bitflipper

Ugh. I expect more from Warren. While nothing in that video is a lie, he is clearly struggling to put a spin on it, resorting to literally equating "musical" with "quality". As in "Acustica stuff always sounds super musical; I've never heard anybody complain about the quality of what they do". By that logic, every plugin that does what it's designed to do qualifies as "musical". Voxengo SPAN, the musical spectrum analyzer! MNoiseGenerator, the musical white noise generator. Heck, I've got some speaker stands that are pretty high-quality - but I've never thought of them as "musical".

If I get to a point where I can't take care of myself anymore, I plan to move to the Philippines. There, I can hire a maid, a cook, a driver and a fluffer for less than the cost of an assisted-living facility in the US. Probably even bring in live music once a month. Fresh tropical fruit delivered to the house daily. All while enjoying a culture that actually respects geezers, er, elders.

Yeh, it is possible to do damage with a vacuum. But my CPU's heatsink was so clogged that I had to apply my big shop vac to it. Man, that fan was spinning fast! But dust is a computer killer. Well, not so much dust as heat. Dust doesn't conduct or radiate heat well, so everything runs hotter, not just components with heatsinks. Clogged filters impede airflow. Fans can stop working altogether. This applies to laptops, too, but hardly anybody looks inside there unless there's smoke coming out. But laptops have tiny intake and exhaust ports that take very little to clog, and laptops are more likely to be set somewhere with poor ventilation, such as on a bed. Or even a lap. In my case I think a contributing factor was a GPU upgrade. Fancy video cards are great for games, and it's the main reason people prefer the desktop experience over a low-fps console for gaming. But high-end video adapters generate a lot of heat, as indicated by the 2 or 3 fans built into them. The layout of my motherboard is such that the graphics card sat right below the CPU. That, and a sluggish fan and a dust-filled CPU heatsink probably led to the CPU having a meltdown.

I used to listen to several audio-related podcasts. One day I'm listening to an episode where one speaker is drifting off-mic and barely audible, while another speaker is pegging the meters. Ironically, the topic was compression. Another time the subject was acoustics, but sounded like it was recorded in an empty room with a mic 6 feet away. After awhile I started questioning whether I should be taking audio advice from people who make such awful-sounding podcasts. I switched to political commentary for a few months, but gave that up because my walks are supposed to be relaxing, not for raising my blood pressure. Nowadays I listen to audio books, especially comedy. A favorite that I return to often is George Carlin's Napalm and Silly Putty. Another is the original BBC radio production of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Also any of the old Firesign Theater albums, e.g. Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. These are like Greatest Hits compilations, in that I can recite them from memory but still enjoy hearing them again. Carlin's mellifluous voice is especially conducive to relaxation and falling asleep.

Not a bad idea. Unfortunately, he'd destroy them in a day, and even the cheapest musical instruments would add up over time. That's why I don't scold him when he drags in a tree branch. Got lots of those. Found items are generally fine by me. I only intercede when he's eating glass or ceramic garden gnomes. Lately it's been roofing tiles. I haven't figured out where he's getting them, but I may have to start locking up the ladders.

I can pull a rock out of his mouth and throw it as far as I can into the blackberry bushes. It might take him an hour, but eventually he will return with the very same rock. Kenny, you're not giving me any hope here. Your Milo is older than my Sirius, and I've been assuming the pup will grow out of his destructive phase. Two weeks ago the band was setting up for a gig when the drummer held up an unrecognizable piece of plastic and cursed. It was a crucial piece of drum hardware that my dog had somehow gotten hold of. After a moment of panic, he found a spare one in his tackle box of odds and ends and a crisis was averted. But he'll probably be packing up most of his kit now instead of leaving it in my garage between rehearsals and gigs. At least he (the dog, not the drummer) seems to have lost his taste for microphone cables. Fortunately the drummer is a dog lover too, living with five of them himself.

