gah....

so, the funny sound wasn't my ears from the boris concert, it was because i had the treble up all the way on my receiver. sound goes out through the computer into a jvc amp and out the headphone jack.

i don't know how long it's been like that. i know i remember playing with the treble for time machine, and i suspect it got stuck there.

so, i need to review some stuff. for the new track, i'm going to need to boost the treble on the way out and re-up. i'm not sure how many of the recent tracks i've done where that might be a continuing issue, but i may need to re-up some more of them as well....

the mix was sounding really bad to me yesterday, really tinny, and it was kind of weirding me out. i kept turning it up and it just wasn't doing what it was supposed to. i thought maybe it had something to do with mixing it on the pod (it's a very guitar-centric track) and then rendering it through the multimix, but i've now done a very comprehensive a/b test and i cannot tell a difference between renders out of the two devices played back through my m-audio soundcard. (the 4th card attached to this device is a soundblaster live! drive with one of those nice front panel interfaces that i use mostly for midi but also sometimes for vocals. there's a fifth card, an integrated hd chip, but it's disabled in the bios to prevent conflicts.)

it's left me to conclude that my ears were probably ringing from the boris show. that's actually a little bit scary to me. i don't know what i'd do if my hearing were to go on me...

but, i mean, i can't understand people that want to watch something like boris with earplugs, either. i can't imagine those people are getting the full experience.
it seems to sound the way it's supposed to today. something to think about in terms of protecting your ears...

for those unfamiliar with boris, they are *extremely* loud...

in fact, they're so loud that i couldn't find a live youtube clip that wasn't distorted for my review yesterday. your cell phone simply can't handle boris....

10,000 views.

first to 1000...

rip robin williams

part of robin's talent was picking great scripts and then breathing life into them. this wasn't his most popular film, but it was his best.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdgGxgg91Tc

predictably, boris was a good show. i didn't catch the fatty acids tonight, but i slept most of the afternoon, so i didn't get anything done, either. back at it for the night...

i've decided i want to get the song done before i start working on the shelves, as it creates a more natural separation. i just don't want to stop for a week and then get back to it.

well, this is certainly unexpected. somebody has made a video for one of my songs...

i'm not sure i "get" it, but i like the images.

http://vimeo.com/103002209

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY6Qgu0HYrA

i received a link to this in my inbox when i got back from a boris concert early in the morning of aug 10, 2014. it's apparently put together by a camera person in australia, and the music was chosen on the recommendation of his daughter's boyfriend. so, there's not a conceptual link between the video and the music or the lyrics.

most of the time, i'm going to react badly to something like this, but the camera person was very honest in his denial of any conceptual link, so i don't have much to react against. the kind of thing that's going to piss me off is if somebody takes the music and reinterprets it to present some kind of social or cultural messaging that (1) i didn't intend and (2) i'm opposed to. there's none of that going on here, so i have nothing to be upset about.

further, there's actually some nice camera work here to check out. so, i'm going to throw it up.

but i do want to make clear that this isn't an official video for the track in any way. it's just the track set to some images.

the camera person's site is here:
https://vimeo.com/103002209

the track appears on inriched:
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched

second concert in detroit: boris w/ subrosa

i survived my second night in detroit just fine, including my first night at the legendary magic stick, and familiarity is actually producing a level of calmness. i realize that i've only explored a small part of the city, but the part i have explored is really not very scary. what i saw walking up woodward at 8:30 on a saturday night was actually a very vibrant, cosmopolitan and relatively clean city.

it's good to know that my health card is acceptable as id, but i haven't been able to test if my bank card works yet. the magic stick itself is a lot smaller than i thought it would be - smaller than the upstairs gym at the sala in montreal, and not much bigger than babylon in ottawa. the design actually reminded me more of a bar in ottawa called cafe dekcuf, although it's certainly bigger (but not substantially so). i was worried about the bus, so i didn't get a slice of pizza on the way out. next time...

so, i got there just as subrosa was starting, got stamped with an inverted crucifix (that's not cliched.), asked to be surprised by a beer (and received a somewhat uncreative pbr) and stumbled off to the middle of the floor.

subrosa is an act of some importance in underground rock circles and that i've intersected with multiple times over the last ten years, but have never really been able to get into much. they've just always existed in this kind of middle point of ideas without really taking any of them anywhere. it's maybe a proof of concept, and it's influence has been and will continue to be felt, but they've continually missed the mark in actually producing substantial work themselves. so, i was expecting some overly pretentious and mildly goth doom/sludge pop for mopey young people to get their gloom on to and that ultimately lacked any real depth.

what i got was actually pretty surprising: they've finally taken it to the next level in extrapolating their ideas by giving the songs a bit more space to breath. some listening this morning has informed me that this is something that began with their 2011 disc and reached it's first real application with their most recent one. that is, subrosa's new record is a real pivot for them and may represent an entirely new phase in their career. ten years from now, they may have a fan base that starts their career with their new disc.

while still being fundamentally a pastiche of ideas, i have to say it was enjoyable. what i got out of it wasn't very comparable to anything in the genres they're usually associated with, but an extrapolation on the sound a perfect circle put together in the early 00s. now, i always had some problems with apc - the production always struck me as very cold, the drumming very clinical, the musicianship very hired. their records have a "made by session musicians" feel to them that negates a lot of what maynard was trying to do with the band. i don't think he ever figured that out. but that's a criticism that doesn't apply to subrosa, who came off as a much more organic, living, breathing entity with a very forceful drummer. i was actually a little concerned about the structural integrity of the building at a few points; their drummer thumps exceedingly hard, like a good rock drummer ought to. the extrapolation was filled out by drawing substantially on swans and gybe!. if they can get the right exposure with their new sound, they could go very far with it....

as for the show i saw last night, all i can say is that it was a nice surprise and that while it's not likely to turn me around on their older work it's going to get me to listen to their new disc a lot more closely than i would have otherwise. further, i think there's a lot of potential for the next one.

if you can get a chance to see them on this tour, don't skip it.

i kind of have to point out, though, that the above track has a riff that was lifted directly from this song:

here is a full set:

i didn't want a second pbr between sets, so i asked the bartender what else there was.

"blue or canadian."
"what?"
"blue or canadian."
"you sell canadian beer here?"
"ok, one canadian."
"that's not what i...."

*bottle opens*

"well, ok, i guess."

the canadian did indeed taste like a canadian. but the blue turned out to be more deceptive.

the atlas moth were, in a word, "bad". it's not the first time i've seen a second band with a smaller audience than an opening band, but it was one of the more dramatic drops in attendance i've witnessed.

again, it wasn't quite what i was expecting, though. i had them mentally categorized along with wolves in the throne room, liturgy and the like in toning down "black metal" to something less racist, satanic and nihilist (and stupid) due to the bit of recorded material i'd heard. that's not something that really appeals to me, so i was expecting to cringe my way through the set. live, they were more of a generic post-grunge act that existed somewhere between kyuss and early deftones. it's more like i ended up yawning my way through it...

the singer was very critical of the audience's lack of response, but maybe he should have looked at his own band's lack of torque. the riffs could have been worse, but they just kind of spun around in circles on the stage without projecting any kind of force outwards. then, he complains that nobody's reacting. if you want to get people dancing around and throwing their underwear at each other, you start an ac/dc cover band and riff out "thunderstruck". if you're going to do a lot of mopey (and mostly boring) post-grunge, you're going to get a lot of mopey (and mostly bored) people.

there's no harm in skipping these guys.

now, the next thing you need to do is watch this. he's right in deducing that blue is a "party beer" and that it is "watered down", although his tastes are a little gauche if he's happy with a canadian. give the man a keith's.

the takeaway is that blue is a lighter beer than canadian.

