mememiner.com

Well, I finally, actually finished a track. After years of sketches, experiments, half-efforts and abandoned ideas, I finally saw a track through from start to finish, and, -gasp- I didn’t hate it. I’ve sent it to a couple friends, and lo and behold, they think it’s “tight”, “mixed well”, “coherent”, possessing “flow” and a “head-nodder”. I’m not gonna link to this track. Linking to it would mean that I felt like it was finished, that it didn’t need any more work, that I was ready to release it to the world. I’m not, but I almost am. If you want to hear it, send me an email and I’ll consider sending you a link. The funny thing is, I didn’t have to give up being picky about my music or anything. I was picky, and it’s still almost done. It’s not the most amazing track ever made, but I feel it’s all those things my friends said. On a big system, the bass would slay. It would definitely wreck heads. So, that has led to some increased confidence about where I’m going with this music shit. I think finishing this track was the result of two things: one, getting to the arrangement a lot sooner in the compositional process and two, it’s the payoff of an extended period of committed study to the instruments I play, and synthesis/sampling techniques in general. Feels good.... Read More »

[Update: Click on the picture to see the full comic.]... Read More »

Way back in the day I used to be a starry-eyed follower of the Grateful Dead. To those who knew me then, or have heard the tales, this comes as no surprise -- but for those who have only known me in the post-Dead era would probably have a hard time putting me in a tie-dyed t-shirt and Birkenstocks behind the wheel of a VW van. I do assure those of you in the latter category that it is indeed true. Fact is, at one point the Dead were a very important band to me, the gravitational center of my universe for both extremes of good and bad. I had some of the most rapturous moments of my life at Dead shows, and some of the most extreme lows as a result of living the lifestyle. For a long time, the Dead's songs and allegories were apt tales to weave the story of my life around ("Sometimes the songs that we sing are just songs of our own..."). Eventually though, the power their music held over me would start to fade, not surprisingly around the same time that Jerry started hanging out with Deborah Koons and doing smack again. I remember being at my 2nd-to-last Dead show at the Pyramid in Memphis, TN in 1994, and listening to Jerry butcher his lines all night. It used to be that Jerry's performance at a Dead show was like an ice sculpture -- it would start off the night an unformed block of ice, but throughout the night a series of artful, delicate maneuvers would transform that block into something magnificent. The ice sculpture that resulted would be affixed in my memory forever as testament to the man's guitar-playing genius. On that particular night, however, it seemed as if Jerry was drunkenly attacking the ice block with a chainsaw, letting loose with burps and farts of his signature guitar tone. His work had heroin written all over it that night, and not in the good way. I remember, before walking in the show that night, hearing two snippets of conversation from the crowd outside the venue: one, a girl with her finger in the air, despairing that she might not find a ticket -- "I HAVE TO FIND A TICKET!", followed by the response: "What the fuck do I care if I get a ticket? I've already seen 200 shows. I'm just here to make money." I think I knew right then that the dream was dead. Flash forward to the present day. After struggling with Etree announcements and saturated FTP servers for years, archive.org announces it will start hosting the Grateful Dead archives. Thousands of soundboard and audience recordings go up seemingly overnight in lossless format. I did my best to download as many shows as I could, starting primarily with the shows I actually attended over the years. I start looking at Grateful Dead books again. I'm considering getting the entire Dick's Picks collection to supplement the archive.org downloads. Thinking the archives will be around for a while, I stopped downloading. Big mistake. On November 22nd, apparently at the request of Deborah Koons and Phil Lesh (who I guess is in charge of GDP these days), Archive.org took down all of it's lossless archives, audience and soundboard recording alike, and announced that it would no longer be offering anything except audience recordings in (the worthless) streaming mp3 format. Quite coincidentally I'm sure, this follows close on the heels of news that Dick's Picks was going all-digital, and that the Dead had inked a deal with iTunes. The emergence of archive.org's dead archive seemed to me to be one of the few promises of the internet age to actually bear fruit. I remember, back in 1991, writing to people who had placed classified ads in the back of Relix magazine, asking for their lists of tapes and hoping for first-generation copies from DAT. To have it all at my fingertips just seemed to good to be true. As it winds up, it was. The last 17 years were a good ride, and although my interest had definitely faded the last 10 years or so, archive.org had been a pleasant reminder of everything I loved about the Dead. Unfortunately November 22nd was a painful reminder of what I had grown to hate about them -- the sheer, unadulterated greed of it all. To see the ethos of the Dead's liberal taping and trading policies reach it's zenith with Archive.org only to be knocked down by greedy fucks who care only about the almighty dollar -- it's so sad, and it makes me so angry. So to Grateful Dead Productions, Phil Lesh, Deborah Koons and the rest I say this -- congratulations! You finally did what years of exceptional electronic music and sub-par wanna-be jam bands could not do -- you nailed the final coffin in my interest in the Dead. I will never, for as long as I live, buy another Grateful Dead product. I will never go see another Phil n Friends show. I will never buy a stupid, lossy DRMed track off iTunes, ever. I have too many good bands and producers and honest human beings to support with my obsessive music collecting habits. I think BoingBoing.net got it right when they wrote: "This is pretty disappointing. Deadheads made the Grateful Dead some pretty substantial fortunes over the years by acting as unpaid, volunteer evangelists for their commercial offerings. This is a genuine betrayal of the audience from a couple of greedy people who would line their pockets at the expense of the memory of the generous, mutually beneficial relationship between the band and its supporters." Exactly. Nothing like betrayal to utterly destroy a relationship, Mr. Lesh. [Additional thoughts: I forgot to point out the unbelievable irony of a band that once employed John Perry Barlow - a founding member of the EFF - as a lyricist undertaking such a backwards move. I hope that he comes out with a statement at some point with his position on the matter.]... Read More »

