Thursday, May 27, 2021

in fact, that strat is so heavy that it weighs more than my sg:


like, a lot more.

go back to the previous video, though, and check out gorgeous maple neck. like i say: nobody can figure out where the body came from, although it has a typewritten number on the inside of it, suggesting it's fairly old. like, just the font suggests 60s or 70s. but, it seems like somebody put the coronet neck on it.

one hypothesis is that somebody smashed it and put the coronet neck on to replace it, but that doesn't help us understand where this heavy hh strat came from to begin with.
here's the obese strat:

you could maybe call it an obese strat...
open concept basement bedroom, 1997-1999

- my parents moved across the city in mid-1997, and i lost the soundproof room in the process :(. i lost the drum kit & the tascam in the process, as well. however, i gained a computer with internet access and windows 95 (my previous computer had no internet access, and had windows 3.1. in fact, my first bedroom pc was shipped with ms dos 6.2 and wordperfect, the latter of which was actually reasonable, given that i grew up in ottawa (corel disappeared, but the big adobe building remained a presence in downtown ottawa for years.). i've actually kept up on the old software reasonably well, mostly because i never stopped using most of it: cool edit 96 (https://www.audacityteam.org/), noteworthy composer (https://noteworthycomposer.com/), the windows 95 sound editor, a hacked version of logic that never ran smoothly and a guitar tablature to midi program called "bucket of tab" (https://antisleep.com/bucket) were where i got started on this. but, this pc did not have the resources for even the most basic sound recording.

- i got an ry30 mid summer, to replace the drum kit. my dad was sad; my stepmother wasn't. that ry30 stuck with me until 2003, when i sold it to go to bc. of all the gear that got sold, that's the piece i think i most miss, and i'd love to see a serious attempt to emulate it. i can load samples into battery, but it's missing the point - this was a powerful little drum synth, and i made massive use of it for years, all the way to the end of the rabit is wolf period. that said, the reason i sold it is that i felt i grew out of it, and there kind of wasn't a lot left to do with it. i couldn't justify spending $400 on it given that i can do everything with free plugins nowadays, but i will eventually replace this thing...

if you know where to get an actual vst emulation of the ry30 - not samples of it, but a vsti of the actual machine - let me know.

- a bass reappeared. i don't remember the model. it was green, and played very smoothly, which was necessary because i have freakishly small hands (to this day, i play a mini ibanez bass).
- i actually synced the noteworthy composer sequences with the ry30 parts manually because nobody told me i could sync them automatically. so, it's all very meticulous, but using very simple hardware. i would have had a basic consumer grade soundblaster in this thing, and the initial sequencing is all using general midi. it's for that reason that i went looking for general midi a few years ago and came away with bandstand, by native instruments (a very big company in music creation circles):


bandstand was central to the recordings i did over 2014-2016, because i needed a way to emulate general midi using updated sound fonts. this has been discontinued, and i think it's the last attempt by the industry to save general midi for recording, as it seems that the standard nowadays is to use specific sample libraries rather than a general sound font library (and native instruments suggest the use of kontakt, instead). i think this is unfortunate, myself, as i liked the standardization of being able to take a midi score and plug it into a daw, but the industry doesn't seem to be interested in scored music in much of any abstraction at all anymore and rather more interested in just creating textures out of existing sound. so, the standard nowadays is to sell you this pile of violin scratches, rather than a collection of violins to sequence - and tell you to hire a violinist instead i suppose. but, of course, i still have soundblasters i can track if i need to. i will eventually install kontakt on the 64 bit machine, as the experiments i had with the 32-bit machine were just simply that i needed more ram. but, i actually found that kontakt was unnecessarily inefficient (it loads everything on start-up, even if you're only using a fraction of it) and that the freeware sound libraries actually even sounded better....

i would like to find an update for bandstand, but nobody seems to really want there to be one. this seems to be something people have moved past, and something you're going to need to curate old software for if you want to hang on to.

- the jx-8p & tascam 4-track both show up about this time, with the jx being my only and primary keyboard for years after. this is of course the last version of the roland juno series, and combines analog style juno sounds with more modern digital sounds. the jx has been keyless for years and driven by a dx100, and i've had a midi frontend installed on it for years and never used it, but this is a vsti of it in case i want to sequence it (i could of course sequence it manually, too):


i should also look into something called "zenology" when i get my windows 7 machine back up and can start looking for evaluation copies.

but, i suspect i'll keep programming it with the little window, as that's what i'm used to doing.

