so, i'm going to create a separate blog just as a timeline for release dates.
this will replace the facebook page, which will be shut down relatively soon.
Monday, June 14, 2021
i can grasp the corruption in sound audio, but how'd it get out of sync?
what seemed to disappear in the track was the pickup up note that it starts on, which both precedes and finalizes the loop. i'd notate this in 4/4 and make the loop four bars, so you'd end up with the following if you were to notate it:
x |: 1... | 1... | 1... | 1..x :|
...with the pickup note where the xes are. so, it's just an extra quarter note at the front of the pattern...
i don't know how, but something got confused somewhere, as it sounds like the pickup shifted to the one, which just put everything out of order.
like i say - this is very weird...
yeah, the bandcamp compression seems to be having some difficulties with that rough version of the lost symphony i pulled from tape. there's supposed to be a flanging effect on the right channel, and it's just a gross, muddy, warbled mess on the stream. oddly, it seems like the stream is having difficulty syncing the right and left channels together as well, which i don't quite understand. the file i uploaded is correctly in sync. what process would separate the channels and then put them back together wrong? it's weird.
it sounds fine on the other computer...
but, it's a temp mix anyways, and i'll need to fix it when i clean that up over the next few weeks.
and, today's period 3.1 update post is for the bedroom cassette demos (inri077). this is likely complete.
==============
inri077.
these are some demos that i recorded on my 4-track in sarah and heather's apartment on dalhousie in ottawa in late 2003.
initially, the only thing i transferred was a section that became "like divine amoebas", because i was using it, directly. i seem to have lost that tape, but i have found a second tape with an early version of the lost symphony and added it to the ep. it's not currently immediately clear if there are further demos from this period in the other room in a pile of boxes or not.
released november 1, 2003
inri076
so, it's uploaded now and it's staying there.
i think that, of the pieces not yet released, this one is the most emotionally difficult to let into the public listening sphere. it was a long time ago...
if it's not obvious, the track is pretty sardonic. but, this is also, like, just pure sound art - i was feeling fucked up and just wanted to capture it best i could.
do i sound like sean in the recording? well, sean admitted he was trying to sound like me in the first place. the rabit working relationship was always sort of weird, as i was in total control of the whole process from the very start, so sean sounded the way he did because i made him sound that way (and he never figured out how to recreate that, if he actually wanted to). what is true is that there is some lingering feeling from that part of the discography, which had at that point just closed down a few months previous. but, i never released this until today, and it doesn't linger much longer than this.
that noise file i found from 2004 actually uses the same jx-8p sound effect i used in this track, and there's a conceptual idea i wanted to document that's kind of lingering, so i will probably add a noise composition to the start of this that is based on that existing file. that works out quite well.
i'm past due to eat....
==============
inri076 will be a short single with the early version of eleventh dimension (& all you need...)
soul swap piece?
============
i'll do a write-up for this a little later.
for now, i'm just going to point out that my brain sort of broke in the middle of 2003, and this was the result of it. it sort of speaks for itself in some sense.
i think maybe two people have heard this....
the second track got cleaned up and used for the start of the interplanetary isomorphism (the third trivial group symphony), but the first track just got completely discarded - and there's lots of reasons for that that we'll go over later.
what i've done in 2021, for now, is remaster the track to turn the vocals down. the track is otherwise bitwise identical (excluding some intentional clipping).
i may write an original piece to precede this to close it.
written & recorded in 2003. remastered in 2021. inri076.
as always, please use headphones.
released september 1, 2003
j - guitars, drum programming, digital wave editing, synthesizers, electric mandolin, vocals
alright, this is on it's way up a few hours later than i wanted it to be but so be it.
i've never released this before...
....and this is, i think, unlike anything i'd ever done previously. i'm lucky to have an archive like this - i don't tend to repeat myself, creatively. so, let it begin - this is period 3.1...
*deep breath*
(like anybody's listening, anyways.)
Sunday, June 13, 2021
so, what i want to do with this tonight is very simple, and it may be all i do with it at all - as this kind of pre-track for the interplanetary isomorphism is more or less stranded. in the end, i'll have to decide if i want to pull it back into the final product or leave it here, but for now what i need to do is just pull the vocals out and put them back in slightly more quietly.
i was still using cool edit to mix at this point, so the files were pasted on top of each other. period 3 is the last period using this method, but it's still dominant until early 2007. as mentioned many times, there are actually major benefits to this (and i'll continue to come back to it when i want something with a certain blurry sound, like the reprise to the time machine), and the material done in this period really exaggerates it, but it means i have to reline everything up in cubase from scratch to remix it on the existing hardware.
unfortunately, the vocals and guitars were both pasted in with a clip so it's not as easy as phase reversing them out - it leaves the distortion there as a relic. so, i have to rebuild it.
so, what i've done is copy the abandoned combined mix i had into cubase and then take each of the parts and put them into their own new tracks. once i've phase reversed each part out as best i can, they'll be lined up - and i can then reverse them back to where they were initially and mix them without the clipping.
Saturday, June 12, 2021
first upload of inri075
the next chunk of material to come up is going to be inri075-inri080, inclusive. some of this is totally done (inri079, inri080), some of it needs a brief look at (inri076) and some of it will be a project to finish (inri075, inri077, inri078). i'm going to try to get an approximate document for each project up, one per day, over the next week. this was an unstable period, so some of these releases will be short eps meant to represent ideas that were temporarily abandoned due to needing to relocate and finished elsewhere in a different mindset as a result...
for today, here is a rough outline of inri075:
this release is meant to document a tracklist of acoustic material, as performed over the summer of 2003, when i was backpacking across canada. some of these will be tracks from period 2 and others will be demos for the upcoming period 3. as such, it's a sort of middle point between what was done over 2000--2002 and what is coming up for 2003-2007.
i want to re-record a number of these tracks on acoustic guitar because the demoes i have were done for electric or classical, and may rerecord everything in the process. we'll have to see.
for now, this is a starting ep that i'll fill out over the next few weeks as i finish these releases for period 3.1, which ran from mid-2003 to mid-2004 and was kind of unfocused and scattered due to reality around me.
Friday, June 11, 2021
they're selling you cds at 44.1/16, so you think it's actually pretty good, right?
see, that's where you go wrong with this...
if it's radio music, the sad and pathetic reality is that it's more like they're functionally upsampling a master done at 22 khz, 8 bit - so your mp3 compression isn't degrading the sound nearly as much as you imagine that it is.
any artist that's actually taking advantage of cd quality audio isn't going to compress to mp3 well at all...
it is true that some of the more sound-conscious artists out there at least used to do things like create mixes for radio and mixes for cd/lp. you'll also find tv mixes back in the mtv/muchmusic days, and i've heard of corporate rock musicians mixing for mp3 (that was even really what the loudness wars were actually about). so, don't take my statements too broadly....
but, generally speaking, if an artist is marketed for radio play then the product that you buy on a physical media in the store is mixed to play on am radio, and plugging it into an expensive sound system is pointless because the source is intentionally garbage.
then, when you compress it it doesn't matter - because it's shit to begin with.
that is why people can't tell the difference - because they're listening to trash.
well.
what kind of music do i make?
the answer is that it's electro-classical music with jazzy and bluesy flairs and only vague references to rock music instrumentation (i play electric guitar. that's not very "classical". but, besides that, i'm a composer.), and while i don't think i need the dynamic range of 24 bits to get those super quiet oboes and flutes, i do insist that you try not to butcher the frequency range too badly, please.
to put it another way, this is the actual pathetic truth - corporate music is so badly produced, in general, that you can run it through massive compression and not lose anything important.
