so, a compressed audio file (an mp3) reduces it's size by throwing away information on the high and low end. running that through an eq that exaggerates the low and high end can compensate for this mildly. it's not as good as an uncompressed source through a flat eq, but it's better than a compressed file through a flat eq. but, when you put an uncompressed file through an eq designed to compensate for compression loss, it's going to sound absurd.
there's actually been a change in mixing philosophy recently, where producers in certain genres are mixing their records to sound optimally through compression, throwing all kinds of wrenches in the whole thing...
at the end of the day, you're right: there's an eq in foobar and there's probably an eq on your mp3 player, but not all eqs are created equally (the one in my sansa is kind of weak and was not able to boost the lows as powerfully as my bass boost headphones were).
ExpensiveGarbage
Soooo..... you're just sitting here having a conversation with yourself?
deathtokoalas
the truth is we're all really conversing with ourselves.
ExpensiveGarbage
Yes, this is I can agree with.
ImActuallyABanana
well what you have to understand is that when an mp3 "throws away" information in the highs and lows, that information is gone. Beats audio exaggerating the lows and highs isnt exactly a good things. Beats audio is boosting the severed highs and lows... its not adding, its boosting.. so basically, your boosting highs and lows that sounds like crap.. you get me ?
deathtokoalas
if you look at the response on the phones, it actually cuts the lowest registers and boosts around 100. this is consistent with an "mp3 bass boost". i have a pair of sennheisers that does the same thing, but it's marketed as "bass boost for mp3 response".
what an mp3 throws away is mostly outside the audible range, but it sort of bleeds over into the audible range in various ways. i don't have the numbers off hand, but it's not going to cut at 100. it'll highpass around 20 or something and then slowly reduce the information up to around 50 iirc. so you want that cut down bottom to cut out the noise, and then the boost a little higher to exaggerate the lost lows.
so, no. you can't boost information that is gone. it's just gone. it's not boosting a "severed" high or low. what's lost is lost. what's is doing is exaggerating what still exists in order to compensate.
it's not some kind of magical de-mp3 uncompression algorithm or something, it's really essentially a trick. but if they're anything like my sennheisers, it's a trick that works.
stated another way, you can mangle the signal under 50 and boost at 100 and get the effect of reconstructed bass, even though it's not what's actually happening.
if you're listening to really deep bass, you'll possibly be able to tell. but the average bass range is simply not that low. you're getting overtones and murkiness on the bottom. the overtones are gone, they can't be reclaimed, but you can fudge it by boosting a little higher.
i doubt the phones have them, but a little reverb box might be able to reconstruct a bit of those overtones. you'd be fighting with purists, though. fuck, i'd fight with you over that...
ImActuallyABanana
thats mostly what i said.. if you ever listen to an mp3, you can clearly hear that isnt not just the unheard frequencies being gone.. if that was the case, then mp3s would sounds great.. but its not. mp3s sound like shit in general no matter what bitrate they are. they lose alot of the frequencies that matter as well and with those frequencies completley gone, boosting the highs and lows will do absolutley nothing for sound quality
deathtokoalas
obviously, you can't make an mp3 sound like a flac by using an eq. that's not what i was saying. but, you can make an mp3 sound "punchier" by boosting the bass, and it will sound better to most people.
you can try it yourself. find a wave editor. i still use a copy of cool edit i "found" somewhere back in about 1998, but i think the standard free tool to do this nowadays is audacity. rip a cd to wav. pick something that's not deep bass music. then, run it through a high pass filter around 20 hz. you'll immediately notice that the rumble is gone, but that the track doesn't sound particularly different. then put it through a parametric eq that slopes from -50% at 20 to +50% at 100 and then back down again to 0 around 150. you'll immediately notice that it's punchier than the file that's just cut at 20, even though it's missing the subbass.
it's not a perfect comparison because the mp3 is losing some information up to about 50 (iirc). but it gets the point across.
ImActuallyABanana
ive done this alot and i can honestly say that to me, being in audio for 6+ years, i have never heard an mp3 sound even slightly better with any type of eq... its like compressing distortion, no difference. in reality your just turning up Crap. Ive had to take mp3 samples of things and put them in a new song (24bit/44.1k) and when you blend in that mp3 well in there, thats when an mp3 is tolerable. but yes your right, to some people(meaning regular consumers), boosting those frequencies on an mp3 would sound better. to them. not to us of course. i just hate mp3s in reality.
Randy Parsons
The compression rate has a lot to do with it. Unless you use a really bad compression people simply can't tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed. Even so called audiophiles. They have done studies, although they are kinda hard to find with Google. As for EQ. EQ to the room or to your 10$ earbuds or whatever makes it sound good to you. Beats certainly didn't invent the EQ. Many cheap earbuds have pretty horrible bass. I would always prefer to EQ myself instead of some 'preset' that Apple and Beats does. Not sure if Apple still does this on their ipods.
deathtokoalas
for those that are curious, the highpass (sort of.) does occur after the fourier transform (for the lowest frequencies), but this isn't the right place to get into the mathematics of the issue and such a pedantic discussion does nothing to address my argument. if you want to look into this, though, understanding the way the waveform is split in encoding will help you understand why more information is lost at 40 hz than at 100 hz and why there's still enough of the signal around 100 hz to boost for the signal loss in the subbass. i don't think i implied that mp3s literally highpass, and i apologize if you've misread me in that way.
fwiw, i wrote the following piece of music using wavelet and fourier transforms in partial requirement of a graduate level course in mathematics on data compression algorithms:
i just want to ask if you did an a/b with compressed v uncompressed sources regarding the bass?
the reason is that mp3 compression kills the bass. some time in the middle of the last decade, i actually bought a pair of sennheisers with a bass boost (and they were advertised and marketed this way) that was purposefully designed to counteract the mp3 compression. if you tried to use them in the studio, the bass was totally muddy and washed out. but, if you plugged some studio phones into the mp3 player, the bass sounded thin - reflecting the source.
deathtokoalas
but, just how bad are they? i've never heard them.
i'm not quite an audiophile. as a composer and heavy listener of complex music, i'm very concerned about quality, but i know most of the claims made by audiophiles are unable to pass double-blind tests and you usually want to take what they say carefully. i've been into high end sennheisers since i was in grade school, so i know what good and bad headphones sound like. i just can't think they're really that bad, not even with the understanding that they're mass marketed for profit rather than manufactured for audio purposes.
one of the things that's recently impressed me with my sennheisers is their ability to pick up the bow noise on a cello part. just excellent reproduction. but, is somebody listening to top 40 pop looking for that kind of response, or do they just want the bass to drown everything out? if your expectations are less (and dre's expectations may not have been high), you're going to test the phones in less stringent ways and ultimately not be able to tell.
there's going to be a cut-off point in terms of quality where virtually everybody says "this is shit", but that cut-off point is much lower for the consumer market than it is for the audiophile one.
so, how bad are they?
the other thing you have to keep in mind is that headphones nowadays are mostly bought for portable use, which means the source is probably compressed. are people really using flac? i doubt it. music that's....found...online is still generally compressed.
i was looking for a pair of sennheisers a few years ago for portable use and searched around a little and realized they're actually producing a completely different line of phones for it than their studio models, which are created specifically to compensate for the loss inherent in compression. i ended up going with a bass boost model. when i plugged my studio sennheisers into my mp3 player, i could hear the problems with the compression - on certain albums that i've heard hundreds of times and can play back in my head from start to finish. the bass boost alleviated that mildly (although it didn't help with the high end). conversely, i couldn't use the bass boost in the studio for obvious reasons, it just muddied everything.
i'm going to guess that the beats are probably a bit boomy, but it's a valid question as to whether that's a purposeful response to the compression and whether people are using wonky metrics.
but, i'm really just curious: how bad are they?
Stegmutt
Innerfidelity's review is a good place to start, although maybe a bit technical: http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/monster-beats-dr-dre-solo
deathtokoalas
that wasn't very technical at all.
it's beginning to confirm my suspicion that these phones are made for compressed audio, though - exaggerated low end, and a rolled off high end, where it doesn't matter due to the compression killing it.
i again have to reiterate that high-end companies do this, but they market their products properly. the result sounds awful from a flat source, but really brings the compression back to life on the bottom.
i can't argue they're not overpriced (my bass boost sennheisers were $100 (canadian) not $350), but are these reviews using them to do what they were engineered to do....?
