Rain

My Sweetwater card keeps teasing me, and reminding me of all those 36-48 months offers...

Woke up the other day after one too many glasses of wine the night before and I was worried for a second.

Found a tube amp in my Sweetwater shopping cart, but apparently, I had resisted the urge to click the "place order" button. 

That's my version of living dangerously I suppose.

This will be an interesting watch. I'd not realized he was behind so many albums that I liked. The first record that comes to mind when I think of him is usually Ozzmosis, and I didn't like the production all that much, but the man produced Superunknown.

Not sure he mentions it but if I remember correctly, the Korn album was edited in Nuendo because Pro Tools had yet to catch up with higher sampling rates options and that one was recoded in 24bit/96k. Seems trivial now, but it was cool to see such a major production done on a native system back then.

I'll stick with The Exorcist, my favorite Christmas movie (and will be turning 50 on December 26th).

It's also my favorite Halloween movie, as the beginning of the movie takes places on Halloween. 

It's also my favorite Easter movie and my favorite Valentine Day movie, but I don't have a reason for that.

I've played that one so often that I'm pretty sure I could go through the whole thing relying on nothing but muscle memory almost 30 years later. In fact, I could probably go through 75% of the whole album on that alone. 

I'd just gotten my first half decent guitar (a Korean Squier Strat) and my first relatively decent amp (a transistor Marshall), and a wah, was deep into Hendrix and I couldn't get enough of these types of licks and that type of tone. Those were exciting times I thought, when music got back to sounding a little more "organic" for lack of a better word.

Man, how I wanted a Univibe, though.

Took the picture earlier this week when it actually saved the day. An old Alienware laptop a friend gave me. That thing is a tank. 

In terms of lifespan, it's outlived every PC I've ever owned. I can still load project, but I can't work with it, and if it's on for a while, the audio drivers fail (at least that's what I think that's what it is) and I need to be reboot it. 

If I could run Sonar 8.5 on a recent version of Windows that supports the plug-ins I use, I'd have no problem with it. I believe it's still one of the finest DAW softwares ever.

I know you guys hate Apple, but by comparison, I recorded this thing on my old 2010 MacBook tonight because I wanted to spend time downstairs by the fireplace and I wanted to mess with Dimension - no interface, just a USB keyboard. Plug it in and move on.

Remember how we used to have to reboot every time we hooked a new device and how we struggled with latency back in the early 2000's?  Now you just hook up your device to your laptop and you're all set, and latency isn't even an issue, even with the built in interface. 

It's not mixed or anything, just piled up tracks - I don't have monitors downstairs. And my cat insisted on assisting, so the camera moves around a bit... 

I did migrate from Sonar on PC to Logic on Mac back in 2010 - it wasn't so bad because I wasn't in the middle of a project, and I'd been using Logic on the PC for years and really loved the software. I simply began working on new material and only eventually started importing old projects during down times or when I didn't have any new idea to work on.

I still have an old laptop running XP and Sonar 8.5 in the other room, with all my pre-2010 projects, and every now and then, I pick one up, transfer the audio to a flash drive and rebuild it in Logic. Actually, I was just working on one tonight. Funnily enough, there was an issue with one of the tracks which had been created using Dimension Pro which is no longer available, so I ended up using an old MacBook Pro running Logic 9 and Dimension to re-record that one track, bounce it, and transfer it to my new DAW.

I'm glad I have the option to load the old projects even if I have everything bounced because it allows me to see what plug-ins and instruments/presets I was using, in case I need to try to replicate something. I'm guessing some day I'll no longer have that option, though. And that'll suck. I am still fond of the old Sonar, 've written so much music in it...

Whenever I see pictures of Regent Sounds, it never ceases to amaze me. From the first time I heard the first Sabbath, I had this picture of such a large space. But they recorded it in a frickin' closet. 

Same phenomenon for Ozzy's Speak of the Devil. I thought it sounded huge. And that seemed to match the photos I'd seen. But then I saw what those concerts at the Ritz looked like...

Expectations:

Reality:

Ok, so we know that a guy making fart sounds with his hands is too outrageous, but animal farts are ok.

Gentlemen, I say let us proceed without our investigation.

I'm doing this for scientific purpose only, to try and figure out what triggers YouBoob. 

A thread about farts. Just what this place was missing.

I'm serious.

5 hours ago, craigb said:

But, is that the "small" bus?  😁

Like, the Special Ed bus?

