Guess who just got back today?

October 6, 2009, 12:15 -05 by chris
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Those wild-eyed boys that had been away
Havent changed, havent much to say
But man, I still think those cats are great…

So we’re back to being a Seattle band again, as opposed to a Seattle, Manhattan, Not-Really-Getting-Much-Done band.

Musing over where to shoehorn in another keyboard, whilst watching the tracking number on the Siel.

Also, five dollar Craigslist kick pedal. One of the late-70s / early-80s Camco ones, just like Neil Peart used to use. Not that I actually know how to play. Or have room to leave a kit set up anywhere just yet. Details, details.

Acquaviva Picena Sound Machine

October 1, 2009, 15:14 -05 by chris
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Tried to convince myself I didn’t need a 1982 Italian divide-down oscillator string machine. Failed. Now it just needs to get to Seattle in one piece.

Tidy up!

September 19, 2009, 20:41 -05 by chris
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Ikea’s great if you need some budget studio furniture with your ten-meatball lunch special. Seen here, the just-picked-up-today “Lustifik” (sp?) shoe rack lying on its side as a mini keyboard stand for the Micron (now I can actually access the top panel of the Yamaha, in case I ever want faster-than-booting-up-the-computer access to crappy ROMpler sounds… hmm, might be handy for practice or working out quick ideas, actually). Tons of other people are using just-happen-to-be-the-right-size Ikea bedside tables and shelves as studio racks, one of the other shoe racks is a galvanized-metal angled shelf that’s great for drum machines and ‘desktop’ modules, there’s a floor-to-ceiling metal poles with shelves in-between closet system I’ve seen used by people with obscenely large synth collections, and the (discontinued and now a hot used-market item among home-studio geeks) “Jerker” desks are great for a computer/synth workstation as long as you get the version with multiple tiers and the optional swing-out side shelves, which are perfect for studio monitors. And that’s before you get into the whole “Ikea hack” thing – regardless, the trick is to go through Ikea with an eye towards using stuff for not-necessarily-intended (re)purposes.

The eagle suffers little birds to sing / and is not careful what they mean thereby…

September 17, 2009, 10:18 -05 by chris
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http://twitter.com/dollfactoryband

Deep Thoughts

September 11, 2009, 17:07 -05 by chris
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When you’re a couple of grown-ups with wives and new babies and chores and remodeling projects and honey-do lists and commutes and mortgages and car payments, and are still playing rock band (literally, not the video game, which is indescribably frustrating to play when you actually know how to play the actual songs on actual instruments), it’s impossible to take yourselves too seriously. Because no matter how cool you may like to think you are, you inevitably end up looking like the final act of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, in which the protagonists triumphantly return from a phone-booth journey to the future with The Princesses, wearing those baby-carrier backpacks, which you actually do own in real life because it’s easier on the ol’ back. And not only do you like it, you’ve never been happier.

“Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday.”

September 11, 2009, 15:42 -05 by chris
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• Didn’t post for a week.
• Went down to Eugene, Oregon to visit family and Garrick, who will be back in Seattle in October.
• Realized the whole “sure, of course we’ll continue recording while one of us is on the East Coast and the other is on the West” thing doesn’t really work so well for us.
• Was OK with everything in Eugene having sprouts, avocado, and cream cheese on it. When you’ve been raised in Eugene, a certain amount of post-traumatic-sprout-disorder is probably inevitable, so it’s good to be on the road to recovery. 
• Hand-drew a best guess at the “negative-going trigger pulse”, as described in the Akai AX-60 manual, with the pencil tool in Bias Peak, loaded it into the EXS-24 in Logic, looped a continuous line of 16th notes for the duration of the song, plugged in a 1/4″ cable, and it really, actually does sync the arpeggiator – success! But the best part is that it doesn’t ‘freewheel’, it advances one step of the arpeggiator cycle each time it “hears” a “pulse” – so it’ll work with any pattern – not just straight, continuous 16th notes, but whatever rhythm of “pulses” it receives at the trigger input. And one of the arp modes is “all notes being held down simultaneously”, which does a half-decent poor man’s approximation of that high-chimey-chord-pulses thing on a lot of early-to-mid-period Skinny Puppy stuff. Not bad for a $100 pawnshop-rescue polysynth.
• Still need to pull the MIDI-cable-spaghetti, aka “cable salad”, out from behind/around/between/over/under/through everything, start fresh, and reconnect all the MIDI cables to everything, which I’ve been putting off because I hate hate hate (hate!) cable spaghetti. There are MIDI cables back there that weren’t even hooked up to anything, as it was easier to just grab another cable and lay it across the top than to try to extract an existing one from the melee. 
• There hasn’t been a single interesting thing in the “musical instruments” section on Seattle, Portland, or Eugene Craigslist in, like, two weeks. Just a bunch of (sorry-dude-that’s-not-actually-that-RARE!!! or MUST-SEE!!! or CUSTOM!!! and I don’t want to MAKE OFFER!!!) guitars and the usual double kick drum pedals (there must be some sort of not-amateur-metal-enough-for-Craigslist law that prohibits the sale of regular single-beater kick drum pedals) and Casiotone/Yamaha PSR-series toy keyboards. This is both a good (saves money I shouldn’t be spending anyway) and a bad (boring, and foils evil plans to take advantage of the “economic downturn” by buying up everybody’s vintage synthesizers) thing.

Plowing through your bean field…

September 2, 2009, 19:51 -05 by chris
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Line 6 must be A) Crazy, B) Feeling generous, C) About to come out with something new, or D) All of the above, because they’re giving away Pod Farm free during the month of September if you own an iLok or PodXT / TonePort / GuitarPort-series product – and I have both. Better go get it, before they come to their senses.

Because every track needs to sound like it was recorded through a Pod. Right? Hello? Hey, where’d everybody go?

More Craigslist excitement…

September 2, 2009, 12:39 -05 by chris
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…well, exciting to me, anyway. I’m not sure what it says about me that I can manage to get all excited over scoring a great deal on a classic, vintage…

…MIDI interface. Watch out. Lock up your daughters and throw away the keys, folks, ’cause those edgy rock-n-rollers are back in town – and this time, they’re packin’ another square rackmount box with blinky lights on it that doesn’t actually make any sound or do anything by itself. Hello Seattle! Are you ready to send some actively-buffered continuous controller messages to the MIDI-to-control-voltage interface… to-NITE? Yeeea-uh!