Berenizes Gutierrez
when it comes down to it beats are perfect for the average consumer that really doesn't care about being able to hear every aspect of a song
deathtokoalas
i'm really curious if somebody with a pair could test with compressed audio, specifically. that's not the way you're supposed to test audio equipment, but it's the consumer reality right now. it would maybe help if beats had specified, as sennheiser did. but, it's easy to draw the conclusion from the frequency response that that's what they're going for.
luwiigi427
Marques does explanation of what Beats is actually doing with the audio /watch?v=Cdbn_pmxFic
He also does a side-by-side comparison with the M50s /watch?v=et_PWifUd1w
The only thing he doesn't do (which is probably what you really want out of this) are legit audio tests/comparisons. To be fair, I'm pretty sure he doesn't have the equipment to actually do it.
deathtokoalas
right.
so, a compressed audio file (an mp3) reduces it's size by throwing away information on the high and low end. running that through an eq that exaggerates the low and high end can compensate for this mildly. it's not as good as an uncompressed source through a flat eq, but it's better than a compressed file through a flat eq. but, when you put an uncompressed file through an eq designed to compensate for compression loss, it's going to sound absurd.
there's actually been a change in mixing philosophy recently, where producers in certain genres are mixing their records to sound optimally through compression, throwing all kinds of wrenches in the whole thing...
at the end of the day, he's right: there's an eq in foobar and there's probably an eq on your mp3 player, but not all eqs are created equally (the one in my sansa is kind of weak and was not able to boost the lows as powerfully as my bass boost headphones were).
so, maybe they're overpriced.
but maybe it's a clever way to make up for sales lost to torrents, while making the pirated product sound better at the same time.
i mean, i'm not as big as dre. nobody's torrenting my work. right now, i'll argue that if you like it you should throw me some cash, 'cause i'm just getting by and it'll help me keep going.
but if i was dre, and i had some money in the bank, what would bother me most about torrenting would be that people aren't hearing the thing i spent hours and hours creating properly. i mean, i didn't spend all day tweaking the reverb so you could fucking compress the file afterwards and lose it. if i had to resign myself to compressed audio as the de facto standard, i'd be yelling at people to tweak their eqs properly...
it makes sense when you analyze it.
even if it's overpriced.
when you keep that in mind, the whole "as the artist meant it" thing does make sense - presuming you'd otherwise be listening to compressed audio on a flat eq. more accurate would be "closer to how the artist meant it to sound, considering you're BUTCHERING THE FUCKING SOURCE".
i think it was kef (a medium to high-end british speaker manufacturer) that initially came up with the "as it was meant to sound" line in relation to producing very flat speakers.
Stegmutt
I don't think the solo hd's were designed with compressed files in mind- they were just badly designed. From a manufacturing standpoint, it doesn't make sense to deliberately create an acute roll off spanning the lower two bass octaves and have a spike from 100 to 300hz. This probably has more to do with Monster's incompetence than any strategic design. But this is all in the past. By most accounts, the Solo 2's are excellent performers and a great value. Hopefully Beats bringing engineering in house has turned around their product line and they will offer good products at competitive prices.
deathtokoalas
but it does if you're trying to compensate heavy bass compression - which is just as applicable to xenakis as it is to dubstep.
somebody really ought to do the test.
Fabian
sincerly, they sound good :/
Stegmutt
No, from a manufacturing standpoint it doesn't make sense to have a roll off in the lower two octaves. It's not like they save money by having crappy response in the octaves most bassheads crave.
deathtokoalas
on a clean source, yes, but an mp3 is going to cut off so much from the lows that turning it up below 100 hz is just going to introduce noise. it's 100-300 where you can still reconstruct it. that's probably also why there's such a steep cut about 7500 - you're just going to get static on an mp3 if you boost it there.
fwiw, it's below 114 hz where mp3s start getting noisy.
Miguel
About 2 years ago. I had a friend who purchased Beats -- the ones that sit on the ear and not cover them. I tried them out and I was astonished how similar it sounded to my $40 sennheiser ear buds. Sure the bass was higher but it was missing a certain clarity to it. Sure my friend didn't have a dedicated amp or use flac or even a phone with a great sound chip. But this is the typical consumer. Buying "high end" headphones just for the brand and less for actual quality. But whatever. The sound was obviously not horrible but horrible due to the price. It'd be fine if they were $35.
deathtokoalas
and here's another question: was their ability to compensate for mp3s a part of the reason apple bought them and then changed the design?
one of the reasons i don't own an ipod is drm. now, i understand they've changed it a little. but i want a device i can put what i want on without proprietary software &etc.
if this pair of headphones shows up to make lossy audio sound better, it potentially hurts their product.
Stegmutt
I understand the concept of psycho acoustic compression, but once again, from a manufacturing standpoint, having a steep roll off spanning the lowest two octaves is bizarre. Sure, many consumers use lossy files, but it make no sense to deliberate manufacture poor response below 100hz. Or are you implying that beats assumes all their customers exclusively listen to 96kb mp3's that have no data below 100hz and then specifically designed their headphones to perform poorly in that range? That is a dubious assumption at best.
deathtokoalas
you don't have to go down to 96 to get bad low responses, you can hear it at 128-256, but the limitations of the technology are going to create weaker bass response even at 320.
i am explicitly stating that it seems like beats has assumed that their customers are listening to mp3s on their phone, and this is the reason they've created the frequency response that they have.
and they're mostly right.
and again: sennheiser did something similar with their "bass boost mp3 phones", which sound great through my sandisk that's sending out mp3s and horrific from my cd player.
MistahJuicyBoy
What bitrate are your MP3s? Lossless is a big difference, but it's not that drastic. Good headphones will always sound better, no matter what you're putting in
deathtokoalas
i rip to 320, but the stuff that i....find....is however i...found...it, which is often 256 or lower. 192 is probably most common.
in my view, you want your studio headphones flat. but flat phones will then reproduce the compression. just trust me when i say that that bass boost in the sennheisers (which i can confirm were engineered specifically for mp3 use) made a gigantic difference. but, as one would expect, it made higher quality sources sound muddy, as well.
Toxis
To be honest - they sound pretty nice, especially if you like deep bass, and as a person who listens to hardcore (gabber, not a punk one:) - they really really sound great - never owned them, too expensive, and I bet there are better headphones for the price (i.e. audio technica) but the beats do not sound crappy at all (again, I am not an audiophile, they sounded good for my taste) - the price is different beast - would I buy them - nope. would I use them if I had those - yes:)
heh, I do own scullcandy fix - and I never knew until this video they are same category as beats (the overpriced category:) - got these beacause my brainwavz died, like them a lot, especially because managed to get them for ~33$ - look awesome, sound awesome, fit awesome :)
energeez
hey smart lady , love your comments! i own a pair of beats and use them for dubstep, club music, which i listen a lot to, but listen to everything, which i use other headphones for. My theory for the freq. is that they try to make them fun sounding (which i do find them fun), and how do you make something sound fun? You cut off the sub bass, and increase the kick bass/ mid freq synth bass. Thats my take.
it's going to be very close, but i think my august totals should just match my july totals.
but my july totals were a significant increase in hits over my june ones (judging by the way the curve was swinging, it was a two or three or even four month jump), so i'm ok with a minimal growth rate, or even a very small negative one.
i don't think my september totals will greatly exceed my july or august ones, either. i'm going to be waiting until the end of october or even november before i see any real increases.
but i think i caught the curve and will not concern myself with it for another few weeks.
i have enough data at this point to understand what kind of rates i'm getting in drawing people to bandcamp. this page is really just a blog, it's sort of inconsequential if people get here....
from approximately 52,000 comment views, i've generated around 12,000 video views - which is a little under 25%. a bit more than 10% of that gets to bandcamp. so i'm looking at about 3% of the traffic getting to where i want it - which is not bad, really.
i don't have metrics, but i think i've averaged around 10,000 comment views over each of the last two months. i need to get that up to around 15,000 and then 20,000 - but that's easier said than done. some of the comments are on videos that get a steady stream of visitors, so once they migrate to the top of the comment section they're fixed. others are on videos that are trending, and they get lost in a torrent of other comments and quickly forgotten.
what i've learned is that trolling the trending videos can get a quick boost in posts, but that this fades within a day or two due to high turnover in the comments section. the more worthwhile approach is to find older videos that continue to generate steady traffic and try and climb the comment section...
bass parts are written and demoed, now the mixing headache begins...
the problem is that i don't really want heavy compression on the source for most of it, so i'm trying to get the parts in clean, but that's always a struggle with bass. i may have to re do some parts with the active pickups on or the volume very low, but the ideas are all down, at least.
i didn't sleep well yesterday afternoon, so i'm going to crash a little early.