- later programs included hammerhead (a 909 emulator) (http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/introduction.shtml), sound raider (a noise generator) (https://web.archive.org/web/20060721182502/http://www.andyw.com/zip/raider.zip), goldwave (for extra effects processing) (http://www.goldwave.ca/), granulab (https://www.abc.se/~re/GranuLab/Granny.html), coagula (light-sound synthesis) (https://www.abc.se/~re/Coagula/Coagula.html).

- my aunt sent me back a flute from a trip she took to india that shows up on several tracks

- somewhere along the way, the cassette deck stops working properly, and a song is constructed out of it.

- it was some time in late 1998 that my dad asked me to go to songbird with him to help him pick out a guitar for my sister, who was going through a difficult phase. as mentioned, she had been doing a lot of piano playing since she was very little, and now wanted to play guitar and was threatening to run away from home if she wasn't gifted with an expensive brand name guitar (in fact, i think she was trying to get my dad to buy her boyfriend a guitar, and i don't think that ever clicked). so, my dad got baited into buying her a guitar.....which she didn't accept, because it didn't have a brand name on it. and, it definitely pissed him off, yeah. meanwhile, i continued to play my entry level ibanez, right? it's worth pointing out that my sister was a delusional, spoiled brat at this point, but i really never said anything about it. the guitar i picked out has yet to be properly understood by anybody i've presented it to; it seems to have a coronet "batwing" neck, the dual humbucking pickups seem to have been installed manually and the body, while shaped like a strat and built like a paul, is of unclear origin. so, this is a guitar that somebody seems to have built from parts. the reality is that i picked the guitar out from the store because it played better than any other in the store due to the beautiful neck on it; after my sister rejected it as not sufficient because of the lack of brand name on the headstock, i ran it off to my friend greg's before it could get sent back, where i let it sit until everybody forgot about it. it eventually found it's way back to my studio, and has been my main guitar ever since.

- while i never said anything about it, i get the impression that my dad eventually felt a little bit stupid about asking me to pick out an expensive guitar for my sister (who did not play guitar), while i continued to play a starter ibanez roughly ten years on. i didn't care about the brand name, but that frankenguitar i snagged from songbird had a beautiful neck on it, and i sure appreciated it. nonetheless, he seemed to realize, in hindsight, that it was kind of a shitty deal for me, and went and bought me a red sg, along with an electro-acoustic. the black guitar itself is somewhere in the sg/guild range in terms of weight, in the sense that it's lighter than a paul and heavier than a strat, but i've always treated it like a sort of a fat strat due it's shape and construction. so, in the end, i got three guitars out of my sister's hissy fit and she got zero. all three of the guitars start showing up in recordings over the end of 98 and start of 99.
let's go way back.

1996-1997 basement room

when i was a kid, my dad built a soundproof room in one of the basements of one of the houses he owned. i suppose he intended to use it himself, but he was a 40 year old man with a day job and it just didn't work out that way; i was a 15 year-old kid on summer holidays, so you couldn't pull me out of there. so, my earliest demos were recorded in this little insulated room i was lucky to have. what gear did i have that i could look for?

- i was using an ibanez guitar with a floating bridge. i actually don't regret selling this guitar, as i found the bridge to be annoying and i don't have the attachment to ibanez that a lot of metalheads might.
- i still have my ancient cheri amp
- i still have my zoom 1010 effects pedal, and wouldn't imagine anybody would want to model this. google suggests "no" on first pass. it was a beginner floor guitar effects pedal that...it didn't sound very good, or at least not as a guitar processor. i didn't know any better. it was useful as a noise generating device, even if it wasn't so useful as a guitar pedal. so, there's some great sounding distorted cymbals recorded through it. i would be interested in finding an emulator for the reason that it's so overwhelmingly noisy that it's almost useless in scenarios where it would be great if it wasn't. in later years, i've put the jx-8p through it and that's all i'd ever use it for nowadays. but, all my guitar parts used this thing, for years.
- my dad's friend larry left a broken mxr phase 90 (script logo.) down there that i still have. it still works, if you pay close attention to the pot on the inside, and i used it quite a bit. he just never retrieved it. hey larry, do you want your mxr back? he was a van halen fan; i was a corgan fan, and even at that age i understood the influence and the value of it. this is a classic pedal - it's both in the pod and in guitar rig - but i wonder if there's a standalone....

there's one attempt here:

...but nothing official, i don't think. if i was mxr, i would have this, for sure.