This is the first time in my life I've taken a computer to someone for repair. But given that the problem is likely the CPU, I don't want to buy a new MB/CPU just to find out. At the same time, anecdotes abound about inexperienced and/or unscrupulous techs screwing up systems or convincing customers their only option was a new system. So it was with some trepidation that I asked around and found a repair shop. As soon as I walked in, though, my reluctance was assuaged when I saw the place was populated, not with tatooed children named Jason, but with long-haired, bearded geezers. My tribe. In the end I'd arranged a CPU and RAM upgrade and a new case fan, at what seemed a reasonable price. Of course, everything seems like a bargain when you only upgrade every 7 years. But I'm going a little stir-crazy without a DAW. It's like being in a power outage, where you pace the floor trying to think of any activity that doesn't require electricity, and realize you have none. But I do have juice, just no DAW. I'm trying to entertain myself by programming synths. Today I figured out how to use one sustain pedal with two synths, a breakthrough. That epiphany was thanks to a page from the Nord manual, R.I.P.

Our bass player's out of town this weekend, so no gig and no rehearsal. That means a weekend to revive stalled months-old recording projects and maybe start a couple new ones. Which is how I spent Saturday. But you know how it goes, as soon as the stars seem to have aligned for happiness, something's gotta blow up. Yesterday the weather was nice so I sat outside with a coffee and read the user manual for my new synth. The sun was shining and my puppy was quietly - for a change - lying at my feet, as content with the day as I was. But my coffee was getting cold so I went into the garage/office/studio to nuke it in the microwave. When I came out the manual was gone. Took me a while to find it - shredded into a thousand scraps by the pup, who was apparently angry with me for leaving him without permission. I'd been putting off reading that manual. Hopefully, it's available for download. Minor inconvenience, I said. Back to a project I'd composed ages ago but had never started mixing. Have a little cannabis for perspective. It's a warm Saturday night, I've got a buzz on and I think this new piece is gonna be pretty all right. Should try out this new sample library, add some interesting percussion. Life can be good at times, at least briefly. Then my computer froze. A hard hang. The kind of hang where you have to unplug the computer. Then, nothing. Power supply seems OK, measured some voltages to verify, USB ports are powered, keyboard lights up, My fancy video card's cute RGB lights come on. I can hear my conventional drives spinning up. Displays are both working. But all I get is the initial BIOS screen and it's unresponsive. I note that I've been lax with preventative maintenance: the inside of the case is pretty dusty, the CPU heatsink is stuffed with dust bunnies, and one of the case fans is barely moving. At this point it looks like I may have fried the CPU. But without a spare motherboard to test - recently did a thorough housecleaning and tossed all my old computers - I can't be sure. Best to take it in to a repair shop, I guess. But I haven't ever done that before and have no idea who's a reputable fixit guy in the area. Regardless, nothing's open today, being Sunday. Maybe there are other things to do on a pleasant Sunday, or so I've heard. Take my puppy to the beach, perhaps. No, f*ck him. He shredded the manual I wanted to read.

Not if you're playing a guitar, saxophone or timpani. The closest they can get is the occasional brown or blue note. But they have no black notes. Come to think of it, neither do pianos. They have black keys, but the notes are rainbow-colored. F#, for example, is navy blue in my synaesthesiac brain. E is yellow, A is red, and only G makes sense, being green.

Being the kind of guy who reflexively drives against the arrows in the parking lot, I went at it in reverse: I'd already spent a few hundred dollars on Melda stuff before finding out about the existence of the free bundle. In particular, I have no paid equivalents for MOscillator and MNoiseGenerator, which I mainly use for testing other plugins. My latest freebie find is called Darvaza, a fancy auto-panner/mangler.

Not a Reason user myself, but it seems unlikely that registry permissions would interfere with graphical elements in any application. The registry just holds small pieces of data and is mostly only modified during installations. Things in there that are routinely updated by programs (e.g. the last 10 projects you opened) are written to a part of the registry reserved for per-user data, a place where Windows assumes that if you are that user you have permission to write there. Sorry, I don't have a hypothesis as to what the problem is, only that it's probably not related to registry permissions.