but, what this really is about is garbage in / garbage out, and it's not an argument for the parity of the technology, in a broader sense.
the ranges of frequency that mp3 removes are not chosen at random - frequency bands that are ignored by your kind of standard or "normal" corporate pop/rock/rap producers are taken out rather consciously. mp3 programmers refer to this as "psycho-acoustics".
it's not just the high and low bands that are outside of your frequency range, it's also a fairly large amount of frequency bands that corporate pop producers cut out on purpose. so, it's actually very true that you can't tell the difference if you're listening to celine dion or taylor swift or something - because the production process intentionally cuts out the frequencies that the mp3 removes, which is why the mp3 removes it.
but, if you're listening to abstract techno that's mixed by non-professionals (or professionals that don't know better), anything labeled "classical" or "jazz" or even interesting psychedelic or progressive rock then things actually do exist in those frequency bands - and i demonstrated the point when i posted that ping-pong effect, which the compression algorithm just demolished. you will lose a lot of music with an mp3 if you're listening to these types of music because they weren't mixed with the corporate pop techniques that the mp3 compression is designed to take advantage of.
so, the process is like this:
1) corporate pop producers eliminate specific frequency bands, because they get in the way (and can't be produced on am radio, for example)
2) the designers of the mp3 algorithm realized that and took advantage of it. so, they cut out the same ranges that were cut out during the corporate pop production process. they call this "psycho-acoustics", which is just a pretentious term to describe what i'm describing.
3) creative musicians then come along and they don't cut those ranges out when they're producing their music.
4) somebody uses mp3 compression to compress these songs, unaware of what i'm trying to explain to you.
5) large amounts of the music disappears, and they don't understand why.
a good rule of thumb is this: if the music you like is released on a major record label, it probably doesn't matter if you use mp3 or flac. but, if you're listening to anything that is remotely interesting at all, you're really better off avoiding any kind of lossy compression - because the mp3 algorithm didn't intend for you to use it to compress the music you're listening to.
and, i'm an expert on this topic - you're not.
so, i hope that's clear.
Thursday, June 10, 2021
i'm very, very close to getting back to it, and when i do i'll start with uploading versions of inri076 and inri080. the projects in front of me are now going to be inri075, inri077 and inri078, and that will get me to the inri records compilations, which is the next pause.
while i suppose that another catastrophe may be in front of me still, it seems like i'm back to work. imminently.
as mentioned several times now, it's going to work like this:
- music over weekends
- alter-realities (starting in 1989 and hopefully stabilizing shortly. i didn't really start listening to much rock music until about 92 or 93, so i still have time) on fridays
- music journal catchups in the week (i have to do the diet thing, first)
i will eventually have this more linear, it's just....this is where i'm at right this minute.
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
so, i needed to synchronize my various backup files, first, and then back everything back up to the various places. it's this 100 gb folder with what's left on it that i have in slightly different versions in roughly 5 different places....
i'm just about done copying everything to my data drive. once it's properly filed, i can copy it back to the satellite spaces.
what i want done by the end of the night is everything from mid-2003 until early 2007 filed, numbered and ready to finish.
some remixing will be necessary, but the fact is that most of it is done.
and, when i get over this hump, the stuff from mid-2007 forwards should be a lot fresher. yes, 2007 was a long time ago. but, all i have from 2007 forwards is mostly just a collection of seeds.
period 3 is the real heavy lifting in catching up to where i was, even if where i was is now a long time ago, too.
ok.
so, i may have to reperform some (really, most) of these tracks, and that's ok. so, there'll be some overlap with the impressionist jazz punk disc, but i want these all to be strictly acoustic, so i'll have to redo it. that's the conceptual break here, regardless - inri075 is the backpacking trip which i'm going to date to july 1, 2013 and inri076 will be a mini-single of material worked out when i got back.
so, let me file this as roughly and then get to working it all ot.
inri075 - guitar backpacking disc. redo some guitars. functionally, a hybrid demo disc of upcoming third period material, with some stripped down versions of period 2 pieces.
inri076 - all you need single. remove vocals? most of my vocals in this period are pretty cringey, these ones are particularly awful, but also kind of intriguingly pathetic. i'll probably include both options.
inri077 - bedroom cassette demo ep. right now, it looks like two tracks - but i want to finish the demo, as i left it. i mean, i left those channels open with intent. let's finish the demo before i do the final recording.
inri078 - this is the lost symphony. the other three symphonies for this project will have versions from 2003-2006 as lead-offs, remixes and alt-takes included and then final versions as hidden tracks (which will be album versions). this one cannot do that, but needs to be comprehensive in terms of collecting demo versions and outtakes. may include new remixes. in short, i'm recording this more or less from scratch, so it should get a full treatment like the jjjjjjjjjjjjj material.
inri079 - this is the art show demo, released as is.
inri080 - this is the ftaa disc.
and, i need to file a little bit more before i can carry forward - but intend to do that by the end of the night.
these numbers are now final.
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
tentative track list:
- me, myself...
- 9:46
- gravity's rainbow
- hyperbola
- kelowna <--------
- preludio
- little suite
- psi
- stress
- trepanation nation
- you know, they really should've killed aristotle, instead <--------
- punk django dance thing <-----------------------------
- lost symphony <-----------------
i think these are all accurate, at least. some of it will upload easily, some of it....i'm going to need to see if i can extract guitars, or otherwise convert electric recordings to an acoustic sound.
inri075 cover art
so, this is how i'm doing this...
i keep it on my wall, because who wouldn't?
this is a sketch of me performing on the big steps at the ubc, done in june of 2003 by an anonymous sketch artist (presumably a student) that snuck up behind me and handed it to me:
i would have been performing a mix of older songs and newer ones and i'm pretty sure i know what most of them are; in fact, i had a sort of a setlist that i would normally go over that was roughly an hour or so. i don't remember exactly what it was, but i can fudge it enough to make it worthwhile.
so, that's going to be my bc release - a compilation of acoustic pieces, as i recall them.
and, that's my inri075, that's settled. just let me put it together.
so, how am i going to do this?
i've done this once before, but i'm going to copy all of the files i have from cds and dvds to disc and at least file that. it'll help me better understand what i've got in front of me...
life was weird when i got back from bc. it was mid summer, sarah and i were pissed off at each other, and i wanted to go back to school for the first time in my life, but didn't really want to either. and, then i ended up homeless because my stepmother was a retard, and where else was i going to go? and, how does one make time for art between math degrees, homelessness and a hopeless relationship brought on by financial necessity? it's really kind of insane that i actually managed to get a substantive amount of writing done.
but, it's less that i have completed projects and more that i have segments of time spent in a handful of different places, and sort of lost ideas that need to be built one way or another. so, let's understand the segments of time first, and determine whether each one is worth it's own release or whether it should all be put off until the end.
1) there was the time from may, 2003 to aug, 2003 spent travelling and coming back. some material was written over this period on the acoustic guitar i brought with me, some of it reworked and some of it forgotten. should that be released as a single or should i wait? how much can i date to that trip with any certainty? jazz punk stuff, even?
2) i have a two track single dated to aug 31, 2003 of material recorded in that swank basement before i got kicked out. the first track got dropped entirely, whereas the second became the start of the interplanetary isomorphism. should that be released here or should it wait?
3) i remember going on osap for the first time that year in an emergency bid to try to get some cash. so, that would have been really early in the semester. i didn't think the situation would last the whole semester, but it did - and then some. so, i would have been at sarah's in like september or maybe early october. there were the four-track tapes recorded in sarah's apartment that fall, which i appear to have two tracks for. one ended up on ftaa and the other is a demo fro the lost symphony. should that be released as an ep, or should i wait?