So I recently came across a situation in which it became clear that I was going to be able to run either Windows XP or Linux FC2 on my old Dell Dimension workstation (it having been relegated to second PC status with my acquisition of a work-supplied Shuttle XPC 3.2GHz P4 a couple of months ago), but not both — I could not get FC2 to properly install a boot loader if Windows was installed first, and Windows wouldn’t install if FC2 was installed first. I decided that one OS was enough, and settled on Fedora Core 2 (I actually began with Fedora Core 3, but backpedalled when it became clear that I would not be able to get any audio applications compiled and running under FC3, but that’s another story). Then I remembered that I would not be able to run Recycle, MESA or Millenium to dump samples to my Akai S2000 with if I was running Linux (not that i really use the ole S2000 much anymore anyway, but it was the principle of the thing), and had a brief moment of panic before I decided I would give VMWare a whirl. My friend Paul had mentioned to me recently that VMWare seemed to have exemplary device pass-through capabilities, so I thought to myself: “self, I wonder if I can get SCSI sample dump running under Windows XP while it’s running under VMWare emulation?” I downloaded a demo copy of VMWare, and proceeded to install it, then Windows XP, then after a brief confusing period trying to get bridged networking mode working, got the network running under NAT and all seemed to be well. I thought that it might be a good idea to get VMWare configured such that it’s audio output would work with artsd, which is the resident sound system server under KDE, and a flip of the google later, I found vmwaredsp and quickly had VMWare piping the Windows XP audio out to the artsd daemon. Then, I wondered how I would get VMWare to recognize the Akai sampler as a valid SCSI device, so I probed /var/log/messages where I found that Linux was recognizing the sampler as a generic SCSI device at /dev/sg0. I then went through the VMWare config settings, and added a new generic SCSI hardware device to my Windows XP virtual machine at, where else, /dev/sg0. After a quick chmod to allow read and write access to all users for that device, I fired up my Windows XP virtual machine, and lo and behold, it came up in the “Found New Hardware Wizard” complete with accurate vendor string. Realizing that while this was a good sign, it still meant absolutely nothing in terms of securing my goal, I proceeded to install the ASPI layer for Windows XP, and then Recycle 1.7, and rebooted. With fingers crossed, I fired up Recycle and asked it to look for the S2000. It found the sampler! I then loaded up the Windows startup sound, chopped it, saved the MIDI file to the desktop, and arrived at the moment of truth: Would it send to the sampler? I clicked the lightning bolt icon and watched in amazement as it sent all 7 slices of the Windows startup sound to the S2000. It worked! How cool is that? Subsequent tests with MESA and Millenium cemented the conclusion. Windows XP run under VMWare absolutely supports SCSI sample dump to Akai samplers. Not only that, VMWare is fast as hell. I benchmarked it with SiSoft Sandra, and found that as far as the CPU was concerned, Windows XP running under VMWare on my 1.2GHz Celeron Tualatin was about as fast as a 1GHz P3. Not too shabby.... Read More »

Music blogs I've been reading lately: blissblog (Simon Reynold's blog -- pretty decent, except for that one moment when he blogged a totally incorrect correlation between Winter Music Conference and the death of dance music (TM).), Fluxblog; gabba - POD (not actually a blog about gabber, interesting design); new(ish); Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again (with a blog named this, how can you go wrong?); Mystical Beast; The Tofu Hut and finally, Tyrone Shoelaces. Happy reading. (note: none of the above-mentioned blogs are necessarily electronic music-oriented; all are by bona-fide music lovers)... Read More »

http://www.allen-heath.com/xone/ 2 effects send & returns AND MIDI? me want.... Read More »