exipolar.net

Mark came over today, we worked on a song that I had started months ago.  we finally finished it clocking in at 5:07 in length. here’s a 30 second clip.  hopefully I’ll have some lyrics drafted tomorrow to record, and the only thing left to record some real drums to it other than the amazingly repeatative drum machine.

Left to Question – epiphany(we need a real drummer mix and some vocals would be nice mix) clip

I’m starting to feel like my influences are starting to meld together into a coherent me for the first time.  I used to have very different aspects of myself that were derivative of other things.  Time seems to have melded them into a cohesive image of what I want to make.  I’m still way to affected by my environment to be 100% productive though. :/ I think when I get this loaf in the oven, I might do a jog around the block since it’s at a nice temperature out.

Got them custom made through the Vans site, I wish ESP guitars had something like that.

Sugar Disaster

Originally uploaded by exipolar.

The Good thing is that the jar for dispensing the sugar just filled

enhanced for pinkness and how dark the original take was.  Thing is, my hair is really highlighted pink, don’t let the oversaturation fool you.

oh and I got a plurk because twitter is beginning to suck, sorry guys :/

I’ve decided to no longer wait to go bed with courtney everynight as she closes at her job at midnight five nights a week, and instead have decided to go to bed at a reasonable hour provided that the place is in decent shape when she does get home.

So far, my plan is working wonderfully!  Yet again I have a ton of energy. I have a bunch of song ideas that I’ll work on when I get some private time to myself.  I started on a song last spring that I’ve been redoing in the last two days and it kicks ass.

Waking up early and having more energy has had one unintended side effect.  I’m much more restless with others around me.  I’ve always been sort of independantly minded though.  Most of the time, I I find that others just get in the way of what I want to do, espescially in this town when it comes to music.  Lame people are everywhere and I still am.  I guess with that attitude it’s best for me to do things on my own for now.

The Mixing Console continues to yeild new surpises in functionality.  I’m starting to get the hand of the three band Equalizer for de muddying instruments.  Though I do hate having to pull it out, plugging it in, plugging everything else into it, and turning it on everytime I want to do something.  Before I just had to start up jack and use Ardour’s Mixing Capabilities.  I do overall prefer the tangibility of the mixer itself though, which Is why I don’t unhook it.

Follow me up on twitter

I bought this mixing console not too long ago.  This is by far the most intimidating thing I’ve ever used.  Took me days to even come up with an eloquent way to hook it up to my Multi Track Card.

Equipment Nerdiness is now

This thing has 8 RCA post fader outs. 8 XLR in’s, 8 RCA in’s, 16 TRS in’s, Inserts for the first 8 XLR/TRS/RCA ins.  Three Band Parametric Equalizer… it’s intense.  My Mutlitrack card is an M-Audio 1010 lt delta.  It has 8 RCA analog outs, 6 RCA analog in’s and 2 XLR in’s.  I’m also planning on this thing being hooked up to my Direct injection box that also has 8 channels on it.  Right now I’m using the Unbalanced output of the DI box to hook up to the M-audio card.  But the DI box has XLR outs on the back which means provided that I invest in a snake, I can use strictly balanced signals through the mixer save the card’s RCA jacks.

Along with the Mixing Console I got an Alesis Quadraverb.  This thing is a beauty.  I plan on somehow hooking this up to the effects console. I’m still debating whether I should put it in the aux sends & returns or use inserts for it. I think as Inserts that they’d be much more useful and cause less confusion.

I deduced that when recording for now, If I were to record from the mixer that I record raw tracks from the Monitor outs since they are prefader (hence why it’s called the monitor) into the 2 XLR in’s on my Multi-track card. I don’t want to record anything post fader on account of the obvious fact that it would go through the equalization again through the main outs and that could be problematic.

Right now, the first 3 inputs on my multitrack card are from the unbalanced outs of my DI box for intrument recording.  the 4th is from my Marshall Lead 100 Mosfet that I need a Cabinet for.  The last 2 RCA outs are coming from the mentioned Monitor outs as I do not have the TRS-XLR(M) chords, but I kinda like it like that because I can simultatiously record Vocals and the V=amp 2 if I wished but I can just as easily do it with another less desirable configuration.  I only go through all this trouble to use only balanced connections without having to spend $500 on a Presonus Firepod.