- there was a bass down there to start (i don't remember the model), and then there wasn't, so i bought a boss oc-2 to try to create bass parts out of my guitar, and it didn't work out that well. i ended up using it mostly for keyboard parts, but i sold it without getting too much out of it.

this is an emulation:

- my sister, who was a serious pianist at a young age, had an electric piano with some organ sounds and stuff. she was strangely propertarian about the item, and repeatedly refused to allow me to record in her space. so, i had to sneak into her room when she wasn't around. i eventually got the jx-8p...and she eventually got a grand piano parked in the living room, that was great to record on when nobody was home. i don't remember the model.
- her metronome is also heard a few times
- there was a peavey bass amp down there that i held on to for years and think my sister ended up with, in the end. i can get all manners of peavey emulation from the pod or from guitar rig, even if i actually prefer the sound of roland or vox amps.
- there was a drum kit down there; don't ask me about the details. again: i never saw him actually play it. in hindsight, maybe that was intentional.
- larry also left his tascam down there, and he did pick that up, along with an acoustic guitar that belonged to him.
- there was a graphic equalizer hooked up to a luxman receiver
- i never mic anything any more, but the mics i was using were dixon md-1178s, and i actually still have both of them. i have some mic emulation software, but this is something i pay very little attention to because i line almost everything in through the pod or the alesis (including the electronic drum kit), and almost all of my music is instrumental. i later picked up a very old altec 683 b, and it's the mic i use when i need one (and the mic sean used to record everything, as well).
- ....and my sennheiser 440-IIs, which i still have, were what i listened to everything through.
i think we'll be installing this, as well:

if that plugin works well in cubase, it could get a lot of use, especially on the lost symphony, as it would have been fundamental, if i had actually recorded it at the time.

if you're curious, this is how i tend to work - i go looking for what i need when it comes up, i don't tend to just download things and experiment with them when they're brand new.

but, i wonder if i should actually even go out and find all of the old gear that i've lost in plugin form. how possible is that? what is really missing, actually?
this soundcard is actually an older model than i thought it was.


it's at least designed for nt, so maybe the software might work, if i get the right peripheral for it.

but, it also has a firewire, so i wonder if i could drive it from the alesis....

right now, i just want to get drivers and script them.
the key shift in approach should be this:

it may be true that 24 bit is technically superior to 16 bit, but, in the end, it's, just, like, your opinion, as to which sounds better.

don't believe me? go ask that kid with a record player.

so, i want to mix towards an output, not just get superior quality for the fuck of it.

but, i need to understand what people are actually listening to, and the answer appears to be the following: spotify is currently upgrading from streaming lossy mp3 to cd-quality audio. and, youtube seems to be pushing downsampling. so, for right now, 16-bit seems like the way to go, still.
my previous build of the 32-bit xp machine had the soundblaster live drivers built into the os install. since putting the live back in the 98 machine (which i'm calling 16-bit but is actually also 32-bit) where it came from, i've put the audiigy that my sister's first husband gave me (he decided to be a douche bag mac user around '05ish, so he didn't want it) in the 32-bit machine to replace it. it also has what was the last line of m-audio delta series pci cards in it, which i got for very cheap at the end of it's lifecycle explicitly because it has an actual rca out on it, and the dac is dealt with right away kind of thing - it's about minimal amounts of conversion, although i later found out that the windows kmixer sort of ruins it and i have to connect via asio to make sense of that. and, i'm connecting an alesis 16-track mixer as a recording interface via firewire, as well as a pod xt via usb for direct guitar ins. old gear - like i said. and, none of this is going anywhere any time soon....

anyways, i didn't need to script up a driver install for the live because the drivers came with the os and the software didn't work on xp anyways, but i'm going to need to script something up for the audigy. i'm currently searching for an install cd, and will probably hold off on anything complicated until i can get one of those interfaces like i have in the other machine. the major reason i'm going to use this device is to make use of the dsp in it, which is intended for gaming and is consequently a little thicker than you'd get out of most normal audio-focused applications. a large percentage of the weird guitar and drum reverb i used from about 1999-2004 was actually using that eax as a pre-amp; i lost it when i upgraded to xp in 2004 and put it aside when i couldn't get it to work when i built the 32-bit machine in 2007.

