Hi I'm Warrior Bob

So today the guitar class that I’m taking had a little mini “open mic night” that was somewhat deceptive because there was no mic to be open.  However, students were invited to come to the front of the room and perform anything they had prepared.  One of my friends went up and did a very groovy blues jam with another student (it was his first time playing live and he did fantastically), and I performed a simple piece I put together recently.

It wasn’t technically complex nor requiring of any skill, as it was three power chords repeated with varying strum patterns which I think is kind of my schtick.  However, I did haul in two guitar amps, a wah/volume and a distortion pedal, a whole bunch of cables, and a Nintendo DS running a copy of Dai Gassou Band Brothers, which was considerably more interesting.  The DS went through the wah and then the distortion into one amp, while I played guitar through the other amp.  Since I’ve never played before in front of people who I wasn’t related to, I believe this counts as my first live performance, and it was a rush.

I screwed up a bunch of times but the class really got into it anyway, and a lot of people who I look up to told me they were really impressed.   And of course it felt amazing to play music that I assembled myself, and which I get into, in front of lots of people.

You traxinspace people already know about this since I mentioned it on your forums, but there’s a girl in the class who never smiles.  It’s a pity really since she seems like she’d be a really pleasant person if she wasn’t always looking disappointed or withdrawn.  But she smiled when I played my song, and that really kind of hit me.  My performance, however rough, cracked her shell and made this girl smile.

Call me sappy but that makes me smile too.

My blog is now a much more satisfying WordPress-default-blue-and-white.  That was some mean pink action going on there and I’ve no idea how I survived it.  Astounding.

I made the discovery today that my awesome electro-drumset can change the sound of the metronome that it uses.  This is fantastic because previously I had been using the default, which is an obnoxious voice with a relatively slow attack that counts “1, 2, 3, 4” and is actually pretty hard to play against.  But lo and behold, there exists a hidden menu where I can change it to all sorts of different sounds.  It’s like night and day now.  I’ve been playing with this set since 2005 and wishing it had this feature the whole time.  Know how I found it?  by READING THE FREAKIN’ MANUAL.  God I’m retarded.

This is equally silly considering that I have read the manual for my new B-Control, cover to cover, at least 5 times.  Granted the latter isn’t that long, but even still.  I also found out yesterday that Rebirth, the old Roland synthesizer synthesizer, is controllable by MIDI control signals.  It’s like a brand new program to me now, one that isn’t programmed so much as it is played.

The journey to the ever elusive “song I’m willing to put up on Traxinspace” continues.  It doesn’t help that some of my favorite musicians post there and it’s really kind of humbling when I’m blasting the competition in my room as loud as I can stand it as I write this (at the moment, TwiTerror’s vocoder/synthpop playlist).  It’s a good problem to have; I’ve found so much good music there.

Three days before my site turns back to a color that isn’t emasculating.

I have managed to sign on at the local community college running their digital music lab. You could say I am rather excited. While I’m really just a lab monkey, there is a certain sense of pride and ownership that goes into it. There are really only a few people who administer the lab. I’m number 3 if I count correctly. One is the professor immediately in charge, and the other is his boss who is really pretty hands off.  I have a fair degree of control and I think it will be a good chance to help a lot of people learn to do digital audio.

I’m no real musician, but I’ve aspired to be one for a long time. Some of you Traxinspace people have a pretty good idea how long.  I’m getting closer. I certainly never thought I’d have “music” in my job title though, even if it is just a temp job while I look for some real career work. I confess a kind of satisfaction.

So if any of you Folsom Lake College kids are looking to play with some music hardware, stop on in and I’ll show you the ropes.

For the last week I have had some kind of ear infection. According to people with degrees in identifying this sort of thing, I have a case of Swimmer’s Ear, ironic because I don’t remember the last time I swam anywhere. For most of the week I was basically deaf on the left side. I could hear some low frequencies, but many of them were the sort of thing that my brain can’t localize anyway, and so everything sounded like it was coming from the right, or wasn’t making any sound at all.

Since I’m all about doing things that make sense, I’ve spent much of the week playing with audio apps. I would really like to find a suitable replacement for my old standby Garageband 2, which came with my little Mac and has served as a suitable ground for trying out musical ideas quickly and painlessly, and learning the basics of DAW style programs. I’ve made some silly little tunes with it, nothing special at all, but I’m starting to want something with more features. More signal routing, things like effect automation, and Not Slowing Down the Computer With Freaking Animations that Don’t Need to Be There. I mean they’re fun and all, but I could use the power elsewhere.

I’ve checked into several apps, and I think the real killer features for me are effect automation, cross platform support (I use both a PC and a Mac and would much prefer to be able to go back and forth when one side gets a better plugin or something), and a good interface. So far Ableton Live, Aodix, and REAPER are looking like good candidates. Live is by far the most expensive but it’s just so fun to use.

Especially when you have some kind of MIDI controller. Not wanting to drop the money on something official, I spent all day today and most of last night writing a Pure Data patch to translate joystick inputs into MIDI signals. It even works too. It’s not fast, as there is significant enough latency to make me unable to play MIDI drums with it, but for triggering loops in Live, it works fantastically when I plug in my eight-dollar Beatmania controller.

Maybe someday I’ll even have good musical ideas to use it on.

Currently, like a bra from the 80s, my website’s header is electric pink in support of breasts.

My friend Kyle is doing it and he’s a pretty cool guy so I figured I ought to do it too.  Maybe it’ll help somebody out.

I’ve discovered that lately whenever I just kind of want to sit there and sort of zone out for a while, I either take a walk around the block or I start reorganizing some little part of my room.  Today was a day of the latter.  I’m not sure exactly what it was that I did, but now my desk arrangement is somehow more organized despite the fact that I actually added stuff to it.  It’s just that instead of a ton of papers and figurines all piled up everywhere, now I have keyboards and mice and Things With Dials on Them.  It all looks very slick, and I can now welcome my Commodore 128 to the world of computers that I have in front of me instead of in a closet somewhere.

And what do I do with my newfound creative space?  I draw sock puppets on napkins.

Truly, I am a man of ambition.

The internet was kind of fun tonight.  Thanks to the directions of the venerable this guy I have cobbled together a sort of ghetto talkbox for myself to play with.  It’s kind of quiet right now but it is definitely a talkbox sound, and I think if I just drive the speakers harder or build an amplifier or something then I will have it working.  I’m using a headphone driver right now so it isn’t really designed for wattage.

After all of this, I find out that Novus, who I’ve been listening to for some years now, has been playing In the Groove, and noticed my name in the credits.  It was neat to be recognized by somebody I respect, and also neat to discover that I’m apparently in the credits for both games.  Sweet.  StepMania still hasn’t figured out how little I did to help their project.  Ahahaha.  Little victories.

Tomorrow I think I will play with OpenGL some more.  I’m enjoying this whole ‘technical things that I don’t get graded on’ concept and it still feels like a novelty.

Well now.  It seems I have a blog again.  A generic WordPress blog to be sure, but still a blog.  Here I shall blog stuff.

Right now it’s all standard WordPress fare, but I’d like to see if I can’t start slowly mutating it into something more my own.  It’s nice to have all the backend work done for me though – I’m no web programmer but I do enjoy having things like dynamic content.  Some of it is a little much though, trackback URLs and such.  I have no real use for such things.  I just want a site where I can post things now and then.   Really, running a blog is kind of an egotistical thing anyway.

I’m no writer any more than I am a web programmer.  It’s just kind of fun.  Hopefully my friends will enjoy it.