Wibbles is right; George should have said "mean", not "average". As in "you can feel superior to the average mean person, because there's a chance he may be dumber than you". No disrespect to Mr. Carlin. We could sure use him these days. To quote one his most famous lines: "****, ****, **********, ************, ****, ****, *****".

Woo hoo! Sign me up. But I also want fat and crunchy, and, um, wide. Extra points if it's endorsed by a famous engineer who "helped" to design it and couldn't have been nominated for a Grammy without it.

I have fewer plugins today than I had ten years ago, and I could lose half the ones I still have and not miss them. The only category that continues to grow, albeit much more more slowly than in the past: sample libraries. But it's been years since the last time an acquisition truly inspired me to be creative.

I'm technically not retired yet, because you don't just retire from a sole proprietor business. I say I'm "semi-retired", because I still have a job but I just don't work very hard at it anymore. But to answer the question: yes, since entering into this minimal-work phase of life I spend far more time immersed in music. I play in a band, I compose and record my own music, contribute to bapu's Citizen Regen project, and even set aside time to just sit in the sun or lie in bed listening to music. At my age I am well aware that the finite number of hours left in my life are rapidly ticking by, so I've become increasingly picky about how I spend them.

A couple of my favorite film score concerts: Hans Zimmer Live in Prague, and Joe Hisaishi in Budokan. Both epic, but the latter especially so, with a huge orchestra and choir. I got turned on to Hisaishi years ago; my granddaughter's all-time favorite animated film was Princess Mononoke, and we watched it together many times. I was so impressed with the music that I had to read the back of the VHS tape box and see who the composer was. Followed by a trip to the video rental store and then binge on Japanese children's animation.

Thanks for adding that link. I said "Dave Grohl" but it was actually Mike Portnoy that I was thinking of, and I was just too lazy to look up the video. There was another example in the back of my mind that I couldn't recall the details of, and that was someone relating a story of Eric Clapton picking up a random budget guitar at a music store and playing it. When asked what it sounded like, the storyteller said "like Eric Clapton". Maybe you can fact-check that anecdote as well. Given my leaky memory, it could have actually been Steve Vai, Jeff Beck or Carlos Santana.

Well-said, Paul. Ever seen the video of Dave Grohl playing a pink Hello Kitty drum kit? Anyone who claims you can't make a great record with only stock tools just doesn't know what they're doing. Every time I hear the phrase "musical compressor" I just want to gag.

In defense of Pentagon...it was, and still is, a great way for beginners to learn about classic subtractive and wavetable synthesis. It was actually fairly sophisticated for its time, with features that weren't common in other early software synthesizers (e.g. oversampling, formant filter, polyphonic portamento, user-loadable waveforms). The only reason it's "obsolete" is that Microsoft made it so when they started locking down the registry for security purposes, breaking many products' installers.

Are "new chords" even possible? I think I've played every chord imaginable, even if many of them were by accident.

VIP Section at The Eagles Concert Breaks into Brawl During “Take It Easy” https://consequence.net/2022/06/brawl-the-eagles-vip-take-it-easy-watch/ I don't feel at home in this world anymore.

Never lost it.