 ....but that's exactly why i'd rather get blue at the bar when i'm seeing a show. the beer is half for fluid retention in a sweaty pit (it wasn't too tight last night), and i'm not there to get smashed, just a little loose. neither option is very good, but i'll pick the blue every time.

so, this is what i asked for.

"just a blue, please."
"ok, one bud blue."
"excuse me?"
"you asked for a blue?"
"did you say bud blue?"
"are you asking for a blue?"

*awkward silence*

"yeah, just a blue please."
"ok. so, one bud blue."
"you keep saying that."
"listen, what do you want?"
"since when did budweiser start making blue?"
"forever? who else would make blue?"
"well, in canada, blue is manufactured by labatt."
"but it's all made by budweiser."
"so, i'm buying a bud is what you're saying."
"all labatt beers are made by bud. it's just a different label."
"in canada, blue is not manufactured by budweiser."
"riiiiiiiiight."
"ok, now i HAVE to try it."

sure enough, it did not taste like blue. as stated in the above video, blue is a light and watery beer. the "blue" i purchased was almost as strong as the pbr, and actually a little syrupy. i've done some research today and can report that when you buy a blue in the states you're actually getting something brewed by genesee, which is a medium sized brewery in the state of new york. when labatt's parent compant and annheiser merged in 2009, anti-trust legislation forced them to spin off blue because it was popular in new york. it follows that none of the labatt products in the usa are bottled by budweiser, and the bartender was flat out wrong in her suggestion of a "bud blue". it's a "genesee blue".

the american blue was pretty gross, really. i'll be avoiding those in the future....

boris is a known entity, and very good at what they do in a live setting, if their recorded output is a little less consistent. they started off with some more upbeat material, and let it flow into some of their bigger, epic tracks, including some new stuff.

something i found really interesting watching them is that they've managed to master a technique of waving along with the music in a way that feels like time has slowed down. anybody that's ever done psychedelic drugs knows that feeling - the music slows down by around 20-50 bpm in a way that you're consciously aware of.

but it's very rare to get that kind of trip when you're entirely sober, or even after three beers (which is pretty sober). it's a combination of the drone on some of the heavier tracks (vomitself, for example, which is just surreal to see live) with some physical performance art. the wave is just off the beat. i guess it's sort of hilarious on some level, but it's a powerful experience.

i'm going to post some newer material, because you couldn't possibly get the effect of experiencing boris live by watching a youtube video, anyways.

the walk home was actually very nice - a little breeze was coming through. but i was stuck waiting for the bus for almost an hour.

detroit was in the midst of a "ribfest", which backed up traffic under the tunnel.

it'd have been really, really nice if i could've just walked across a bridge.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2014/08/09.html

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

this one i really like, actually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yeah, that fixed it.

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

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

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

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

the other soundfont was crappy.

aha!

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

weird error solved...

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

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

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

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

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

actually, i'm not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*deep breath*

time to turn it back on and see what happens.

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

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

memory errors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

midi guitar's my best choice...

i haven't listened to this in a while. 2 & 3 are both quite strong - much more interesting than his operas. somebody said something about vivaldi, but glass is far darker and far more vivid than vivaldi. i get more debussy out of it.

i'm trying to find some good tuba samples to model the dynamics properly on a midi guitar. the kind of tuba playing where somebody is blowing into the thing with the aim to knock the house down. it's harder than you might think. oddly, tuba players seem to be unusually reserved and polite folks, which is rather remarkable given the nature of the instrument they play. perhaps they realize the extent of their power and that leads to an exaggerated sense of responsibility. i suppose that would make them excellent nuclear engineers, but they seem to be rather boring musicians. the tuba players of the world really need to throw caution to the wind and let it all loose. they need to unleash all that power and force...

this kind of jumped in my head for the end section, but it's not quite what i want, either.

this is, in fact, the correct way to play the tuba - with extreme force. to hell with all the weakling bourgeois players that are afraid of playing too loud. to get this instrument to sound the way it ought to requires every ounce of lung strength and emotional catharsis you can pull out of the innermost depth of your absolute being. a proper tuba performance should require an oxygen tent.

it's a shame the quality is bad. i need a good sample to get the dynamics right; i'm trying to figure out how to make my guitar sound like one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o966wA2N7Q

reacting to tuba players on youtube

tubas are actually the best punk instrument if you play them loud enough. for some reason, though, tuba players seem to be incredibly shy and refuse to rock out. i want a rockin' tuba solo, thought punk might be the right search word...

but, no. as timid as ever. sorry, but that tuba player's just not into it. not feeling it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JFkg4rKv9s

it's funny how sometimes the simplest parts are the hardest ones to get right

so, this is my posting schedule for the next year, taking me out of my noise/punk/emo/grunge stage (inri001-inri003) and into my synthpop stage (beginning with inri005 and carrying through to about inri010). inri004 is a plunderphonics piece that i constructed a few months ago out of experiments i did over the fall of 1997.

i've got this worked out to mid-2001 and will add to it as i go forward. it's partially because i'm going to want somebody to do this for me if i don't make it past 2015.

yeah. it'll make more sense if i make the jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj lp more inclusive of all of the 2001 and 2002 material and then park it in the middle of 2002 as a 2xcd that is roughly chronological. i have unformed sequenced material up until about that point. so, that means i'll also put the guitarland stuff on there, a few instrumental rabit tracks and the ideas i was working out over the summer.

if i go with the comprehensive approach, the other option is to split it into two records, one placed in september '01 and the other some time after that. but, that would mean i'd have to split up some things from the fall that i've always considered to be conceptually linked to the stuff from the spring. and i've always considered time machine conceptually linked to guitarland, too.

if i choose to not be comprehensive, i'm going to have several stranded eps and more than 80 minutes to try and pare down into an lp. so, i'll have to leave tracks off.

i could still change my mind. i really never know how i'm organizing things until everything is front of me.

angular momentum

this is a short section from the song i'm working on. the idea is to put it on repeat and listen to it for hours. i throw these sorts of loops up periodically, but i haven't included any in any releases. i'm going to start doing it...

there's a pizzicato bass line for the piece that i may or may not add to the loop. i'm expecting not to.

but, i just love the way the syncopated cowboy ramones drums interact with the slightly metallic psychedelic grunge riff and the soaring gazey guitar tremolo. the thing that makes the loop, though, is that carefully placed minor seventh chord.

i can listen to this for hours. maybe you might, too.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/angular-momentum



i compose/record by ear and work out the details after the fact (mostly for soloing), but i think the reason the minor seventh works so well is the microtonal tuning. all of the guitars are purposefully slightly "out of tune", with the b and g strings down an eighth tone and the low e string down a quarter tone. that removes the song from the boundaries of western theory. while there's a prominent accidental on the b-flat (tuned down a quartertone), it's otherwise basically in g (but centered around it's relative minor, e, tuned down a quartertone).

the minor seventh strums through all the microtones and ends on the high e, which is correctly in tune and sort of rings out of the piece. so, it brings your ear to it - it's tonal clarity in a sea of harmonic confusion.

loop isolated on aug 7, 2014.

uploading to spin inside dull aberrations to the scratchpad

this is a mildly messy mix, but it gets the core of the track down.

i've decided to orchestrate this quite a bit; i suspect i would have done so, if i had recorded it properly in the period it was written. voice, strings, brass....

on the one hand, i need to warn you that this is loud. on the other hand, i need to request you listen to it quite loudly.

any ideas, would be collaborators?

