WarriorBob.com

I don’t finish music very often. This is probably because of the way I approach it: while I seem to be obsessed with music and the creation of it, I tend to come at it from a technical angle rather than an artistic one. I won’t call myself a “technologist” per se – I’ll leave that label for those who are more interested in labels – but the term isn’t entirely inappropriate. It certainly fits better than “artist.”

The first time I can really remember wanting to write music was when my dad’s friend gave me a 3.5″ floppy disc which contained, to my young ears, pure magic. I’ve never done drugs so this was the closest thing I’d ever heard. It was “Second Reality” by demoscene stars Future Crew, along with a copy of Scream Tracker 3 and a bunch of really neat s3m modules that I could listen to and take apart using the software. They were amazing – I had never heard this kind of electronic music before outside of computer games, and I found out that they were all made by individuals or small teams of people on their computers. Not signed artists or bands, but scrappy teenagers with a technology bend. Normal people.

Growing up in the 80s I tended to think that anything “produced” required faceless companies and huge budgets and couldn’t be made by ordinary citizens like me. That disk represented the first time I had found great music that wasn’t made in a huge studio somewhere. And if it had been, it wouldn’t have been the same.

And if these guys could do it, why couldn’t I?

Short answer: Because I Had No Idea What I Was Doing.

Music composition tools were starting to become more prevalent on personal computers at around that time, and there was enough of it available to me for me to have a go at it on my own. The great part about computer technology is that, with enough determination, you can really learn most of the technical concepts at home, no formal education necessary. Most software is at least somewhat self-explanatory, and if not, a bit of research and cleverness is usually enough to figure out what you’re trying to do, even if you aren’t doing it in the “best” way yet. Musical concepts are similar: they’re somewhat self evident if you stumble across them, and there’s no hole a bit of dedicated learning can’t patch. The important thing to remember is that I didn’t know this about music, and so after making a few recordings that sounded like a beginner violinist and a synthesizer being thrown down some stairs I decided it wasn’t something I could really do, much as I wanted to, and I didn’t sit down to learn any theory until almost ten years later when I’d graduated college.

Anyway.

My interest in music began with electronic tracks written by hackers that I listened to on a computer and then I went and studied for ten years, mostly math, and now I write and fix software for a living. My technological, analytical side has a far better idea what to do with anything than my artistic side does. I think this is why I’m so often trying to do something musical, yet so rarely finish any music. I know what I like, but I don’t know how to get there.

I’ve never put much faith into “tricking yourself into doing something” but we’ve already established that my evaluation of learning ability is suspect. A couple of months ago, I started doing technical studies by watching Youtube videos and trying to figure out how certain sounds and music worked, on the logic that if I wasn’t going to make music, I could at least build up my technique in case inspiration struck. I learned a bit about varying lowpass filters rhythmically, and pairing this up with other effects like distortion to make those “wobble bass” sounds that are pretty popular right now. I took a fairly standard sample set from a 606 drum machine and tried to make it sound like outer space. I tried taking samples and changing their timings to make new rhythms. I learned that a Korg Monotron can make one of the most annoying sounds in the world if you listen to it for half an hour don’t put some effects on it. Pretty soon, I had made myself a collection of related sounds that I kind of liked, so I started experimenting with putting them together.

And it worked! The track that came out of all of this is called Flight from Dubai. I won’t claim it’s “good” (that’s up to anybody who’s still reading this wall of text to decide) but I like it, and it’s gone over well with the people I’ve shown it to.

In fact last night it was used last night by the bellydancer Firefly as the opener to her set. Firefly is one of my favorite dancers so you can imagine how excited I was. She was amazing as usual, and now I can say that I’ve written something worth dancing to.

Time to study some more, and get ready for writing something else. But first, I think I might have a drink and celebrate my small success.

I recently replaced my workhorse Toshiba laptop with a shiny new MacBook Pro, for the sole purpose of using it as a platform to run Ableton Live. It wasn’t so much that my old machine couldn’t handle Ableton, so much as it just wasn’t stable enough to use in a performance environment. It wasn’t, as the saying goes, the right tool for the job. This isn’t to say it was bad equipment; It was certainly passable for studio work. I mean, Katharine and I wrote Hurry Home on that laptop, which is probably the best recording I’ve ever had a hand in, but I had to admit that sometimes we spent more than our fair share of time fighting the hardware when it would crash or indulge itself in glitchery. ASIO, for all it’s wonders, feels like kind of a hack, and I wonder why Microsoft doesn’t just design a low latency audio system that runs out of the box. Their OS is cool and all but it doesn’t feel like it’s meant for audio work.