We didn't have a van at first, and had to hire someone to drive us to gigs. Our drummer's dad offered to buy him a VW bus. But the drummer, Rafael, grew up in Puerto Rico and had never driven a car before, never had a driver's license or instruction, or had any idea what a clutch was for. So the rest of us traded off driving duties, not wanting to risk giving him driving lessons with our precious gear loaded in the back. And loaded we were. That little motor wasn't meant to haul so much weight. Every trip was a slow trip. At one point, we were pull over by the Polizei for driving too slowly up a hill. We all pretended not to speak German, so he grumbled something about keeping up with traffic and sent us on our way. Cops in Germany were mostly pretty cool. They would stop you on the sidewalk and ask where you're going and make you show ID, but then wish you a good day. We had a long drive from Frankfurt to Munich, at night, in winter. But a few hours out of Munich Rafael insisted that dammit, it was his van and he was going to drive the rest of the way home. So we stopped at a Gasthaus and everybody but Rafael downed a number of beers with Schnapps, with the intention of sleeping through the certain terror that was coming. With 5 of us aboard, 3 could fit up front and 2 had to travel horizontally, lying atop Marshall cabs. Planning to sleep anyway, I took a spot in the back, atop my cushy Kustom cabinet with the stuffed Naugahyde. The night before, we'd played in Bitburg, at a large US air base near the Luxembourg border. That night, I'd had an unsettling dream; the van was spinning around and I was being assaulted by flying mic stands. So in the morning I convinced everyone to take all the gear out and re-pack it in such a way that we wouldn't be crushed or impaled in an accident. No one was happy about that, but all agreed the move seemed prudent, even if seating would be less comfortable. So there I am, trying to sleep with the aid of alcohol in the back of the van, but every time I closed my eyes that dream came back and I was again spinning around in the van. Except that on the third time, I opened my eyes and the spinning didn't stop. We were actually going in circles, then the van hit a guard rail, jumped it, flipped on its side and slid in the snow for a good 50 feet before stopping. The side doors flew open, and the only thing holding the amps from exiting the door was my Vox Continental. When we stopped, our roadie was on his knees in the snow, in the doorway. My poor organ was bent in a U shape, supporting the weight of all our gear. I had to crawl out through the back window. What had happened was we'd come over a hill and there were two cars blocking the Autobahn from a fender-bender. Rafael, who had only recently seen snow and ice for the first time in his life, panicked and slammed on the brakes. Anyone who's grown up in a snowy place knows exactly what happened next. The van was totaled. Rafael then called his dad in Nuremburg. I don't remember how, as this was long before cell phones. Poor Ralph, he was sure his dad would be extremely angry. If you've ever known a Puerto Rican dad, they don't take no sh*t, and his dad was a hard-as-nails Army sergeant with a mustache that he trimmed with a Dremel tool. He scared all of us. But Ralph's dad was cool. The kind of guy you'd want as your platoon leader in combat. He calmly told us to stay with the van and he'd send someone. He called some contacts at the base in Ulm, and they sent an Army tow truck. We're talking a serious tow truck that was designed for pulling BIG trucks. Our crumpled VW bus looked like a sad minnow on a hook, dangling from the back. They drove us to Ulm and let us sleep in the brig. Next morning we called our old contact back in Munich to come pick us up. Despite the accident, the only injury sustained was by me, when I slipped on the ladder climbing up in to the monstrous tow truck. The organ, though, never fully recovered and had a noticeable bow to it until its retirement. But it still worked, a testament to Italian construction. It was only the first of many calamities experienced during my rock 'n roll road journeys. Every band has such stories. This one's remarkable only because it was my first. And one of the few road tales that are G-rated and can thus be told to a mixed audience.

It's more likely they'd have seen his band than mine, as we mostly played in and around Bavaria with an occasional road trip north. I don't remember the name of his high school band, I'll ask next time I see him. My first Munich-based band was called Last Hopes Lost (with a mushroom cloud as our logo). The second band was called Bilbo's Tired Head, from a line in The Hobbit. Everybody'd ask which of us was Bilbo, so that became my nickname for many years. We were booked to play the Frankfurt AYA at one point but it got cancelled and when we arrived there was just a note on the door. This after driving all day down from Bitburg, but we were young and full of energy so we just jumped back into the van and headed for Munich. Wrecked our van on the way there, but that's another story.

Even if you just have a passing interest in film scores - and who doesn't? - this is a must-view. Yeh, much of it is obvious observations such as how a violin section made the Psycho murder scene scary, how motifs are used to establish characters, how the score sets the mood. Most of you will spend the first few minutes wondering when the film's gonna get to the meat. Yeh, we get it. Music's important to storytelling. But the music's really good. I was amazed at how many scores I knew from films I'd never seen. Never saw Superman or Dark Knight, but I fall asleep many nights listening to their scores.