Sad Day

Today I heard some news that I knew was coming but was shitty all the same.

Yesterday, Derek K Miller, known to me as a co-host of the Inside Home Recording podcast, passed away after a knock down drag out brawl with cancer.

In the end he tapped but not without a touching farewell.

Death sucks giant donkey balls.

But That's Cheating!

The haters...  I've heard haters hating on singers because of their use of technology.  Not fair, really.  Why should instrumentalists have all the fun.

The video above, part of some marketing fluff (but interesting and cool nonetheless) by tc electronic shows what's possible in real time with vocals.  Holy crap.  I knew about pitch correction but real time harmonization (playable!).  Colour me impressed.

Hate all you want and when you're done accept that this is pretty cool.

Wonder what it would sound like on guitar?

When Two Worlds Collide

For a long time, I have had a split personality when making music. I either start playing with synths and go wherever that leads or I start with my guitar and explore that. Of course, guitar occasionally garnishes the electronics. But the approaches feel very different and separate.

Intellectually, I know this needn't be the case. Intellectually, I know that synths have oscillators (or some other sound source) that gets heavily processed. And I know something about that processing.

About a month ago, in a chat I verbalized that a guitar is really just six oscillators that get passed through a similar (but constrained by convention [and superstitions/biases/etc]) set of processing tools or modules.

Until recently I hadn't actually acted on that line of reasoning. One day I was fooling with Absynth (prodded by some tutorial ware that floated by in the RSS stream) and I remembered that you can use it as an effect. So in the preset browser, I selected effects, picked up the guitar and started exploring. Wow, some really out there stuff. A completely different and new pallette. I then tried the same with FM8.  And then Reaktor. And then my head exploded.

I have years worth of things to explore. And I'm stoked.

So look in again in your toolbox. Maybe there's a way to connect things that you hadn't considered before.

Funny Thing Happened

Thanks to the recommendation engine of emusic.com I recently discovered Arovane.  I liked it so much, I grabbed two albums and listened to them a couple of times each.

Thanks to the scrobbling of last.fm, it appears that I'm a top listener of Arovane's Tides album.

Of course, I didn't know that until I got a private message from someone in the UK saying that he noticed I was a top listener of said album and could I hook him up with a free copy.

Now I am a big fan of sharing music... with friends.  It forms part of the substrate of culture we share together.  This request from a complete stranger, however, seemed different.

So I said sorry and as politely as I could suggested that he support the artist by buying a copy for themselves.  Or asking the artist directly for a free copy.

What would you have done?

RPM Fail

It's March. I don't have an album done.  FAIL

I have been grappling (ok maybe that's overstating a tad) with whether or not to analyze this failure here. One the one hand, the reasons for not finishing are just a litany of boring excuses but on the other hand maybe there's something that I (or you) might be able to learn from.

My excuses fit into several broad categories:

Time. This February, there was a whole bunch of things that all conspired to "steal" time. An awesome visit from my best friend (good times, not too much drink, a bunch of awesome rockin and some glow-in the-dark eggs benedict), an opera with my mom (Nixon in China, super awesome and mind blowing), sports with my son, my own skate training and so on.

Music lessons. In my guitar lessons, we are working less on technical playing stuff and more on compositional things. My teacher (I'm thinking to start calling him my (composing) guru rather than guitar teacher) is encouraging me to explore form and composing a little more deliberately. This is really good but a lot slower than I have tended to work. It will take time to develop a process or processes that work for me. For now, it's a kind of practice.

Equipment. My looper is still not back. It seems stupid but it has become part of my headspace and learning to work without it has been a distraction. A good and necessary one.

Desire and expectations. Desire to complete, if I'm to be honest was low. Desire to make something good was high. With some experience, my expectations have gone up. The irony is that the RPM Challenge is entirely about breaking out of patterns of self censorship.  I now realize that I didn't really have a self censor and the "sudden" appearance of one might just be a natural development in an artists travels. Nevertheless, I am starting to resist the temptation to immediately publish my work. This comes from a positive but time consuming experience in which I spent a day working on a track. At the end of that time I didn't think much of the result. But taking the advice I've read and given countless times I walked away and returned later and made a bunch of changes. The result is a massive improvement. There is room for more but it got me excited about making better work slower. And it was here that I realized that if I took several days per track that the clock would run out on this years RPM effort.

These are just excuses, I know but since failure is a much better teacher than success, I'm just trying to be a better student and own up.

Of Limbs and Kings

Just having my first listen to Radiohead's latest album, King of Limbs and I'm having some thoughts...

• I never like new Radiohead records for the first month or so; this one is no different, right on schedule to be my favourite in the April/May timeframe
• it is really cool the way this record introduces the sorts of noises made by my fellow electronic composers and me to a more mainstream audience
• it will definitely not be cool when somebody hears something of mine (or somebody else similarly DIY) and they say, "hey, that sounds just like Radiohead."

Hardware Sucks

Today disaster struck. I started unpacking a guitar and my looper (which had come with me to my guitar lesson) plugged it all in and was met with silence.

Debugging led me to determine that my looper (Digitech JamMan Stereo) was the problem. It was seeing signal but not passing it. More time lost determining that the metronome function was working but only coming out of the right channel. Plugged headphones into the headphone jack and found that the metronome was in full stereo.  Guitar was coming through the headphones but only on the left side. wtf?!?

It's a weekend so Digitech's support people are enjoying their time off. But I'm way behind in my third RPM Challenge. I need this like a hole in the head.

Lucky for me, I have a computer. With a host of looping plugins and apps. It's a pain in the ass but I'll find a work around.

So all the guitar players that swear by their stomp boxes and poo-poo all things digital... I've seen tube amps just stop working onstage, I've watched guys frantically trying to debug problems with their pedal boards. And I'm wondering, and admittedly I'm a complete beginner here, but why the fuck do you put up with this shit. Cause right now, I got a $300 door stop (maybe I'll get some warranty relief, we'll see) and I'm pissed and distracted from what I want to be doing, which is making music.

Update: I've taken it into Long & McQuade (a large Canadian music equipment retailer) and to my chagrin they're pursuing a repair.  Bummer.  A replacement/loaner would have been preferable but then I'm not a hissy-fit kind of customer (yet).  So hardware still sucks and I now I can't even hold the door open.