Plaidophile

Watching a TV show/ad/movie/whatever and recognizing the majority of the loops used in the soundtrack, especially when they're just stock loops bundled with GarageBand or SoundTrack.

(Tonight's offender: Mythbusters)

I have entered a few of my songs into the Tap Tap Revenge contest. If you go to the contest voting page and happen to come across any Sockpuppet songs, I'd appreciate you voting for them. (And meanwhile, go ahead and vote for against songs based on whether you'd like to play them in a rhythm game or whatever. There's no way to vote specifically for a certain artist, which is probably a good thing in this case.)

(Well, okay, it actually IS possible by merit of their voting app being incredibly insecure and the complete list of entries easy to discover, but I am certainly not going to condone that means of messing with things.)

(Wow, they took the worst possible 30-second excerpt of &counting.)

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So, after learning that the older PS3 models function as an SACD player, I decided to buy an SACD. I'm listening to it right now. So far I'm not particularly impressed, as it doesn't actually sound any better than a CD (not that I was expecting it to). I think the only thing I can say in its favor is that having true 5.1 multichannel sound makes it sound better than a stereo CD played in PLII Music mode, but I never play CDs in PLII Music mode to begin with and my stereo soundfield is just fine anyway.

Also, it's worth noting that this music sounds like it's overcompressed and clipping, which is surprising considering it's a Rachmaninov concerto.

Okay, I know I have said this before but Logic 8 (aka Logic Studio) is a very very worthwhile upgrade. Take comping alone justifies the upgrade cost. In Logic 7 and earlier, managing multiple vocal or instrument takes was a huge pain in the ass since you had to create a bunch of virtual channels and manually splice between them and mute/unmute regions and stuff and then set up your crossfades by hand and it got me into a bad habit of just trying to get a single perfect take for everything (which is impossible).

But with comping, you can just rerecord parts that need work, and then your master region gets a little 'expand' widget on it, and when you expand things the individual recordings which make up a comp appear and you can very very easily just select the parts of which takes you want to use in the master comp, and it handles the crossfading for you, and you can also tweak the individual recordings through the sample editor and so on. It is so very very nice and it has completely saved my sanity while working on this album.

(Oh yeah I am working on an album.)

So, my new record player arrived today. After running to Radio Shack to get some RCA couplers (for some reason this turntable has an integrated interconnect cable, which is way too short) I got it hooked up, and finally put on an album I picked up in a pile of free stuff at Amazon a couple years ago.

There's something surprisingly satisfying about hearing the needle hit the groove with a nice "pop," then the subtle crackling which comes before the music starting. I won't say the sound is any better than CD (not that I've heard this album before in CD format or anything) but it does sound nice and crisp, and the bass is exceptionally clear. Now that I've made sure that this player works and doesn't, say, destroy records put onto it I might try out Radiohead - In Rainbows since until now I've only heard that in CD form (actually, only in 160Kbps mp3 and later as 192Kbps AAC). Most likely I'll listen to the first track on vinyl and then on CD (via my PS3).

Of course the most annoying thing about a record player is it's so huge. In order to fit this onto my entertainment center I had to move my TV forward and put the AppleTV onto the TV's base (although there's a better place to put it if I tidy things up a bit). All for the ability to listen to music in a format which was made obsolete two generations ago.

Oh well. Now this gives me an excuse to head over to Amoeba.

1. "Oh, what's this in my last.fm feed? Radiohead and Beck! Wow! I wonder how much tickets are."
2. "Neat, the festival is green-oriented... wait, $225.50 plus fees? Seriously?"
3. "Oh, that's only for a three-day pass. One-day tickets are, er, only $85. Well who else is playing?"
4. "Okay, Radiohead, Beck, Tom Petty, Primus... and a whole bunch of others I've never heard of. And to hear all four bands I do care about, I'd still need to get a two-day pass. $170."
5. "Maybe if I hang out at my sister's place I can just hear the concert from there."

I was feeling depressed and irritated at work today (gah stupid proprietary remote debugging crap), but when I got home I found that two overpriced online purchases arrived! First was the pair of Weighted Companion Cubes. Next was the Alesis ControlPad drum controller which I got so I could record "live" drums again without needing a huge amount of space.