4) i have some tracks dated to the end of the year that would have been recorded in my mother's apartment, which is where i ended up for a few months. i have already decided to release a demo dated to the first weeks of 2004.
5) there's some further tracks recorded in my mother's apartment over the spring. i don't expect to release anything specifically around that.
6) sarah and i ended up in a separate apartment together in the summer, and i did a systematic review at the time, so there's mixed cds and rereleases dated to the early summer. i built the ftaa at this point. i then more or less completed the interplanetary isomorphism over the summer, and there will definitely be an ep for that. the cycles per second was started here, and there will be an ep for that, at least. xenophanes is started but not completed here.
8) i moved out in i believe february because i couldn't handle the situation and ended up in an apartment on prince of wales. i completed xenophanes in this apartment, and there will need to be an ep for that. there are some further demos created here, as well, that i will need to finish and release.
9) i then finally ended up back in a different basement, as my parents had at this point moved several times (again) that was essentially a storage room, and i had to leave almost everything in the closet. there were some compositional type pieces done here.
that is where i close period 3, which is a difficult phase in my life.
so, it seems like the ambiguity is about the early stuff.
let's start with idea number one, to close the gap - how many demos can i isolate that i think were written on the road in the summer of 2003? i wanted something from that period, so let's see what i can pull out.
first, i need to copy everything to the drive, and then i can organize it and pull out what's there.
to be clear - i've got the live drive! with the panel in the 98 machine.
i want to get another panel for the audigy in time, but i probably won't actually use it for anything until i get one, anyways. so, there's no real point in leaving it in there, with all the potentially annoying drivers running.
the 98 machine only has the soundblaster running, so it can take over that machine, if it wants.
ok.
so, what i wanted to do was organize everything perfectly and completely (i've never been diagnosed with ocd, really) before i got back to recording, so everything was perfectly functioning and i could just quickly get through everything. yes, it would require some time invested upfront, but it would be with the payoff of efficiency as i went.
as the machine has some kind of unknown problem, that's not actually feasible. instead, i should do a quick and rough organization upfront and file things as i go - which means i can be back to work within a day or two, but will need to stop frequently to reorganize, until i'm done.
i have to adjust. so be it.
so, i'm going to take the audigy back out (soundblaster installs are just loaded with bloated drivers, and it's a perfectly plausible cause), disconnect the front panel (i'm not using it) and even unplug the blu-ray burner (which was added years after i constructed it) to start.
i'm also going to hold up on the deletion script, for the reason that the machine is no longer on the internet so i don't have to worry about locking it down as hard as i did. the machine will still run faster with as much of windows taken out as is possible, but i'm going to slow down and take things out one piece at a time.
and, i'm just going to get right to it, so i'm back in order for the weekend, which is the schedule i want to click in to.
i have every reason to think i'll be able to get back to normal rebuilding on monday, and to the alter-reality not this friday but next friday. and, if i'm productive, i can hopefully get tons of stuff done by labour day.
return to three room basement suite (2002-2003)
after selling the house with the concrete jail basement for a profit, and renting the split-level townhouse for a few months, my dad found himself employed again and they were able to move into this four bedroom mansion about a block from where i went to high school. the room i ended up in was designed pretty much perfectly for me, as it had a door leading to a room with another room off to the side, which i was able to split into a bedroom and a studio. my sister got her grand piano back, which meant i got to make use of her digital piano (heard on reflections and flying). but, not a lot of new gear entered this space, either - i just got to make the most of what was there.
tracks recorded in this basement:
- trepanation nation was finished
- penny shoeman & jumped up and down were demoed
- untitled was started
- atom's & taught to twist the affected were done
- reflections symphony
- and the start of interplanetary isomorphism, along with some outtakes associated with it
- in an attempt to move to multitrack digital recording, i bought a copy of cakewalk but i couldn't get it to run on the pc i had and had to abandon it. it disappeared some time after 2003.
- the introduction to untitled was created using orion
- the drums for untitled were created from a variety of sources, including noteworthy composer, leaf drums, sounder, hammerhead and some new programs - fruity loops and an emulator of novation's drumstation.
- reflections uses claps, pens on tables and spoons on bowls for percussion.
near the end, i was trying to get sarah to move her drum kit in, but it never happened - rather, she moved in, herself.
and, this is where i've left off.
so, if i was hoping to get a list of lost gear to emulate, that didn't happen, did it?
downstairs studio in split-level townhouse (a few months in 2002)
apparently concerned that i was spending too much time alone in basement dungeons, my parents made the conscious decision to move to a house without a basement. well, it was like a split level kind of thing. there were two upper floors and a lower area with a fireplace and an entrance to a backyard with a manmade lake (which was gross, and nobody went anywhere near, not even the two retrievers living there), but no actual basement. i had to sleep upstairs. foiled, right?
well, i talked my way into being allowed to use the storage space off to the side of the downstairs as a studio. so, there was a bed upstairs, but i didn't sleep in it very often...i more often slept on the studio floor....
i think they were renting this place, actually, because they wanted to sell the last one to some developer, who tore it down and built a mansion on top of it. so, i was really only there for a few months, and i only really remember working on what would become trepanation nation.
- still hoping to get that demented foot pedal guitar sound, i swapped the morley for a digitech xp100 and still didn't really get what i wanted. the harmonizers are exceedingly synthetic sounding, probably because they're ultimately doubling the sound from a sampler, which is kind of lame. it was used in the next two basements, but was sold in 2003. the pod actually does what this did a lot better than it does.
i can't think of anything else.
spacious concrete jail basement (2001-2002)
i was into the next basement by the end of 2001, and was only there a few months. this space was essentially a concrete jail, but it was at least fairly roomy. annoyances about moving aside, my parents were relatively smart about buying the place for peanuts, then selling it for a nice profit, which let them move into a nicer place down the street.
i remember working on the following in this basement:
- #9
- the wave
- 9:46..
- time
- trepanation nation (start)
i do not think any new gear was purchased by me or given to me when in this basement.
soiled rug on a concrete floor basement (2000-2001)
i didn't know it at the time, but my parents actually didn't have nearly as much money as they liked to pretend they did, they just borrowed absurd amounts, and were able to convince people to let them borrow it as long as they had two incomes. but, the company my dad worked for relocated around the year 2000, which sent him back to school over 2001-2002. they had to downsize, which meant i had to relocate from this posh three room suite into an unfinished basement, with cracks in the floor and a house fly infestation, to boot.
they still had leverage in their mortgage, though, and they managed to buy some property in a good area for cheap and then sell it off to somebody that wanted to rebuild, which let them move back up the ladder within a few years and eventually into a mansion that they couldn't afford. i don't know why this was so important to them, but it's not uncommon amongst people born in the late 50s, this "generation jones" mentality, where it's absolutely imperative to seem like you have money, even if you're driven hopelessly into debt in order to do it.
so, everything disappeared in the course of about a week - the drum kit was sold, the piano was sold and the house was sold along with it. i kept the things that were mine, which was a large percentage of the items that had built up, but i ended up in a 10x10 room, and fighting off the flies. this kind of dramatic shift in perceived wealth is something i'd already been through a few times (i grew up with my mom, who lived in a rent-subsidized townhouse) and would go through a few more; it's kind of indicative of reality, for me. i could very well go through it a few more times, too...
so, there's no new fancy gear in the next few basements, just a lot of use out of what i actually had.
- the one new piece of gear that shows up in this basement is a dx100, which my dad found for dollars at a garage sale. near the end of my stay in the last basement, i took the jx-8p apart to fix a stuck key, and i couldn't get it put back together again. listen - i didn't break it, it was already broken. but, i needed a controller for it, now, and the dx100 was ideal. i also used the dx100 itself in a lot of the rabit is wolf material, most of which was started in this basement.
