Friday 27 July 2012

Idled my day away yesterday, doing that too often. Still, today's sunny and the beach is calling. Why not? No music to write, a couple of app reviews but no hurry on those. Really will have to look for some proper work.... next week seems ideal for that. :)

Apparently they're talking about stretching the Hobbit to three films. Desperate, cynical, depressing. I spose LOTR turned into such a money-making machine they just couldn't resist.

The Grand Egg and Spoon starts today. More cynical money-making but thank heavens for Jessica Ennis and her cute bottom. Oh, and beach volleyball. Roll on it all being over!!

This blog appears to have mostly degenerated into my ramblings about work I'm not doing, or should be doing. It takes maybe a minute of my time to write and has no thought either, so any good ideas always occur later. I think I'm losing the plot, which reminds me...

Tuesday 24 July 2012

Heartbeat stuff uploaded today, turns out they liked the early ambient ones after all so it's five tracks (including alt mixes) and edits. All done so I can return to "the infernal machine" and get that polished off.

first a spot of lunch methinks!

Wednesday 18 July 2012

Spent the morning working on tension beds with heartbeats. Thought I'd buggered the Modfactor too (swapped for the Filterbank 2) but managed to rescue it with the help of a file found on the Mac and the old laptop, the only thing that appears to be able to perform the update without screwing up. Note to self: don't try with MIDI again!!
This evening Pat working and I'm in between engagements. Tony and Colin here tomorrow, will try and get Elka fixed if poss rather than have it go away, plus will look at Synthi and get P2K power supply sorted. Feel a bit of a loose end. Should work on that infernal thang but I'll leave it until Sunday night I think. Need time to get in the mood for that one final push.
Enjoyed the Ideation gig so much am considering flogging the Octatrack. Life's so much easier without it and all it really does for me is play long static files. The rest of the stuff I can do easier with other gear and I really miss using the ESX-1 for its immediacy. It was very obvious when I was showing stuff off to David (Modfactor guy) that demoing the esx from scratch was easy and I never even considered trying to so the same for the Octa. Wish someone else would bring out a product that simply streamed long stuff from card, I'd go with that I think.
Or am I being foolish (again)?

Sunday 15 July 2012

Chuffed, the gig went well. Even my theremin playing was not a disaster. Lots of good comments after too so we seem to have gone across well also. Happy days! Now back to work, review to finish and that heartbeat tension music to do. Life is good!

Friday 13 July 2012

Experimented with theremin and freqbox. May take that to gig and see what noises it makes. Wild huh?

Tuesday 10 July 2012

Turns out the theremin not so badly out so I've wasted weeks. Still gonna take to gig I think but will probably  concentrate on fx though!
Dunno when I'll get time to work on gig. Not much I suspect so thank goodness we practised.

Sunday 8 July 2012

cracking w/e practising with pete for awakenings. first track we did was brill - hour long too! other stuff of interest also, spawned some good ck ideas too in terms of performance need - jolly useful. stuck in horrible traffic queue on way home though, sat on m40 for over an hour.
This week must send off the app review (almost done) plus work on diva and calibrate theremin and do stuff with tim, time permitting. Really should find some new library work!
tempus fugit....

Tuesday 3 July 2012

Progress on a difficult review, well small steps anyway. Still some questions being pondered so hope for more feedback and info but gonna do a total reset and then look at the ext/int storage issues and see if sticking to some manual filing routing helps reduce or even eliminate the crashes/hangs. I am not completely optimistic but will do my best.
Turns out sample import is not actually supported and it seems the internal flash is almost not recommended to be used (!). Some confusion about streaming from external media too as what I was told seems wrong/unlikely/impossible. We'll see. Spose they can't all be a pleasure to do.

No music done, dunno what I'll get done this week really. Have that small app to do plus the softsynth review I really want to get stuck into. But it's gig practice this weekend...

Sunday 1 July 2012

Couldn't watch the Vietnamese thing, too many scary operations. Heard one of my tracks by skipping through and thought of maybe getting Waves to give it that "sounds louder at low levels" thing. Dunno though, is that really what everyone does?

Fighting that piece of review gear. Thought it had broken something on my mixer after one crash involving a massive blast of white noise. I think in my panic I pressed a PFL button though, will look later. Can't trust it without a limiter in future though. Have fired off a lot of questions and will see what they say. could be hardware fault.

Ain't done much else. Still not writing any music although trying to learn Albion. Colin released the JSON version of Cirkos which has individual song/instrument dumps. So that's a good thing. He also added scene-level tempo storage and P3 pattern bar repeats up to 99 (IIRC) but I don't think he's really mentioned the updates. There's more too but I can't remember offhand.

Another filthy day, off to see mum later and sort going in the week for next few weeks. Weekends gonna be taken up with visit to pete, gig, Synth DIY. Wotta life!

Got an amazing softsynth to review.