Saturday, August 30, 2014
i've never understood why so many rock bands have their bass players playing the root notes so often. it may have initially been out of a lack of training, but it became stylistic and trying to do something else with a bass ended up really frowned upon. bass solos continue to be ridiculed...
but, a good bass counterpoint can really elevate an otherwise ok rock song to something sublime by adding something more complex on the bottom end. it's really constant in the history of art-rock from the beatles through floyd, bowie, joy division, nirvana...
given how important it is, and how obvious it's importance is, it's really just kind of head-scratching how it is that so many musicians just ignore it, or merely use it to beef up the guitars.
this is pretty much everything except the bass and any extra guitar subtleties i may throw in at last minute. i might turn that distorted cello up a bit, not sure...
that means it'll also be the last rough mix posted - for the first part. there's going to be the three parts to this.
AmbiAnts
Ahh that's a refreshing simple melody, I'm so glad I came across this.
What an atrocity today's popular music is. Corporate cancer milking teenagers for everything their parents can afford. I used to think It was just me getting older but now, I think today's music actually does just suck.
Turn on popular radio and what do you hear nowadays? emotionless shit where the only thing that matters is that the bass sounds like a lawnmower raping a chainsaw and makes you feel physically sick.
The saddest thing is there are still wonderful artists out there, but they're not given the time of day because they don't fit into this perfect celebrity culture we have. It's a great SHAME.
deathtokoalas
so, you think this isn't emotionless shit? it's some white people appropriating some black music, watering it down as far as they can and turning a profit from it.
you're right about modern radio music being awful. what you're missing is that the radio music you grew up with was just as bad.
AmbiAnts
So you think that this band all got together one night and conspired to water down some black music and make a profit?
I can't say for sure that didn't happen, but I think far more likely that they were just influenced and inspired by blues music. Not sure what you were getting at in your comment but if you're saying that this music is in the same slimey catagory as today's Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber then you're not playing with a full deck.
deathtokoalas
if you were around at the time (maybe five or six years earlier), you know the kind of segregation that existed. the whole movement of white musicians taking up black music was about picking up a style that was very successful in black markets, but that white radio stations wouldn't play because the musicians weren't white. by commodifying the product for a white audience, they were able to open up a whole new audience demographic. this isn't the only band that were doing that at the time, but it's one of the least creative examples.
the technology is different, but i don't hear anything more substantial in this than i do in a miley tune. sorry.
if anything, miley has way better producers.
it's a different target audience, but there's no greater artistic value here - in both cases, we're talking about breaking something artistic down to it's lowest level and mass marketing it as a commodity.
AmbiAnts
So what constitutes artistic value? evidently not a group of white guys singing a watered down black blues song, even though they wrote the song and played the instruments. That's just as artistic as somebody who has somebody else write their songs for them, and play the instruments for them?
deathtokoalas
i think you're being a little delusional in suggesting they wrote this song. it's a traditional blues jam.
Edohiguma
Fun fact: the same "corporate cancer" milked the hippies, too. They even produced the hippie "uniform" that every hippie had to wear to show his "individualism" (hilarious, I know.) It was a big market. And all the popular records for the hippie generation didn't grow on trees either. Someone had to produce those too and production doesn't come free.
Ultimately it's always the "corporate cancer", the "evil capitalists" who produce things and bring innovation and progress, while those who rile against those imaginary evils have usually very little to show in terms of production, innovation and progress. The hippies are a great example. They were great at whining about the system and tearing things down, but they have not produced a single thing worth mentioning. Destruction is much easier than production.
deathtokoalas
the hippies created this. it's their fault. they can't step away from it, now, and say "i don't understand this". sure you do. i'll be damned if i'm going to sit here and let hippies claim they don't understand a culture that pushes sex & drugs as the sole purpose of existence...
see, this is why those zappa records are so historically important. he explains it all, with flair and musicianship.
awillypower
It's the same melody of Matchbox by Carl Perkins
deathtokoalas
and carl perkins was, of course, one of the first white rock musicians to get somewhere by stealing ideas from black music.
1894cossack
I eat trolls for breakfast, with my cherrios.
deathtokoalas
well, eat me then.
Jack Grattan
I just love politically correct historical revisionism.
deathtokoalas
i don't see anything revisionist about it. just about anybody alive at the time will tell what i typed.
Jack Grattan
In his introduction to the Howlin' Wolf biography (a book I'M SURE you haven't read), B.B. King said "They said that Jimmie Rodgers (a white man) was the father of country music, but Wolf and I knew better. He was a BLUES singer, same as us, and a DAMNED GOOD one at that." Please notice that Mr. King said NOTHING about "the white man stealing our music." It's called CROSS- POLLINATION. You, of course, call it theft. Which makes you a politically correct historical revisionist. Case closed.
deathtokoalas
i hardly think that somebody that died in 1935 is relevant in the discussion of white musicians appropriating black music in the 1950s and 1960s, as that black form had barely even developed yet. if that's the best you can do, it's beyond being even a stretch - it's just irrelevant.
Jack Grattan
You know, if you said something about white (and black) BUSINESSMEN ripping off black (and white) musicians, I'd be in total agreement with you. Because that's what businessmen do. BUT NOOOO.....we get the ol' PC song and dance routine from you ONE MORE TIME. I'm sure that your delay in answering was because you had to look up who Jimmie Rodgers was. Now go back to your dorm, PC college boy robot.
deathtokoalas
i'm not sure that you're clear about what segregation means. the idea of "cross pollination" largely erases the entire racial condition at the time. segregation means that whites and blacks did not attend school together, did not work together, did not go to church together, did not live in the same areas of the city and did not attend the same types of entertainment.
under segregation, a black man could not simply buy an opera ticket and watch the show. likewise, a white man could not just cross the railroad tracks and enjoy a blues performance.
it was out of these conditions that you had the mimicry that existed. there was a white audience for rock music, but segregation prevented it from being able to listen to it. the solution was for white musicians to perform the rock music for the white audience.
of course, this started easing in the north earlier than it did in the south, and the segregation was eventually abolished in law if not in culture. but it was a legal reality, enforced by people with guns. "cross-pollination", in the period, was a deathwish.
what's frustrating is not that there was a cultural interchange; it may have even been partly responsible for the civil rights movement. what's frustrating is how much open plagiarism occurred.
but, there's a reason why all the early white rock records were full of covers. young white americans would not have been allowed to listen to the original recordings.
Jack Grattan
I notice that you like Frank Zappa. You do realize that Henry Vestine, the lead guitarist on this "emotionless shit", was the original second guitarist of the Mothers of Invention. Oh, the irony! A little trivia goes a long way, doesn't it?
deathtokoalas
by that logic, wings were brilliant.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i was about fifteen years too old to connect to mcr when it came out. i'm more in the cure/pumpkins generation. sorry.
Jack Grattan
Pretentious Post Punk Pontificator.
deathtokoalas
the pretentious part is really fairly inaccurate. i mean, i get it fairly regularly, but people don't seem to know what the word really means, which is sort of ironic. but i'll wear the other three readily enough.
Jack Grattan
How ironic. And pretentious.
Harry Sowerby
I'm 16 and couldn't agree more. I hate the fake and exploiting "talent shows" that air the same thing every year. What happened to talent? Seems that the industry only cares about how much you don't wear, and how easy you are to brainwash. I'm counting one another true music uprising again, and, thank god, I can see it happening. This is why I'm glad of proper bands being signed to an artist, such as Noel Gallagher; they've played in a band and understand how hard it is for talent to get you noticed. I still wish I was around the 1960s, at Woodstock or Haight Ashbury, listening to the sounds of the free and loving, peace man, I totally agree with you.
deathtokoalas
when you grow up, you'll realize that noel gallagher is a talentless douchebag.
Slightlydelic
At least the bands on the radio in the '60s actually played instruments.
deathtokoalas
actually, the 60s were dominated by session musicians - a lot of it uncredited. the rolling stones, for example, neither wrote nor performed the majority of their own songs. similarly with the beach boys.
Slightlydelic
I'm sure they mimed the instruments on the music videos, but they still played instruments live. If not, they did a good job of acting like they did.
deathtokoalas
there were very few music videos in the 60s. mtv launched in the 80s. a tv was still a luxury item. the 60s are still in the era of radio.
i don't know about live and think it would likely come down to a case-by-case thing. i mean, somebody like hendrix was obviously playing. i wouldn't be surprised to learn that the stones were often lip-synching, but i really have no idea. then, there's stuff like the monkees, who were in fact representative of the norm....
i meant in the studio. the rolling stones were actually noted for their use of talented session guitarists - a list that included people like jimmy page and john mclaughlin. these are the people that actually wrote the early stones classics.
the dominant songwriter and performer for the beach boys was a session musician named carol kaye. this was not known in the 60s. even paul mccartney thought brian wilson was the main songwriter.
it was in fact the beatles that broke this up, despite their own reliance on their own crutches (largely billy preston, george martin and eric clapton). before 1965, session musicians dominated the industry, which is something that traced back to the jazz era. after 1970, that was fairly rare.
and the situation held through the 70s and 80s before starting to turn back to the jazz model in the late 90s.
on that level, the 60s are actually the point in the past most similar to today, because of that shared sort of hybrid state.
