Time marks failure

The other day out of some masochistic impulse I put on a album I did in 2000 and much to my shock the disk began to skip. I checked for scratches and dirt but the disk was clean.

I put on someone else's work and no errors appeared. I replaced it with one from my label from 2001 and that one also skipped. I began to panic and quickly grabbed one from 2006 and it played fine, the same went for one from 1998.

With two disks, isolated. I sort of wondered whether the machine I was playing them in had become picky. Although not a technical nor logical explanation it does happen.

Let's step back for a moment. Since 1998 almost all music on my label has been sold online and in person as a packaged & burned CD-R. Although there have been a few releases where traditional manufacturing was done due to a slightly larger demand, the general rule is that my audience is small and technology finally got to a point where I didn't need to store slow moving product.

In that time I have never received complaints of quality nor failure, although when I first started to do product as a made to order thing more then a few folks thought I was nuts.

Did I miss something?

This has to be a prank.

I was under the impression that the music industry was in the process of a significant change and for the most part everyone kind of knew there was much less money being spent in all directions.

I also thought that we all are now in agreement that there has always been too much bloat and we had to cut all that out in order for creative professionals to get paid.

Did something change or are these folks operating in a totally different universe where bands actually have more holes for corporate predictors to fuck em?

Stuff and more stuff

It's amazing how stuff breeds other stuff for people like me.

A few years ago I stepped away from buying stompboxes to concentrate on building my modular Moog, of course I have to continue feeding my other modulars as well. I can see my Wiard and Frac doubling and my Euro continuning to bloom as the Moog reaches something like a cross between a III and a 55.

Meanwhile I am still looking for the right P-bass and there is always a few more mics that I must have in order to be ready to record period accurate stuff.

It's a sickness like any other addiction and what's worse is I can justify it as long as there is an album at the end of the year.

The Egg is dead long live the Egg

The Egg has been the nickname for my eMac, which I used for light work and interweb stuff.

I was tired of the space it took up and the monitor jumping and I decided to pull it's hard drive and plant it in my Mirror Door G4. I have to say the implant worked great, I now have two bootable internal drives (which probably isn't the best idea) and everything is in one nice safe place.

It's a reminder of how easy the Macs are to use, fuck around with and survive.

I wonder when I'll be posting that this whole thing was a horrible idea.

The Egg Will Die

The clock has begun to tick. Soon I shall crack open The Egg.
I will harvest it's innards and toss away it's empty shell.

NAMM Oddities

Mr. Barry Wood's the Other Room treats us once again to the best of the odd.
This is the only thing I personally wait for during NAMM season.
Go get you newest NAMM Oddities!

Minimoog is a beautiful thing

For anyone who bought their Minimoog back when they didn't cost a whole lot and weren't worth sending to "someone" to be fixed it is either a bad memory or an ongoing love affair.

I bought mine for about $300 from Hirsch Gardner at Daddy's Junky Music (MAIL ORDER!) around 1990. If I remember correctly he was selling it for a friend, he was told something about how it had had some sort of Tom Oberheim upgrade, whatever that might have been has been lost in my memory banks.

The unit sounded great from the get go. The keys a bit squirrelly and the tuning took a moment. I think a previous owner had been a rock star or maybe even a working musician but it hadn't been used in a while.

Over the years I have never done anything but play, clean and every blue moon or so calibrate and surprisingly it seems to get better with age.

I'm sure this instrument could use a professional overhaul and in doing so we might find out what weird mods by previous owners. This being my Minimoog and the only one I have ever owned, I probably wouldn't be able to spot some differences.

I had this on my mind today because the pitch wheel had been bonkers for a while and I finally cleaned it up and now it can do what it's supposed to. It is a great instrument and despite what limitations it may have, it belongs solely in the same class as the few real classics that have maintained their thaang since time began.

Over & out...

when shit isn't bad enough

Articles like this one in Rolling Stone Magazine, who have always been known to be really "with it" speculate about the so called volume wars.

These "wars" that producers and labels are supposedly in to fight for our attention are causing mastering engineers to squeeze out much of the sonic detail and frequency content by over using compression. This "battle" that is raging is apparently due to the fact that so many people are downloading their music as MP3 files and the file format has a limited bandwidth.

O.K. so we're all clear on this concept that is being put out there just as we are all clear that the MP3 is the devils tool, blah blah blah.

So what I don't understand is why the fuck anyone would even care when the standard for compact discs hasn't improved since they introduced it in 1982 (yep nineteen eighty two) -check wikipedia and see what they say.

16 bit is shit, it wasn't good sounding when it came out and the only reason people aren't complaining now is that their fucking ears have been scared from listening to music in this crumpled up tin woodsman kind of way.

-Generations of mutants can't tell that they aren't hearing most of what they paid for and should be hearing.

So next time some duche bag brings up your stolen MP3s or how loud the new TJ Blowyouz disk is, you just tell em that you are waiting for a higher bit rate before you commit to dancing.

studios?

I will pretty much use any excuse to record with my band. Since we don't leave anywhere near each other it is only an occasion that can bring us together. My upcoming 40th birthday is just such a thing.

Once I got a sense that my somewhat unwilling comrades were willing to indulge my artistic fantasies once again, I began to look into studios.

With the proliferation of cheap studio gear filling people's homes and the real studios needing work I was pretty convinced the minimal requirements that I have to cut the basic tracks would be easy to meet and I would have a number of studios to choose from.
-Hell no!

Amazingly concepts like live drums, isolation and decent mixer are just old fashioned. I was picturing bringing in a portable set up, using their space, drums and montoring -nope.

O.K. Now bare with me for a moment.

All I want to do is record three people. One playing bass, one playing guitar, one playing drums (small kit -two mics). So if my math is correct that would be four tracks plus a fifth as a guide vocal.

I would like to record straight to PT (Mac) with a safety two track mix going to DAT or something and maybe have everything bussed to 8 Track half inch (as if that was even an option)

Somebody send me a sign.

Death to the 8500

After over 10 years I finally stopped trying to justify keeping my 90's PowerMac 8500 which I bought when Cycling 74 released MSP. It was the first application I needed a PowerMac for. David Zicarrelli actually went to the trouble of helping me choose a computer from the newish used models. -That should tell you how small and how supportive the Max world was at that time.

Despite being one of the worst designs Apple had ever come up with in terms of the ease or lack there of with which one could open up the computer and update parts, it was a sturdy and great computer.

Tonight I wrestled out the hard drives, the Sonnet card which I had used to run the machine as a G3, the USB card and of course the Audiomedia III (which I never felt sounded as good as the II). After that stuff was sort of dusted off and bagged I brought the carcass down to the basement.

I have to kind of wonder whether Mac users tend to have not developed past the anal phase. I don't know whether anyone has looked at computer user profiles to see which one is more likely to use a computer long past it's prime but I bet it's the same one who save gross unmentionables in jars.

BTW I have updated a few times over the years, I just kept finding extra uses for the 8500.

Next I plan on PIMPING MY EMAC.