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

this is coming along well. i won't get the flourishes done today, but i might finish all the guitar tracks.

i'm done the first phase of guitar tracks, the rhythm and harmony stuff.

there will be extra lead parts, but i want to put the synths in first to get a better handle on how much space is in there. i'll have something up by the end of the night.

somebody talked me into updating my cd list, so i spent most of the night last night doing that. it was something i was going to do soon anyways; that's one of the reasons i'm going to get some wood to build some shelves. but it means i didn't get any recording done.

it's up here, if you're curious.

now, i should add the caveat that it's pretty thin regarding releases after about 2002 and especially after 2005. this is partly because i haven't had a lot of cash to blow on cds and partly because the wide variety of options for downloading music have meant that the cash i did have was often perceived as better spent elsewhere. not having to take chances on discs anymore has also drastically reduced the amount of time i've spent listening to things. back in the 90s, you'd take a chance on something and then force yourself to listen to it at least ten times to be sure you don't like it. nowadays, i think we all tend to write things off without giving them the time they might need, while gravitating towards things that appeal to us as instant gratification and/or make it instantly clear that the complexity level is off the wall. there's a good and bad side to that - it increases the amount of music you're exposed to and in the process gets you closer to what you really want, but it also abolishes a certain aspect of subtlety. i try not to be a hypocrite, but i can't defy arithmetic. what i will say is that the list of planned purchases for discs released after 2005 is both very long and very weeded out by much listening. as a collector, i still have a prerogative to buy discs, but that is something that is usually going to happen when the disc is five-ten years old and i'm convinced i like it enough to add it to the collection.

i'm going to be weeding the collection out slightly, but the truth is it's already been weeded out. the three aims in the collection right now are related to rarity, quality and the label the thing was released on. so, i've got a lot of constellation stuff, for example, that i very rarely listen to but have no interest in discarding due to the collector quality of the label. that issue accounted for, this is a relatively elite list of music produced before 2005. the guilty pleasures are mostly connected to 90s grunge discs that i know are bad but can't bring myself to discard because i like rocking out to them from time to time.

there are reviews attached to the first dozen or so entries in the list. i'm not at all prioritizing this at the moment, but i will eventually come back to it, and when i do i'll be trying to address the holes in the list created by mp3s replacing physical discs.

i'll be recording tonight.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/music/index/index.html

if there's anything (new or old) that you think is a glaring omission, let me know. i'd say chances are that i'm familiar with it, and i can let you know if it's in the list or not and how i'd rank it.

and, i have a new top track on youtube. my ridiculous 1996 version of "i did your mom" has overtaken my 1996 version of "boogeyman", passing by it with 961 views.

i have such a love-hate relationship with this stupid song. i explain it in more depth if you open the link to the youtube page. the short story is that it is not a song promoting misogyny, but a song exploring the misogyny i was dealing with as a teenager. but, i'm entirely cognizant that the subtlety is not apparent and i've been very apprehensive about promoting it.

it's now clear that this will be the first track to hit 1000 hits and it will likely stay in the top track position until boogeyman is placed back on the front page in mid-september, when it will probably (perhaps temporarily) regain the top spot. these two tracks will likely not face much competition for the top spot until the end of the promotional period for my second demo, which is not until december.

despite my apprehension about the track being misunderstood by precisely the kind of jerks i wrote it about, these are absolutely the two most substantial tracks on the first demo, so it is rather fitting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oSadVCVav8&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbslW9qCBKT_nEcwUt1DY0aN

i'm also eliminating thru. to recap for those just tuning in...

there's a collection of about a dozen tracks from 2001 that were written into scorewriters and largely left incomplete. i'm taking a pause from that to work on an industrial/hardcore song meant for a full band, but completing and compiling these tracks will be the primary project from 2001 when it's done.

as i had all the pieces scored out into midi tracks, i thought i'd go ahead and make a chiptune disc out of it. but, most of the tracks have scored guitar parts and/or were planned to include unscored guitar additions. i wasn't entirely comfortable with using sequencers to produce the guitar parts, but i wanted the chiptune disc, so i concocted a plan to create three separate options for each track:

1) an ep for each track with multiple mixes
2) a chiptune disc of purely sequenced midi music
3) a final disc that replaces the sequenced guitars with live ones.

i haven't been able to keep that separation complete. the first two tracks demonstrated the separation perfectly, but i didn't bother creating a raw midi version for the third track and i let the sequencer play the guitars on the fourth track. further, the last few tracks don't have sequenced guitars written into them at all.

so, i'm removing (2) as superfluous. purely sequenced versions will remain available on the singles. otherwise, all final versions will be available on the jjjjjjjjjjjjjj record. what i WILL do is place the purely sequenced tracks at the end of the record.

i am adding the intersection to the disc. written june, 1998. reimagined june, 2001. slightly rearranged and re-rendered at the end of july, 2014



i have five further tracks to complete for this disc, which will be dated to dec, 2001. there's a few other things in between (including what i'm doing right now).

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



there does remain a possibility that i may go over the time restraints of a regular cd. now, these restraints don't exist in internet mp3 land, but i'm trying to maintain a physical possibility for these things in case i can get a distribution deal in place. i have no interest in a traditional label arrangement, but if i can get somebody to pick some of this up and market it, and i'm convinced they can market it well, i'll be happy to give them a cut for those services. everything is designed to be ready to print with minimal label involvement.

if that happens, i'll probably split it back up and bring the vst versions back - but into a double record single release that's broken along conceptual lines, rather than two separate ones.

i know i'm going to be pushing it, and i'm not going to compromise to hit 80 minutes, so we'll see how that goes. but i just don't want to release two 45 minute discs. i always feel ripped off when i get a double disc where the total could have fit on one if they removed five minutes of feedback or some acoustic half-demo or something. if i'm going to double this, they'll both be pushing 70 minutes. if that means i have to push the project forward by a few months or reinterpret something or something i'll do that.

for now, i'm expecting a single 9 track record that is very close to 80 minutes in length.

this is conventional record number 5, if you're keeping track.

1) inri (inri005)
2) inriched (inri007)
3) inridiculous (inri016)
4) deny everything (inri023)
5) jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj (inri032, probably)

all the stuff in between are eps and singles.

so, i'm done with my strategizing eno warrior plan phase on this. that's phase one. phase two after this gets done. it shouldn't be too long. it's going to rain all day tomorrow, and should clear up by wednesday morning, so i've got the wood day set for wednesday (weather permitting). i should ideally get the bulk of this done before then.

