uploading screwed up to youtube

the track switches tonight. this track will be up for four weeks, and i expect to be through a whole lot by that point.

hits were down tremendously over the period unintelligible was up, to the point that i'm barely on track for two thirds of my last month's total. will they go up now that i've mentioned it, as happened previously? i honestly can't pretend i care anymore.

we'll see in a few days, but the curve seems irreversibly broken at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSK3q-R9Y6s&list=PL3JSjmqp0cbsN9vZEYmFDghfz0V6hWbLI

that was a very long day, which required upwards of five hours of walking through some pretty nasty windchills and ran about 36 hours...

...but i got my prescription, in the end.

that's one of two medical issues i needed dealt with. now, i need to figure out how to get the odsp renewed for at least another year.

i have my doctor's appointment in london in a few hours and i'm incredibly nervous about it. the first time, i figured it was just a formality. this time, i'm really apprehensive...

of course, i've been thinking about it a lot. at the end of the day, regardless of the outcome, the decision i made is not reversible. denying me hormones isn't going to coerce me to change my name back. it's not going to make me more interested in living a male gender role. it's not going to change how i present myself, how i dress, how i identify or how i behave. it's just going to put me in the awkward position of needing to explain that the health system is denying me treatment when i show up to a job interview in a skirt.

so, i'm hoping it turns out well. but i've kind of put it aside. it's not the chemicals that define who i am, and not taking the chemicals isn't going to change who i am, either.

i do hope i can at least convince him to keep me on the androgen blockers. i hate masturbating, and i'm very happy that i haven't had to in well over a year. i don't want to go back to having to deal with that, it's such a waste of fucking time...

what i really aim for, i think, is total sexlessness. just the abolition of sexuality. i like the fact that the feminizing hormones make me a little prettier when i want to be, but it's really the testosterone blockers that are giving me what i really want.

i spent 25 some odd years realizing i'm not very good at being a dude, and don't have any interest in being one, either. that's not just going to change overnight…

and the reality is that i will eventually get access to hormones, even if it takes a few weeks to figure out how.

ok. i've got the thing set up to remix it - i can do this. i may have to split the drums up, but it's otherwise pretty clean. you can barely tell on an a/b, and i'm going to be putting it through a mastering transform, anyway, so it just has to be close. bonus: i can resync that classical guitar part.

that's it for the night, and probably until wednesday afternoon....

it's almost a total reconstruction, afterall.

the parts i can't recreate are the drum soundscape (it's the reverb) and the time modded guitar effect that defines the second half of the track. i mean, i can do it in theory. and i may end up trying. but trying to get the exact point where i split it and the exact length i stretched it to is a fool's errand. if i feel forced to do that, i'm going to get a different shape in the second half of the song. i can say i've decided that the production is more important, but i want it to be a last resort.

i should be able to just cut the track at about the six minute point.

it's a slow fade in at that point. so it's easy to splice. i can then master that section a little differently.

so, it's coming together. again: i'm not doing this a fifth time, so i'm not fucking around with it this time.

ok, it's the first few minutes that are pissing me off.

and i can probably reconstruct the first few minutes. it just means cross fading the end.

which is easy to do anyways.

i need to go to london (ontario) tomorrow, so i won't be working on this much longer tonight. but i think i've got a successful tactic, here.

realistic assessment: i think i can make it better. i have to resign myself to the reality that i can't make it perfect. i guess every serious composer has a piece that somehow got away from them. maybe this is it for me.

one thing i want to try is to run the drums and bass separately through a mastering shape, then kill the high end, then mix it with the same file that's had the low end cut (and just has the cymbals and snare reverbs on the top). that could conceivably separate the tracks. but i sort of already know that it's going to sound messy. have to try it though...

these are the kinds of hacks that i'm stuck with, though.

one thing i'll state clearly: in the end it'll be close to what i want, and i'll fuck with it until it is.

ugh.

running this through mastering software really pulls the parts of the mix out that i want pulled out, which are mostly on the bottom end, but it also introduces a large amount of noise into the track. the noise is at the same frequency level as the cymbals, and is the result of not cleaning the parts up well before i mixed them together in the wave editor (a lot of it is tape hiss). trying to mix the bottom over the track is just making it muddy - what i want is a clean signal on the bottom mastered separately from the top. the only way i could get around the problem is to rebuild the track from scratch - which is essentially impossible. there's all kinds of reverb settings and time manipulations that i could approximate but could never recreate. rebuilding the track is necessarily going to create a new song, which i don't want to do - i already did that a few months ago.

everything i'm doing right now is final. i don't want to come back at this in another five years and decide it still doesn't sound the way i want it to.

so, i'm going to have to do many, many experiments. and this is likely consequently going to take a lot longer than i planned it to take...

i've already learned the lessons and applied them, but i'm still stuck with the consequences.

there's really nothing else like this (excluding the earliest demos, which i can write off as early demos). it's not just the last time i'm mixing this track, it's also the last time i'm going to be dealing with this problem.

the day i saw you cry (instrumental version)

ok, here it is one more time.

i'm confident this is really done this time. i think i should have the mix up to date to july, 2002 before the sun comes up, but i'm not uploading that version. the final production decisions may take a little longer. but i'm still convinced that this gets done by the end of the day.

