

it's all raw instrumental guitar stuff, probably the closest i'll ever get to being any kind of folk musician. i'll get these to a space on bandcamp eventually, once i decide what a reasonable thing to do with them is. like, do i want to release them as singles or together somehow? for now, i think using soundcloud as that kind of sketchpad is an interesting sort of experiment...

actually, i was just floored by the sheer volume. this is going to take a good night. i want to finish this track first. in a few days...

been playing with guitar effects...

....but also writing new tunes.

i'm trying to really focus on finishing old stuff rather than make new stuff, but then i start jamming something out and fuck me. the thing is who knows how long it will take to get around to seriously working on anything, when i have such a ridiculous list of stuff. so, i'm going to set up a soundcloud page for just random thoughts as they come out....

...and i'm actually going to put a bunch of stuff up there, 'cause i have a bunch of stuff in that current status.

23 likes.

1337 h4x0r.

nobody will get that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma

weird what one finds on a random search. i'm working out a solo in f minor. searching for fun...

if you're going to do something like this, it would do a lot of good to explain why the chord is f minor. once you know that F, Ab, C (with f on the bottom) makes an Fm, it's just a process of finding the triad where you want it to be. i find the d shape to be quite nice for minor chords.

anyways, back to my solo in f minor :P

mumble mumble mumble

THE MUMBLE HAS MY SOUL....

deathtokoalas
so tired.

enough of this. been going on too long, now. need a manic episode, please. five, six days without sleeping. that's the good stuff....

@michael huggins in addition to the synth, you're dealing with an expression foot pedal connected to a pitch shifter, although i feel that your initial idea of a sampler is probably pretty accurate. i don't think the solo is live, i think it's cut up and pasted back together.

but you probably don't need an actual synth to get this, you just need some kind of software system with a foot pedal and a whammy bar. i could get something close to it out of a digitech whammy/pitch combo.

also, fwiw, the whammy work screams belew rather than fripp.

uploading i did your mom to youtube

so, with the shift to using youtube in a staggered historical presentation, my entire calculus on the value of uploading this or that track has changed. i was initially wanting to use it to highlight specific tracks to send people to bandcamp with, but the reality is that the only traffic i'm getting to bandcamp is through youtube and the site hosts so much music that it's basically impossible to sort through. it makes more sense to put almost everything up at youtube, and hope somebody stumbles on the right link.

this is a demented track that half of me wants to forget and the other half realizes has value in being just off the wall creepy. i need to trigger warning for anybody that's dealt with any kind of abuse, and out of just general bad taste. but, there's this point where you just half to laugh, and i think i pulled it off.

there's a more detailed write-up if you click the link.

however, the primary reason i'm uploading it here is that i like the music. it's really noisy and cathartic. if i'm documenting myself, i can't skip over it.

this will pass over to the featured track tomorrow at midnight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oSadVCVav8

just to record this somewhere public...

the idea i've decided on is to literally stagger it by 17 years and eight months, with the bandcamp dates as reference. i'll explain by example.

the first song up is fire, which i'm guesstimating was completed on sept 1, 1996. the second is boogeyman, which i have down for oct 20, 1996. that's 51 days. fire will consequently stay at the front of the page for 51 days.

which means i should catch up to today in 17 years and eight months. :).

it also means that some tracks will be up front for very lengthy periods.

that table ($10) is a long time coming, but makes all the difference in the world in getting those synths off the floor and connected together.

i'd like to get another small table to give me a bit more foot space over on the other side where the small amp is. the idea would be to put the cases on top of the table, and some pedals underneath. the amplifier underneath the laptop is also being hoarded as a possible guitar amp system, but that depends on a lot of factors (the most important of which is if i ever end up playing anywhere). if that works itself out, that extra small table will also be useful. but if it doesn't, i can always take the cases out, too. that's going to depend on availability, mostly - and how much i feel i need the foot room.

for now, the studio is otherwise done to my need and liking. so, there's a few more shots...

(there's that table, set up with the gear on it, which 

     completes the loooooong process of finally reassembling 

a place where i can record safely and comfortably.

      i'm not letting go of it this time, either. no fucking way...)

that music stand came out totally blurred.

i spend most of my time sending guitar parts in,
either clean through the pod via usb or live into the mixer.

and that just completes the pseudo-panorama.
 that's where i'd want a tall, skinny coffee table type deal, maybe.
i've never bothered with boards, 'cause i'm constantly changing
things around, but the extra foot space is valuable.

scored a table for my synths for $10. a little beat up, but it works. i mean, a table needs to be sturdy, not pretty. sounds unexciting, but i've been looking for something the right size for months. that means i can finally get my synths and other machines off the floor and hooked up and get my pedals organized underneath...

in hindsight, i realize i was in a state of shock through the whole period of time i evicted myself back in late '11. i left well over $1000 worth of furniture in the apartment. i didn't even try and sell it! it didn't even cross my mind, i was so fucked up about it. so, i ended up in windsor without any tables or bookshelves....

guess i took a few days off. was super sore from walking, and more interested in reading. that's happened a few times recently, and i'm really not used to it. guess i'm out of shape from spending so much time inside and curled up this winter. and not smoking. seems weird, but if you're a smoker you get it. i'll snap out of it when i get my border papers and can start to get out to see some shows in detroit.