-double guitar in quiet spot, offset
-replay offset stadium riffs (stereo offsets)
-double end riff with fuzzier tone
-end riff on high e
-melodic hardcore riffage as double over the townsend section
-tremolo big melodic hardcore riff
-trep guitar sorts (jangly parts)
-synth oohs
-vocal oohs
-lots of es at end
-walking bass - INTERSECTIONALITY

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

+samples?
+live drums on an acoustic or electronic kit?

to spin inside dull aberrations (raw mix)

so, this is what i'm working on this week.

it's another song from 2001, but it was written to be a stadium rock anthem, which is dramatically different than the other things i was doing at the time. the change in direction was due to working with a guitarist that was into more conventional, aggressive rock music and wanted to start a band.

that band never actually happened, and as a result the song never really got completed.

i don't have scores of this, but i do have the original drum tracks. there's going to be two mixes. the raw mix is what it would have sounded like if you were eavesdropping on me in my basement over the summer of 2001. i write so much stuff on guitar, and then take it in so many weird directions. the result is that a lot of the actual songs get lost in these hazes of production and weirdness. i've decided i should try and create as many of these stripped down guitar mixes as i can, to actually get the songs down somewhere. at the end of the day, there's going to be an audience that isn't going to be able to handle the 35 minute version of these things with 15 minutes of psychedelic loops but may enjoy the raw, seven minute psych punk version. if you see what i'm saying.

the second will be the fully complete track, which i'll be doing over the course of the month.

this raw guitar & drums mix is an accurate representation of what the track sounded like as i was writing it in my basement over the summer of 2001. this contains one guitar part with no overdubs.

track written summer of 2001. drums from 2001. guitar recorded aug 3, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/raw-mix

stress

it was requested that i record this as the "secret song" for the record. as it turns out, it was the only song that was recorded at all...

written and recorded, 1999-2001. this recording did not happen until mid 2001, but i was playing it at parties months before that. this file has not been altered from the 2001 recording.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/stress

the raw track'll be up soon.

but that goddamn microtone is just so evasive....nothing came out of it, but i made the right choice all those years ago...

yeah, this is working out just fine.

my philosophy over the ten years this has been broken has been "don't fuck with it, so long as it works". just going to stick with it...

i need a bit more tone than i'm used to, but the track calls for it, anyways.

yeah. i'm not going to get a good result by popping a precut nut into this thing, it's going to mess with the string spacing. i mean, that might be beneficial or might be negative but the key is that it's not the way the guitar was designed.

i'll head down there some time during the week and see if they either have the part or if i can order it from them (i apparently can't order from epiphone).

if i can't, and it's still bugging me, i'll actually pay for somebody to shape a blank nut. i have some extra cash this month and that's money well spent...

for now, i actually think i can probably bang this out alright.

worst case, i'll have to sit there with the old nut and try and sand the new one down to emulate it, but i'm not particularly confident that it's even possible given the spacing.

well, it's far from perfect, but it wasn't to begin with and it does seem to have set a bit.

it sounds sort of weird, but i actually want to replace it with the cheapy stock plastic nut that they're shipped with. it's just a question of normalizing the issue, and that's the best way to do it. if that doesn't fix it, i may want to experiment with shaping something, but if i swap a different nut and it continues to buzz then i can't really know if it's still the nut or if it's the tension in the neck. that's important because adjusting truss rods needs to be a last resort. taking it back to the "factory defaults" will help me get a proper grasp on the issue.

i'm not convinced this is possible to do, though. grargh. i guess if i *can't* get the stock nut, i'll have to go back and get the one they had....

i was very tired yesterday and didn't do much of anything.

and while i have the measurements worked out, i'm going to wait until after monday to head down to get some wood. ironically, i suspect the civic holiday may be the busiest day of the year at home depot - it's when all the bourgeois couples decide to renovate to try and fix their broken marriages. i'd rather avoid that. and, i have to wait until i get a crystal clear day to haul that much wood around, so it could be a few days.

i picked up some strings on friday because i was out that way to get some tomatoes, but i didn't get a new nut for the red guitar. they didn't really have the right part. i should probably have some spare heads around anyways, so i'm going to see if i can order the part from epiphone.

so, i'm going to try and get some work done today, but if the red guitar is still unplayable for this tune then it's going to mostly be about experimenting in trying to get the right tone out of the black guitar.

first concert in detroit: oneida w/ brothels

so, my first show over in detroit was a success over all. you can imagine that i was a little apprehensive about walking through downtown detroit. but, i had to balance the apprehension between two extremes - the reality that the united states is a deeply racist society that will nearly reflexively criminalize the negro and the reality that i'm a naive, friendly canadian that locks my doors at night out of convention rather than fear. the truth is somewhere between these extremes. i had to realize i needed to be careful, while not allowing the deep racism underlying the media portrayal of the region to blind me to what i was able to actually observe. this is going to be a struggle that is not going to go away soon and that i'm going to have to work out empirically; i'm going to have to find the sweet spot in balancing my naivete with actual observable reality, and learn what the best way to behave in a city like detroit is through trial and error.

there was a short part of the walk to trinosophes that was a bit unsettling, but it was because it was an unfamiliar area in a large city and not because there was any rational reason to deduce it as unsafe. that will evaporate as i become more familiar with the area. i have every reason to think this is a safe walk.

so, this is what i did on thursday...

i went down a little early because i wanted to get tickets for boris. that meant walking up to the magic stick which was about a half hour detour up woodward. i think a part of me wanted to walk the street during the day to get a grasp of the safety of it...

there's some construction up woodward, but it's otherwise an affluent downtown street full of banks and other things of the sort. that holds until you get to a highway, on the other side of which is a short walk past a field into an area called "midtown". midtown is apparently the hipster area of detroit, and is considered to be safe for affluent looking white people to walk around in. but, what actually struck me is how many affluent looking black people i saw. it's really the first time i ever walked through a middle class area that is also predominantly black.

now, if you look across the field that separates downtown from midtown you get a good eyeful of "scarytown". i don't want to gloss over the reality: it seems to be that woodward is a sort of a sheltered walkway through some rough areas. i wouldn't want to wander too far from that street, at least not for the time being. but i think i'll be comfortable walking back from a show at the magic stick, as i will be next saturday.
 
the soundtrack for the walk was pinkish black, and it fit the atmosphere fairly well:



walking back, i went back through downtown (including a walk through a total doppelganger of confederation park in ottawa), before crossing another huge highway on my way out of the downtown core, which is actually quite small. i don't think this little area has a name. it's kind of really just a strip of highway between two interchanges. but what defines it is the contrast between very old structures (the GENERAL HARDWARE sign on the ancient store looked to me to be at least a hundred years old, plausibly mid nineteenth century) and encroaching gentrification. directly over the highway, there was something that looked like a gated castle on one side of the street and a string of boarded up, long closed factories on the other. the venue (trinosophes, which is an unlicensed coffee shop) was locked from the front, so i walked a few openings up and stumbled into an overly bourgeois jazz-themed lunch restaurant with all the fancy dinnerware that was closing for the day. can't sit and have a beer, they're closing....

i was about an hour early, and there wasn't an open bar i could see in either direction, so i just sat outside the front of the venue and watched people walk by. there was another interesting contrast: designed landscaping contrasting with strips of grass that haven't been mowed all year. private v. city property. and, there was actually a smokestack in the middle of the road. this really tripped me out. a literal smokestack, pumping out nonstop pollution from somewhere, parked right in the island on the road, at a level of about four feet from the ground.

