“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.Â
- 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.
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