So I decided to save up my pennies and get this new laptop. And of course I love it. But unlike every computer I’ve come into ownership of before, this one didn’t come with the whizbang sense of multifaceted potential that computers often represent to people like me (“nerds”). This felt more like getting a new instrument. And really, that makes sense: the major thing that this laptop does that my last one didn’t is hold up in certain musical situations.

So okay, Core Audio is great, the hardware is more stable, and the the whole package is much prettier. None of this is really surprising. What hasn’t been as obvious has been the little features and details that come from the platform, particularly with Ableton. I haven’t confirmed this, but I’m pretty sure that Ableton was originally designed and developed for Mac OS, and the Windows version was a port designed to interest people like me who were more
casual and weren’t investing in the more expensive Macs. And of course this means that certain things have to be somewhat shoehorned onto the different environment.

For example, in with ASIO on Windows, as far as I know, the ASIO application takes exclusive control over the hardware. It is possible to have Ableton or Reaper fail to load the ASIO device on startup because I left a YouTube tutorial on in the background and forgot about it. Because it couldn’t load the device, I have to either close the DAW, close YouTube, and restart the DAW, or switch to DirectSound or WDM and deal with the latency. This has not been an issue on the Mac, since direct hardware access isn’t necessary – Core Audio apparently can reconcile multiple applications and low latency. I don’t know how it works, but it does. And it saves me time and frustration.

There’s a similar feature for MIDI devices. Just plug them in whenever, and go to town. On Windows, for whatever reason, MIDI devices are only checked on startup, so I have to restart Ableton if I want to plug in something new, or if I lose USB for whatever reason. I don’t know if this is an app problem or a Windows limitation, but either way it works better on my new computer than on my old one. This feature alone has been worth a ton, and has enabled some “oh shit I need this controller for this trick” improvisation that I would have never tried on the old system due to all the restarting.

Of course, nothing is ever easy. The biggest problem I’ve run into was’t so much a problem with the new environment, but just that I’m doing a platform shift at all! There’s no Synth1 in the Mac. There are other synthesizers that do similar things, but my old projects don’t reference them. At best, I can set up a small Windows box to host that program and act as an external synth. This doesn’t hamper new creations, but it’s a problem in the meantime. Perhaps it is a necessary headache.

The crux of it is that I’m very happy with the new setup and it’s nice to be using the software in the way it was, I think, originally intended.

Looks like I can update WordPress from my iPod. That was a pleasant surprise. I must admit that this device has been full of surprises since I got it and started trying to do things on it.

Probably the biggest surprise has been how much the “sleek and nifty” features actually have gotten in the way of using it as a music player. The touchscreen is pretty, but now I can’t really use it while walking around without taking it out of my pocket and looking at it. Usually, I just reach my hand in if I want to skip a song or pause it, neither of which are uncommon. Now, I have to click the button, slide on the screen to open it, and then control the player application from the screen. Not hard, just harder than it used to be.

But here are the cool parts: I seem to be able to run most of the iPhone apps, and have basic internet access through wifi. This reminds me of the Palm OS days, when it was fun to just see what I could do from the device. It’s often practical, sometimes not, but definitely fun, since you can pick it up and take it with you. Which for some reason is like crack where consumer electronics are concerned. Throughout the years I’ve used PDAs, music players, Nintrndo DS’s, and a TI-89 for much the same reason.

So finally I see what all those iPhone people were talking about. I’m just glad I don’t have to pay for a data plan.

I have acquired myself an iPod touch. Within days of acquisition, the 303 app on the app store goes free for this week. I consider this to be a matter of divine providence. And to think all I had planned to use was TouchOSC :)

For those of you interested in the Indie Music Cancer Drive CD I talked about before, apparently if you order them before March 1st you can get free shipping on the physical CDs, or a couple of bucks off the digital ones. Yay!