- i sold my main classical guitar in 2003. a second mini classical guitar appears in this basement, which was purchased at a garage sale. i still have this one, and it's frankly better suited for my freakishly small hands.
- an old 12-string acoustic guitar made by a budget guitar company from japan was found underneath the stairs, apparently left by the previous owners, which i then inherited. my sister appears to have stolen this from me when i left it in storage at my parents' house in 2011, probably because she incorrectly deduced it was worth money due to it's age, and she probably sold it for peanuts. in fact, it had a vicious warp in the neck. it's very sad to see what drives people in this world. it's heard in the end of clarity and in strung out.
- there was another no-name guitar found for nothing at around this time that i kept for alternate tunings and shows up on a few tracks. it was also very old, but essentially worth nothing. it also disappeared in 2011.
- i don't remember where the harmonica came from, but it first appears in clarity.
- i think the altec mic first appears here, as well.
- my dad kept buying and selling basses, because he never played them, but pretended he did. so, when he had money, a new bass appeared, and i could play it; when he didn't have money, he'd sell the bass almost immediately. i got fed up and bought a red washburn bass that i hung on to until i left in 2003.
pieces recorded in this basement were:
- little suite
- preludio
- strung out
- give 'em hell, harry
- stress
- me, myself...
- time
- clarity
...but i spent most of the time writing into noteworthy composer, including:
- stuck..
- time machine
- symphony of psilocybin induced madness
- intersection of two identical particles
- existence
it was late 2001 or early 2002 when i ended up in the next basement.
(this post was started on the evening of may 27th and worked on over may 28th, then abandoned on the morning of may 29th as i focused on a number of more personal concerns. i am resuming it and finishing it on june 7th 8th.)
my parents moved a lot, and i tended to end up with some kind of space in the basement - be it a finished bedroom, an enclave near the laundry or, in this case, access to two adjacent bedrooms, along with a large open area full of gear.
as before, my dad had a desire to have an open jam space, but nobody ever showed up. this was his last attempt at this, but the initial set-up was absolutely amazing - he put a new maple drum kit in beside a giant grand piano, and a huge fender bass amp (which i still have). i was supposed to get one room and my sister was supposed to get the other, but the sister didn't want to live there (?) so i ended up with both rooms, instead.....at least to start. slowly, my stepmother reclaimed one of the bedrooms as an "exercise room" and the various instruments started getting moved out of the recording area (some into my now cramped bedroom), which was reclaimed as a "family room". this was on some level a tragedy, but the fact of the matter is that nobody was using any of this stuff, except me. but, i sure used it...
so, what have i got to look at here?
- the one extra piece of gear on liquify was a dan electro dd-1 fab tone that was temporarily left in the space by my friend greg. out of all those dorks i knew at the time, greg was the one that actually had some raw musical talent (as a guitarist, a drummer and a singer), but he went through this yoga rebirth anti-pot phase in his early 20s that set him down an extremely different path as a human being, one that we weren't really going to base much commonality around. i fucking hate yoga - it just destroys people, as individuals. i've been through this with too many people. it's a fucking awful cult. he was a legit good guy, though. no, really, he was. but, there was a new greg and an old greg, and i found myself voting for the old greg, the one with silly, flappy hair that did too many mushrooms and played guitar like a jimmy page wannabe, not the one on some bullshit "spiritual journey" to buff up and get laid. we just kind of drifted apart...but i wish there was an explicit greg + j recording, and there isn't. he actually left it in the basement by accident sort of thing, and i mostly used it to create a feedback loop in the bridge as i found it wasn't hot enough to get the tone i wanted (it would have sounded better with a boost in front of it, which i didn't have) and i also realized very quickly that it was ridiculously noisy, and consequently difficult to record in such a way as to allow it to be driven later (amplifying it in cool edit just blew up into noise, and you put a gate on that and ruin it). the distortion on the track was actually mostly created manually in cool edit, over top of a very low send. and then i pasted it back on, after. so, it ends up sounding doubled because it is. i mean, you can tell that that isn't my normal guitar distortion by comparing to the other guitar parts, and the dan electro is in fact the reason why (even if i had to find a way to predrive it, as mentioned). so, it's integrated into a few of the guitars and a component on some of the drums, but i was actually trying to use it as a send on a track when i fed it back accidentally, and that's what really ended up sticking. so, if somebody can find a vst of this, i'll archive it, but i wasn't particularly enamoured with it (good guy greg loved it, though - and it worked well with his good guy riffs).
these things have somewhat of a following, but they're just, like, utter noisy cheese, imo:
...although, as mentioned, i wonder what kind of screech you could get out of it if you put something like an electro harmonix linear power booster in front of it....
if i saw one for less than $20, i'd probably snag it.
- it seems like the first use of the new soundblaster is in the track "tribute", which features me feeding my guitar through the environmental audio processor - and it's easy to see how warped it sounds, almost immediately. it's like instant frippertronics. i was lucky enough to get a new pc as a combo birthday/christmas present, which had the soundblaster live in it. as posted previously, here's a vst emulator of this that i hope works well:
- it was around this time that i started using a leslie rotating speaker emulator fairly frequently. like, on almost every song. it's very heavily utilized on 'stress'. i still install this.
- i started using a filter by prosoniq called "north pole" as well that can, for example, by heard on the breakdown in book it. i still install this.
- the "pi" filter was also used quite a lot for guitar effects in this period. i still use this.
- there was a hyperprism plugin pack that i used extensively from about 1999-2004. this company no longer exists and the files don't appear to be available anywhere online. i do still install these, though.
- i started using a program called "sounder" that lets you generate midi sequences using an interface similar to the video game "pong". you tell the computer which notes to play, so you reduce the randomness to note length and dynamics, while picking the key it's working in - making it sound more like a jazz musicians than a computer. it was the kind of generative app i felt was actually useful, to the point that i was frequently jamming with it. i could never get this to work on xp, not even in a virtual machine, but i intend to reinstall it to the 98 system - in fact, it's one of the reasons i'm doing it. this program formed the basis of the track "entropy", and is used in a number of other places.
- there is some tactical use of an old version of acid at this point to mess with some horn and string samples, but i've always found the interface sort of stifling. yes, i said that. in fact, you'll notice that - i don't make music that is loop based like that (sometimes, the differences are subtle, but everything is live, and it's very consciously so). that said, i more seriously toyed with the idea of using it to build a string library, but even the new computer had problems with using it in any meaningful way due to the program's extremely heavy use of ram. acid is not currently in the list of programs i'm installing on this machine. acid is no longer owned by sony, apparently. you can hear this in "entropy", as well, but you'd never guess it was acid. in the end, i just preferred to write midi scores than try to use samples.
- i picked up a morley pro series wah around this time for pretty cheap but i found the effect to be a little more subtle than what i wanted. i mean, i was hardly interested in doing 80s hair metal whammy dives, but, after playing with direct x filters in cool edit, i wanted a much more dynamic instrument that i could warp like a dj or sound engineer warps filters with their hands, but in real-time with my feet, and found this was really designed to be the opposite of that. there was no doubt a mental disconnect between the world this was made for (southern rock guitarists) and the kind of sounds i was imagining (warped sound effects from contemporary experimental techno, like download). i mean, i knew better, but i guess i didn't. that said, i made some sufficiently demented use of it in the climax to "entropy", as well as in the intro solo to "ignorance is bliss" before i swapped it for a digitech xp-100 a few basements later. the pod has a couple of wah sounds in it; it wouldn't make sense to try to model this in a daw, unless you have the right kind of controller. so, you need hardware here, one way or another.