but, i'm sorting through articles to try to find exactly what i'm looking for, and the obvious question presents itself - is it time to move to 24 bits?

wait. i'm recording at 16 bits? what? well...

see, this is my actual logic, here - the machine i did everything on until my system collapse was built to use 32-bit software, and almost all of the plugin software (like guitar rig) is written for 16-bit audio manipulation. so, what happens when you send 24 bit audio into software written for 16-bit audio? if it's well written software, it should actually stop you from actually doing it and tell you to downsample the audio or buy a new plugin. but, what most plugins are going to actually do is simply truncate the file and then spit it out with a bunch of zeros, meaning you end up downsampling your 24 bit recording to 16 bit by accident as you process it. and, you probably will not be able to tell the difference, as you're doing it.

on top of that, you downsample in the end anyways, right? see, that's the assumption. is it true? for now, let's assume it is. now, some people will tell you that you want the extra space for the calculations, if your software allows for it. ok. but, that's the rare scenario where you probably can tell the difference between 16 and 24 bit - when you've run the project through a thick reverb and filled all that space up with data. and, then what happens when you mix it down?

the answer is that you just delete it - and you've wasted your time getting something to sound great as a 24-bit sound file, only to have it sound entirely different as a 16-bit product. and, are you going to even notice, are you going to listen to a 16-bit file through your shmancy sound system? nooooo. 

oops.

so, i developed a policy of sticking to recording to the output quality. that is, i decided that if people are going to listen to the end result on 16-bit playback devices (or, god forbid, fucking speakerphones) then i'm going to mix them at 16-bits. logical, right?

but, how true is that, still? i mean, nowadays nobody listens to anything on cds - what they actually do is stream it, probably. and, are they therefore able to stream it at 24-bits? i mean, their hardware can probably do it.

the 32-bit machine that i'm reinstalling this morning will remain 32 bits and geared towards 16 bit recording. that's not going to change.

but, as i get around to building that 64-bit machine and wondering how i'll be recording into it, the question i'm actually going to ask isn't about maximizing recording quality so much as it's about trying to understand actual listening habits. i know that i still listen to everything in 16-bit. am i out of touch on this? if i am, and people are listening to 24-bit flacs on their phones, then i should adjust to mixing final outputs in a way that conforms to how they're actually going to listen to them.

if i mix everything in 24-bit and the world listens to it in downsampled 16-bit, i'm just deluding myself through the process - all of that effort exists strictly in a parallel reality that nobody actually inhabits. however, if i mix everything in 16-bit and the world upsamples it to 24-bit to listen to it, i'm missing out on an opportunity to expand the quality of the mix.

all the technicalities and specs are fun to analyze, but it's the user experience that i'm really concerned about.
ok, so that was a wasteful few days due to needing to undo the cops breaking my computer (yet again.), but i have my machine coming back up now. i was in fact able to isolate a crc error on the dvd; the reburn is booting from the dvd, as intended.

but, listen, you fucking idiot thugs...

the chromebook is the only machine i use to post to the internet and, so long as this continues, that is not going to change. the 90s laptop is being used strictly as a phone, right now, but will eventually also be used as a tv. and, the recording machine is kept off the network and used strictly to record and compose music on.

the computer you want to hack for kremlin codes is the chromebook. please leave my recording pc alone.

is that simple enough for you to understand?
yeah, the disc seems to have some problems, for sure. i mean, it reads some of the time, but sometimes it doesn't...
so, i was having difficulty booting the install media from the dvd drive and i had to figure that out because that's how this sits - i just leave the install media in the bottom drive and let it sit there, so i know what the most recent version is, and i have it available in case i need it.

but, as i was doing some troubleshooting, i started to suspect that it's the media itself that's corrupt. thankfully, i do in fact have a backup. of course. so, i'm going to try to reburn that and try again.

