Picosecond Jitter's Journal

3:11am: Ed made me a "I (wireframe picture of a human heart) Machinedrum" shirt for my birthday. It is one of those shirts that inclines people to talk to you. In this case, it is super useful because it is mostly electronic musicians that talk to me.

Best present ever!

12:13pm: I'm 30! Woo!
30 feels exactly the same as 25. Maybe 26. It's a pretty good feeling.

I organized my mp3s in celebration. Musicbrainz correctly guessed most of them. The other 1500 I'm sorting by hand. Lots of them are non-album/pre-album tracks by you guys or random live recordings, but some of them are things that MB SHOULD recognize. So I've been contributing a lot of track info for various industrial-ish albums to MB.

I didn't know there was a databomb track on spahn ranch/retrofit! That's so cool.

12:23pm: I got my Machinedrum UserWave! Truly, it is a thing of wonder. It came loaded with some Swede-y urban beatz, but I will replace those samples with some transistor-transistor logic style noises. Then we will see whose brain sucks the most.

Oh - the upgrade. It's nice, they replaced the plastic LCD screen bezel thing with a glass one. When's the last time you saw fuckin' glass on a synthesizer? Probably in a starved-plate 12AX7 tube with an orange LED behind it. (take a close look at that "glowing" tube, kids. flicks on like an LED when you turn it on? LED.)

...oh wait, looks like they just replaced the window with another, also plastic window. Damn you, synthesizer making people!

I'm gonna have to yank the knobs off and put em back on less tight. Upgrade dude put them on too far and I can't click them down for fast edit. sure as hell don't want to send it away again, but those knobs are on tight. Tight knobs.

12:00pm: Wow, ReBirth 2 is free now. It was all part of my plan to get some 3,500-day warez. You can just download the CD image now at Rebirth Museum. You gotta fill out a registration form to make an acct, etc.

How fun is a laptop with just rebirth on it? BIG FUN

6:19pm: Figures that right after I got my machine back from an extended service absense they would release a hardware upgrade. Ok, so my machinedrum is going back in for the UserWave modification. Oh I love it so much... such depth of character and harsh range. I will miss you MachineDrum.

Ah yes, story with the repair dude is that he got in some kind of personal jeopardy with his family and immigration and being sick. Sounded pretty bad. He still should've emailed everyone. But he's a bigger elektron hardware freak than I am, so I will cut him some slack. That time. This time there will be no mistakes. I have... foreseen it.

Meanwhile I'm reading the citations for congressional medals of honor. They tell, in summary, the stories of the people who have received the MoH; why they deserve it. I can't believe the hellishness of war. We've got guys in the army who kept fighting after being hit five times by machine gun fire. I guess I knew all that, sorta, but seeing all their names written down makes my hair stand on end.

5:54pm: Jesus, repair dude finally sent me my machinedrum back. I don't know why, but that was really bugging me, not having it around. Sure, I've got all these potential soft-synths, but I like to PLUG SOMETHING IN TO THE MIXER AND THEN HIT THE BUTTON and then HAVE THAT BUTTON MAKE A NOISE. Once in a while.

Today's friday, I'm still sick (like everyone), I replaced the lightbulbs in my office and now it's all hot in here. major sad emoticons.

Hehe. I saw nine inch nails last weekend. Trent porked up a little bit since he quit drugs. Also saw Chemical Brothers. To the people in the Chemical Brothers tent: STOP TOUCHING ME. thx

2:59pm: You know, I like stuff.
I am thankful for:

Bananas! Holy crap, weirdest shaped fruit there is. And they're bright yellow! I guess they taste pretty good, too. Loaded with vitamin K! Avoid getting cramps! Eat your banananas.

Electricity: None of my favorite instruments would work without electricity. Sure, I could sit around playing the hurdy-gurdy all day, but it just doesn't sound quite as phat as the machinedrum.

Wind up robot: Wind up robot scares all the micro-ducks away, fleeing in a clot of horned colorful rubber, all a-quack. Thanks, wind up robot.

2:28pm: Well, looks like things are go with the drummer dude. Practicing with a live drummer is something else. You just make a suggestion, and suddenly it's in the rhythm track, in a split second. Writing songs sure goes fast that way, when I don't have to stop and open up the sequencer for editing or what have you.

Practice felt good, really good. I had to suppress a grin, because I didn't want to get too full of us right off the bat.

So, we just handed him a bunch of our tracked CDs, full of synthetic bonks and snaps. We'll see where we go with that.

Note to self: put in earplugs first thing next time. eeeeeee.

3:39am: Up all night, going through the big stack of unlabeled CDs trying to find an example of what kind of music we're supposed to be making which doesn't make me poke myself in the eye in shame. Hmm this one's kind of .. no wait, that's eraknid's.

Maybe humming and beatboxing will be sufficient to get the point across. No? Dang.

12:22am: My machinedrum is still in LA, and I'm getting kind of depressed about it. Whither thou, SPS-1? Some local d0odz have asked if I'd be interested in programming tracks for their reasonably popular riff-rock band. I would! Except my fat beets are AWOL. Well, I guess I'm all right with the other stuff.

Oh yeah, probably a new guy joining the band. He's a drummer, but also produces and masters music in his spare time. So that's THREE engineer/producers in one band. We're going to a) kill each other b) never get anything done or c) be totally great. I'm hoping for c, will report. Oh yeah, he's a Mac/Logic guy and I'm a PC/Sonar guy and Kris is a whatever/protools guy. Balanced or bad idea? Platform kumite! Fight!