--

the recording of this track over the spring of 2002 seems to have occurred in spurts, likely based around gaps in my school schedule. the drums in the first part of the track were sculpted together on the night/morning of march 7/8, which would have been a little after the track took it's initial folk punk form and centred on it existing in that way. the drums were sculpted from a mix of the initial drum machine part, real time ry30 square pushing, washes of digital noise and short, sculpted samples of greg playing in real time. the track seems to have been shaped into what it is during the week of april 15-22, a little after it was expanded by playing it as a classical piece, with the addition of multiple guitar and synth overdubs and all kinds of digital wave shaping through notch filters and time manipulation. i must have had that week off for exam related purposes; i probably had late exams that year. incomplete versions of the track exist that seem to have been burned around april 25, which are what the live version with sean would have been based upon.

the next spurt in recording was to add bass parts over the weekend of may 17-19. further drum and guitar parts were also added at this time.

i was experimenting with sequencing a rabit is wolf demo throughout may and ended up with two cd-r snapshots of the track at this point. these are the only instrumental versions from the period. unfortunately, the more complete version cannot be ripped from the cd properly - it was burned in three sections and normalized, which created volume gaps. it also has roughly 0.050 second null spots at the beginning and end of the three tracks, making it impossible to paste together properly. so, i've reconstructed a very close approximation of a late may mix out of a good sounding april mix. i've then used that mix to reconstruct a final instrumental version.

i was growing very insular during the period this was recorded, which was partially out of a decision to force myself to go straight edge in preparation for transgendered hormone therapy, which i was set to begin at the start of may. the bulk of the track was recorded before i went on hormone therapy. it may in some way reflect a sense of resigned preparation for a difficult process. but, it really comes more out of the isolation i had forced upon myself.

my parents were coming out of a difficult financial situation due partly to their own mismanagement and partly to my father coming out of a period of unemployment. he was completing a course in management over the period, which put me in the weird position of having to do his statistics homework for him. i was a second year honours math student at the time, so his basic stats assignments were not very challenging for me; conversely, he wasn't interested in the topic. i should probably have a diploma in business stats from the university of manitoba along with my math degree from carleton. but, who's counting, really? my math degree never got me anywhere in life (i haven't aspired to use it for anything....), but his management course opened up doors for him that have aided me. so, it worked out....

what this meant was that i found myself living in a split duplex around the beginning of 2002. for many years previously, i had lived in various basements and more or less had those basements to myself, merely having to tolerate the odd laundry run. the split duplex put me in the rather normal situation of having a bedroom upstairs, the privilege of having a studio downstairs and the inconvenience of having to follow scheduling rules. as i'd been so used to having total freedom in my scheduling for so long, i was unable to adjust to this.

if i were to come up and down the stairs in the middle of the night, i would wake my labrador retrievers up (who just wanted to come say hi) and that would wake up my parents. this was consequently forbidden. to get around this, i started sleeping in the afternoon, so i could go downstairs in the evening and not come back up until the morning. this left me without human contact for days or even weeks at a time. on long days, i would sleep on the carpeted floor of the studio. some days, i simply wouldn't sleep at all.

what you're hearing here is in many ways the culmination of this lack of human contact, complete abstinence from drugs and sleep deprivation - all in the context of the stress from simultaneously completing two university programs and preparing for a dramatic life shift. while the music was recorded in spurts, those spurts were emotional stress outlets. while parts of this may sound like my sanity was fragile while it was being created, the process of recording them is probably the only thing that allowed me to maintain it.

the final mix for this track was completed on nov 24, 2014, to mimic the version that existed immediately before vocals were added.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/05-the-day-i-saw-you-cry-instrumental-version

i missed a classical guitar part last night. i was wondering about it when i was mixing it, because the file was dated to after the cutoff but seemed to already exist in the mix. i'm sort of remembering that what i did was cut the file up to create a manual delay effect. so, i need to do get that back in there and upload the initial instrumental a third time.

it's a subtle effect, and you'd probably miss it if you weren't listening for it.

i missed it myself...

strangely, it turns out i had this all wrong. the version i rebuilt the track on in 07/09 was actually the same file i'm using now, minus a sort of swoosh at the beginning. i thought i had time shifted the file, but was wrong...