Now to set up the midi system for the Quadraverb and my Behringer V-amp 2(it’s cheap but it has uses)

Despite how smart my friends seem to think I am, I takes me awhile to learn things.  For instance, I have yet to learn how to open a blog entry without the same tricks.  Notices how the subject opens up with every entry?

Anyways, I finally discovered Luna Sea.  I’ve known about them for as long as I’ve known about jrock, and I’ve known that they are possibly the most influential band of V-kei next to X Japan.  until recently I’ve never figured out why though.

the past 7 years has simply been a journey through learning how to listen to music.

First of all, finally got around to upgrading to wordpress 2.5; this is pretty f-ing sweet if you ask me.  Love the new look and feel, haven’t explored all of the functionality yet.

Anyways

A long time ago, there was this show on the Sci-fi Channel called Lexx, and every time it would come on, my father would change the channel.  He apparently thought it was stupid or something,  But from the 5 to 10 minute snippets that I could catch while he was somewhere else, I found the show to be very interesting.  In the end though, I never got a full view of how amazing the show really was.

Lexx, revolves around four very different people as the crew of the Lexx, the most destructive ship in the universe as it can destroy whole planets in a single shot.  The consists of Stanely Tweedle (nothing more than a hapless failure), Xev/Zev Bellringer (A Love slave/Cluster lizard without the mind control of a love slave) Kai (Undead assassin formerly employed and enslaved by His Divine Shadow, he the last of his people) and 790 (a robot head with Xev’s love slave programming for which makes him madly in love with her despite being only a robot head).  I regard the show itself as a kind of post modern fantasy space opera dark comedy more than simply sci fi.  I was more of a parody of space opera sci-fi.  But, even though it acted like a parody, it wasn’t always funny.  Though it never really told any jokes, but it was funny.  It was never very serious but there was real heartbreaks.  It was cynical like a lot of things in the 90’s but you could still connect with the crew.  There turns out to be so much subtlety to this show.

I remember when it was on Sci-fi. it was on the hour after farscape; I also remember how people would constantly compare the two even though, aside from featuring a rag tag crew on a living ship, neither of them were alike at all.  I don’t think a lot of people knew how to take it.  It could be whatever it wanted to be when it wanted to be, and viewers tend to expect things being a particular kind of way.

Though, the episode we watched today stunned me.  I’m not quite sure how to explain it.  Most of the time when I watch TV these days, I don’t feel anything for anybody.  A guy dies and all I’m thinking about is the plot, I don’t even realize the shock of injury or even death.  This episode introduced two characters only enough to for us to realize that they are human and that we are allowed to relate to them in the way we might the main characters, and precisely when that occured, both of them are instantly removed from the plot.  The feeling was equivalent to just feeling comfortable in a strangers house and having the seat pulled out from under you as you go to sit down.

I really wish there were more shows like this on today.

It’s really good to be an adult to be able to look back on the things that one’s parents disdained for one to enjoy (or disdain) with mature critisism for one’s own self as opposed to having it being made for them.  It helps me realize how I’ve developed away from my parents views.  I see them as rather open minded people, but I can see how the sensibilities of their generation and enviornment of limited them from being able to enjoy the subtleties they themselves taught me to seek out.  I guess this is just another symptom of a slice of social evolution.

I spent a good portion of my economic stimulus check on a new midi controller! It’s not like it has knobs and buttons all over the place like others but it’s enough for my purposes.  Mainly I have been composing a lot for piano-ish/keyboard type music, I realized that doing this sort of thing strictly through sequencing isn’t going to do unless I actually had a keyboard on hand to know how one plays it.  I’ve actually learned a lot more than I wanted to.  This isn’t a bad thing of course.  What I was hoping for was to give my compositions more life by adding some improvisational flair to the rhythm pattern,  Instead though I got a handle of the proper “posture” that one plays piano that made even the original renditions sound more like piano music.  To be specific, the way I had originally wrote felt very awkward as I attempted to play it.  I decided to spread my hands our a bit which of course spread out the harmonic range of the phrases.  I noticed that the result sounded more natural as well, it sounded more like a piano piece.