pedestrian traffic up the street was very light; there's nothing but highways in either direction, making the area very isolated. the little bit i saw was not intimidating: kids in their twenties doubling each other on their bikes, people walking their dogs without a leash, hippies with a bit of a swagger in their step due to obvious reasons, etc.

eventually, somebody came and knocked on the front of the door and got waved around to the back, at which point i realized the entry point is in the back. so, i made it into the venue....

it's a nice little hippie haven, full of potted plants and nice little benches. no alcohol; just coffee, and you know what that *really* means. i wish they'd just fix the legislation, already. i have to be very careful about that, actually, until i get a better feel for customs. i guess it's technically a loft and was probably initially built for an industrial purpose. this opens up into a second room with a small stage and a standing room capacity of roughly 500 people, although the slightly scary cracks in the floor suggest it wouldn't be smart to test that capacity.

so, first up was a band called brothels, which i can't find any information on online other than that it's a side project of another band. the style was psychedelic punk, and it was nothing particular original, but it was pretty solid at a few points. the second track they played is actually very structurally similar to the song i'm recording right now. i feel it's hard to make an overall assessment, though, because it seemed like the bulk of what they played (in the middle of the set) was unfinished. if they can work the middle of the set into the same level of detail as the first few and last few songs, they'll have a pretty solid set of psychedelic punk tunes. but that is something that remains to be seen. i'll keep an eye on them and update further as they develop.

oneida, on the other hand, is a well understood entity and they basically did exactly what they were expected to do. the crux of the band is their rhythm section, and especially their drummer. the two guitarists mostly drone out, while the two keyboard players are mostly for percussive and mild harmonic effect. the style traces back to late 70s attempts to merge noise, punk and jazz together; much has been written about this, so i will not bother repeating it.

there was a bit of an awkward moment in the set where they played a song about a "cat fight" and half the place got up and left. i can't say i had such a visceral reaction to it, but it's mostly because i can't take things of the sort that seriously. if i could take it that seriously, i may have. it certainly made me cringe. i mean, there's always been a bit of a sausage rock character to this style of music, not just this band. what other kind of reaction did they expect? they may want to think that through a bit more.

but, it was otherwise a solid noise set from a solid noise act. and it was nice to get a blast of sheets of easter in real time.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2014/07/31.html

hit numbers seem to have recovered at some point yesterday.

i'd guess roughly around when i posted, actually.

maybe there really is an evil bastard at youtube that's trying to "get" me for insulting her favourite band, after all.

that's about 3 lost days, over all.

i need to invent a transporter system for groceries, connected to an automated online ordering system. it's easy to imagine how this would work.

you go to the factory's website and you checkmark off what you want. that order will get downloaded into a robot, which will collect the order and bring it to the transporter. the robot pushes a button and the food then appears in your kitchen.

i mean, walking is healthy and blahblahblah but all this wonderful choice we get in our capitalist economy can be hard on the feet, especially if you're looking for tomatoes. it's really bizarre that i can live 50 miles from one of the biggest tomato producing regions on the continent and have to go to four stores to exercise my freedom to choose tomatoes that aren't bruised and moldy. i was on my feet for five hours today...

i took a look through, and i don't see a metric for "visits" - that is, a way to determine how many people found their way to my channel page. that would be far more useful to me....

actually, it's still throttling, just not up to 301. mosh pit song says 230+ hits - because that's the reach i've got. that was almost 100 yesterday. but they're only counting 13 of those.

they may have changed their metrics. the trailer ought to count as a hit because somebody clicked the name, indicating interest. somebody at youtube may have decided otherwise.

but, as i mentioned, it's the exposure that is important - not the hits. if they want everything to sit at 301, so be it. but that doesn't imply i'm getting less exposure, it just means the site is now useless at measuring it. i mean, the 231 number measures something more *valuable* to me than the 13 number, whether youtube employees think otherwise or not.

so, that's really the conclusion: i should keep trolling, because i'm generating a lot of traffic, but the google analytics are now entirely worthless in measuring that traffic....

i mean, the hit count only meant anything to me in the first place *because* it measured traffic. if it doesn't measure traffic, why would any musician care about it at all?

what i'll say, at the least, is that it breaks the psychological block. i don't care at all anymore because it doesn't mean anything...

if anybody from youtube is spying on me, though, answer me this: how am i now supposed to have an understanding of how many people i'm *reaching* through my youtube advertising?

again: i'm not thinking there's any real conspiracy here, but i do think that the people that work for the company may be living in some kind of lalaland where they think they're running a site where everybody aspires to be that fucking moron with the lightsabers or something.

it's just a lack of any real connection to reality.

marketing reach is important. how many people explicitly clicked the link is not important.

bloody youtube is throttling me again. this graph defies reason, especially considering i know i was getting traffic because:

1) there were other tracks getting hits off the main page.
2) when i swapped the tracks, the hits started counting again.

it just stopped counting hits on this track somewhere on the evening or afternoon of the 29th, and didn't count any over the 30th.

i can make a reasonable estimate that it just flat out "forgot" to count about 100 hits.

i don't think there's some evil, conniving person at youtube getting off of deleting my hits. i think their algorithms just don't work properly. it's not a conspiracy, it's just bad programming.

and i'm not the type that cares about hit counts. i don't aspire to be a "youtube personality", whatever that even means. the exposure is more important to me than the hit count. so, this will not affect my behaviour in any way.

but i do care a bit more about maintaining that growth curve, for psychological reasons, and if they're not counting hits properly then it could break the curve. that's going to piss me off if it happens. and it's really embarrassing for the site that they can't figure out how to program their hit stats properly. they put so much effort into ensuring hits are their "currency", but then they continually fail to administer the system properly.

like any government fails to devise a proper monetary policy, i suppose.

absolute success - and i've learned two frequent destinations are relatively safe to walk to. nothing is completely safe. it turns out trinosophes is purely a coffee shop, so i'll be awake until some time next week. review shortly...

playing quietly mostly removes it, which is probably why it seems exaggerated, now. this song needs some unusually (for me) aggressive playing.

actually, fuck it.

when i say the black one (they both say epiphone on the headstock. the red is an sg copy, and has those high gain punk pickups so i keep the action low on it and the strings thin on it. the black one looks like a coronet, but it was custom built partly out of ibanez parts. it's basically a coronet neck on an ibanez body. i picked it up in a used shop. great neck, but low gain pickups - which are better for jazz. so i keep it with thick strings to get some good sustain.) is set up for jazz, my concept of jazz is kind of abstract.

i do use the black one for a lot of hybrid chord/lead work. the black one is really my main guitar. i just put it through a few pedals to get the pickups a bit more hot. i just picked it up for the first time in a few weeks and it is soooo much more smooth to play, there's no comparison...

i've thought about getting a jazzmaster. it would make it easier to get some specific sounds, although i can generally get whatever i want out of the combination of the two. they're not cheap guitars, though. and i've usually always had a few $10 guitars i keep around for beyond fucked tunings and other weirdness, although i had to destroy the last one because i got a shock out of it and i don't have one right now.

it's too late for today, i need to get ready to get to detroit. this is the first time i'm actually going to do a thing in detroit. i'm going to be walking from the tunnel up woodward to the magic stick to get boris tickets, and i don't know how long it's going to take to get back to trinosophes so i want to give myself lots of time. the show isn't until 8, but i want to be out of here by 4. and i need to eat and shower...