...and it was just out of sync because i couldn't find the right place to paste to.

what that means is that i've determined the source of the file. it was from a now lost early 3-track rabit cd-r, dated to between april 22 and may 5, 2002.

what it also means is that i should be able to use it to replace the corrupted early version. so, i need to take a mildly different mixing strategy.

i was hoping this would be done in a few hours, but it's the last time i'm doing it so i'm making sure i do it right.

i simply can't use the mix i built in 2009. i ran through izotope or something and whatever sounded good then doesn't sound "right" now. so, i'm rebooting to the beginning one last time.

it means, in the end, i should get three mixes out of this file and use two of them.

there's the monster right there.

that massive file at the bottom is what i've been looking for and what has been confusing me whenever i've tried to do this for years. it's synced perfectly with the rabit version, indicating that it's a clean early mix. the volume captures the shape of the track. i didn't think i could get this perfect, but this is actually, in fact, perfect. hurrah for that...

the big file contains a drum soundscape (i've got roughly 30 components of this - live drums, programmed drums, live drum machine square pushing and digital generated/shaped noises), a bass part, seven guitar parts and two synth parts. so, i could actually conceivably squeeze this onto a 32 track board.

that's synced. i'll mix it in the morning, then it's done.

that file is dated to 2006. i don't remember where it came from; i may have ripped it from a since lost cd-r. i don't know why i didn't rebuild it from this in the first place. it's a long time coming, but it's finally what i wanted it to be....

"i believe that people that are going to commit crimes shouldn't have guns" - george w. bush

this is a quote that was widely thrown around in the mid 00s as supposed evidence of mr. bush's lack of intelligence. i've never really seen the supposed stupidity in the statement. nobody doubts the truth of the statement. it may be a little obvious, but we're talking about an office that declares truths to be self-evident.

i've used it twice - in the unfinished curious george suite, and again in the sample version of the fourth symphony, because i wasn't planning on releasing the curious george suite (and now have). both of these uses preceded it's wide adoption by satirists.

i was taking a different perspective, though. it's one i've never seen anybody else use. i was actually focusing on the irony in the statement.

in fact, mr. bush was somebody that was clearly going to commit crimes. war crimes, as it turns out. therefore, by his own logic, he shouldn't have had guns.

of course, he did. which indirectly circles back around to it's more common satirical usage.

i still find the irony in it staggering. as an american, mr. bush probably didn't pick up on that...

"i believe that wars should not happen unless they are congressionally approved."

it seems like a rather different statement.

but it actually follows logically as a corollary.

that constitution down there is a bit wonky, though.

for all the talk of congressional approval, the reality is that the american form of government is designed to be a military dictatorship. i think that a large amount of the problems down there could be solved by merely grasping this simple point - the president is not meant to be in charge of civilian matters, but the commander in chief. that is, a military leader. and, while congress can act as a check on his power, he's constitutionally not far from being an elected military dictator.

the president can introduce legislation if he wants. and he can veto shit under limited circumstances. but it's not the primary function of the office. civilian things are actually supposed to be dealt with through congress. yet, millions of americans expect the president to set the domestic agenda. then, they get confused when it doesn't happen.

getting people to understand that the president is meant to be somebody that has guns and that they're supposed to deal with things like health care and decriminalization through various representative bodies would shift the focus back to where it needs to be to get things done.

the next step, then, ought to be to take away the president's guns.

but one thing at a time...

replacing symphony 7 on youtube

this is now a discarded mix. there's a lot more information on the single page.

the track was written multiple ways in 2002, but i seem to have avoided saving a completed instrumental version. i've tried to rebuild this instrumental version several times since 2006 and have never got a good result. a large part of the reason for this stems from the mixing strategy i was using at the time i wrote and recorded it, which was to record each part in separately, process it in a wave editor and then literally paste it all together in an editing process. this mixing process is actually responsible for a lot of the blurry mixes i've been able to create over the years (i haven't abandoned it entirely; i go back to it for experimental and ambient pieces), but it doesn't allow for remixing or reconstructing tracks. once i past a part into the file, it cannot be removed or altered without starting all over again.

it's consequently necessary to save mixes at strategic points if you're going to be mixing in this way, and i failed to do that for this track when i added political samples to it in 2002. i've been trying to get the samples out since 2006. this 2009 version was the best thing i could create at the time, without abandoning the mixing strategy. it was built on an early 2002 mix; i ended up pushing the overdubs out of sync, and ruining it with a bad master. i initially didn't think i would be able to resolve this because i couldn't figure out how to get the overdubs back in sync.

however, i've spent the second half of 2014 completing my discography (i lost several months at the beginning of the year due to a bad bios flash. get a bus pirate. they're life savers.) and in the process i've found a proper 2002 mix that is in sync with the final mixes, which has allowed me to reconstruct the file properly in cubase. this best-i-can-do compromise mix is now obsolete.