to be clear: i could install it from the blu-ray drive, but i don't want to do that, i want to install it from the dvd drive. and, the dvd drive seems to let other media boot, so it kind of has to be the actual disk itself. i think....
today's post is inri059, which is a theoretical demo for the acoustic rabit is wolf tour that the second half of the project was geared around but that never happened, and something i pulled together over late 2014 from existing parts of published tracks (me, myself..., psi, magenta, day) and demos of unpublished ones (penny shoeman,  jumped up and down) from the very last sessions we did. i'm not sure that sean even knows this exists (he stopped returning my emails quite some time ago), but it is a far better representation of what sean wanted to do. around the time we did penny shoeman, he even tried to bring in an emo-style guitarist (i did not know him and do not recall his name) and asked me to recede towards electronics and production, but i didn't have the slightest interest in the style and was happy at that point to sort of him let him go start an emo band if he wanted to do that...and convert the track into a techno piece, without him, instead. which i did - it's inri061.

these opinions may be jarring to people following this space that thought they knew all about me, but all i can say is that they weren't listening to what i said and actually presented and actually posted. while i grew up listening to and self-identify as a punk, and there was a brief period of art-school emo after 2007-ish (that included defeater, touche amore & la dispute, primarily) that i was able to get into starting around 2010-ish, i've been starkly critical of emo for decades and wasn't remotely interested in it at the time, at all. and, i keep posting links to abstract electronic artists like son lux, not to contemporary rock music, if it even still exists at all. if you thought i was some kind of emo rock star, that's your opinion of me forced down upon me, and not something i ever projected or ever embraced. 

and, it's frustrating because i know that this is what jon and sean both thought of me, too - and that they were both apparently disappointed to find out it wasn't true, in the end. i don't take responsibility for that perception, and i don't apologize for their disappointment - it was their own delusion, and they're the ones that ended up missing out. we could have produced interesting art rock, but they didn't want to - they wanted to be boring old, normal-ass, generic-as-fuck rock stars.

that said, insofar as acoustic demos are concerned, i happen to think this is pretty good, my own obvious biases around it's production aside. if there was more emo in the period that was written with this kind of detail and performed with this kind of passion, perhaps i would have been less critical of it. and, my dismissive attitude around it aside, i would have been happy to be a part of this - if it were realistic to perform something like this and maintain the attention span of the audience that gravitates towards it. in truth, a demo like this, and a performance that emulates it, would have been instantly requested to tighten up, and i would have no doubt gotten up and walked off.

nonetheless, as an alternative demo, i can accept this - and i created it for the reason that it is a better historical document, in some sense, of what was being envisioned by the other half of the project. this is being narrated entirely from my perspective, but i have somewhat of a responsibility to get the other person's perspectives across, as well....as best as i can reconstruct them, in as honest a way as i can. if the rabit demo is a unilateral decision that i know sean dissented on, perhaps he'd be more approving of this.

as mentioned previously, sean soon emerges as a sort of generic indie rock loser trying to emulate pretentious nonsense like the animal collective, and in the process ended up copying a lot of the techniques that i developed in these demos and then claiming he invented it himself. i've even heard rumours that he tried to take credit for some of the performances and compositions, particularly when presenting the recordings to females he had an interest in, but i never confronted him about that and do not know the actual truth of it (it would be sort of pathetic, if true). so, i suppose he saw the value in these recordings after all - and decided he could do this without me. my analysis of the the little bit that i've heard of the recording he did without me is that his arrogance was unfortunately rather blinding, and that it's not as good as he seemed to think it was, in fact that it even sounded like what it actually was (a total musical illiterate fucking around with gear he didn't remotely understand), but i haven't heard anything he did after he got over what was an understandably steep learning curve, given that he had absolutely no technical or musical training at all, if he ever even did get over the curve, if he didn't just give up, instead. sean's vocals do not appear on any further recordings.

i actually played bass for jon a second time in a project he joined as a second guitarist, and i'l talk a little about that in my period 3 run through, in time - that part of the story doesn't end here. 

====

something like this would have been the demo brought along on an acoustic tour that never happened. tracks 1-4 would have represented a live set over the summer of 2002, while tracks five and six are otherwise stranded acoustic demos (and may have been played as encores, where possible). the style could be broadly categorized as folk punk, but it also leans heavily towards the emo of the period. 

written and recorded over 2001 and 2002. mildly remixed in november, 2014 to make the tracks more presentable; nothing substantial was altered, and no new sound was recorded. released on november 19, 2014. re-released on physical media and finalized on nov 14, 2017. as always, please use headphones. 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2002, 2014, 2017).

released august 1, 2002 

j - acoustic guitar, voice (3) 
sean - vocals, lyrics