but i will probably at least experiment with the black one over the next few days to see if i can get the tone i want out of it.

still counting on the nut, though.

it's a tad better. i dunno.

see, it's hard for me to compare in any meaningful sense. i just sort of picked the screwdriver up and started turning without thinking it through properly. so, it seems like it's buzzier than before, but is it really? i wasn't really paying attention.

and, similarly for the action itself. it was "low". but it's not like i had it measured. is it lower now than it was?

i guess i just have to set it up the way i want it and not really worry too much.

it needs a new nut, anyways.

see, and putting the new head in is going to have a tension effect...

i think the reality is that it needs to readjust due to the combination of factors, and i'll probably be adjusting the action mildly every ten hours or so for the next week. hopefully it's enough that i can get the track out by the time i get the nut fixed.

i've pretty much ruled the truss bar out. yes, the humidity in here is up and down due to the air and the windows. but it's just one string.

i'm putting faith in swapping the nut.

then again, i raised the action slightly and will let it sit over night and see what happens tomorrow.

a small amount of buzz on this guitar is ok, because it's purely used for high gain applications. that is, this guitar is set up to sound distorted, so the buzz washes out under the fuzz. but, right now, it's just a bit too much to be useful.

gah....

i let it sit for the night to let it set and it's come back buzzing like crazy on the bottom string.

i'm not convinced it's the truss rod. it's just the one string, to begin with. and it's a little weird to think the frets just jumped up overnight sort of thing.

the fact that i can get the buzz a bit better but not gone entirely by raising the action suggests to me that it's probably the nut. and, in fact, the nut is actually even broken. but it's been broken for ten years. it's weird that it just developed the buzz now.

i can't really use the other guitar for the track because it has very thick strings and high action. the black one is for jazz and blues; the red one is for punk and metal. they're set up that way and it can't really be mixed up much.

i'm going to have to switch the nut out first. if i still can't get the action right....i'll have to fuck with the truss rod. i don't want to do that...

i wanted to get a guide track down today because i've got other stuff lined up this week. this is going to come in two mixes. the first is a raw version that is going to be exactly what the thing sounded like as i was writing and practicing it in 2001. the other is going to be a more formed version.

i'm hitting oneida tonight, and then i'll have to do laundry and groceries and shit tomorrow. saturday, i want to go down and buy some wood, and sunday and maybe into monday i'll be building shelves. getting that down would have felt good...

but, i need that low string to get the one-track version i want. i probably won't be able to get the nut in until the middle of next week.

so, i took a google walk up randolph and gratiot to trinosophes, and it just looks like downtown-anywhere to me. any downtown area is a little creepy; this doesn't seem bad. caveats and smart behaviour obviously apply, as they would in any downtown anywhere, but i'm not really worried.

google claims it's a 25 minute walk. my experience is that that usually means it's more like 15, because i'm fit and i walk fast. walking there while the sun is up isn't going to be a concern, but i am going to have to walk back around 11:00. well, i'm going to have to figure things out by experimenting, anyways. if i walk by a mugging, i may think twice about it next time.

i think by foot is actually the safest approach, given that detroit has a high incidence of car vandalism and buses really just get you stuck in a corner you can't get out of it. a brisk walker is less of a target than a bus passenger.

i'm going to go down early to pick up some tickets for boris on the 9th. i've avoided listening to the new record...

head is back on, and i can tune my g again without breaking my wrist for the first time in quite a while. yay....

no wobbling. perfect snug fit.

i should have got some strings while i was there, though. well, i almost did but it seems like d'addario changed their packages and i wasn't sure if they were the same gauge or not. strings are strings. but i'm picky about gauges...

well, that worked out well.

initially, i was faced with a wall of $50 grovers. no thanks.

the guy pulled out a $30 pair of precision tuners, but they would have required drilling new holes, and i wasn't going to do that.

the tech eventually walked by, and he went and got a single stock epiphone head for me. $5. hurray...

i am going to want to swap these out eventually, but i don't want to drill holes so it's going to be a research project to find some heads that will allow me to swap them out in the holes that are already there.

also, i just realized that the initial post could be rather badly misinterpreted.

just to update on it: i couldn't get the head to stay still, and it sort of clicked that it was physically broken. so, i unscrewed the knob to see if i could tighten something and it just completely fell apart.

cheap heads break. that one lasted fifteen years. that's actually pretty good.

and it may have had to do with the way it was tuned. i may have bent it by stringing it with a wound g. i've gone back to unwound strings on that guitar.

no.

head is fucked.

going to buy a new one. hopefully, i just can buy one...

the hazards of long nails on your picking hand, which is also usually going to be your wiping hand...

i scratched my anus.

:(

i should do a psa for kids, so they know.

"remember kids: if you play classical guitar, always wears gloves while wiping in order to avoid scratching your anus."

what else is there to do besides stick a wad of toilet paper in there? so, now i'm going to have to walk around looking like i shit my pants for the next few hours.

jokes aside, it's got me wondering if there's like an e coli risk or something. i mean, opening up a hole in your anus so bacteria can crawl into your bloodstream can't be good news. i guess i just have to hope my neutrophils are populated, armed and ready for battle!

"unfortunately, we regret to inform you that jessica has perished due to complications resulting from a mild case of accidental anal scratching."

i should publicly apologize to my neutrophils for increasing their workload. i can only imagine what they're thinking....

"dude, where'd all this e coli come from"
"the fucking idiot scratched her anus."
"how?"
"classical guitar finger nails."
"she didn't know better than to wear gloves?"
"apparently not."
"what a fucking noob."
"there's a few over there, let's go phagosome 'em."
"i'm not hungry, i just had a bunch..."
"just fucking do it."

uploading the mosh pit song to youtube

that was a very productive two weeks, the kind i'd like to see happen more often. i'm moving into december, 1996 in the alter-reality - and the end of the first demo tape. this is the last original track off of that tape; there will be one further track posted, but it's a 1998 rerecording of the version on the tape. there will be a 66 day period between the end of the first tape and the beginning of the second. i was actually grounded at the beginning of 1997, and not allowed to play guitar. so, i'll be cycling through the tracks a second time, but won't post them here over that period. that won't turn over until the end of october.

hits are up dramatically this week due to trolling weird al, so the bach song has done very well. i doubt i'll be able to sustain that kind of traffic over the next two weeks, but the curve has been generally increasing up to now so it's hard to predict. i wouldn't have predicted this kind of traffic, before.

i hope to get at least the song i've been trying to start for days done by the end of the two week period, and aspire to get up to the end of sept, 2001 permanently dealt with. we'll see how that goes.

so, this will switch over at midnight.