Slightlydelic
Oh, I gotcha. thanks
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i'm not trolling; i'm entirely serious, and entirely correct. please don't mistake your ignorance for disingenuity on my behalf.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i don't know even know what the second suggestion means, but i just clearly stated that i'm not trolling. now, you need to understand that.
Jack Grattan
The Stones wrote and played their own tunes. PERIOD. They AUGMENTED some songs with session pros like Ry Cooder and Nicky Hopkins. The Beach Boys WROTE their own tunes, and after '65 utilized The Wrecking Crew (LA session pros) on record. You are, AS USUAL, entirely INCORRECT. Don't they have one of those "History of Rock" courses at that junior college you attend?
deathtokoalas
i've already stated the reality of the situation, and have grown tired enough of gratton's vacuous trolling and badly presented disinformation to outright block him.
i will state again that the stones and beach boys both followed the industry standard of the time, which was to split the process into "writing" and "performing". up until the beatles changed this aspect of the industry, it was very rare for white musicians to write their own music and even rarer for successful black musicians to do so. pretty much the only people that performed their own music would have been unsigned black musicians. neither the stones nor the beach boys were exceptions to this rule.
fwiw, i'm 35 years old and graduated with a math degree from an accredited university in 2006.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
i did not remember that - it was quite some time go, and while my memory is quite good it tends to focus on things that aren't entirely irrelevant. i do a lot of posting on this site. that particular comment was rather snide, but consider the context; a few snarky comments does not a troll make.
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
sampling is a bit of a double-edged sword. it can be done terribly. but, it's not fair to attack the tool. i mean, at it's worst sampling isn't different than doing a cover. and, if you want to talk 60s music and covers - the reality is that all these "60s classics" are building on existing structures in a way that is no better or worse than the process of sampling is. i wouldn't give somebody like jimmy page any more credit than somebody like run dmc when it comes to actual creativity, it's just that they're stealing ideas in different ways.
i tend to avoid sampling music in my own work. in fact, i don't think i've ever sampled an existing song (although i've sampled sounds from films and video games, which is what "sampling" almost exclusively means in my liner credits. well, that and using a sampler to trigger notes, in which case i'll almost always provide my own samples. the closest i've come to sampling music is cutting out isolated drum snippets and using them to build larger drum loops.). but it can be done with a high degree of creativity. one of the better examples of somebody that used sampling creatively is an act called art of noise. despite their records being 20-30 years old, i think they remain the kind of primary example of what can be done with the form.
actually, that's not true. i have a track called about a squirrel that samples and loops about a second of the nirvana hit about a girl, but you wouldn't be able to tell by merely listening to it.
throughthefire
Too bad her she doesn't have actual talent that can grab attention more than antics that include dry humping 'Beatle Juice,' while trying, and failing miserably, to do an assless twerk.
deathtokoalas
i take it you're referring to miley cyrus. i wasn't arguing that miley is talented - she isn't, i was arguing that she isn't less talented than a lot of the so-called classic rock musicians of the 60s and 70s. time will eventually sort this out, the boomers just need to die first...
(deleted post)
deathtokoalas
it's a good point. bowie got paid for ice, ice baby. nobody ever sent robert johnson royalties for the dozens of riffs that page stole from him.
jake pace
look up Canned heats net worth and compare it to any mainstream musician today. That will tell you all you need to know about music then and business now! While some songs now still send a message and can be enjoyable to listen to 99.9% are in it for the money. Back in the day you were popular and broke long before you were famous. Now you are rich as soon as you are popular and famous. The music just doesnt have the soul its a business now, but honestly it can still be entertaining!
deathtokoalas
record contracts in the 60s were notoriously terrible. even the beatles got screwed. it's not like things are better now. while i don't know how many records they sold, i doubt they made any money off of it.
bands like this were primarily interested in the groupies, not the music.)
Friday, August 29, 2014
yeah. i wanted some swanky psych guitar, but i don't think there's room for it or the choir. i was going to put a temp mix up, but i found myself nodding off when mixing the levels on the last synth, so i'm going to leave it for when i wake up. i'll be working on the bass over the weekend...
i was going to hit detroit tonight to see zorch, but it's a long ride to pontiac and i'm not really up for it. this is worth checking out though, in absence of my rough mix:
my processor is hitting a limit at a little under 130 tracks, but probably due more to all of the plugins. i'm going to need several bass parts so it's not reasonable to stop...
it's good to know where the limits are, anyways.
two tactics.
1) there's a number of things i may be able to bounce - particularly all the delays constructed out of layering parts.
2) i may render the track, record into a second project and then import the files back in in minimal form. that way the final project gets one bass part that's been bounced down rather than 8.
(1) is more likely. it would give me back around 30 tracks immediately, and that's probably good enough to get it done.
it's getting closer to the point where i can start playing the bass. the strings are finally mixed; i'm currently working on adding some fuzz to some guitar parts. there's one more lead part and a synth fill.
i'm second-guessing the choir. there's not enough space in the mix. i'm going to do to an "overdub mix" that takes the main guitar out and may bring it in there if i ignore it in the main mix.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
i actually bettered my weird al troll in terms of single day hits...
i needed three good, strategic ones to do it, though, and it's not going to have the same fallout. regardless, what i needed was just one outlier to match the outlier from last month, and i think i've got it. hopefully, hits are up enough month/month next month that i don't need the single hit like that to keep the curve going...
(that's over 230 views yesterday)
of course, i troll for social awareness. you already know that. mean people should be annihilated. i'm using the term lightly....
funny how things work out.
the expensive fake strings had too much reverb baked into the samples and no way to get it out. please, people - keep your samples dry. let me do the effects work myself. it's especially problematic for the staccato, which you don't want bleeding off between the notes.
the free fake strings initially seemed to have better staccato, but upon listening to them over and over they lacked a level of depth. i tried a few effects, but it was just a lack of character.
my machine can't really handle the expensive string plugin. it's bad programming - there's no reason, in theory, that i can't run a sampler on a dual core processor with over a gb of free ram but it's doing it over three application levels and a far-too-fancy gui. it's not the samples that's eating the ram, it's the sampler. but, hey, you've all got 16 gb of ram to waste, right? i've got 2 i can use...
what i can do is run each phrase one at a time through the sampler, dump them to wave and then mix them into the project as wave files. there's no loss in quality.
so, i ran all the expensive fake strings through and mixed them at roughly half the volume of the free fake strings, just to beef the free ones (which have a better staccato, but lack depth) up a bit.
i think it's finally sounding the way i want, but i'll have to confirm in a few hours.
it's really amazing, though, that i'm using a thousand dollar plugin as a secondary sound source to a free one. remember kids: markets don't work. you usually don't get what you pay for...
next song, i'm going to replace that fancy string set with one of the competitors that has a drier source. for now, this is working.
i should point out that upgrading this thing would not be expensive. the board can take 8 gb of ram. there's 4 in there, in 2 gb chunks. i have a 64-bit os from school (2, actually). so, i'd just have to get 2 sticks of 2 which would be relatively cheap nowadays...
it's the hassle. it's an nlited os with all kinds of scripting set up...
i haven't seen a reason to yet. this is the closest to a reason i've yet seen. but it's not convincing me.
hrmmn. gotta give this a good listen, as they're hitting detroit tomorrow. well, a suburb of detroit. i really liked their demo back when it was doing the rounds, like a lot a lot, but i haven't heard this yet. if i could walk across the street, it wouldn't be a decision, but it's a two hour bus ride through detroit and it's going to mean i won't be able to get back across the border until the morning....
i'm a little concerned it's less psych and more pop. when i'm done mixing this string section...few hours...
yeah. it's a shame they decided to sound indistinguishable from the animal collective (i'm not a fan, too sappy/kitschy). that demo was really good, though. too far from downtown...
actually, it seems to have picked up starting about ten minutes in....
i guess it's sort of expected that they'd put that townshend-goes-kraut lizard song on here.
they should have cut the first ten minutes off, it's really just giving people the wrong idea.
this is a step down from the demos (two of the four substantial tracks were already released before the record was, and i really prefer the more experimental material they discarded on their demos to the trendy pop songs they tossed on to here), but there's just so much potential that i'd feel like i'm missing something if i don't go.
and i guess the band they're touring with is worth staying for.
i've actually never been that deep into michigan, the ride has it's up sides.
and, actually, it seems like those extra tracks are included in this file.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
bit of a slowdown the last 24 hours....
i really have a lot invested in that growth curve, psychologically. i understand i had a huge spike in july from trolling weird al, and numbers are up month-to-month when that's controlled for, but i really wanted to get a good spike in for the end of august to try and keep the curve growing (it seemed like i was going to miss it by about 100 views). so, i've got some real high-quality trolls up that i've had to tend to, but i'm going to close it down after supper to try and get most of this done by the morning.
so, i checked again and i still wasn't happy. i've redone some of the strings by relayering them. which now means there's a LOT of string parts, but it's getting better....