- audiomulch makes it's first appearance here - try the "v2" sounds in gravity's rainbow, or the jungle drum sequences in the "curious george suite" or the weird sequence at the end of the curious george suite. i still install this, although i don't think i used it over my last recording binge phase (i would expect to use it for cycles/second, along potentially with max, reason and a few other overwhelmingly nerdy things. that's a research project of it's own when i get there.)
- i use a bass sequencer program called "rubber duck" by d-lusion (that is based on a tb-303) on a few tracks for the deny everything period (you can hear it squelching in acidosis, and gravity's rainbow):
- the drum sequencing for "curious george" was done using leaf drums, and took in a number of odd sources, such as a donald duck sample. i also used rubber duck as a source for some of the samples. there was also a "leaf effects".
- the secret effect on the guitar tone in curious george is the "megatrancer" direct x plugin, which i can't find anywhere online or in any of my files just right now.
- i made some use of a generative sound program pushed by brian eno called "koan sound" that has since been purchased by wotja and that i should look further into:
- hammerhead, coagula, granulab and sound raider were used extensively during this period. some of the synths on ignorance is bliss used coagula to generate samples that were then pitched using a soundfont program that came with the soundblaster (vienna?) and performed on the jx-8p.
- there was a program used to generate "ukelele permutations" which was some kind of guitar chord teach-to-play software, but i've forgotten the name of. it might have come with the soundblaster, but i don't remember.
- there is some use of the synthesizer in the soundblaster, as well, just as a midi bank. specifically, the "orchestra hit" is used in ignorance is bliss (and then warped mercilessly in cool edit)
- i also picked up a creamy dreamer, which is a modded russian muff intended to sound like the tone that corgan used in siamese dream. i still have this, and in fact still use it. regarding emulations, there are attempts to pin this sound both in the pod and in guitar rig and i'll leave it at that. i have a regular muff as well, and we'll talk about that a few basements up.
- around this time of his life, my dad tended to disappear on sunday mornings for a few hours. in later years, it was obvious that he was trying to avoid going to church, and he even used routine breakfast with myself as a way out of it (after i had moved out). but, in these years, it's a little less clear what he was really up to. however, he'd often come back with things he'd purchased at garage sales - which ranged from speaker parts to beatles lps to obscure, out-of-print prog cds and whatever else he could get his hands on. it was a hobby, no doubt. and, from time to time, he'd come back with some old guitar effects that cost him a buck or two each, which included the following:
- mxr m-168 stereo flanger, early 80s. i still have this, but it is finnicky and often doesn't work. i think it's a power issue. this is kind of a basic flanger; universal audio emulates the rack version, if you insist on it.
- mxr distortion II, late 70s (the big one, with the plug, in the gold box). i still have this, and it's noisy, but it works - i'm no fan of hair metal, which is what it's associated with, but it gives a good noise rock tone if floored appropriately, as well and is used on numerous recordings from 2000-2002, although i never left it in my normal signal due to the noise. these units are very expensive ($600?), and i don't want to sell mine, but i can't imagine why - they don't sound particularly good. i'd rather use a boss sd-1 for that kind of light overdrive sound as it's a bit tighter. the mxr+ is widely emulated, but the mxr II is kind of obscure. like i say - i'd suggest using an sd-1 for normal use, anyways. but, i like having it around as an oddball secret weapon if i want a particularly noisy, live sound (most of the amped guitars in little suite were done with this, as one example).
- mxr m-102 dyna comp (this was broken on arrival and appears to have disappeared. i think he gave it to his friend larry, actually. so, maybe larry got something in return for his broken phaser, after all.)
- ibanez ge-601 (this was broken on arrival and never fixed. i still have it, though.)
- i picked up a mooger fooger mf-102 ring modulator that spring, hoping to drive it with the morley and get that dramatic foot driven techno-oscillation filter, but it didn't actually work; it just didn't convert to an expression like i hoped. i never got another expression for it. guitarists kind of have their hands busy, so this became an expensive trick item. that said, it is used extensively as a bass (acidosis) and vocal (trepanation nation) processor over the next few years, before i cashed it in as having done it's purpose. it's also become very expensive ($600?), but isn't any more useful than a freeware vst plugin - it's expensive because it says "moog" on it, and likely of little actual functional value to you, unless you're doing very modular synth work. just about any old ring modulator with a carrier signal should be just as good.
i wish i could find a demo with the expression pedal plugged in like i wanted to set up, but what this demo does is really demonstrate how kind of useless the thing really is:
during this period, the eventual set up was:
mxr flanger---->moogerfooger mf-102---->zoom 1010 (for comp-->dist--->chorus/flg---->rev/delay)---->creamy dreamer---->boss oc-2---->mxr phase 90 ---->morley wah
...with the mxr distortion II set up off to the side.
you can hear at least parts of that chain on "entropy", on "ignorance is bliss", on "being a good little monkey" (which uses the ring mod) or on "acidosis", as well as on some tracks recorded in the next basement - like little suite.
and, there's really nothing in there worth looking for a specific emulator for, that i can't get in the pod, or in guitar rig.
- up until this point, my guitar training was in blues and rock music, and i felt i needed something a little deeper, so i started taking classical guitar lessons. i just wanted to get a basic footing before i ran with it on my own. so, there was a classical guitar in the house now, too, which is heard on "acidosis" primarily, until it picks up a little in the next basement. i took about a year's worth of lessons before i stopped. i still had the ibanez, the epiphone sg and the obese strat at my disposal, along with an electric-acoustic.
- a found an electric mandolin at this point at a garage sale that eventually developed some electrical problems and had to be disposed of. it's heard on "acidosis" and "strung out" amongst other things.
- another item i picked up at a garage sale in this period was a bontempi electric air reed organ. this was a noisy, half broken piece of gear that i had to use digital noise reduction to remove the motor from, when recording. it's heard in a number of tracks from 2000-2003 (acidosis, 9:46..., little suite), before my stepmother discarded it under the claim that it was "garbage". sadly. i can get an organ sound from any vst synth, and then mess with it further from there, but nothing quite sounds like this old thing that probably end up in the landfill.
this is similar:
- an ebow was purchased while living in this basement, as well, which i still have. it's heard on "acidosis" amongst other things.
- as mentioned, there was a drum kit in my bedroom at this point (heard on the curious george suite, a commercial break, gravity's rainbow), along with a grand piano a few feet outside of my door (heard on acidosis) and a large fender bass amp (used to record most of the guitars, which i still have).
- there was a peavey bass/keyboard amp (gone) and a cheri guitar amp (still have)
- the wood flute is used in "acidosis" and "book it!"
- the jx-8p is the main synth, still. the ry30 is used sporadically, because the memory was full and i didn't know how to back it up.
- there was a bass, but i don't remember much about it.
- the equalizer i had been hauling around for a few years went belly up around this time, and you can hear me taking advantage of it near the end of "acidosis".
alright. so, i don't really want to troubleshoot this machine, but i unfortunately have to as it keeps freezing, and i'm not convinced it's hardware. i simply don't know what the problem is.
there were some periodic freezing issues back in 2015 that i thought was ram, but i'm no longer convinced is. there were also base issues with chipset drivers when i first bought the machine, years ago.
what i'm going to do is reinstall the machine in the most minimal way possible - just the programs integrated on the disc + the drivers for the most minimal hardware configuration possible. and, then i'll bring things in further as i need them, rather than all at once and carefully observe what happens.
i suspect i may need to reprogram the board again like i did in 2014. why do i have to keep reprogramming the board, pigs?
the reality is that there's a lot of software on here that i barely use and that the next phase is not going to be heavy on things like vst synths so much as it's going to be about guitars, actual hardware (like drum heads) and abstract sound design. so, i shouldn't get caught up in getting all of these virtual vstis to work, because i'm probably not going to use them much anyways.
and, once i'm convinced that i've found the problem, i can rerun the script again.