It’s been a hell of a lot of work, but I can finally say that I’ve finished this year’s submission to the Indie Music Cancer Drive.  This is the second year that I’ve submitted to IMCD, but this year is much more interesting for me, since this submission is also the first song by my new downtempto band, Fever Pitch, which my good friend Katharine and I started some months ago.

Pre-orders are open for this year’s Songs for the Cure CD at http://www.cancerdrive.org.  You can view the list of contributing artists at that site.  There are some pretty well-known names in there, in certain circles.  I’m very much looking forward to hearing what they’ve come up with this year, as there seems to be a push to step it up from last year’s disc, which had some excellent tracks on it.  we’ve been asked not to distribute our work for now, so as not to compete with our own project, so you won’t see my song on this site in the near future, and IMCD will be the exclusive distributor for the time being.  Apologies for the inconvenience, but we feel it’s the best way to help their efforts.

Pricing is variable – we aren’t selling CDs, we’re asking for donations to cancer research.  For donations over $25, we’re sending out physical copies of the album, which I believe is going to span two discs, considering there’re something like 30 groups contributing.  For smaller donations (I forget the cutoff) there will also be a digital copy available later.  The physical CDs will be a one-time pressing, so get yours in now if you want one.  All proceeds go to the American Cancer Society.

It’s been a few years coming, but I’m happy to present to you this, my first finished song.  It is an electronic rock song entitled “No Reason Not to Fly” and is available here as an MP3.  Other formats are available upon request.

Warrior Bob – No Reason Not to Fly

I originally wrote this for Josh Whelchel’s excellent Indie Music Cancer Drive album last year.  The version on that CD was written by me and mixed/mastered by Josh, but I’ve learned a bit more about how sound works since then and have, with his permission, decided to release my own mix of it for free on this site.  I hope you enjoy listening to it.  I certainly enjoyed making it.  It is the limit of my current ability.

My brother, having decided that he rather likes guitars, decided to take it upon himself to build his own.  And damn, he’s getting good at it.  He just came home with his third one, a purpleheart-encrusted thing of beauty.  I wish I was that cool.

At the very least, I can look that cool, since I happen to have his second one in my possession: a beautiful bass guitar that matches his fist lead guitar.  And it looks awesome.  And I do, by association.  Rock.

I FINALLY upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, which as of this writing is 2.8.4, and it looks like I can write a post from this little thing in the admin console. Let’s see what happens.

EDIT: Not like anyone reads this so it’s no worry.  :)

Gamestop was having a rather ridiculous deal over the weekend in which the bundle for Guitar Hero: World Tour was more than half off.  It seemed like something I’d enjoy, so I traded in my used and squeaky guitar controller and came home with a big box of new toys to play with.  I’m quite happy with the drumset – it’s sturdy enough, the pads are made of a well-chosen rubber that doesn’t make as much of a “thwock” sound, and the cymbals are passable.  In particular, the pedal appears to be impact-sensitive, as opposed to the proximity-sensitive Rock Band pedal, which I actually find I like, though I did not expect this to be the case.  The drumset also appears to have a MIDI-in port on it, which I do believe I will need to experiment with considering the implications for using my beloved TD-6 in such an entertaining game.

The single hilarious failure – and it seems there will always be one -  were the crappy drumsticks included with the set.  They’re lightweight, to match the admittedly small set, and are otherwise unremarkable except for the “Guitar Hero” logo printed on the side.  Also they appear to have a use-life of approximately eight minutes, as halfway through my third song one of them decided to become two of them over the course of several strikes.  It didn’t shatter or snap, like you might expect, rather it just sort of disintegrated, so that I was holding a stick in my left hand, the front half of a stick in my right, and the back half of a stick against my right palm.  It didn’t really affect my playing, other than distracting me via the WTF reflex.

Fortunately I had a set of Drum Circuit-branded Studio 1 sticks which were about the same weight and were within rummaging distance, but I’m not really sure what market they intended the pack-in sticks for.  As if giving kids (who love this game) little sticks to hit each other with wasn’t bad enough, now they’re giving them sticks that turn into spiky implements of jagged stabbery when their parents aren’t looking.

I wonder which suit at Activision thought that up.