Jessica;
I would like to clear up a few points in your email.
While your landlord may be correct in that the house may be serviced by separate storm and sanitary connections (I can't confirm that), both these connections would outlet to the same combined sewer in the road. There is only one sewer Cataraqui and one on Marion, and they are both combined sewers meaning that they accept both rain water and sewage.
With respect to the Wyandotte project, there is no sewer work being undertaken as part of that project. Windsor Utilities is replacing the watermain and services and the City will reconstruct the pavement following that work. This project would have no impact on the sewers servicing your property.
You are most likely correct in that there is a correlation between rainfall and the slow running plumbing in your house. This is due to the combined nature of the sewer that services your property. During rain events, combined sewers fill with rainwater and therefore have limited capacity to accept flows from buildings.
With respect to the apartment building across the street from you, all rainfall runoff from this property would have entered the sewer system via foundation drains prior to the fire, so the fact that the basement may have flooded and the water is now entering the floor drain would change the drainage pattern very little. In fact, rainwater entering the sewers from this property would be very small in proportion to that coming from the catchbasins draining the roads in the area.
With respect to abandonment of the connections servicing the apartment building, that would be addressed when the building is demolished by the Building Department. If you have concerns regarding the state of the building, please contact the Building Department via 311.
Hopefully, this answers some of your questions. Please contact me if you want to discuss this matter further.
Sincerely; Name Withheld, P.Eng. A/Contracts Co-ordinator
the plug was like 50 feet deep in the drain, almost certainly in the city pipes. if i understand correctly, that means the city should have paid to remove it...
i've seen people throw everything you can think of down the drains. it was probably garbage from the street that washed through after the storm.
i want to be clear: i can't complain about my landlord in terms of responsiveness, interest, etc. i mean, he just paid to clear a city drain. on the other hand, it's because he wouldn't listen to what i was saying....
odsp mail for september arrived today. no letter of doom yet.
i'm waiting, patiently, though.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
gah....can't find it....let me know if you know a secret link...
i rendered this morning to check for glitches on playback, and they're thankfully not there. might as well replace the temp file...
the strings are updated and there's a little bluesy guitar solo in the build. i'm chewing on a piano part, which, if added, will probably be the last midi track.
the piano is in, and that's the end of the midi part. well, except for the end section.
a synth part, a vocal part, a few more guitars, bass, final guitar overdubs and then final mixing.....
so, i set up some thousand dollar string plugins beside some free ones...
i'll admit the thousand dollar plugins would be more applicable if i was writing film scores, but i'm not. i'm trying to construct a small chamber orchestra. given the price of these things, it's actually remarkable how inflexible they are.
the thing is that i understand i'm working against the purpose of the software. the idea is that if you buy the fancy sample set then you won't have to sit around and multitrack individual instruments anymore.
but, then how do you route each instrument through separate effects processes? generally, how do you be neurotic about over-producing everything?
i'm being a little self-deprecating, but i'm making a valid point. these are the details that composers and arrangers live their lives for. that hint of distortion on the trumpet, that reverb on the flute....oh!...
the free plugins are simply better able to give me what i want, and at a quarter of the ram usage, too.
there's probably some sample libraries for solo instruments, jazz bands, chamber music, etc. but i don't need them right now.
i stumbled upon this library of prepared instruments, though - inspired by john cage. it's not useful for anything i have lined up right now (maybe one thing) but it sounds like fun...
see, the thing is that it's a good idea...
but if they want to make this useful for musicians, they should separate the libraries into individual vst instruments, one for each real instrument. that's how people write and arrange and mix.
that way, if my mix has 2 violins, a viola and a cello (a standard chamber orchestra - and this is not my current mix, fwiw) then i can set each up to it's own channel and mix it individually with it's own character.
but, sure - give me every possible cello sound imaginable. let me fuck with the mic. let me determine how big the room is. and etc. these are good ideas.
it's the way the thing is formatted that isn't so hot.
deathtokoalas
i really wish plugin developers would focus more on modularity. this goes for soft synths, samplers, effects and everything else. i know, use something like reaktor, right? but, when every developer decides they're going to make the "ultimate synth" or "ultimate sampler", what you actually end up with is a huge array of synths and samplers that can do one or two things really well and are lacklustre at everything else. if there was an easily accessible interface within cubase where i could string filters and generators and specific libraries from different manufacturers together, i could take what i like out of synth x and connect it to what i like out of synth y - allowing me to create my own ultimate synth. and, ultimately that's what all us composers actually want, even if some of us don't have the clarity of thought to realize it. it makes it more like building your own modular system, or even like stringing guitar effects together.
it works with samplers, too. there's been this tendency recently to create these 50 gb libraries full of these ready-made samples. but, composers and arrangers and mixers and producers just don't think like that. the way we think is in terms of separating each track as much as possible. i've been sequencing some string sections recently and realizing that the best samplers are in kontakt, but you can't really separate them well without using 50 gb of ram. see, the flaw is that it's not designed to separate them, you're supposed to pick the ensemble you want out of the box. no real composer is going to want that, as it makes it impossible to isolate the tracks. i could, for example, want some bassy fuzz on the cello, a heavier distortion on the viola and a harmonic exciter on the violin. to do that in the kontakt sample libraries, you need to load the instance as many times as you have instruments - and it defeats the aim of the software. i'd rather see the sample libraries split into instruments. sell me 5 gb of cellos, 5 gb of violins, etc and let me load them as separate instruments with smaller footprints and mix it myself.
i know this is going to require a rethink and a new interface, but i think the developers have to come to the realization that they're using the wrong approach and go back to thinking in terms of modularity. ultimately, they're programmers - they get modularity, they're just ignoring it. perceived market demand for total solutions, or something. it's not actually what we want. what we want is control. these sample libraries - whether they're strings, horns or whatever else - are really largely useless to actually compose with.
OK
I wish everything worked more like Nexus tbh, yes it's simple and yes it's basic but damn that's how they should all work with added features instead of a new UI for everything and also having to have 49234932 different instances taking up 10x more ram that exists in your pc
deathtokoalas
the benefit of modularity is that it allows user control over the level of complexity. the way i would use a modular sampling system would be quite elaborate.
it's not like options don't exist, but they tend to be outdated and not really designed for modern daws - or they require a level of programming to build. when it comes to synthesis, that pre-requisite for programming is necessary. but, if i'm orchestrating something, i want to just do it, not write a program to do it. what they're selling is really the samples.
again, i think it's just a disconnect between what a composer is going to want and what the designers think they want. and i think it's sort of obvious that this standard approach is backwards for almost everybody, upon a moment's reflection. it's useful if you want to write film scores, i guess, but not very useful, otherwise.
Monday, August 25, 2014
i had to leave my browser window open last night, and it's generally a bad idea to try and record with it open due to ram issues. it's done now, mostly. i'll have to wait until after 2 am to get back to downloading the rest of the libraries i'm looking into - i'm looking at about a 50 gb download, and...
there was a court ruling last year that put usage based billing in place, meaning the isps can charge you based on your bandwidth. there's a really bad oligopoly in canada with internet, stemming from the way the infrastructure was built. somebody might correct me (i'm not old enough to remember, first hand) but i believe the telephone and cable companies in canada were previously state operated. honestly? that makes far more sense to me, and the reason is that it doesn't make sense to have multiple lines. you want one cable infrastructure and one phone infrastructure - anything else is just wasteful. but, the result of it moving from public to private ownership was that, in any given area, there's a monopoly on the cable and a monopoly on the phone based around who owns the lines. splitting the lines up to different companies in different areas didn't really have the effect of breaking up monopolistic practices, and why would it? if you live here in windsor, cogeco owns all the cable lines (and bell owns all the phone lines) so you're ultimately forced to go through one of them if you want to use the infrastructure.
so, reacting further to the monopoly, the court ruled that the companies that own the lines have to sell service to smaller isps. so, the way it works is that teksavvy buys bandwidth from cogeco, and i buy bandwidth from teksavvy. the capitalist relation should mean that's more expensive, because there's more managers.
but it isn't. it's less than half the price. but what i like about teksavvy is that they offer very basic rates. i'm on youtube all the time, and i download a bit of music, but i don't game or watch netflix or anything like that - and there's only one of me down here, rather than a family of 5 or 6. my average monthly usage is much less than 30 gb - and usually closer to 20. nor can i download faster than the internet will let me download. so, all i need is about a 5 mbps line with a 50 gb limit. what i have is a 6 mbps line with a 75 gb limit (for $25/month) - and 99 months out of 100, i'm not going to get close to it. even if i were to download 50 gb of libraries in peak hours, i'd still only be something like 73 gb for the month.
