I finally quit cigarettes after over ten years of about a pack per day. It's been Twenty days since I had a smoke. My taste buds are back! I can definitely feel the difference in my lungs when I work out. I used hypnosis from Paul Mckenna that really helped on that first day. My reward is upgrading my car stereo.
Didnt really have much money so I bought really cheap boss rear 6x9/front 6x.5 speakers and a JVC X250BT head unit. I can't afford a subwoofer or amplifier yet. A small cheap hundred dollar upgrade that was overdue.
No more CDs! My old car stereo was the last device that used a CD player. All my music streams from my ipod/iphone through bluetooth wirelessly. No need for extra usb or auxiallary2 cables to connect my music. No more wasting time burning music to cds or connecting cables. As soon as I get in my car my ipod/iphone gets connected automatically.
The system sounds much better now. I actually enjoy driving in traffic better. But the speaker are underpowered by
not using an amp and distort badly at volumes above 30. The JVC receiver
only puts out 20W per channel. I will eventually put in a sub/amp in the back. That will be my reward when I lose 40 pounds.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Just got tickets to go see Björk at the Hollywood Palladium on Jun 8th. Initially i had tickets to her Hollywood Bowl show but the seats were not that great. the Hollywood palladium show has gen admission right up front. I only have to get there early.
This should be an epic night.
SX Furrian MN P90 modified, new wilkinson lok tuners and a p180 bridge pickup and blade humbuckers. Painted headstock black,new 500k pots, redid all wiring, copper shielded. needs straps loks fret leveling new nut and maybe string rollers and new bridge. Guitar only cost me 2 hundred but modifications cost more.
Learning how to get a good setup for microphone. On melo test I realized that recording through the acoustic guitar's preamp sounded horrible. Recording this way doesn't pick up any of the nuances of the guitar vibrations. I only had a Shure BG5.1 condenser mic to use but sounded a hundred times better.
Sweet spot was about at the sound hole and fretboard about 10 inches away or more depending on how dynamic performance is, Used Walden d610ce with Solid Engelmann Spruce top. Preamp sounds horrid for recording. A lot of computer noise in background. I suppose using a laptop instead will fix this issue. I lot of clipping when trying to find acoustic sweet spots. Very boomy when playing bass notes on acoustic. Must position mic further away for the heavier sounding and hitting parts. Must install a brick wall to protect new monitors.
Single loop using the roland JV1010 and jamman stereo looper. Don't remember what settings I was using or the key or the sound patch. God my laziness is gonna bite me in the balls one day. Sounds like something in tron to me. Gasp O no.
Recorded in Ableton original bpm 98.52 upped to 105 bpm. Ableton drum kit Kit-LowLoudSquashed-Stick.
Roland JV1010 sounds. 110 bpm but various original BPMs. Original loops recorded in Jamman pedal. Loops used: Instructively Believing1 and 2(103.09bpm). Robing Elephants 1 and 2(103.47bpm), Near the Complex and Founding Makers(91.12bpm). Ableton drum kit used "Kit-OldSchool-Stick" izotop Ozone Plugin. Ableton Church reverb use in effects. Key of A harmonic minor (mostly)
Well This experiment worked well. Found a new recording method. I can record song parts loops by using Digitech Jamman Stereo pedal. A pedal I got to loop parts to learn to play drums with since I can't play two instruments at once. Finding anyone to play music I'm interested is hard not to mention the scheduling differences that always get in the way. I record parts into the pedal using guitars and a Roland JV1080 module keyboard. My bass amp is still blown so the bass parts are synthetic Ableton bass instruments. Which didn't sound too bad. The experiment was too see if I can actually use any of those parts for actual recordings. My first problem was tempo issues. The jamman pedal does not have any way to input the bpm.
Welcome Ableton Live. Loops are 'warped" into the correct bbpm to fit your needs. Hitpoints can be moved also. It's so intiutive to getting stuff done instead fiddling with cubase's stupid browser or melodynes long processing time and too much time taken away from the creative process. Thank God for ableton I didn't want to spend the money on a Boss RC5 pedal that can input the BPM manually.
Stats
Key A Harmonic Minor
BPM ~102 speeds up during the end.
Time Signature 4/4
VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS-Keys-Clavi Crybaby, Bass-80s Bass String
VIRTUAL EFX-Ableton Reverb Cathedral preset, Izotope Ozone 4
REAL INSTRUMENTS-Custom Telecaster copy- with high output guitar fetish dual rail pickups and 1000k pots. Tricone Resonator guitar or cheapo Lyons acoustic plywood.
REAL EFX- Digitech RP255, Digitech Jamman Stereo.
PROGRAMS-Ableton Live 8 suite, Wavosaur to convert stereo to mono loops.