The Classic Rock Trio dubbed “The Psychotics” for which I am the bassist of is going to be playing at a local bar the 30th, I see it as my internship on the whole rock ‘n roll band.  Experience to be used for when I actually use my own projects.  I’m fairly excited, it’ll be my first show.  we’re trying to get fliers posted around town and all.  If the gig is successful I’ll look into making a myspace and all for us.

I started what Leo from Zenhabits called a tralog.  Basically it’s a blog to keep track of personal progress on things; it’s very dry and simply full of stats but it’s good to reflect on.  You can read (& comment on) it here.  I’m going to update it twice a day at least, once in the morning to show what I have planned, and once before I go to bed to show what I have done outside of plans.  I hope that eventually I’ll be 100x more productive and I’ll be able to get things done easily.

In first grade I was diagnosed ADD and emotionally challenged.  I should scan the paperwork for a post header.  I really didn’t know about it until my early adult hood.  The fact is though, it takes some real living in order to understand what it means to be “emotionally challenged”.

I kinda disdain the term actually; it seems insulting to my faculty as a human being; it implies that I was made “wrong” from the beginning.  I’m not sure if it’s a developmental problem or just a learning disability, but the fact is I do have trouble relating to others.  I’m often insulting, crass, tactless, and just generally uncouth; the only way I even know this is from analyzing the reactions of others around me.  I aspire to be a musician, but it’s been a hard road having to make the heart I have to use to be my muse for my art; at least I don’t have to settle for the one I was born with.

But without being so pretentious, I do experience emotions, I just don’t experience them in the way we seem to be acustomed to them being presented.  I like to think of the way I experience passion, and hate, and all of that as the way we individually see colors, and it just so happens my frequency assignments are very different from others.  My only worry so to speak is that I question if a person who experiences emotions so different from others can succeed in what I have a passion for. Well, Beck certainly made it.

Saturday night I got a melody stuck in my head that I probably heard in a video game somewhere, but is now encorporated into the most epic song I’ve ever endeavored to write.  If the last few days didn’t suck as much as they did I would have gotten more done with it (jack server kept crashing) but it’s been behaving today and I think I have enough focus tonight to work on it again.

Espescially after watching AWESOME poetry tonight.  We weren’t prepared for paying for anything so I sacrificed laundry money for a copy of poems by a Roger Bonair-Agard who dazzled me with his words tonight.

Well the last few days haven’t been all bad.  Other than said Poetry, I got my copy of Queen live at Wembley which rocked. I’ve even developed a Queen obsession not too unlike my Jem obsession only real difference, is that courtney already has a ton of Queen CD’s for me to raid and rip to my computer (suck it RIAA).  I really want to do a cover of Stone Cold Crazy.

Other than all of that, I finally ghetto customized my guitar.  I spray painted my pick gaurd.  I want a real custom pick gaurd though, but I don’t have the money for that yet I don’t think.

Damn this post is juvenille.  Here’s a pic of the guitar

I just “emailed” last.fm tonight about a problem with their manager’s interface.  Hopefully that goes well.  So far though, what last.fm is offering independant artistis is amazing if not unheard of.  I love it so far.  I signed Left to Question up for it now that band activities have resumed to a degree.  I’m not going to be offering any free downloads until this issue is set with the uploads that I have right now.

I’m so happy I’ve found that this is what I want to do with my life.  Music is what I really want to do.  It’s become my obsession and my biggest love.  Now I just need to get a better career to support myself so that I can do music professionally.   It is an expensive habit.

Another review of yesterday’s jam:
I can’t believe we made a song in three hours.  Still it’s in a rough long cut form right now, but it’ll get completed sooner than later.  All I have to do with it now is re-record Dave’s vocal’s while wearing headphones so as not to have as much bleed in the vocal track like this one has.  I can actually turn off the other instrument tracks, you would still be able to hear them loudly in the vocal track.  Right now, I’m exporting a version without the horrible solo, not just for our listening pleasure, but for practice copies for mark to solo too.

not music related:
Tomorrow, I will try to have a running exercise before I go to work.  I have the gotten doing a morning routine into habit enough now that I think I can do it and make running a habit now.  For now though, sleep!