i don't want to push it, though.
teksavvy didn't like the ruling. so, what they've done is put the download limit down (and, like i say, 75 gb is usually way more than sufficient for me) and allow unlimited downloads over night, from 2-8 am. it's a good solution for gamers, i guess, who are usually up all night, anyways.
for me, waiting until after 2 to suck this down is an isolated thing to make sure i don't hit the limit...
but, i don't need a browser for that, so i should be able to work overnight. i've got a few things to play with, hopefully one of them gives me what i want right away....
i should point out that i have youtube defaulted to the lowest quality level, though. this isn't for bandwidth reasons, it's because my internet tv is a pIII that shipped with windows 98 on it, so i'm trying not to max it out. well, that and i just use it to watch lectures and news shows...
i don't need noam chomsky's wrinkles or paul jay's bald head beaming at me in crystal clear high definition or who-gives-a-fuck p.
it sounds like an organ because it's being played like an organ...
good idea. i wish you'd rock those low tuba notes a bit more, though. now that i've got one paying attention, what's with tuba players being so polite? your instrument sounds best when you blow into it like you're trying to knock the house down. why is that you all play such a powerful instrument so timidly?
yeah, the person doing this review is really doing the plugin a disfavour. not only does this person not understand what the instrument's ranges are, they're playing the keyboard like it's a piano and just randomly running through the presets...
the plugin woks best with a little bit of distortion to fatten it up. but it's a more raw sound than you see in most sample libraries, which seem to want to focus on a polished film score sound.
deathtokoalas
i wish you would have done staccato on the ewql. the truth is that even a roland juno can do decent sustain stuff. it's the staccato that requires a sampler...
Andrew Chellman
I always thought it was the other way around, in my opinion. Staccato is short, there isn't much time to decide if it sounds realistic or not. EWQL has round robin which contributes to a nice staccato sound.
deathtokoalas
it's short, but it's pretty complex when you think about it - a bow scraping a string, producing a sort of a broken waveform with fundamentals collapsing differently from note to note. staccato on a real string instrument consequently always sounds a little out of tune, which is difficult to create synthetically. the longer the notes get, the more easily a synthesizer can use the tools it has to shape them just because it conforms better to what a synthesizer does...
reali reddoot
the fundamental frequencies collapsing? elaborate
deathtokoalas
you're scraping two tense objects together in short bursts. we usually think of modelling strings in terms of combining frequencies of sine waves because they're vibrating strings, but staccato is really more like scratching nails on a chalkboard in the sense that it's two rough objects rubbing against each other. so, there's a lot of friction in there (meaning the waveform is quite broken) and not much of the vibrating action we associate with string synthesis - meaning that the associated frequencies (fundamental and resonant, excuse my colloquialism) fall apart very quickly.
reali reddoot
very interesting, im very curious now and must conduct more research. Thanks for the insight!!
deathtokoalas
if you want to get something close to it, you're going to need to model the friction with a noise generator or random oscillator and do a lot of experimentation to "dial it in". you're also going to need a way to get the notes to spike out of tune a little as a result of the extra force on the string. i've played with a few abstract synthesis approaches that use physical modelling of things like springs to get around the limitations of traditional oscillation-based additive synthesis. with the tools we have available today, you're likely to be able to get something decent - but not with a traditional hardware synthesizer.
it might be fun as a project, but if you're serious about getting a good staccato for musical application, i'd really advise using a sampler.
your program looks a lot nicer nowadays than it did when i downloaded the demo back in 99, although it still seems to work in basically the same way. nice to see that doppler's still rocking it...
so, while recognizing and upholding the necessity of empirical enquiry in physics,
let's think carefully about a few things for a few minutes.
acknowledging that all particles have an associated wave function,
if a phenomena demonstrates particle behaviour
then it must mean that the particle is massive. (and what is a massless particle, anyways?)
otherwise the wave function wouldn't even exist. right?
COLLAPSE!
now, uncertainty refers to measurement,
(not in the sense of the observer effect, but as the nature of what uncertainty is)
so, it provides no information about causality or a lack thereof.
(it is merely a model that is useful in predicting results)
and it seems to me that the nature of space is an important thing to determine empirically
(and we can't even answer questions related to the number of dimensions it might have)
so the proofs of uncertainty are consequently as valid as the assumptions about the nature of space that underLIE them
(this actually pulls the rug out from underneath bell's feet)
and
now
it
all
falls
apart
it's not that i'm claiming anything is wrong, per se
(it's more like i'm arguing that it's not even wrong at all)
but the question of whether space is continuous or discrete needs to be resolved
(in order to unite relativity with quantum mechanics)
platonic idealism as applied to mathematics is an oversimplification
(this is what godel has truly taught us)
the math itself is merely a model to imperfectly describe physical space
(one look at the banach-tarski paradox is enough to give up)
so light one up.
no empirical concept
of the underlying geometry
so, no, you CANNOT see,
the overgeneralized orthogonality
(perpendicular delusions
give arise to false conclusions)
so, i finally got around to updating kontakt from v1.0 for this. yeah. v 1.0. you can see how often i've used it since i downloaded it in like 1998 or something.
i've just never really been the sampler type, i guess, and i've always found a scaled down solution. but i need good strings for this...
...and there's a few other things i've had on my to-check-out list that i'm going to find while i'm at it.
i can't download everything, these libraries are enormous...
it
turns out there's actually been a recent push to make better string
libraries. i stopped recording for a few years; this is just more
evidence that the technology has jumped dramatically since then.
i'm going to download all of them, and mess with them until i get it right.
i gotta say this, though: it's nice to have a problem, google it and find there's an answer.
that wasn't true five years ago. and it was a dream 13 years ago, when i was scorewriter-focused.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
i'd pick up a variax if it was cheap enough. my pod has the in. but
the way they built it wasn't really offering a whole lot. most
guitarists that would want to switch between the classic models have a
way to get the sound of the classic models already. like, i have an sg
sounding thing and a fat strat sounding thing and that's enough to get
me what i need. i wouldn't mind picking up a single coil guitar, but i
don't have much use for the too-thick paul sound (the sg is the thicker
metal/punk sound i really want, because it's thicker but not too thick).
so, they were really selling a guitar that can sound like a banjo. it's
a shame it all got discontinued, but i have to wonder if there are
people out there creating models and uploading them somewhere....
yesterday wasn't as absolutely productive as i hoped, but i did get a guitar part and a string part down, and i think i've found a way to make the violins sound better. it's the staccato that's hard to get with the right force. i think the problem is that the people writing the plugins are listening to too much rossini and not enough beethoven. so, you can get a nice schmarmy bourgeois sound, but it's harder to get that overly-serious rockin' the bows to a satanic hymn overture sound - which is weird, because that should be much easier to reproduce in a wavetable based synthesis. regardless, i think i got it. if i'm not satisfied, that'll be the focus the rest of the night. i think i've found a great general string solution, i'm just not completely sold yet. but finding one will actually open up a lot of possibilities. in the past, i've used e-bows and i actually picked up a cheap electric violin a while back that i've never played because it needs a setup. doing this over midi is the best answer that's going to give me the flexibility i need and want, it's just a question of getting it done.
i've also got it tactically worked out. this is necessary sometimes when i get too many ideas to try and cram into one space. i've oversaturated some mixes in the past and have learned that it's better to be a bit more subtle in how ideas come in and out. so, if i'm listening to something and i get this it needs a piano! and eight guitars! and a kazoo! type response, i need to be careful about overloading. i think i've got it worked down to focusing mostly on a crescendo...
it's really just scattered parts to finish before i add the bass, which is a more substantial project. it should be mostly done by the morning, but i keep saying that....
i will one day take a few months of violin lessons, just to get the bow fundamentals down. beyond that, it's just another string instrument, and, from a string player's perspective, it's just a question of teaching one's self the geometry of the thing.
i know that pisses some people off. i think it was peter buck that pointed it out. he was all like "listen. a mandolin's not just a funny sounding guitar. it's it's own thing.". i get where he's coming from, but sometimes you just want a funny sounding guitar...
now i'm remembering that my mandolin disappeared. grrr.
what i'd actually like to see thrown out there some day is a midi guitar with the electronics built into the guitar (you could do it with an iphone chip, and things much cheaper than it) that has a switch selector on the side that allows the player to switch instruments: guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, ukelele, violin, cello, etc. i know there's tuning issues, but that's actually easy to fix with a midi system. you throw in a usb out, and you should be able to actually set the tuning in the software. the strings will sound differently than the out, but that's of little importance if used correctly.
