turns out i had plenty of electric strings, after all. i'll have to get some acoustic strings, but i'm actually not even sure the guitar is usable. forgot about that.

i'm still debating whether to swap the strings on my jazz guitar. i'll probably do a few tests and then decide. bright, new strings are the fucking worst. but there's a point where they're a tetanus risk, too, and just sound dead. that middle point is the sweet spot. which generally means "don't ever change a string, unless it breaks".

...which is pretty rare on the jazz guitar, which is a black epiphone coronet. well, not really. this guitar was actually somebody's frankenstein, with what appears to be a vintage coronet neck pasted onto some kind of ibanez. i leave 12s on this guy and use it for about 80% of my recording, and have since the late 90s.

the other guitar is a red epiphone sg copy with much louder pickups (one may recall the high gain sg craze of a few years ago, although that wasn't a factor in getting it) that i keep 11s on and use sparingly for specific fuzzy lead sections. to me, 11 is low gauge; anything less than that, and i'm breaking strings every session...

i've variously had other guitars hanging around for alternate tunings and whatnot, but they've disappeared. i know i tossed one because i got shocked from it. there's another that seems to have been stolen, along with an electric mandolin and a 12-string guitar and some other things.

but that's all ready to go now for when i wake up. :).

it's sort of comical to me that these thick strings are being presented as anomalous to make your shredding sound thicker, when the purpose of skinny strings was to help shredders get through certain sections because they couldn't play it on "normal" jazz strings. which are actually 13s. i mean, i guess it's nice to see that the trick is no longer perceived as necessary, but this stuff is more flash than substance. this is really quite silly.

thick strings like this are great for blues players, and help to fatten up those big jazz chords, if you play them. punkabilly. etc. but if you want to seriously shred? well, they cut the gauge down specifically for you. and this shit is deceiving...

on second thought, those numbers are too static. i'll have to let it be more fluid. i'm having difficulty defining precise categories. that'll have to define itself as it goes through.

like, i'm averaging a little under 100 hits a day, so i could theoretically hit 1000 in under a month. but it's spiking up and down. the curve is upwards. so, those bigger numbers might be less ridiculous looking in a few months from now.

this is a surreal thing to read, perhaps. well, i'm talking to myself, here, i'm just letting you listen in, if you'd like. it's for the wikis of the future, really. you're just experiencing it in real time. feel special, or something.

see, the numbers aren't really the important part of it. i think that's my point, here. it's the ramp up tied to the chronology. and i suppose that's premised on the assumption of a continued ramp up, making it pointless to make strong predictions in the first place. 5000 hits in may is very different than 500.

so, i guess i could take it down around 1000. or maybe around 500. i'll have to see when it feels right to continue the emulation. it's the emulation i'm announcing, whatever the numbers end up being...

uploading fire to youtube

i keep cycling back to these super old tracks, but i hadn't really conceived of how to do this well until right now. see, here's the thing...

The Game of Youtube is to get things sent viral. now, this isn't a game i'm into for two reasons. the first is simply that i don't think i have a high chance of winning. there's nothing about any of this music that is likely to break through any mainstream barriers - thankfully. i'd have a lot less respect for myself if i thought these pieces could potentially go viral. the second is that having a viral video seems to be something like having a cocaine addiction: there's a painful crash involved that i'd rather not deal with. fifteen minutes of fame isn't worth ten years of derision.

what i'm interested in is getting the ideas out. i've had this discussion with so many people that just don't understand my thinking on this. no, i don't want to be famous - shockingly. some of us really don't want to be famous. really. some of us just want to be able to live a comfortable, mostly anonymous existence producing art. it's very sad just how confusing so many people find this. it really reflects how shallow the culture is.

but, the cycling algorithms i've been using have been too short to get any kind of a point across. i need to leave songs up for a week or two at a time, not a day or two. i'm consequently cycling back for a third and final time and partitioning the set of tracks into the following subsets, which i plan on mapping to the following number of views:

100 - meh
1000 - dead experiments & extended tracks
10000 - completed symphonies & epics

i'm purposefully doing something else wrong, here. i'm supposed to pick my best tracks and push them, right? that's pretty rational, really. why market something i feel is a "dead experiment" at all? because i'm the product. it's the story.

i feel that if i stick to this kind of approach, and increment chronologically, while continuing to post comments, i'll be able to slowly get the pieces out in a way that mimics the construction of myself as a character.

the first track up is fire, which is either a dead experiment or an extended track. i'm a little over 100. this catastrophe needs to get past 1000, which i'm thinking should take about a month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2E0p0sWW4c

as for the oldNew track i'm working on, i spent yesterday doing grocery shopping and today tying up some other beginning of the month type loose ends. i forgot to get new strings, but that can wait until tomorrow. i will be laying down tracks overnight.

i've also set up a companion facebook page for the comments. it's a front for the google+ page, which goes all the way back (although, sadly, not as far as before i was forced to switch). but in a sense i'm starting again right now. and this should really all be interpreted as integrated.

https://www.facebook.com/deathtokoalas?filter=1

the hits are more about staggering the process, and trying to emulate the timing associated with a musician beginning from scratch and building it's way up.

think of it like a virtual reality.