2:26pm: All right! Today we're moving our collective crap into the practice space on, uh, guess it's Elliott Ave W. Then I guess I get to find out if the guitar rig still works. And the P.A.. And my earplugs.

So far, the other bands I've heard practicing there have been pretty rock n' roll. I get a little self conscious when I'm the only one with electronic wooping noises coming out of the door. Or off the stage, for that matter. Why do we always play at heavy metal venues?

(Answer: because booking gigs is so tedious that you don't really notice where it is you're playing)

1:06pm: You gear junkies. You cowbell fanatics. You need to see this.
Rad Monkey Cowbell Technology

kdarr sent it!

1:02am: So I'm supposed to be doing music and sfx for bcamper's unicycle platform game, and he says what I've come up with so far is "kinda dark". Today he asked, "could you try making a song which sounds like a commodore 64 sid tune?" And so I tried. YUNI PSYCHO.

8:32pm: My gear is touring the west coast without me! Serious. The MD is in Los Angeles. The Fly is in Vegas. I'm still here in Seattle! Well, the stuff is travelling for modifications and repairs. I'm just sitting here programming win32 screensavers or whatever.

Looking into a practice space, looks like we could share one with Jesse from Saqqara, since he's not gonna be using the whole thing right now. I'll be happy to play out, all this sitting around the house has really made me feel disconnected from the show, and I don't think it's a good idea to play out "cold" without having weekly rehearsals. First de space. Then de annoying phone calls and talking to club people. Then de flyers. THEN de shows.

Oh yeah, I guess I need my guitar and drum machine back though, huh. Come back, gear, come back!

12:23pm: I love T Rex and all but geez... this is what happens when musicians write their own software.

10:46pm: Yeah, I'm trying as hard as I can to make a small piece of work this month. All I came up with today, a potentially productive weekend day with no other responsibilities, was this guy.
Hard Up For Vocals mp3

2:40pm: Haha, kdarr, your patchbay label for the Juno looks like "JUNQ". I think your subconscious is displeased with the plastic synthesizer.

7:53pm: Ok, I got a behringer BCF2000. All I can say is: WHY DON'T SYNTHESIZERS COME WITH FLYING FADERS?!?!

Seriously. It's cheap. Its Mackie Control emulation for Sonar kicks some ass. I can control every parameter on the machinedrum with it, and it can read the controls back and the faders move to match, or display the value on the LED rings. I could buy 4 of them and still not spend as much as a mackie control, and I could chain them all together and have one giant faderboard for Sonar.

Downside: when you've got all those faders moving around at the same time, they make kind of a honking noise. Honnnk. HEHE. But then, you can flip the mackie control fader functions with the rotary functions. I can see why mackie's having a hard time. Ya know, I'd like to support them, but it's gonna hev to be with something else besides a control surface.

This month is NATIONAL ALBUM RECORDING MONTH sooo.. um.. guess I'd better push some buttons already.

and also did I mention I'm a perm job guy now? I don't give people perms. I am permanent. That's like, what people did before there were layoffs, right? Gah.

2:52am: Yaaayyyy it's working.

So K got his NFR copy of LIIIIVE, we ran it. CPU spiking at 60 or higher when in fullscreen mode. I open the computer, swap the OEM video card with some kind viper v7700 thing I had lying around, and open the same project, fullscreen. CPU does not spike, load at 1, even when waving the mouse around wildly. So. I guess 2D acceleration is important, even in audio-only computers. glbglhblblgblghb

Exercise 11: Colony mp3

4:02am: I'm complaining about hardware again! Yes, I got another computer which will only be used for audio production. I guess that makes it a "DAW". To transfer the 30 gigs or so of active projects to it, I thought I'd use a USB hard drive. Only, windows XP and this motherboard and the buslink USB1.1/2/1394 hard drive do not work together. At all. Fine. I'll go and get a firewire 800 card for the DAW, that'll come in handy soon enough.

So I go out to Fry's, carefully examine the pictures of the pci card on the box to make sure there's no sign of a cheap crystal + PLL combo like what a lot of firewire 800 cards are using, and get something pretty decent. I take it out of the box and give the pcb a look. Yep, high frequency clock crystal, that's good. But what's this? An ACM1117-1.8 voltage regulator plugged into the TI chip's supply lines? Christ. It supplies 1.8 V, we can expect that to fuck with functionality if I ever actually plug a firewire 800 device into it. (TI specifies a minimum voltage of 1.85, typical 1.95, max 2.05 V in their data sheet. someone has to go to the factory in china and knock some heads.)

Anyway. I'll return it after getting everything transferred or whatever. But wait! Can't you just plug a couple of firewire-having computer into each other and make a real fast network that way? Yes! But only if they don't run retarded windows operating systems. Boo. Oh, two Win XP computers can do it. But not a Win2K and a WinXP. So I'm doing the hard drive swap thing.

And It's doing the "delayed write failed" thing on the 2K box, in firewire mode. I'm now using it in USB 1.1 mode.

This is going to take fucking forever. 30,000 Megabytes into an idealized maximum speed of 12 megabits/sec? That's what, five and a half hours? Okay! Goodnight! Maybe we'll make a noise tomorrow!