i think line6 has something like that (called "variax") but it's designed to model different guitars, and it's hooked up to the box. having the selector on the guitar itself would make the signal path cleaner.
but i should get back to work.
yeah. the pressure knocked the valve off. wrench fixed it. for now, anyways. hey, tearing the pipes up is neither trivial nor cheap. but the idea that it was the pressure got through, at least. this is good.
so, things are back to being idyllic in my little basement hideaway, here...
now that i understand the plumbing a bit better, i'll have to be a bit more aggressive. that (and any pipe damage) could have been prevented by unclogging the clog when i first saw it. but i just didn't understand the system. it was just a basic empirical "if rain, then slow drain. should report issue.". which is what i did and should have done. it was really the "rainwater cannot cause slow drains" response that really cost him his pipes, if there's damage....
there may be an upside to it.
the roaches are in the subfloor somewhere. the only one i've seen since may has been out in the laundry area. it's a good guess that their nest was where the flooding was. if i'm lucky, it drowned the bulk of them and washed away a lot of eggs when it flowed through.
it's ok, i'm used to this.
there was a meme in my group of friends when i was in high school. "fuck. shoulda listened to j.".
as applied seriously:
i failed my french assignment because the teacher said i didn't understand the question. it's actually what j said. fuck. shoulda listened to j.
as applied ironically:
it's raining and i forgot my umbrella. fuck. shoulda listened to j.
(in such ironic usage, j would not have offered an opinion on the umbrella, and would probably not even be present.)
there were other usages. but there's a point. shoulda listened to j!
time is moving forward in the alternate reality...
at
midnight, it will be 17 years and 242 days ago that i finished my first
demo recordings, in the basement of an upper middle class suburb of
ottawa, canada called "sawmill creek".
my dad had built
me a recording studio in the basement, and put a drum kit along with a
bass and a 4-track recorder in there. i think he had plans to use it
himself, and the idea of building it for me was basically a ploy to get
it past the wife. that happened more than once before i turned 20...
...but
i also think he was hoping i'd stop sitting in my room by myself with
my guitar. i'd been playing for around five years at that point, working
on a combination of original songwriting, semi-formal blues training
and informally teaching myself how to play the alternative rock of the
period. people didn't really interest me. it was a bit of a problem, one
that's only gotten worse as i've aged. if he could build a studio with
some gears, maybe i'd meet some friends and start a band...
the
thing is, that isn't how i interpreted it. my favourite artists at the
time were billy corgan and trent reznor, so it just sort of struck me as
natural to lay the parts down myself. bass is very intuitive for a
guitarist, and keyboards are intuitive for everybody, but a big part of
this demo is about me teaching myself how to play drums - and at times
it's quite obvious, although i should temper that with an explanation
that the drum parts are quite purposefully off-kilter in many places.
what
can you say about a 17.5 year old demo written by a 15 year-old?
there's a few interesting moments on the disc, which i've pulled out as
highlights and uploaded to youtube. the bulk of it, however, is exactly
what it is - an exceedingly awkward and mildly ostracized teenager
working out various day-to-day issues that only a teenager can really
understand, while displaying overwhelming influence from overwhelming
influences. hey, at least i wasn't writing "mmmmbop". this isn't as
polished as frogstomp, but it's arguably more interesting and certainly
more original. if i could go back in time, i'd take the influences off
my sleeves just a little.
i've come to understand what i
was doing as a part of the then contemporary emo-punk movement, albeit
on the fringes of it, as it existed in disconnected basements across
north america. i had no understanding of that at the time. i'd guess
most people a part of it didn't either. it's been defined in a
revisionist manner.
i stopped recording for a little
while after this. it's partly because i was naive, and was expecting
some kind of response, but it's mostly because i was grounded for a
substantial period in early 1997. i've cut out a period of 66 days, and
will consequently start pushing tracks from the second tape demo
(recorded in the same place) on the 29th of october. over this period,
i'll be cycling the 11 tracks from the first demo that i have up on
youtube in 6 day periods (with boogeyman consisting of three tracks from
this demo, and teenage jesus consisting of two), but i will not be
posting those updates here.
so, this is the last
youtube switch update for a bit over two months. the song i'm working on
has been slow, but i'd be lying if i'd say i wasn't expecting that. in
two months, though, i should hopefully have plowed through from the
summer of 2001 to sometime in 2003.
i learned a lot about plumbing from this exercise. it's not something i'd looked into before...
the eel fixed the drain. but, for future reference, this is what happened:
- your sump pump is connected to outside
- your floor drain is connected to the sanitary.
-
there was a partial blockage deep in the sanitary, meaning the floor
drain was emptying the basement water very slowly. this caused the sump
pump to be running all the time to compensate.
- so, when it
rained the basement got full of water and that water blocked the
sanitary completely, causing the slow flush, sink gurgles, etc. given
enough of a dry spell, it would have come down on it's own through a
combination of slow floor drainage and sump pump action, but it's of
course better to clear the plug.
so, the systems are
not entirely separate. your pump is pumping excess water to the street,
but most of the rain water is in fact flowing through the floor drain
and into the sanitary, and if you were to block that off your pump
probably wouldn't be able to keep up.
so, in the future, if you see a slow toilet after the rain, it means your basement is slowly flooding due to a blocked sanitary.
so, i've updated the temp file with the final guitar proportions.
excluding
the bass, i'm really heading into post-production with this. lots of
work to do still, but it's mostly flourishes on the existing track. this
is the core of the track, the way it was always meant to sound...
it's always nice when you have your own songs stuck in your head :)
fuck. just gotta laugh.
i'm pretty sure the high pressure from the rainwater backup/clog issue burst or dislodged something in the toilet upstairs, leading to a leaky pipe. by the end of it, an upstairs toilet flush was making the dishes in my sink rattle. there was clearly a substantial force of air feeding back...
now, the fact that the snake fixed the problem isn't going to help my case. "i told you there was a clog". and i agreed there was probably a clog, but i pointed out that it wasn't the clog causing the backup, it was the rain. and, i was right. had we not got all that rain, the clog wouldn't have been a problem.....until spring. it's good it was found. but, that doesn't change the fact that i was right about the rain. had he not convinced me that the sump pump is more powerful than it is and that the systems are completely separate, i wouldn't have emailed the fire department in a desperate attempt to figure out where the rain was getting in. it makes absolute sense now, but (dammit jim!) i'm a nerd with a creative streak and an ability to think outside the box (i think i proved my worth on that basis with this), not a plumber. leave it to an artist to come up with the most ridiculous way possible to explain water seepage into the system, right?
that's not going to get through. what's going to get through is "i told you there was a clog".
so, i'm going to be told it's the seal on the toilet and they're going to replace the seal. in the end, replacing the seal might make the connection tight again, and it might fix it. but could it be a coincidence? is the leak unrelated to the backup? i can't prove it one way or the other, but i think it's at least likely that the air pressure broke something and hoping it's just the seal is pretty risky...
"a camouflaged pelican of immense girth must be transporting water from the river to the sewer."
Friday, August 22, 2014
so, i've actually spent most of the last two days doing dental work on my headphones....
some time back in the mid 80s when they were made (by dad bought these phones for himself when i was a young child. they're very old sennheisers, constructed at a level of quality that simply does not exist anymore. made in ireland. yeah, ireland. i think it's the only thing i've ever seen that was made in ireland.), they came with dust protectors on the side. but, over the years the dust protectors have faded to the point that they are now dust themselves. so, i'm trying to clean it all out with a set of tweezers. it's time consuming...
but the good news is that i've finally got the guitars mixed the way i want. i had to split it into three separate combinations over three different types of fuzz and then tweak the eq on each separately. it's a total of 8 different parts, sent and morphed differently. i wanted it to be dirty and crunchy and bassy and trebly and harmonic all at the same time, which is a lot to ask out of a couple of power chords. but....finally...
tonight, i should hopefully get done what i wanted to get done yesterday. i've decided i want a piano-sounding guitar in the middle of the track. i've always wanted one of those little stompboxes. but i'll have to see what i can pull together into terms of plugins...
i also finally found that one stupid hair i knew was in there but couldn't get out...
the sturdy design is a tragic flaw, really. i can swap out the cords, but i can't get to the drivers - which is great, except when you've got a hair in there.
i admit defeat, with tweezers. i need to find a vacuum...
so, the fire chief tells me there's no sump pump in the building.
to begin with, how would the fire chief know if there's a sump pump in the building? is there a master list of sump pumps in city records?
well, maybe there is. who knows. but, there was a tenant in the basement - the lights were often on late into the night - and there's a spout on the side of the building. clearly, there was a sump pump.