==

this is literally the first thing i recorded, when i was 15, so i'm not particularly invested in defending it's quality. yet, it remains an intriguing listen. i was trying pretty hard to be weird. all these years later, i'm sort of impressed with myself in accomplishing that.

i suppose it's sort of fitting that my first musical statement reduces to some kind of anarchist rant about burning the world down, or more accurately about letting the world burn itself down. somebody said that destruction is never negative because it is required to rebuild. that's stuck with me for many years.

so, the crux of this is an orchestration of a world on fire, as i imagined it, when i was 15. which, oddly, sounds somewhat like kurt cobain jamming over a throbbing gristle workout. it's easy to see why i've pulled it out and salvaged it, despite it's many flaws.

yeah. heating situation here is now officially ridiculous, and something buddy and his brother are going to have to work out.

it hit a low of about 7 degrees this morning, with an overcast high of 12. even so, there was enough retained heat in here from yesterday that the heater didn't really kick in until this morning - and even so, only weakly. but, see, the air conditioner wasn't on. nor should it have been, with temperatures ranging between 7 and 12 - in addition to it being overcast and rainy. so, it was *actually* close to 21 in here. which was nice.

in addition to this, it seems like nobody was home up there for most of the day, which allowed this normal situation to go undetected. the air is now noticeably on, which is triggering the heaters again.

it's 12 degrees out. the heat came on because it's cold. that's what heaters are supposed to do. but the heaters were in fact barely even running. i'm being totally normal here; it's turning the air on to reverse normal heating operations when it's 12 degrees out that is anomalous.

and, i had the bathroom heater off, but am going to have to put it back on.

i mean, i can get that these are bigger people. so, it's like they're always wearing a few extra layers. ok. but, why not open the window, then, when it's overcast and twelve? that makes a big difference for the surrounding units, due to the way air conditioning works.

it's been a slow ramp down, but i'm willing to finally (albeit cautiously) declare myself a purely social smoker. the last three weeks of april were pretty much cold turkey, we're talking one or two opportunistic puffs over three weeks, and it's really put me over that final hump. i've been slowly disassociating the habit from the things i had it attached to: wake up, after meal, etc. at this point, those connections are just not there anymore. i even spent my smoke money on mushroom soup, which sounds weird but the expenses related to fixing my pc had me broke all month and i found myself down to spaghetti and canned beans the last week, which is something i don't want to repeat. hence, a large stack of mushroom soup (which i use as pasta sauce).

so, i have no nicotine budgeted for may. if i get to june 1st without breaking, i'll be done with the "cautiously" part.

it was weird walking around this morning, though, 'cause i found myself hypersensitive to other people smoking. smokers will mostly agree that they can't really smell the smoke coming from the guy at the bus stop. i can't say it ever bothered me before i started smoking, either. but, when you've stopped smoking for a while, you start to notice it, and it starts to bug you because you're trying to avoid it. it's especially been the smell, for me; once it gets in your clothes, you start carrying it around with you and it's a constant reminder. i mean, i'm sure i'll get used to it over time. but that was a surreal experience that i took as indicative of something positive...

the new cloud nothings record

i was a bit weirded out by the first single, which is at least thankfully left at the end so it can be, err, quarantined, but this is definitely near the top of the year-end list, if the year-end list isn't full of pretentious garbage. i tend not to agree with most critics this side of the pitchfork abomination, but the acclaim on this is warranted. i just have a few suggestions for those reacting badly...

a) try headphones. it's not a stereo thing so much as it's a volume thing.
b) turn it up as loud as you possibly can.

i guess if you don't like loud, fast, energetic punk music then that's another issue. and i suppose a lot of people that are actually closer to my age (maybe a bit younger) really don't like that kind of fast, energetic music. which is a part of the record's appeal to those that are going to get it for what it is.

but, you know what they say: fuckin' hippies.

best strategy is to keep it off most of the time, and set it high for about an hour when the air gets bad. i mean, i don't want to kill my landlord on the electrical bill, either.

i really think it should cease to be a concern once we get a week or two over 20 and i can just keep the window open. it's just that the basement is having a hard time "turning over" because we're stuck in this middle temperature range, and the air is really acting as a huge setback in it doing so...

actually, no. it's the gradient i'm noticing. keeping at 21.5 is just a waste of electricity - i'll have to crank it if the air comes on, regardless.

it seems to have levelled out. thankfully.

what i'm going to do is take it down to 21.5 and just leave it there. that'll trigger it before it gets too cold...

it must be about 10-15 degrees upstairs.

i mean, it's been over 20 all day and the heater has been working at 50% for an hour to get it to 22. ridiculous...

i've lived in air conditioned basements ~ half my life, and i've never seen an air unit run this irresponsibly.

another way to measure the temperature down here is via the floor. and i'll just say that the floor was not this cold at any point in the winter. which is bizarre.

i should hopefully be able to turn it back off in a few hours.

i mean, i can't articulate how stupid it is that i'm cranking the baseboard heat to fight off the air conditioner upstairs on this rarest of nice days of the year so far. but it would be below 20 in here, otherwise. and that's not acceptable to me.

i just wish it would warm up and stay warmed up. if we can get a week or two of warm weather, the basement will heat up. it's just that all we're getting right now is a few hours every week or so, which the air is negating. so, it feels like march in here because every time we get that little bit of warmth (a) it goes away and (b) the air sucks it out.

and the landlord wants to put an air conditioner in here. i'm trying to explain to him that it's not only unnecessary, it's completely backwards. he needs to try to get his brother to turn the air down....

i mean, if my thermostat can't even get to 22 then it's certainly not air conditioner weather. that's called enjoying the warm weather. air conditioner weather is 30+.

the thermostat was hovering around 21 naturally (ie not really on) before i turned it up to 22, but that was not indicative of what it feels like in here. it's that frigid air conditioning air that sinks down and makes you feel like it's january, even as the temperature in the room stays steady. yuck.

yeah. it's 25 degrees out and i'm shivering with a sweater on. absurd.

so, the heat is now on. buddy can explain that to his brother.

i mean, move to winnipeg if you want to live in a tundra.