Monday, June 7, 2021
i'm trying to remember if i had this problem before and i don't remember.
however, i vaguely recall figuring this out a while back. i backed up my appdata directory so i copied it back over and the load process was instantly different.
i don't need every single plugin to load every time i launch, what i need is to figure out if i've got a ram issue or not, and there's no easy way to do that....
the immediate concern is just making sure that the plugins i recently downloaded actually launch. so let's hope i can get through that without it freezing further, then try to bring some more ram back in.
so, i launched cubase to check to see if the eax plugin was loading, and it froze with the third stick in.
i took it out, and it booted.
here's what i don't know right now - is the stick bad, is the board funny or is cubase having difficulty with this hybrid ram channel thing? what i mean is this - if i have two sticks in, it loads them together and if i have four sticks in it loads them in parallel. but, when i put three sticks in, it does this weird in between thing.
i have to experiment with it, but i want to make sure everything is loading first.
in the end, if i decide that one of the sticks is bad, i might have to choose between 2 and 4 gb if i want the machine to run. but, i should be able to get 2x1 gb of ram relatively cheaply nowadays, right?
Friday, June 4, 2021
Thursday, June 3, 2021
let me put this all in one place in case there are questions about it, and i'm going to do it running backwards from the order of last modification.
when was the last time i altered these releases?
early 2018:
inri068 & inri069: constructed over late 2017 and early 2018 from tracks finished over 2014-2015 and written over 1996-2003.
late 2017:
inri026, inri031, inri034: remixed from orphaned demos from 1999
inri030, inri038: constructed from mixes done over 2015/2016.
inri042: constructed from 2017 mixes of 1999/2000 material
inri043, inri044, inri047, inri050: rebuilt from midi over 2014 by adding extra recorded parts, final mixes added over late 2017.
inri048: recorded more or less from scratch over late 2014. extra mixes from 2014 source added over late 2017.
inri055, inri056, inri058, inri061: demos from 2001/2002 were completed over late 2014 by adding extra recorded parts. extra mixes added in late 2017.
inri065: midi file completed in may, 2015 by transcribing demos from early 2003, which was then used to build multiple extra remixes. last mixes complete in late 2017.
inri071, inri072, inri073: compilation from 2015 of tracks completed by that date, but updated in late 2017 with more appropriate alternate mixes
inri074: initial version from 2003 was stripped of samples in late 2017 and added as a hidden track. will also appear that way on trivial group 2xlp.
over 2016:
inri004-inri015 & inri017-inri022 & inri024-inri025: this is the proper inri/inriched release cycle. remastered, with much difficulty due to interference from some unclear source, over the summer and fall of 2015, and finally remastered and rebuilt with many stops and starts over the course of 2016. the first singles were finalized in january, 2016 and the last comp was finalized in december, 2016. minimal midi parts and one new vocal part were added in this time frame, as well.
late 2015:
inri066: all ry30, soundblaster sequences and jx8p tracks from the late 90s or early 00s. some added sequencing and production work from late 2015.
early 2015:
inri035: mix tape constructed from material recorded 1996-1999.
inri046: lead mix finished in 2006 from files written in 2001. extra mixes added in 2015.
inri049: a new ambient mix was created in may, 2015. all other files are unaltered from late 2002.
inri062: new recorded vocal mix added to demo from 2002 in may, 2015. all other mixes from 2002/2003.
inri063: 6th lp. final version compiled from material remastered and finished over 2014/2015.
inri070: soundblaster & vst renders of material written before 2003, as output between 2014-2015.
late 2014:
inri052: 5th lp. final version compiled from material remastered and finished over 2014.
inri054: remixed, remastered and completed over late 2014. demos from 2001/2002.
inri059: constructed in late 2014 from disconnect parts recorded in mid 2002
inri060: remixed from existing tracks from 2002
inri079: imminent release, hopefully in 2021. but, all tracks for this release were done by late 2014.
early 2014:
inri041: 4th lp. final sample-less version remixed and compiled from existing source material from 1999/2000
late 2013:
inri000-inri001: remastered late 2013. otherwise unaltered from 1996/1997.
inri002: mix tape compiled in 2013, from source material from inri000-inri001.
2003-2013: black hole to be filled in.
2004
inri078 - demo tape from 2004, released as is in 2019
2003
inri075, inri076, inri077: unfinished demos from 2003 as of now.
2002:
inri053: released in 2014 and again in 2017 from unaltered 2002 files.
inri057: released in 2014 from unaltered demos from 2002.
inri064: released in 2015 from unaltered demos from 2002.
inri067: releases in 2017 from unaltered demos done from 1999-2002.
2001:
inri045: files from 2001 were released unaltered in early 2014, and project was closed down due to mysterious disappearance of sheet music attached to it
inri051: released, unaltered, in late 2014
2000:
inri036, inri037, inri039, inri040: compiled and released from existing recordings in early 2013
1999
inri027-inri028: released as is in late 2013
inri029: released as is in late 2013 and expanded with alternate version from same time period in late 2017
inri032: appended to in early 2014 with existing mixes from the time period, but not otherwise altered since.
inri033: 3rd lp. last trick split off in early 2014, otherwise unmodified
1998
inri016: released as is in late 2013
inri023: compiled from remixes created over 1998 in 2013 and expanded in late 2016
1997
inri003: compiled in 2013, but files unaltered from 1997.
this machine should be installed by the end of the night...
what i was doing yesterday was trying to finish a rough install of the recording pc, before i finished up a number of notes regarding the gear i used in the various places i've lived, with the intent to build emulators out of all of it. i've currently got 3 sticks in the machine and it unfortunately did something when i turned my back that i didn't catch.
so, we're starting the install from scratch, and we're iffy on that third stick...
i was going to do some running around today, but i clearly got distracted. i'm going to make some eggs and get ready for a big day tomorrow, instead.
it'll be nice and warm, at least - nice, hot weekend coming up.
Thursday, May 27, 2021
in fact, that strat is so heavy that it weighs more than my sg:
like, a lot more.
go back to the previous video, though, and check out gorgeous maple neck. like i say: nobody can figure out where the body came from, although it has a typewritten number on the inside of it, suggesting it's fairly old. like, just the font suggests 60s or 70s. but, it seems like somebody put the coronet neck on it.
one hypothesis is that somebody smashed it and put the coronet neck on to replace it, but that doesn't help us understand where this heavy hh strat came from to begin with.
open concept basement bedroom, 1997-1999
- my parents moved across the city in mid-1997, and i lost the soundproof room in the process :(. i lost the drum kit & the tascam in the process, as well. however, i gained a computer with internet access and windows 95 (my previous computer had no internet access, and had windows 3.1. in fact, my first bedroom pc was shipped with ms dos 6.2 and wordperfect, the latter of which was actually reasonable, given that i grew up in ottawa (corel disappeared, but the big adobe building remained a presence in downtown ottawa for years.). i've actually kept up on the old software reasonably well, mostly because i never stopped using most of it: cool edit 96 (https://www.audacityteam.org/), noteworthy composer (https://noteworthycomposer.com/), the windows 95 sound editor, a hacked version of logic that never ran smoothly and a guitar tablature to midi program called "bucket of tab" (https://antisleep.com/bucket) were where i got started on this. but, this pc did not have the resources for even the most basic sound recording.