hopefully, the first one i'll be able to catch will be swans in late june. the time frames are sketchy. but hopefully. that's an excellent start, actually. and i'm gonna be pissed if i miss it. btw, there's a new swans record out today. so, you should stop reading my facebook page and go listen to it.

i've got acoustic strings, but they seem weird and i might replace them. haven't strung it up yet.

i otherwise think this track is going to complete itself pretty quickly.

the next one up is a short renaissance guitar piece that i've wavered about assigning to piano. there's going to be a few choice renders as well as at least one built up version of the track.

it's funny how quickly the machine will jolt you awake, though.

i seem to have forgotten to post this as influential on the track of the day, which is now track of the month in order to ease the tracks in a bit more slowly and get the counts up. i posted 70 tracks all at once. that was an error. so, now i guess there's going to be some retreading.

i'm picking this out specifically because the song of the day is full of flanging. and i know now that that's a cabaret voltaire thing. as far as the exact track is concerned, throbbing gristle is actually a better comparison musically - and einsturzende neubauten is a better comparison, thematically. but i didn't know that when i wrote it. what i knew at the time was this disc, which was pumping in the headphones every day for a year.

and i mean every day. for a year. at least. in hindsight, i have to say this record probably warped and damaged me pretty badly. or, to be more objective, that it really strongly shaped me.

(relative tracks: fire, most of the late 90s emo/noise/grunge/industrial demos that are at bandcamp but not youtube, bach goes loopy, happiness is a harsh gun, weed in the yard, all unauthorized remixes, the inridiculous compilation, the curious george suite, j's adventure in guitarland, schizoid, like divine amoebas, leonardo pisano, all symphonies and others that are not yet uploaded)

just had a good laugh at myself for realizing that i'm back to carrying around the ol' blankie...

well, i know enough now not to take it out of the house. but i actually think i always knew enough not to take it out of the house. at least i have no memories of taking it out of the house.

but, whatever i'm doing in here - reading, typing, watching, playing, recording - is all wrapped up in this blanket. and you're likely to get hit with a frying pan if you think you're taking it away from me.

*disheveled glare*

don't touch ma blankie. fuggin gumamint, stealing blankies. they came right in on some kid in florida, assault rifles, pried the blankie out at gunpoint.

i guess old habits die hard

great day to go for a walk. it went up from 10 to 20 as i was walking. and the high today is a nice 28. yay . best of all, it seems like the basement is retaining heat well. finally...

got stuck outside the music store (i needed strings) for a half hour before they opened, so i went across the street to the salvation army. i know. but, why not sort through the books while i'm waiting? i was looking specifically for an old text by thomas hobbes, which i think is actually on the banned books list. yes, there's still a banned books list. seriously.

danielle steel. wall to wall. i kid not. i burst out laughing, actually. says a lot about christian repression, doesn't it?

there's a used store down the street with literally everything. snagged my leviathan on the way back for $5.

also, i found a market that sells local tomatoes for a quarter of the cost of the imported mexican ones at the grocery store. happy about that.....

bad news: up to 12 more weeks before i hear back on my border papers. fuckers. i'm missing mt. zion this week and at this rate will probably also miss swans next month. fuck.

i have one more walking trip to make, and then i've got a nice comfy week of reading and recording.

thankfully, my old electro-acoustic seems playable, after all. i can't say for sure until i get some new strings on it, but the intonation problems are not what they were. i'm straining my memory, but i think i put a new nut in it a while back and that may be the difference. i'm also not sure why i seem to have strung a low e in place of a d or a high e in place of a g, but maybe i had some hunch that worked out. for some reason, my usually superb memory is particularly bad over about '06-'09. trauma, maybe. i was also a drone worker in that period (i exaggerate - tech support), maybe it's a function of that. but i just don't remember.

regardless, i need to get some proper strings on it to properly test the intonation. but the notes sound the same across the six strings as far as i could tell with my morning test. there's reason for optimism.

also, it was only warping past the 12th fret, which i can mostly play around. i do tend to get jangly near the top of the neck, but that sound can be faked with an electric. it's the percussive bottom end i'm more attached to. meaning worst case is still workable. i hope.

what happened was that i took it backpacking with me - and this was ten years ago almost to the day - and it came back with a culmination of damage related to extreme temperature and humidity shifts. one day, we're in the mountains where it's damp and rainy, the next day we're on the coast where it's bright and sunny. montreal to winnipeg in 24 hours was another really dramatic shift in humidity. and it was exposed to outside the whole time, pretty much. then it sat without being played for a long time (acoustics are loud. i was in close quarters. simple as that.). when i finally picked it back up, it seemed like it was just flat out warped. i had written it off, but couldn't part with it.

anyways, i'll get some strings in the morning. i think i've got the introduction part down, and managed to keep it to less than five parts. i might add another. i want to sit on that. so, i'm done for the night.

right now, i need to scour through some old books to see whether i actually have a copy of leviathan or not (i don't think so, but i've picked some "classics" up at garage sales for $0.50 and forgotten about them) before i go buy it. i'm ok with reading articles online, but i'm still tied to the flexibility of books for such things as reading on one's back....