One of my favorites!

13 hours ago, hockeyjx said:

I don't think FB Marketplace is a good place, and not sure about eBay either. Any music store won't scratch but about half it's true value.  Because if I sold it for $3500 on reverb.com hypothetically, I'd still get $3185 in pocket.

I'm open to other ideas, I am just not aware of them.

FWIW, of course it depends on your location and if you're shipping, but I sold 6 or 7 guitars, a Marshall half stack, a few outboard compressors, smaller amps and amp stands, pedals, mics, and a Pro Tools control surface on FB and never had a problem. 

I felt that the good thing is that you can have a look at their profile and at least get a feel for who they may be, and decide whether you want to do business with them. 

One time a guy reached out to me for that Pro Tools mixer. Took a peak at his profile. No sign of him being involved in music in any capacity, and his occupation was "Gettin Money". Googled him and what I found was an article with a mug shot and something about criminal charges for traffic and some time he'd spent in jail, and even that he'd been investigated in connection with an homicide. 

That being said, I got to meet cool people. Sold the aforementioned Pro Tools mixer to a guy from Gogol Bordello and a guitar to a guy from Slash's band.

Don't any of you guys dare leave...

On 11/10/2023 at 12:06 PM, bitflipper said:

The late Old_55 (Jan) was there

Jan is gone?!! And no one told me... Ouch...

It's amazing how people you never even met matter.

Remember Ba-MIDI? Sharky went out of his way to find him, only to learn that he was gone. 

You guys better be around until I croak... All of you's.

Good job, I love it.

And I feel like a complete moron, although I already knew that my fields of interest were rather limited, so there were more chances of me knowing about the Vitruvian Man, Plato and words like Crepuscule than the highest paid athlete or the festival of colors in India.

Craig mentioned the time aspect, and I must say that even in cases where I knew the answer, I barely had the time to retrieve the information, and sometimes not at all.

That being said, I have an old brain (51), cluttered with tons of useless information - and it seems to rely more and more on the fact that data can be stored on a computer and recalled will, so it's getting lazy.

Thank you guys! I sincerely appreciate.

From an old project, but I just realized that everything in there is done with Cakewalk instruments. Figured I'd share it with my old pals on this board. It was recorded/sequenced in Sonar 6.

Essentially it’s just me squeezing as much as I could out of those two chords with each new “verse”, approaching them from a slightly different angle each time, as you would for a soundtrack, while trying to remain true to the macabre/70’s horror film vibe of the song for 4 minutes. And then the weird finale.

It’s called 1440 Monument Avenue, and it’s an ode to the now defunct Museum of Funeral Customs that used to be located at that address.

I used Dimension Pro for the piano - a patch called Alien Piano that I used to use all the time, tweaked just a little, and Z3t4 and Rapture for all the the synths. Roland Groovesynth for drums - layered with a few drum samples from Dimension.

It’s not properly mixed, but whatever EQ (used for sound sculpting purposes), reverb and compression plugins were used, it was all Sonitus (I’d been a fan of those way before Cakewalk acquired them from Ultrafunk). The only non-Cakewalk plugins would probably be two freebies: Camel Crusher (a distortion plugin) and LoFi by Ephonic. I say probably because I think I recognize the sound and I used those two in almost every project back then to tighten up things a bit.

I love that Z3t4 patch at the end so much! I think it’s one of the factory ones, although it could be something I downloaded off of KvR back then.  I’m not sure I even tweaked it at all (I may have tried to dial the reverb back a little but it’s still drenched in it). It’s so beautifully layered and so huge in term of frequency range, from the low end to the sizzling distortion on top. A thing of beauty, but it really needs all the space.

I imagined some kind of Dr. Phibes-esk character playing some weird organ-type of instrument, but that doesn’t sound like an organ at all.

I sincerely hope that Bandlab re-release those old instruments. They were such an integral port of my workflow. I guess this song is also an ode to them.

Oh and there's no video, it's just a pic. As much as YT sucks, it's still the best platform to share music, imho. It's just a song idea, anyway.

53 minutes ago, craigb said:

What's weird is that this thread had to be "approved" by a moderator before it would show!  Um, why??? 🤔

Posting ends need intervention supervision?

Skinny Puppy gave their last show earlier this week. I wanted to see pics on Facebook, so I typed "Skinny Puppy" in the search field...

Even after I typed Show Search Results, this remained at the top of the page.