it may have been an illegal sump pump. an illegal sump pump? well, maybe there was an illegal unit in the basement. it's not uncommon, actually. but, like i'm supposed to get sad about accidentally reporting it. i need the drain fixed, bob the bourgie across the street that fucked off on his property rights responsibilities can fuck off if he doesn't like it...
i mean, if you're just going to sit there and let the drain back up into the neighbourhood's toilets, you deserve what you get.
i just realized the fire chief (yes, i cced it to the fire chief. i'll call the fucking mayor if i have to.) is going to read this and go "what is she, some kind of anarchist or something?".
ordered solutions are preferable. but if nothing happens, i WILL smash through the windows and fix it myself...
cced to pretty much the entire management of the windsor fire department:
hi.
sorry to be aggressive about this, but i know that the response rate on email communication with public employees can be a little slow due to high volume, so i'm hoping you can advise on what is actually a fairly unfortunate situation.
i'm renting an apartment at marion & cataraqui. about a month ago, there was a fire in a large property across the street (also marion & cataraqui, but technically on cataraqui). since then, the rain has been overwhelming the sanitary on the street (several houses are getting slow toilets and backups) and i'm fairly convinced the cause has to be the rainwater draining through the floor drain. the property is abandoned, and the electricity is off, so the sump pump is not working. additionally, this seems to be causing additional stress on neighbouring sump pumps.
it's unfortunate that there was a fire on the street, but there needs to be a drainage solution developed before the spring. this is a large property and it simply can't be left to drain into the sanitary like this.
i've been informed that the fire department probably turned the power off, and i certainly understand the reasons why. but, there needs to be a pump in the property, or the drain needs to be plugged, or something else - otherwise the toilets on the street are going to back up badly in the spring.
so, i really ultimately need to know who deals with this. the city? the fire department? the property owner? neighbours smashing through the windows and doing it themselves?
j
i'll smash the place up with a baseball bat, and then cram the bat right down the floor drain.
yeah? just watch me...
it'll have to overflow through the windows, out to the storm sewer.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
gah...
so, a few weeks ago, a heavy rainstorm came through here and the toilet started flushing slowly. at the time, i had no idea what that meant - i didn't even know if i was on city or a septic (i'm on city). but, some back and forth with the landlord and a lot of googling have led me to believe that something is broken with the piping.
the upside is i've learned a bit about how this works. it's something i've never had to think about before. but the way it's supposed to work is that the rain water goes into the storm drain and down a separate pipe to the river, where it dumps in untreated. the toilet water goes into a separate sanitary line and out to the treatment plant. so, rainfall should never back up the toilet.
and, yet it was clear from the beginning that rainwater is in fact slowing down the toilet's drainage. it's not quite backing up. yet.
but, of course the response i'm getting is "that's impossible, it's not how the system works".
there's since been two rainfalls that have caused the toilet to slow down at levels that are proportional to the amount of rain that fell. small rainfalls mean small issue. big rainfalls mean big issue. so, we've got correlation and proportionality. the scientific method tells me we have a causal relationship, here. but science has been less powerful than faith. my scientific reasoning was met with an offer to use the landlord's plunger.
but, what the causal relationship i developed demonstrates is that there's either a break in the local line (which would be expensive for the property owner to fix) or a break on the city line. so, i asked the guy next door...
yup. he's getting backups from the rain, too.
now, i need to convince them that they need to get the city in here to fix something before the snow melts in the spring. as the relationship is proportional, things could get messy down here if nothing happens before then.
there's some construction on the main street a few blocks away to replace old sewer lines.
i'm *hoping* that what's going on is that they have the rainwater temporarily routed to the sanitary, and it will be corrected within a few weeks. but, i have no evidence of this.
my other suspicion is connected to the house across the street. there was a fire there about a month ago, which is about when things started backing up. the property's been completely shut down. if they shut the sump pump off, the rainwater could be pooling in the basement and heading down the floor drain - which is usually connected to the sanitary. that would explain it. the problem is that it's hard to understand how that could be generating *enough* water to back shit up without there being significant blockage somewhere. but, then you need to ask the question: what else has been flowing through the floor drain since then?
i've done all i can do, though. i've proven to them that something is crossed, and it's probably a city issue. now i just have to hope they do something about it...
i'm honestly expecting a more positive response from the main property owner than the guy upstairs. i THINK i've got enough evidence to convince him. he mentioned calling the city a few emails ago, so i think he'll get it.
but i can't risk this backing up in the spring and am going to have to call the city myself if i don't get a good response.
i mean, it's crystal clear that rainwater is flooding the sanitary somewhere, even if it's not supposed to.
what was weird about the rain today, though, is that the sump pump didn't come on until like an hour after it stopped raining, indicating it's draining from somewhere - like the house across the street, maybe.
i've convinced myself it's the abandoned property next door.
so, i've sent an email off to the windsor engineering department, asking them about the sewer replacement (is the storm going through the sanitary?) and what the procedure is for dealing with an abandoned property that's not draining properly...
To: engineeringdept@city.windsor.on.ca jessica
hi....
i'm hoping this is a good email address, but maybe you could forward this somewhere more appropriate if it isn't?
i'm
renting a basement apartment at cataraqui and marion and am getting a
few problems and am just trying to determine the cause. my landlord
claims there are separate storm and sanitary lines, and i have no reason
to doubt him. his logic is that rainfall should not cause the toilet to
drain slowly, and he's consequently not taking me seriously. i
understand his argument and why it shouldn't happen.
however, i'm a scientifically minded person and i've been able to demonstrate the following:
1)
the slow down is correlated with the rain. that is, the toilet drains
slowly after a rain and drains normally once the rain has dried up. so,
while a block might exist, it's not the primary cause of the slow down.
2)
the amount of slow down is proportional to the amount of rain. that is,
when it rains a little, it slows down a little. when it rains a lot, it
slows down a lot.
despite understanding that these
systems ought to be separated, my brief and aborted training as a
physicist tells me that when you have things that are correlated in a
proportional manner, it is very likely that there is a causal
relationship between them. that is, i have a high degree of certainty
that the rain is causing the toilet to drain slowly in a manner that is
proportional to how much rain is falling.
while it's
august right now, the proportionality has me concerned about spring
runoff, which is of course substantial in canada. i have every reason to
think that that a lot of snow melting could back up the toilet and
cause a horrible mess.
now, i've talked to the
neighbour next door and he's confirmed that he's actual dealing with
back ups through the pipes, which is a worse problem than i have. he's
convinced that the problem is related to sewer replacement on wyandotte
down the road. this only makes sense to me if they might have put the
storm through the sanitary as a temporary measure. is that something the
construction team has done in the short run?
i'm
leaning towards a different cause. at roughly the same time that the
problem started, the house across the street experienced a significant
fire. the property has been completely shut down. i suspect the sump
pump is not running, the basement is flooding and it's draining into the
floor, which is connected to the sanitary and this is causing the
backup. the issue i'm running into in having this make sense is related
to the volume of water running through the floor drain. it's a pretty
big property - it was an apartment before the fire, but it would have
been a five or six bedroom house some time in the middle of the last
century, and it has a very big backyard. so, there's a potential for a
large volume of water to be coming into the floor drain. how likely do
you think it is that this could be the root of the problem? how big a
problem do you think this is going to cause in the spring, if it's not
addressed now? and what is the better solution for this - running a sump
pump on an abandoned property, or closing the drains off? how does the
city deal with something like this, if it's determined to be the cause?
city of windsor, engineering department
I would like to clear up a few points in your email.
While
your landlord may be correct in that the house may be serviced by
separate storm and sanitary connections (I can't confirm that), both
these connections would outlet to the same combined sewer in the road.
There is only one sewer Cataraqui and one on Marion, and they are both
combined sewers meaning that they accept both rain water and sewage.
With
respect to the Wyandotte project, there is no sewer work being
undertaken as part of that project. Windsor Utilities is replacing the
watermain and services and the City will reconstruct the pavement
following that work. This project would have no impact on the sewers
servicing your property.
You are most likely correct in
that there is a correlation between rainfall and the slow running
plumbing in your house. This is due to the combined nature of the sewer
that services your property. During rain events, combined sewers fill
with rainwater and therefore have limited capacity to accept flows from
buildings.
With respect to the apartment building
across the street from you, all rainfall runoff from this property would
have entered the sewer system via foundation drains prior to the fire,
so the fact that the basement may have flooded and the water is now
entering the floor drain would change the drainage pattern very little.
In fact, rainwater entering the sewers from this property would be very
small in proportion to that coming from the catchbasins draining the
roads in the area.
With respect to abandonment of the
connections servicing the apartment building, that would be addressed
when the building is demolished by the Building Department. If you have
concerns regarding the state of
the building, please contact the Building Department via 311.
Hopefully, this answers some of your questions. Please contact me if you want to discuss this matter further.