W.I.P. Still needs vocals and some live drums probably. That's gonna be fun. Also add some vibrato/bends to the bass parts and end of bars. Need to reinstall Windows 7 64 in Lenovo T510 laptop. I can use more ram but Ableton is a 32 bit host, so I might only gian an extra gig of ram to work with. Might be good to take all that bloatware out anyways.
Need to buy-Mics to record drums maybe a condenser, possibly mixer, AB pedal, New KRK studio monitors. Need some hi quality cables maybe from guitarfetish. Mic stands.
testing melodyne, originally recorded on guitar, midi generated from melodyne. input too low but detected decently, really sloppy. Must edit original melodyne analysis better. midi into ableton piano reverb.
Well I'm finally back to creating some new music. I have a ton of new gear to get inspired by.
017 and 20. 020 by rolie wrote this today used the sampler as an instrument. Going back to ableton. Using loops in cubase is a pain with the browser being such a nuisance.
017c2 by rolie I tried to quantize the previous track. I was never happy with it, It sort of lost it's original feel.
017c by rolie I wrote this a year ago but never uploaded it. I think I found my original sound method. The idea came about from watching a documentary about Girl Talk. This guy cuts up original tracks and mashes them up together. I like the sound but he has to really on a lot of other people's music. It'd be nice to do that with your own tracks. So this track came about from trying to figure a method to get that sampled instrument sound with the different releases for each sample. I basically cut up some random guitar playing into separate parts and assigned them to each key on the keyboard, I used kontakt as my main weapon. Using this method I was able to get different sounds from what is possible before. It's sort of a way of retain that original feel but played mechanically with a sampler. I could set the start and end point for each separate sound. I guess i should document this method since I forgot exactly how I did it kontakt.
Here's the second version. A ton of changes. I was about to scrap this song. I then added a cimbalom, hammered dulcimer. It just needed more melody to break up the monotony.
The intro sounds a lot like the Björk song, on the pagan poetry single, Domestica or Batabib. One of those songs is really wet. I used the Sylenth synth with the ARP doves preset. I just love that synth.
I finally made cubase crash, but I don't think it was cubase's fault. It was more of a bug on my part. I tried to drag and drop a sliced event into kontakt. I could do that with groove agent but kontakt doesn't have that 'drag and drop' functionality. I still used kontakt to slice up a drum loop and reamp to different keys. I read this article about how to sound like Squarepusher. Computer Music wrote it but I find it comical that Tom Jenkinson probably doesn't even make beats like that. I think it was just to sell magazines as they put a picture of Tom on the cover, headlining "How to sound like Squarepusher". No one can sound like him. Like trying to sound like Hendrix, Yeah Stevie Ray covered his songs but it doesn't anything like Hendrix. It always sounds like somebody playing Hendrix. I'm starting to sound like a shitty pretentious artist again.
I doubled the acoustic guitar, added another drum track, using CM's "Squarepusher method" lol. Added more sections to mid part. Sometimes I'll be editing something in a loop and that loop will just sound decent. So I Split the event from Loop region and Insert silence and double the loop. Almost forgot, I finally used this Ibanez bass that my cousin traded me. I used to make fun of my cousin Mark because I was jealous of his bass and how he acquired it. His boss just gave it to him. I used to poke fun of him since he doesn't know hjow to play bass yet. Anyways I will trade my 5 string bass and some cash for it. I really like the active electronics on it. That plexiglass 5 string bass I had just didn't sound right. Thought it was broken when no sound heard but it just needed a new battery for the active pu.
Still sounds a little disorganized, Might need a new bassline or mixed better.
[soundcloud url="http://soundcloud.com/rolie/016-1" params="show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=cc0000" width="100%" height="81" ] Here's the first version of the song. I started to sound like crap whenever I wanted to add anything. I tried to mix up the melody with mixolydian and lydian scales. Something I've never done before. I've always wanted to learn modes but couldn't really grasp it. Joe Satriani wrote this article in Guitar World. I don't even like Joe Satriani music, I kinda despise guitar wankers. He compared the scales on the same root. He stressed hearing the differences and how the Lydian has a flatted 7th compared to major scale and the Lydian has a raised fourth. ! note changes the scale but keeps that major sound to it. What the hell am I saying, is that right? Did I mix those up.
Cubase again, yeah no crashes in over 2 weeks. This version is pretty stripped compared to 016b. I 'm gonna add more percussion to B.
Done on cubase. No compression or limiters. Mostly just some eq tweaks and panning. read this article with Rashad Becker about mastering without compression from http://www.monolake.de/interviews/mastering.html. Very inspiring. he has a lot of valid points. I've been guilty about just putting on a mastering plugin like to maximize the volume and take away any sort of dynamic. The tempo is down to 90. Seems like anything I use at such a low tempo sound exactly like ahem, Sigur ros, oh noes. I audio warped the guitar parts that were originally at 120bpm, something I couldn't do in ableton because of artifacts. I could get away with it in cubase. I think I'm turning it a reverb nut.