the new video is available at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azl0LKVr6EU

this is the old video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=658axrUn-7w

ugh. this is my fault, i should have paid closer attention.

i'm trying to rebuild the mix on a may, 2002 version, which i had reconstructed from pasting together a cd-rip split into three copies. now, i noticed a little gap but i just deleted it...

the gap is a breakdown in information. bad burn, i guess. the first gap is inaudible, but the second isn't. so, i can't build it on that...

luckily, i have a version from april, 2002. which means i need to reconstruct more of the file in the mix, but it's a positive trade-off.

i seem to have built the 2009 on a different april mix that is time shifted strangely. what i'm about to do is the better option.

so, today was a wash. but hopefully i can still get the bulk of it done by the end of the night.

so, it seems like at some point i time shifted the track to 25:00, then i recorded extra overdubs after i time shifted. that explains why it's just a little bit out of sync. but because there were gaps in the rip it's not as simple as just shifting it back.

i'm going to do this the other way around: i'm going to time shift the overdubs back to the original length, then time shift it back to 25:00. it's not going to be identical to the two final 2002 mixes - it can't be.

the only other answer is to rebuild it, but i've tried doing this repeatedly and the blunt truth is that i can't. i can rebuild the first section, but the wave editing in the second half of the track isn't reproducible.

it's not going to be inaudible - you're going to hear a slight delay if you play the three tracks simultaneously. but who's going to do that? and it's the best i can do with it....

i've decided the existing mixes of this aren't sufficient. i built the thing back up a few times from '07-09 because i couldn't find the source, and it's just out of sync in a few places. when i didn't have the original timing, it didn't matter. i just had to guess. it does now...

so, there's a handful of tracks to re-add, and a number of modified tracks from '07 and '08 that i had put aside to mix in as well.

as the issues are sync related, the 07 and 09 mixes are likely to be simply deleted from the discography altogether. the 09 mix is on youtube, and i'll probably leave it that way. i'll have a good listen when i get it mixed down.

it's done

basically.

so, to recap.

- one cynicide disc. inri029. i'm splitting profits with jon on this.
1) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/to-spin-inside-dull-aberrations

- seven rabit discs. inri030. inri034-inri038. inri040. i'm splitting these with you 50/50.
1) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/me-myself-and-the-time-i-thought-this-was-a-good-idea
2) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-wave
3) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/clarity
4) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/9-46-outside-the-magenta-box
5) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/time
6) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/rabit-is-wolf
7) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-imaginary-tour-demo-ep

- a comprehensive fourth symphony overview. inri039. this is two discs, and you're on one, so you get 25% of this.
1) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/trepanation-nation

- penny shoeman was actually written as a techno tune first, and the rabit demo second. i'll probably put the demo on the single when it's done, but as a bonus track. it's otherwise on the tour ep.
1) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/untitled

- my sixth record (60% done) contains several instrumental rabit reconstructions.
1) https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj-2

that's it. all the material with you on it is up. here's the youtube playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3JSjmqp0cbvt_-_Lt2CqTm_MuaOwNrgw

and i'll contact you if or when a check is ready.

(pause)

sorry, here's the free download link.

(deleted)

numbers, again, are: 29,30,34-42. 39 will be up tonight or tomorrow.
41,42 within a week.

j

space, time and conceptual issues are inching me closer and closer to having an ostrich/flying split single rather than two separate releases, and ending the j^2 period with an unreleased guitar collage called "taught to twist the affected so low".

that would be the end of september....

i need to warn you that the material for the next few years is going to be a bit heavy at points. a lot of it remains instrumental, but i'm also reclaiming the vocal role from sean at this point and entering an unstable part of my life.

when i figure this out, i'm going to want to finish building a guitar mix that i started in 2007. this may end up with new sound. then it's done and i can move to the techno track, which is also going to primarily be a remix. there's going to be a few unreleased tracks attached to that. the last song to complete for this period is this thing i called ostrich, which was a first draft of sarah's 2002 xmas present. i ended up discarding it in favour of flying. there's going to be some new sound for this, but not much. the ep of material for the first half of 2003 is already finalized, so that will be a quick up. i'm going to have to reinterpret some stuff from mid 03, but it likely won't require new sound. in fact, i'm not looking at new sound after ostrich until probably early 2005. i always wanted to release symphonies 5&6 as the first part of a double, and no doubt will, but they'll probably also be available separately as record #8. so, i could very well be to xenophanes and symphony 7 by christmas. my period with sarah saw a dramatic decrease in output, but at least i mostly finished what i did. it's after sarah that things get scattered again. oddly. i think maybe i ended up with less time, but more of a need for an outlet and consequently more focus.