Mark was over, and we literally wrote a song in a day!  All of us!  Dave wrote something this morning, and he jammed out the chord progression while Mark and I tried attempting some avenged sevenfold.  Then we jammed it out all together.  We recorded a rough cut soon after and here it is

Left to Question - Murphy’s Lawyer[rough cut]

Left to Question – murphy’s lawyer [rough cut]

Rather, he’s the host, the ignorant studio audience and half the freakshow guests wrapped up into one.  This may explain why he was so understanding of Marylin Manson.

playing on the bass, I was playing better I usually do when I’m bored so I recorded it.

Courtney and I were reading in an older issue of RADAR Magazine (March issue) that now my generation is now official called “The Millenials.”  I guess that’s kinda cool.  They write in an article about Jeff Godinier’s Book, “X saves the World”:

…Millenials (roughly people born between 1980 and 1995) lack the  noble skepticism of [Gen Xers].  They love stuff, they love celebrities, they love name brands.  They’re happy to do what advertising tells them to do.

Okay, so maybe it’s not the official name.  I’ve head my generation refered to as generation Y before.  Oh well.

But the cynicism, I slightly share.  Our generation doesn’t know how to be awesome.  Simply that, it seems that beyond being sheep to marketting, we as a society no longer have the will to be anything, or become anything outside of what were are told to be.  Now, we’ve heard this all before.  But honestly though, who can blame us.

By contrast, pop culture and market trends were easier to follow in earlier decades like the 80’s.  This is partly why I see retro movements like the Electroclash genre, bands like The Bird & the Bee, the come back tours of bands like The Who and Led Zepplin, and the new B-52’s album Funplex in this decade are so successful.  When we look back into earlier decades, we are able to recognize different movements and trends easily.  The 90’s not so much though.  I have a better handle on it now that we’ve gone this far into this decade, but the 90’s by comparison seems like this disjointed hodge podge of meaningless fakery.  I see a lot of my peers in nostalgia over cartoons of their childhoods on youtube.  I see a lot of my peers obsess over the fashion and music from the 60’s and 70’s.  Current fashion seems more like a yearning not for more simple times, but times in which you could say “this is now” or “that was then”.  We don’t have that anymore in this post modern world.

This generation is defined by having no identity of it’s own to make.  We have nothing to grab on to to build off of.  It easy to see that we are going to have to wait for things that haven’t been exlpored yet to be worth while.  I mean things continually evolve.  But what is quality of the progeny of past fashions.  So we naturally turn to the past when in retrospect, it seemed easy to be awesome.

But there are good movements.  However, it’s very subjective of who you are.  Are you a hardcore headbanger?  Or are you in the mood for some low key Ambient Techno?  Whatever you are in the mood for, it exists and there is an established market for it.  No matter how big or small, there is a market for whatever you think you need.  Spend a little cash and you can feel complete until it’s not enough again.

And those of us  who don’t want to buy into it are lost and without an identity because we are so culturally accustomed to buying our identities (buying of course is a term I’m using loosely, many of us download music, but the fact that we are using marketed content is what matters here.)

We are told that “you have to be yourself”.  Does that even mean anything when one can be seen as the construction of anything.  Rather, this generation does not create it’s identity, it cuts & pastes it together out of things it sees on the TV.

So what are we going to do?  Eventually we’re just going to get tired of being marketed to and more and more people are going to want something “real”.  After realizing, that nothing is real the way we think it is, we’re going to start using these consumables in was that are unintended.  We are already seeing this in things like Rick Rolling, and shows like Robot Chicken.  People take something that meant something fake, and using it in an unintended genuine way.  We are going to see more and more people use “fake” things as a motif for real art and expression.  We will cease to buy into and adopt our identity from the markets literally, instead use it in a way that was unintended by the marketer allowing the individual to define himself/herself via parody and satire.

We will mature through sarcasm.  It’s the only way really.

We will take the pieces and paste them into way unintended for the sake of our own individual entertainment.

Now if we hold each other to it, we will be awesome!