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

back when i was a silly kid, i wrote some silly punk songs for other silly kids to be silly kids while listening to them. the tendency dried up when i hit my mid-teens and became sullen and withdrawn and totally into imaginary guitar solos, but there's a handful of these scattered in the old stuff.

this wears it's influences pretty obviously: it's something like nirvana doing a goofy cover of "march of the pigs", with some white zombie skronking mixed in. despite that, i've pulled it out as a highlight because it captures a sort of youthful irreverence. that, and it's pretty catchy.

the track was obviously sped up for effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_Fz2NQrGgE&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbslW9qCBKT_nEcwUt1DY0aN

tomorrow, i'm going to finally start building the rest of the furniture i need in this place: several large bookshelves and a few tables. i simply can't find anything i could substitute in the way i want it on kijiji.

i've been waiting for a year to do this, so i'm a little excited about it. i've got a lot of measuring to do...

i was initially counting on a small but regular sum coming from my stepmother to deal with the extra furniture. well, i say that without a lot of seriousness. it was something my father had indicated was important to him, and there was a verbal agreement reached on his instigation, but i really knew better than to take it seriously. he'd indicated to me a few times that she wasn't listening to him and his wishes weren't likely to be carried out, and i knew it was more than the morphine talking. he tried, but the truth is he knew as well as i did that she wasn’t going to honour anything she didn't sign and she wasn't going to sign anything...

i probably wouldn't have moved here in the first place if i was taking that seriously. i think i *did* think she'd give it a few months, at least. either way, it never materialized.

so, then i was waiting for the tax return to come in. but they're splitting it up on a monthly basis. so, instead of getting $650 in one chunk that i could spend on furniture amongst other things, i get bit a more than $50 a month, starting last month. which means i'd have to go to the hardware store and buy some wood every month for the next three or four months, or save it up until next spring. annoying...

it turns out the landlord doesn't want to pay me interest on my rent deposit, so he's giving it back to me this month. that is, i don't pay rent this month. he knows i'm not going anywhere, so the last month scenario is pretty unlikely. and, he's not going to immediately evict me for missing a month, either. three, probably...

so, that gives me some extra disposable income, and the cash i need to get the stuff built.

i actually don't have a clue what this is going to cost. i'm just going to measure what i need and go down and find out. but i figure there's not more than $20 worth of wood in any single thing i want to build, so i'm guessing $150 absolute max and probably something more like $75. the question is going to arise as to how much is going to end up as waste. but i'll figure out something to do with any extra pieces i get.

i'm also going to have to get a drill. i could screw through particle board, but i can't screw through heavier wood. and i'm mostly going to be making the stuff ikea style, which means drilling holes into the wood and then screwing it together with dowels and stuff.

i mean, i don't otherwise know how to make furniture. shelves are pretty intuitive; the key is just making sure everything's orthogonal. i've put together enough ikea stuff, though, that i can reverse engineer the idea and apply it to the rest of it.

that was time consuming and frustrating but i'm satisfied. and it needed it, anyways.

the heads should be fine for a while, but i need to prioritize it because the g is really, really bad..

i know better than to fuck with my action.

but i fucked with my action.

i'm going to have to replace the heads on this thing eventually. it'll be good for the instrument; they're stock epiphone heads and they don't hold a tuning well. for now, i actually had to reseat the g head to get the thing up past an f. but it took me a while to figure out what the problem was...

...and i fucked with my action instead.

so, that's what i've accomplished today. fixing the action.

well, i guess i've added a few parts to the song, too, while i've been at it.

it doesn't help that i'm picky about action and was haphazard about fucking with it. brain freeze.

scare on the tuning head. well, i guess it's good to adjust your action once in a while anyways....

and, the other fun part of punk guitar playing: changing broken guitar strings.

you don't do that nearly as often playing jazz and blues. in truth, i actually like my strings just a tad bit rusty, so it's a piss-off but it happens....

actually, i need the g about an eighth down, too, so it's tune with the b.

i suspect this tuning may be used in some melodic hardcore, actually. it's very brian baker.

actually, nevermind. i just realized the dissonance i'm looking for is actually relative and relies on the b string being roughly an eighth tone flat. leaving the low e string at roughly a quarter tone flat allows the entire song to be played on one guitar. so, that's the tuning, if anybody is keeping track.

(note that the terminology refers to a whole tone. so, when i say an eighth tone flat i mean 1/4 of the way from b to b flat and when i say a quarter tone flat i mean 1/2 the way from e to eb.)

yeah. i'm just going to tune by ear to separately produce each section, and glue it all together. it'll sound "out of tune" to some people, but the physics are a little too complex to make such a simplistic statement - it's going to be staggered by quartertones and eighthtones throughout, but that's only "out of tune" relative to the obsolete theory that is still entrenched in western academic thought. it's going to be pretty much impossible to reproduce live without multiple guitarists and a set of techs with perfect pitch, but so be it. it's not in the plans, anyways.

so, this is going to be rather tonally complex. good luck transcribing it....

there's only one popular rock band that i'm aware of that made excellent use of microtones in an otherwise tonal context: alice in chains. you can hear it in more avant stuff like swans or sonic youth, but it's not in the same pop context.

specifically, it's the vocal harmonies, which were often just off. again: people think it sounds out of tune and either like it because of that or cringe because of that. tbh, i don't think either staley or cantrell really realized what they were doing, for the precise reason that their new singer hits the notes perfectly. that is, william duvall is a more proficient singer, but, by being a more technically perfect singer, he loses the aspect of the band that initially made them so interesting. i kind of wish some music theory guru would sit cantrell down and explain it to him, but it's also not the same thing to train somebody to pick up a level of chemistry that came through intuition.

i *do* think staley had an intuition for hitting the notes in between, though. like, when staley and cantrell harmonized, staley would often be off by a microtone and would consistently hit the point out of tune because it sounded more "right" to him. in order for that to work the way it does, he has to be accidentally producing perfect overtones. that's why what they had was so special: he was intuitively producing something that exists outside of western music theory, without really realizing he was doing it.

this isn't going to sound like an alice in chains song, but that's the only popular rock band i'm aware of that played with these ideas within the context of popular rock music, accidentally or not.

yeah, this is what i was worried about: i've seen a few baby roaches (a few mm in length) this morning. the eggs must have been underneath the counter or something - somewhere i can't get to. but they're all dead. the residues seem to have got 'em.

they usually hatch in the fall, so this is actually a bit early. maybe it's the weather. the fucking polar vortex is back and it's getting us some cool nights in the low teens.

the fact that i'm not seeing any adults suggests to me that any oothecae that were left have been stranded, in terms of a nesting population. and the fact that they're coming out for food and getting poisoned suggests that they have to. something i noticed before the centipedes left is that they were moving back to the kitchen, indicating they sensed food (ie roaches) there. a few of them were also killed by the poison (although i've seen several in the back room so the population there is doing fine).

if anything, the early hatch is probably beneficial to me as it gets rid of them while the residues are still there. i think i'm still winning. i was never certain if they were coming in from out of the apartment or coming up from under the floors; i was fairly sure of the former, but it meant i had to stop them before they started leaving eggs under the cabinets. i do think they were mostly coming in from outside, but i didn't get to them before at least a few eggs got laid.

now, i simply don't know how many eggs are under there....and have to hope the poison holds out long enough to get them before they breed another time....

if i start noticing a larger population, the next step will be finding out what hole in the floor they're coming up and steel wooling it.

i can't hope to bait them because the truth is that the whole neighbourhood is infested. they'll come back. i just have to block entry.

i'm not happy about spraying again, either. the pesticide i'm using is supposed to have extremely low mammal toxicity, i did the research and it's supposed to be safe for humans in non-ridiculous direct dosages (meaning don't drink it), but i'm a little concerned that it might have something to do with my sore neck.

my arm works again. yay!

i'm remembering now why i cut the song up, and specifically ejected the raunchy riff at the end that next levels it. i was hoping to play the thing live with that singer friend of mine....

