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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take your instinct by the reins
Your better bet's to rearrange
What we want and what we need
Has been confused, been confused

no, j. that section doesn't need 17 guitar overdubs.

....and first couple of guitars tracks are down.

see, this is what i was worried about.

it's 10 out, and 5:00 am, and i can feel the air coming down. which must be because the heat is on high two floors up, to fight the air on the main level.

i can't deal with that. i have to get the heat up. there's essentially no tenant that could deal with that. and it's going to squeeze him out, but it's his own fault.

ok. plugged in and jamming. finally. it's been 2.5 years. which is the longest i've ever gone. even with the minimal output between '07 and '11, it was mostly because i was scheming up other things, building the recording space, working, studying, writing, etc - but even with that, it was never more than a week, maybe two, between sessions, i was just working at a super slow pace and throwing a lot of things away (leaving me with about an hour of absurdly saturated completed music, roughly an hour of half completed music, several hours of demos and several more hours of discarded material - which is actually roughly comparable to the years before, just through a greater level of focus and detail and perfectionism. i suppose i could have had two or three records made up of the stuff that got ignored. people were asking me. 'j, do you have some new material yet?", and it was always "it's going to be the greatest record ever, or the most ridiculous record ever". when it does get tied together, it's going to be a lot of ideas ejected all at once....i'm not going to release it like that, but it's going to be a quadruple or quintuple disc in terms of material....).

and i'm remembering how much fun this is :)

so, i'm going to have to keep myself in check, here. i could see myself overdubbing guitars for the next six weeks if i don't give myself some boundaries.

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

those alternate tunings were more of a problem than i realized, as they cut out one of the guitar sections. i thought the guitar seemed quiet, but thought it was just a function of the technology.

the sampler i'm using to convert midi notes to guitar sounds will simply not allow shapes that can't be played on a guitar in standard tuning. it will allow you to lower the bottom string down to c, which opened up enough space in my case to get the chords out, but that won't allow for really impossible chord combinations. strangely, lowering the range fixed it because it also seems to try and automatically invert chords so they fit on the fretboard.....! i suppose that might be useful to a keyboard player that doesn't know guitars so well, but it's actually horrific for a guitarist that fully realizes what they're doing when they're typing up the notes.

so, i got the inversions to stop and all the notes to come out, so that will update via rss. well, hopefully that's the last version.

the one thing i can't get is this chord in the transition from the bass solo to the post-jazz section. i'm talking about this pesky A#. i could always create a new track and resequence it. yeah. i should do that, actually. good thing i didn't upload yet. but the chord is F-A#-C, from low to high. this is impossible to play on a guitar in standard tuning. the solution is to tune the D string down to a C, making an easy chord to fret. simple. but, the computer is instead just dropping the A# altogether...

that's good to know for future reference.

written late 2000 & early 2001. initially rendered mar 7, 2014. re-rendered due to shift in instrumentation on april 29, 2014. re-rendered again on may 3, 2014 to allow for audible acoustic guitars, after a rewrite to allow the computer to play in an alternate tuning.

it was vindication, if unfortunate, walking to the front entrance today and getting a rush of hot air from upstairs. you know when you come in from outside and can feel the heat rushing at you? it was like that. except i was walking from a basement to a main floor, and feeling the heat coming from behind a closed door and *down* a flight of stairs. and it's 13, not -20. and it's electric radiator heat, too. indicating that it was just right cranked. no doubt to fight the air conditioning on the main floor. i've mostly avoided raising it past 21, which has mostly kept it off. i'm not likely to crank it more than 22 more than a few hours at a time. so, somebody else is more irritated than i am by this unseasonable air conditioning...

i slept through most of the afternoon; a hot shower warmed me up nicely and then knocked me out cold. but it does seem as though it was on again a little after 4:00. i'm still feeling it a bit...

that's another possible answer, for the short term, that i can accommodate better than my neighbours. if he's going to turn the air up in the afternoon and leave it off overnight, i can sleep in the afternoon and stay awake overnight.

there's a bunch of reasons i don't really want to crank it. the rent is low here. i'd rather wear a sweater than see a rent increase, but it's within reason - what's a piss off is how unreasonable setting the air to below 20 is. which i think is the real reason i'm concerned, rather than the actual temperature. that, i can deal with. but if we get into this a/c v radiator fight, it's going to fuck the landlord and that's going to fuck us. electric heating is also quite dry. and the truth is that i like it a little cool. it's one of the reasons i like basements.

we might finally get a real warm up next week, but it looks sketchy.

i'd normally go talk to the guy, but it's not a situation where we're legal under the law. tenant law is badly skewed towards family members. if it's intended to intimidate non-family members, it's worked. i have to be careful to not get into conflict with them and more or less resign myself to his right to have the air as he wants it.

see, the flip side is i have the right to get the heat up. and the lease is the lease, regarding rent costs. there was a verbal agreement to keep the rent static. i think that endows me with a responsibility to try to minimize heating costs. the day i get a rent increase, that's out the window. but, for now i'd like to try and stick to it.

it's just...it all revolves around being reasonable. and the actual owner is reasonable. but i don't feel like i'm getting that from his brother upstairs.

i mean, it's hard to compute the idea that he doesn't realize turning the air on in an unseasonably cold early may and late april is unreasonable. this has to be "i don't fucking care". and it can't really be something that an explanation can resolve.

wonder how successful a claim that current tenant law is unconstitutional would be. it's clearly discriminatory; not clearly enumerated, but perhaps analogous. see, it pits s. 15 rights directly against "property rights", which are in quotes because there is actually no legal recognition of property rights in canada, despite the idea being thrown around by various types of liberals. i mean, there's contract law. sure. but it's not at all the same thing. i would *hope* that s. 15 would trump these imaginary "property rights". but that's up to the judge...

i'd be skeptical. but it would be an interesting case that would bring to light a lot of interesting questions. or, at least it would if i was orchestrating it.

gah....

note to self: indicate alternate tunings in future scores.

in all fairness to myself, i actually do specifically recall having it written out, but it was something i lost in the nwc destruction (which is why the track got thrown into a state of purgatory in the first place). and i know it's recorded in some of the other songs i was working out to notation in the same period.

thankfully, it's a simple tuning that was easy to figure out: take d down to c. but i was scratching my head for a minute.

ERROR.

THIS CHORD IS IMPOSSIBLE. PLEASE TRY ANOTHER CHORD.

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.