I'm surprised they didn't call my nearest relative and send emergency services to check on me.

33 minutes ago, craigb said:

I'm a bit of the opposite.  Instead of using pharmaceuticals to make my ADHD tolerable to everyone around me (while causing me to be zoned out) I was introduced to computers when I was 7 by a very wise school principal.   This has helped me be able to do several things at once productively and it's actually far more difficult for me to get into "the zone" unless multiple things are going on around me.  I don't miss much either!  Besides making me very good in games (especially video games), this is part of what had me approved to go to the Naval Academy in Annapolis to fly F-14's.  Fortunately, I grew too tall (6' 2" is the maximum, but someone really short, like Tom Cruise size, is the best).  I'm 6' 4".  Ironically, I ended up working for a defense contractor right across the street from the Miramar Naval Air Base where and when they were filming Top Gun.  That said, indiscriminately killing people from thousands of feet in the air would definitely be against my current life views!  Heck, I've got cups and cards stationed around the house to capture bugs and release them outdoors (mosquitos do NOT get this favor! 🤬).

That sounds like a brilliant strategy on the part of the principal. Too bad there aren't more people like him.

And indeed, we are quite the opposite. I have attention surplus disorder. And my childhood reinforced that trait.

I grew up a solitary kid, spending most of my youth with my grandparents. There weren't many kids in that neighborhood, which is a good thing because I couldn't stand kids (expect girls - I had a very deep interest in the opposite *****, whether they were my age or whether it was their mother or even grandmother). Little boys were too noisy and hyper for my taste. And they weren't attractive, so, who cares... lol

The main attractions in our small neighborhood were a church, 2 funeral homes, a convent, and the cemetery, across the street, a mere 75 ft from our doorstep. And my grandparents' house totally belonged in that type of environment, what with my über Catholic grandmother, and her taste when it came to decoration - dark wood, tapestries, velour, red and gold, and all. We used to listen to the obituaries on the radio twice a day - that's where I got acquainted with Bach because the theme song was Air on a G string.

I liked drawing, painting, reading, writing, listening to music, and that kind of stuff. I remember spending hours sitting in the stairs staring at a painting of Piazza San Marco that hung above, and getting lost in there, and trying to reproduce it on a piece of paper with my pencils. If I was forced out of the house, I'd hang out in the cemetery. So I guess this type of environment reinforced a tendency to let myself be completely absorbed into one thing. I could spend hours on my bed staring at the ceiling and never get bored.

My other favorite places were the Church and the retirement home where we visited my great-grandmother every Wednesday. I was fascinated by the fact that she had everything she needed in that one room - a tv, a radio, a bed, a rocking chair, and books - and even her own bathroom! And people were bringing her meal. She never had to go out.

And it was quiet.

I thought this had to be the greatest place to be, after the cemetery. 

Surprising that I would become such a shut in, uh?

31 minutes ago, Notes_Norton said:

I've missed important dialog in movies because something interesting was happening with the background music.

This!

2 hours ago, Xoo said:

Miracles can happen 🙂

I've never been a big Yes fan (apart from 90125) but I do find it's good background music when working late at night - I don't feel the need to really listen to it in anger, but it's engaging enough to have playing.

That's one thing I never managed to do. I remember when I started working for that company in the 2000's and my colleagues were telling how cool things were there because they were allowed to listen to music (using headphones, obviously) while working.

For me unless it's something like a string quartet or a piano concerto, and what I'm doing something is essentially just copying and pasting, I just can't. And most definitely, anything with vocals is right out. 

Heck, I can't even listen to music when I'm eating. A movie or a TV show's just fine, but music completely pulls me in, and my brain's trying to understand and figure out parts, and I get all kinds of visuals, especially if there's guitar, it's like I see the parts being played.

The only exception would be when I'm doing chores around the house, but even then, I tend to drift off and forget what I was doing. Same in the gym.

That's it.

No more peyote in the desert for you, mister!

People who listen to Bieber and Rihanna probably won't be able to tell the difference. Heck, it might actually turn out to be an improvement.

Me I'm glad I have endless supplies of "new" old music to discover, stuff that I was too dumb to "get" earlier in my life. This way I do not depend on contemporary releases. Right now, I'm still right in the early days of the Gabriel/Hackett era Genesis - in my world, Selling England By The Pound has yet to be released, so I have that and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway to look forward to. It's a very exciting time.

Heck, maybe someday I'll "get" Yes.