- i got an ry30 mid summer, to replace the drum kit. my dad was sad; my stepmother wasn't. that ry30 stuck with me until 2003, when i sold it to go to bc. of all the gear that got sold, that's the piece i think i most miss, and i'd love to see a serious attempt to emulate it. i can load samples into battery, but it's missing the point - this was a powerful little drum synth, and i made massive use of it for years, all the way to the end of the rabit is wolf period. that said, the reason i sold it is that i felt i grew out of it, and there kind of wasn't a lot left to do with it. i couldn't justify spending $400 on it given that i can do everything with free plugins nowadays, but i will eventually replace this thing...
if you know where to get an actual vst emulation of the ry30 - not samples of it, but a vsti of the actual machine - let me know.
- a bass reappeared. i don't remember the model. it was green, and played very smoothly, which was necessary because i have freakishly small hands (to this day, i play a mini ibanez bass).
- i actually synced the noteworthy composer sequences with the ry30 parts manually because nobody told me i could sync them automatically. so, it's all very meticulous, but using very simple hardware. i would have had a basic consumer grade soundblaster in this thing, and the initial sequencing is all using general midi. it's for that reason that i went looking for general midi a few years ago and came away with bandstand, by native instruments (a very big company in music creation circles):
bandstand was central to the recordings i did over 2014-2016, because i needed a way to emulate general midi using updated sound fonts. this has been discontinued, and i think it's the last attempt by the industry to save general midi for recording, as it seems that the standard nowadays is to use specific sample libraries rather than a general sound font library (and native instruments suggest the use of kontakt, instead). i think this is unfortunate, myself, as i liked the standardization of being able to take a midi score and plug it into a daw, but the industry doesn't seem to be interested in scored music in much of any abstraction at all anymore and rather more interested in just creating textures out of existing sound. so, the standard nowadays is to sell you this pile of violin scratches, rather than a collection of violins to sequence - and tell you to hire a violinist instead i suppose. but, of course, i still have soundblasters i can track if i need to. i will eventually install kontakt on the 64 bit machine, as the experiments i had with the 32-bit machine were just simply that i needed more ram. but, i actually found that kontakt was unnecessarily inefficient (it loads everything on start-up, even if you're only using a fraction of it) and that the freeware sound libraries actually even sounded better....
i would like to find an update for bandstand, but nobody seems to really want there to be one. this seems to be something people have moved past, and something you're going to need to curate old software for if you want to hang on to.
- the jx-8p & tascam 4-track both show up about this time, with the jx being my only and primary keyboard for years after. this is of course the last version of the roland juno series, and combines analog style juno sounds with more modern digital sounds. the jx has been keyless for years and driven by a dx100, and i've had a midi frontend installed on it for years and never used it, but this is a vsti of it in case i want to sequence it (i could of course sequence it manually, too):
i should also look into something called "zenology" when i get my windows 7 machine back up and can start looking for evaluation copies.
but, i suspect i'll keep programming it with the little window, as that's what i'm used to doing.
- later programs included hammerhead (a 909 emulator) (http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/introduction.shtml), sound raider (a noise generator) (https://web.archive.org/web/20060721182502/http://www.andyw.com/zip/raider.zip), goldwave (for extra effects processing) (http://www.goldwave.ca/), granulab (https://www.abc.se/~re/GranuLab/Granny.html), coagula (light-sound synthesis) (https://www.abc.se/~re/Coagula/Coagula.html).
- my aunt sent me back a flute from a trip she took to india that shows up on several tracks
- somewhere along the way, the cassette deck stops working properly, and a song is constructed out of it.
- it was some time in late 1998 that my dad asked me to go to songbird with him to help him pick out a guitar for my sister, who was going through a difficult phase. as mentioned, she had been doing a lot of piano playing since she was very little, and now wanted to play guitar and was threatening to run away from home if she wasn't gifted with an expensive brand name guitar (in fact, i think she was trying to get my dad to buy her boyfriend a guitar, and i don't think that ever clicked). so, my dad got baited into buying her a guitar.....which she didn't accept, because it didn't have a brand name on it. and, it definitely pissed him off, yeah. meanwhile, i continued to play my entry level ibanez, right? it's worth pointing out that my sister was a delusional, spoiled brat at this point, but i really never said anything about it. the guitar i picked out has yet to be properly understood by anybody i've presented it to; it seems to have a coronet "batwing" neck, the dual humbucking pickups seem to have been installed manually and the body, while shaped like a strat and built like a paul, is of unclear origin. so, this is a guitar that somebody seems to have built from parts. the reality is that i picked the guitar out from the store because it played better than any other in the store due to the beautiful neck on it; after my sister rejected it as not sufficient because of the lack of brand name on the headstock, i ran it off to my friend greg's before it could get sent back, where i let it sit until everybody forgot about it. it eventually found it's way back to my studio, and has been my main guitar ever since.
- while i never said anything about it, i get the impression that my dad eventually felt a little bit stupid about asking me to pick out an expensive guitar for my sister (who did not play guitar), while i continued to play a starter ibanez roughly ten years on. i didn't care about the brand name, but that frankenguitar i snagged from songbird had a beautiful neck on it, and i sure appreciated it. nonetheless, he seemed to realize, in hindsight, that it was kind of a shitty deal for me, and went and bought me a red sg, along with an electro-acoustic. the black guitar itself is somewhere in the sg/guild range in terms of weight, in the sense that it's lighter than a paul and heavier than a strat, but i've always treated it like a sort of a fat strat due it's shape and construction. so, in the end, i got three guitars out of my sister's hissy fit and she got zero. all three of the guitars start showing up in recordings over the end of 98 and start of 99.
let's go way back.
1996-1997 basement room
when i was a kid, my dad built a soundproof room in one of the basements of one of the houses he owned. i suppose he intended to use it himself, but he was a 40 year old man with a day job and it just didn't work out that way; i was a 15 year-old kid on summer holidays, so you couldn't pull me out of there. so, my earliest demos were recorded in this little insulated room i was lucky to have. what gear did i have that i could look for?
- i was using an ibanez guitar with a floating bridge. i actually don't regret selling this guitar, as i found the bridge to be annoying and i don't have the attachment to ibanez that a lot of metalheads might.
- i still have my ancient cheri amp
- i still have my zoom 1010 effects pedal, and wouldn't imagine anybody would want to model this. google suggests "no" on first pass. it was a beginner floor guitar effects pedal that...it didn't sound very good, or at least not as a guitar processor. i didn't know any better. it was useful as a noise generating device, even if it wasn't so useful as a guitar pedal. so, there's some great sounding distorted cymbals recorded through it. i would be interested in finding an emulator for the reason that it's so overwhelmingly noisy that it's almost useless in scenarios where it would be great if it wasn't. in later years, i've put the jx-8p through it and that's all i'd ever use it for nowadays. but, all my guitar parts used this thing, for years.
- my dad's friend larry left a broken mxr phase 90 (script logo.) down there that i still have. it still works, if you pay close attention to the pot on the inside, and i used it quite a bit. he just never retrieved it. hey larry, do you want your mxr back? he was a van halen fan; i was a corgan fan, and even at that age i understood the influence and the value of it. this is a classic pedal - it's both in the pod and in guitar rig - but i wonder if there's a standalone....
there's one attempt here:
...but nothing official, i don't think. if i was mxr, i would have this, for sure.