Heres the long list of reverb plugins Iv'e used, ArtsAcoustic reverb IK Classic Studio Reverb Audio damage EOS EpicVErb SIR2 Redline reverb IR2
I thought I had relegated to Ableton Live but Steinberg releases a an update to 5.1.1 that officially supports Win7. First time in awhile without crashes. There's a new project startup graphic that seems ok. I didn't really try that hard but it does seem a lot more stable, or maybe it was because I disabled Windows desktop manager. So for now I'm back with the editing power of cubase. I'm also digging the redline reverb. It's just so damn simple and sounds original and doesn't stress my hardware so much.
Mixed 013 much better. EQed all the channels using the Voxengo spectrum analyzer as a guide. I can get a realtime visual of the eq and make adjustments. Used the frequency ranges I found from Computer music. Mix is much clearer and you can hear a lot of things that were muddied from the original. The first had overwhelming bass that kid of took over the whole track. The Nylon guitar can now be heard during heavy section. Added some hard panning on audio.
Still learning how to mix but I think I'm heading in the right direction, well maybe. I didn't think mixing was this hard. You really need to grasp certain things I would have never learned on my own. The music industry loathes the internet but I think true musicians can really really appreciate the wealth of resources available to them with a click of the mouse. I think Trent Reznor nailed it on the head when he said that the studio isn't just place to record but also create music.
Well I've settled On Ableton Live for my main DAW . The work flow is very intuitive. The Browser alone is such a treat to locate clips. The workspace isn't cluttered with a ton of windows like cubase. Live also runs a bit more stable than Cubase, crashes just kill any sort of creative mojo. Cubase has superb midi features and transparent audio warping quality. In the end things are much more productive on Live.
One feature Live didn't have was the custom shortcuts, but that has solved by using AHK, autohotkey. Workflow should definitely increase. Found this from the Ableton forums.
Cubase didn't allow custom keys on certain keys eg ` and tab caps lock etc. Scripted it to allow the tilde key to toggle between two wrokpaces
!1:: { MouseGetPos, xpos, ypos ; get mouse position MouseClick, left, 21, 118, , 0 ; Live devices browser MouseMove, 66, 117, 0 ; move to first item in browser Sleep 200 MouseClick, left, 65, 136, 1 , 0 ; select first item in browser MouseMove, xpos, ypos, 0 ; return mouse to where it was Return }
!2:: { MouseGetPos, xpos, ypos ; get mouse position MouseClick, left, 21, 142, , 0 ; plugins browser MouseMove, 66, 117, 0 ; move to first item in browser Sleep 200 MouseClick, left, 65, 136, 1 , 0 ; select first item in browser MouseMove, xpos, ypos, 0 ; return mouse to where it was Return }
!3:: ; { MouseGetPos, xpos, ypos ; get mouse position MouseClick, left, 21, 165, , 0 ; browser #1 MouseMove, 66, 117, 0 ; move to first item in browser Sleep 200 MouseClick, left, 65, 154, 1 , 0 ; select first item in browser MouseMove, xpos, ypos, 0 ; return mouse to where it was Return }
!4:: { MouseGetPos, xpos, ypos ; get mouse position MouseClick, left, 21, 189, , 0 ; browser #2 MouseMove, 66, 117, 0 ; move to first item in browser Sleep 200 MouseClick, left, 65, 154, 1 , 0 ; select first item in browser MouseMove, xpos, ypos, 0 ; return mouse to where it was Return }
!5:: { MouseGetPos, xpos, ypos ; get mouse position MouseClick, left, 21, 213 ; browser #3 MouseMove, 66, 117, 0 ; move to first item in browser Sleep 200 MouseClick, left, 65, 154, 1 , 0 ; select first item in browser MouseMove, xpos, ypos, 0 ; return mouse to where it was Return }
`:: ;METRONOME { MouseGetPos, xpos, ypos ; get mouse position MouseClick, left, 180, 58, , 0 ; browser #2 MouseMove, xpos, ypos, 0 ; return mouse to where it was Return }
Early takes, ableton, reaper, cubase. Testing out features plugins, Cubase crashes all the time. Reaper has cool midi features but lack cubase's audio editing power and ableton's easy interface. Ableton lacks midi power and barely gets the job done. If I could only use some cubase's advanced midi editing in ableton then I'd be perfect. Sugarbytes Artillery, Izoptope ozone, Kontakt, sampletank(crashes ableton), tonehammer instruments are superb. Battery for drums seems ok but lacking any 3rd party kits unlike kontakt's endless supply. Cubase has the best Audio timestretching quality, hitpoints and warp sound full unlike the artifacts left from ableton's.
All the remix tracks are form midi songs I wrote circa 2002. I used music masterworks for composition