It's a bit distressing that buying things makes me feel better.

So I'm waiting at the Portland airport for my flight back to San Francisco, and I have a few minutes before boarding begins, so I'd might as well say what I've been up to for the last few days.

Portland show went phenomenally. For the first time ever I actually feel completely happy with how a set went. Tomorrow: Seattle, revisiting the same spot where I popped my live performance cherry for reals. (Okay there was that time I jammed with pts at a night club in Albuquerque before that but I have never counted that as an actual gig so much as a "fucking around with instruments in front of a bunch of strangers" thing.)

I did have a couple of false starts on Run Faster, and I wish I could have had a chance to practice Rhymes With Lucia on loop pedal first (I decided to replace Gin or Ginseng with that as my closer at pretty much the last minute) but once the songs were underway they went very well. Although the (very strange) guitar I was borrowing had a pretty quirky setup, such that the bass pickup is much quieter than the treble. I'll probably end up using Spud's Squier instead for the rest of the tour... it's a much lower-class instrument, but at least the pickups match, and Squiers are at least pretty playable, for all their other flaws. It's not like I'm recording an album, here, anyway.

Oh and of course everyone completely rocked out (especially anti-m, which was the surprise of the evening — last year she did a very quiet acoustic set). It was also a lot of fun to drum for Octothorpe again.

reminder

In case you don't follow every single little thing I do everywhere on the Internet (and why not? HUH?!) I am playing a number of shows in a couple of weeks. Short short sets, but there are lots of other people playing short short sets (it is a Song Fight thing) and it is a lot of fun.

• Wednesday, April 2: San Francisco: The Space Gallery at 8:00 PM
• Friday, April 4: Portland: Imbibe at... uh... some time in the evening.
• Saturday, April 5: Seattle: Finn MacCool's at 8:00 PM
• Sunday, April 6: Spokane: Brooklyn Nights at 7ish
• Monday, April 7: Moscow, Idaho: Student Union Building International Ballroom at 8:00 PM

I believe all the shows are 21+ except the one in Moscow which is all-ages but if you're over 21 what the hell are you doing in Moscow anyway?

When I was a freshman in college, I had a small but growing CD collection. One of those CDs was Weezer (The Blue Album). I lived in the dorms, and my neighbor and I got along pretty well. One time he flipped through my CD collection and saw I had Weezer, and he asked if he could borrow it. I said, "Sure."

He made a personal "mixtape" of the album, which just had his favorite songs from the album. Repeatedly. And he played it, very loud. Repeatedly. And his stereo was right against the wall between our units.

Not being confrontational, it took me about a week before I finally went over and asked him to stop playing it. My exact words were, "If you do not stop playing this album right now, I will kill you." And he believed me, as I believed it.

As opposed to plaid. (Which I also like, as you well know.)

Tonight, I went with a large subset of the Spud-centric Seattle gang to see a well-known saxophonist (Lonnie Williams - you'd never think he was fairly well-known in certain circles for how little there is about him online... hell, the venue he was at doesn't even list him on the events page, wtf?) who's been a friend-of-a-friend-of-Spud for years, as well as his ensemble. While I was chatting with friends, Lonnie came over to say hi and basically do a pre-show meet-and-greet (though he specifically knew most of the people at the table).

He asked me if I played keys, and I said, "A little," and he said, "Why don't you come up on stage later and play with us?" I thought he was joking and said, "Sure!"

And towards the end of the set, he started to gesture at me, and I was all, "Really?" and he was all, "Really!" and I went up on stage and jammed. And apparently I did good!

This isn't even an isolated incident. I guess something about me says, "This person is willing to improvise." (Though this was the first time it didn't involve freejazz, and didn't involve me even being remotely prepared for it.)

It only took me close to 7 years, and a split vote in a fight practically nobody voted for (relative to the number of entries, anyway). Hopefully the next win will come a bit sooner.

Tears of joy.

I just got my download link for IN RAINBOWS!!!!!!