...but the low e is tuned to a microtone between e and eb.

yeah. that's weird. i know. but it sounds awesome when i get the tuning right. i happen to have been playing an out of tune guitar the last few days that was pretty close to the detune i need, so it didn't click until i tried to tune it and it all came flooding back.

the problem is it's hard to get it right and it has to be done by ear. i was thinking it wasn't worth the risk of fucking up the tuning on an acoustic that doesn't stay in tune anyways, because if it goes flat it's really dreadful and if it goes sharp it's just boneheaded. i can't really measure it on a tuner so i don't know what the exact ratio is. but it's got this really raw, slightly atonal sound to it when it hits the sweet spot....

it doesn't matter, now. i'm not playing this live, so i'm going to get it down the way it's supposed to sound and then walk away from it. but playing with the tuning heads to get the right tone isn't exactly the most fun thing to do.

this is a screen shot of a word document dated sept 30, 1997. it's rough notes for the track "too cold", which would not be finished until early 1999. g7 means guitar 7. yeah, i've always used a lot of guitar overdubs.

radiohead fans may get a laugh out of it.

yeah. the pain in my hand has gone away, thankfully. my neck hurts a little (which is why i think "pinched nerve") still, though, so i'm going to wait until midnight.

i seem to have pulled some kind of muscle in my arm from playing punk chords at full speed yesterday.

i'm far too frail.

i think it's a pinched nerve. it's not really stopping me from playing, but i'm going to rest it another 12 hours or so to avoid aggravating it.

the centipedes have migrated out and into the storage area, indicating there is no longer any food for them in the apartment.

i am very close to declaring a final victory.

i actually somehow managed 250 hits yesterday. that's a lot of hits. i've been trolling weird al...

i'm sort of skeptical. i think maybe youtube might have given me back the hits they stole. i'll find out when the stats update. a few hours...

i'm not naive. i know people don't sell records over youtube or bandcamp. i'm really surprised bandcamp is still running, actually.

i think i'm hoping that if i can generate enough traffic it may generate enough interest to get a distribution deal in place.

i knew this was going to be a long process when i decided on it, but it seems to be working. that's growth month over month since i put the youtube site up at the beginning of the year. keep in mind that there's another week in july, so the curve will be up by the end of the month. i'm projecting a nice growth rate that is leveling off around 1.2.

i don't know how long i'll be able to maintain that growth rate. but, if it continues a few more months i can start expecting over 100 hits a day. if it continues to this time next year, i can expect closer to 200 hits a day. that's a lot of hits, and i'm skeptical myself, but the approach i'm using is additive so it's not out of the question.

see, here's the thing: i understand that youtube hits are not a measure of legitimate interest but a measure of marketing reach. people with a million youtube hits don't have a million fans, they have a million-hit marketing apparatus behind them. i'm an independent artist, so i'm mostly relying on trolling youtube to generate hits.

it's actually a win-win because i produce the kinds of comments that people like: smart and provocative. they generate responses and keep people engaged.

but, it's a numbers game - especially with the nature of the sound. get as many hits as i can and hope a few are interested, sort of thing.

i've had a few videos go down, but most of the comments will remain in place permanently. well, all of the comments will remain in place so long as the videos are up. so, the more comments i produce, the more hits i generate. or, so goes the logic. the growth can't be permanent. but, looking at the growth that i'm getting, i have every reason to think the bar is potentially set quite high.

and that's what i wanted. i'm mostly marketing my oldest stuff right now because i'm still "only" generating about 70 hits a day. it'll be another three months before i even get to my second demo, and then another seven after that before i get to what i'd consider more substantial recordings.
if the growth rate keeps up, i could be generating upwards of 200 hits a day *when i start promoting my more meaningful work*.

the idea was to emulate the kind of marketing that used to exist in the 80s, before everything got bought out. word of mouth growth, slowly, over time. one of the great things about this, and one of the reasons the 80s produced such a wealth of substantial underground music, is that it allows the artists to evolve as they're generating an audience. by slowly building up to my more mature works, i'm also emulating that artistic evolution.

i guess this post is bragging that my evil plan is actually working. i'm a bit of a bond villain...

that actually came back very fast.

geez, i'm really working my hands out this summer. that's ok, i obviously need it.

i'm three different types of guitarist. i did take some classical lessons, and there's a lot of stuff in my discography that is either performed on a nylon guitar with fingers or creatively utilizes chord shapes that are common in classical music but are not often found in blues-based music (pro-tip: that's actually how john lennon got his idiosyncratic guitar sound: he used classical chords in blues music. fucking honkies, right? well, it was ukelele chords. same thing. and, it's sort of what sonic youth did, too, in a round about way, by using weird tunings.). and, my lead playing is very blues-based.

but, my songwriting is very punk rock. almost everything i've ever listened to is some kind of punk rock, and almost everything i've ever written on a guitar is some kind of punk rock.

i used to spend hours thrashing along to bad religion and offspring records. people have this dumb idea of punk rock as being easy to play on guitar, because they associate showmanship with musicianship. it always has been a smokescreen. johnny ramone was moving his right hand every bit as quickly as van halen was, it's just that he was playing very fast chords instead of very fast notes. if you break it down to the physics of it, it's really no less difficult to do. we just have this very silly perception of the whole thing.

i haven't played chords that fast in quite a while, and the song absolutely requires them. i'm going to drive my neighbours nuts practicing it....

that's actually something you're going to notice in the next batch of material. the work i did with the singer in 01 and 02 was much more song oriented, which brought my punk guitar roots out. there's a lot of really unusual syncopation going on.

it actually used to drive him nuts, because it would throw him off on the timing. i can do all kinds of weird things and get back to the one, because i'm a musician, and musicians can do that. he didn't have any musical background, so what he really needed was some kind of a click track to stay in time (we never used them, though, i'd just cut his vocals up afterwards).

actually, i just listened to the three guitar tracks i saved and let me just say that the samples will be....minimal. i don't know what i was thinking working with that guy in the first place. sounds like he's been playing for two weeks. i'm not sure there's a point in bothering.

but, i'm glad i have what i'm going to call my angularity back. you don't really lose the dexterity. you could pick up a van halen piece after not playing for five years and get it back in a few hours. it's more the mental aspect of the instrument that fades a little. meaning, it would be hard to write a king crimson song after a long period of guitar inactivity (although less difficult to play one, if you can remember it).

it explains why players like billy corgan go through these long periods that make it sound like they've lost it. people blame the lack of acid. i just think he stopped playing his instrument, and lost his proficiency.

when you reduce your guitar to a tool that you only pick up when you want to gain something from it, that's when you lose it. your guitar's gotta be your friend if you want to get anything out of it.

with corgan, i think if somebody could convince him to sit in his room and rebuild that relationship...

there's bits and pieces of it here and there in his later work, like he rediscovers it for a week and then gets bored of it again. he seems to have gone years without really seriously playing. a guy like that is looking for something that doesn't exist. his head's out of it, in the clouds, looking for meaning.

i want to avoid saying he grew out of it or something, because one does not outgrow the guitar. one may trick themselves into thinking there's more to life, but that's indicative of a lack of maturity, not a sign of it. it's a shame.

other people that have to work for a living lose the time they need. that's been more my problem. but i'm glad i'm out of that loop.

ok, so i'm going to get started on this....