- there was a bass down there to start (i don't remember the model), and then there wasn't, so i bought a boss oc-2 to try to create bass parts out of my guitar, and it didn't work out that well. i ended up using it mostly for keyboard parts, but i sold it without getting too much out of it.
this is an emulation:
- my sister, who was a serious pianist at a young age, had an electric piano with some organ sounds and stuff. she was strangely propertarian about the item, and repeatedly refused to allow me to record in her space. so, i had to sneak into her room when she wasn't around. i eventually got the jx-8p...and she eventually got a grand piano parked in the living room, that was great to record on when nobody was home. i don't remember the model.
- her metronome is also heard a few times
- there was a peavey bass amp down there that i held on to for years and think my sister ended up with, in the end. i can get all manners of peavey emulation from the pod or from guitar rig, even if i actually prefer the sound of roland or vox amps.
- there was a drum kit down there; don't ask me about the details. again: i never saw him actually play it. in hindsight, maybe that was intentional.
- larry also left his tascam down there, and he did pick that up, along with an acoustic guitar that belonged to him.
- there was a graphic equalizer hooked up to a luxman receiver
- i never mic anything any more, but the mics i was using were dixon md-1178s, and i actually still have both of them. i have some mic emulation software, but this is something i pay very little attention to because i line almost everything in through the pod or the alesis (including the electronic drum kit), and almost all of my music is instrumental. i later picked up a very old altec 683 b, and it's the mic i use when i need one (and the mic sean used to record everything, as well).
- ....and my sennheiser 440-IIs, which i still have, were what i listened to everything through.
i think we'll be installing this, as well:
if that plugin works well in cubase, it could get a lot of use, especially on the lost symphony, as it would have been fundamental, if i had actually recorded it at the time.
if you're curious, this is how i tend to work - i go looking for what i need when it comes up, i don't tend to just download things and experiment with them when they're brand new.
but, i wonder if i should actually even go out and find all of the old gear that i've lost in plugin form. how possible is that? what is really missing, actually?
this soundcard is actually an older model than i thought it was.
it's at least designed for nt, so maybe the software might work, if i get the right peripheral for it.
but, it also has a firewire, so i wonder if i could drive it from the alesis....
right now, i just want to get drivers and script them.
the key shift in approach should be this:
it may be true that 24 bit is technically superior to 16 bit, but, in the end, it's, just, like, your opinion, as to which sounds better.
don't believe me? go ask that kid with a record player.
so, i want to mix towards an output, not just get superior quality for the fuck of it.
but, i need to understand what people are actually listening to, and the answer appears to be the following: spotify is currently upgrading from streaming lossy mp3 to cd-quality audio. and, youtube seems to be pushing downsampling. so, for right now, 16-bit seems like the way to go, still.
my previous build of the 32-bit xp machine had the soundblaster live drivers built into the os install. since putting the live back in the 98 machine (which i'm calling 16-bit but is actually also 32-bit) where it came from, i've put the audiigy that my sister's first husband gave me (he decided to be a douche bag mac user around '05ish, so he didn't want it) in the 32-bit machine to replace it. it also has what was the last line of m-audio delta series pci cards in it, which i got for very cheap at the end of it's lifecycle explicitly because it has an actual rca out on it, and the dac is dealt with right away kind of thing - it's about minimal amounts of conversion, although i later found out that the windows kmixer sort of ruins it and i have to connect via asio to make sense of that. and, i'm connecting an alesis 16-track mixer as a recording interface via firewire, as well as a pod xt via usb for direct guitar ins. old gear - like i said. and, none of this is going anywhere any time soon....
anyways, i didn't need to script up a driver install for the live because the drivers came with the os and the software didn't work on xp anyways, but i'm going to need to script something up for the audigy. i'm currently searching for an install cd, and will probably hold off on anything complicated until i can get one of those interfaces like i have in the other machine. the major reason i'm going to use this device is to make use of the dsp in it, which is intended for gaming and is consequently a little thicker than you'd get out of most normal audio-focused applications. a large percentage of the weird guitar and drum reverb i used from about 1999-2004 was actually using that eax as a pre-amp; i lost it when i upgraded to xp in 2004 and put it aside when i couldn't get it to work when i built the 32-bit machine in 2007.
wait. i'm recording at 16 bits? what? well...
see, this is my actual logic, here - the machine i did everything on until my system collapse was built to use 32-bit software, and almost all of the plugin software (like guitar rig) is written for 16-bit audio manipulation. so, what happens when you send 24 bit audio into software written for 16-bit audio? if it's well written software, it should actually stop you from actually doing it and tell you to downsample the audio or buy a new plugin. but, what most plugins are going to actually do is simply truncate the file and then spit it out with a bunch of zeros, meaning you end up downsampling your 24 bit recording to 16 bit by accident as you process it. and, you probably will not be able to tell the difference, as you're doing it.
on top of that, you downsample in the end anyways, right? see, that's the assumption. is it true? for now, let's assume it is. now, some people will tell you that you want the extra space for the calculations, if your software allows for it. ok. but, that's the rare scenario where you probably can tell the difference between 16 and 24 bit - when you've run the project through a thick reverb and filled all that space up with data. and, then what happens when you mix it down?
the answer is that you just delete it - and you've wasted your time getting something to sound great as a 24-bit sound file, only to have it sound entirely different as a 16-bit product. and, are you going to even notice, are you going to listen to a 16-bit file through your shmancy sound system? nooooo.
oops.
so, i developed a policy of sticking to recording to the output quality. that is, i decided that if people are going to listen to the end result on 16-bit playback devices (or, god forbid, fucking speakerphones) then i'm going to mix them at 16-bits. logical, right?
but, how true is that, still? i mean, nowadays nobody listens to anything on cds - what they actually do is stream it, probably. and, are they therefore able to stream it at 24-bits? i mean, their hardware can probably do it.
the 32-bit machine that i'm reinstalling this morning will remain 32 bits and geared towards 16 bit recording. that's not going to change.
but, as i get around to building that 64-bit machine and wondering how i'll be recording into it, the question i'm actually going to ask isn't about maximizing recording quality so much as it's about trying to understand actual listening habits. i know that i still listen to everything in 16-bit. am i out of touch on this? if i am, and people are listening to 24-bit flacs on their phones, then i should adjust to mixing final outputs in a way that conforms to how they're actually going to listen to them.
if i mix everything in 24-bit and the world listens to it in downsampled 16-bit, i'm just deluding myself through the process - all of that effort exists strictly in a parallel reality that nobody actually inhabits. however, if i mix everything in 16-bit and the world upsamples it to 24-bit to listen to it, i'm missing out on an opportunity to expand the quality of the mix.
all the technicalities and specs are fun to analyze, but it's the user experience that i'm really concerned about.
ok, so that was a wasteful few days due to needing to undo the cops breaking my computer (yet again.), but i have my machine coming back up now. i was in fact able to isolate a crc error on the dvd; the reburn is booting from the dvd, as intended.
but, listen, you fucking idiot thugs...
the chromebook is the only machine i use to post to the internet and, so long as this continues, that is not going to change. the 90s laptop is being used strictly as a phone, right now, but will eventually also be used as a tv. and, the recording machine is kept off the network and used strictly to record and compose music on.
the computer you want to hack for kremlin codes is the chromebook. please leave my recording pc alone.
is that simple enough for you to understand?
so, i was having difficulty booting the install media from the dvd drive and i had to figure that out because that's how this sits - i just leave the install media in the bottom drive and let it sit there, so i know what the most recent version is, and i have it available in case i need it.
but, as i was doing some troubleshooting, i started to suspect that it's the media itself that's corrupt. thankfully, i do in fact have a backup. of course. so, i'm going to try to reburn that and try again.
to be clear: i could install it from the blu-ray drive, but i don't want to do that, i want to install it from the dvd drive. and, the dvd drive seems to let other media boot, so it kind of has to be the actual disk itself. i think....
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