Monday, September 24, 2007
Ensoniq was so fucking cool...
video from http://insidesynthesis.blogspot.com/
I love Ensoniq gear. My first keyboard was an ASR-10 Sampler, and I liked it so much I bought its retarded younger brother, the Ensoniq Fizmo synthesizer, a few years later new for $500. Last April I sold the Fizmo to help pay for my Virus TI - I got $800 for it on Ebay.
I'm keeping the ASR-10 for now, maybe someday I'll replace it with the ASR-10 Rack to save space... but damn, they had some sexy, sexy instruments back in the day.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The credit crunch and how we're all fucked...
By now everyone has heard of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, brought on by the practice of giving home loans to consumers who cannot realistically pay them off. What has not been talked about is the way other business sectors besides the real estate and financial sectors have been doing their part to screw us all over by enticing "high risk" consumers to "buy now, pay later" for whatever widget they're selling. (I'm not even talking about credit cards, here.)
Today's businesses are not interested in making money, they are interested in the price of their stock. The more a stock is valued, the happier shareholders are. It would seem like the best, most logical way to make a stock comparatively valuable would be to maximize the amount of money the company makes. Not so, anymore...
In the past few years, since Enron collapsed, more and more businesses appear to be content to count money owed as "money in the bank." The money owed to a business is reported essentially as gross profit, making the stock look better, but the fact is, that money simply isn't there. Consumers who have a history of not paying off debt, or even consumers who have outstanding debt with that very same company, are encouraged to sign on as "new" customers, perhaps with some limitations or strings attached. These "chronic" debtors then repeat their pattern of not paying for their goods or services, and the company counts what they once again haven't paid as revenue. More customers + more "hypothetical" money made = more valuable stock. A stock perceived as being more valuable attracts more investors, the more investors who want said stock, the more valuable said stock becomes.
One major factor leading to the infamous stock market crash known as Black Tuesday that heralded the start of the Great Depression was investors buying stocks on credit. The more investors who bought the stock, the more the stock was valued. When investors buy stock with money they don't have, that stock cannot possibly be worth what it was supposed to be worth if the investors were good for what they owed. Hence, when it comes time to "call in the chips," many of the investors don't have what they represented themselves to have had, and the stock takes a nosedive as more and more people come to the realization that a stock's value was overinflated.
If our chips are called in within the next few years, likely by foreign entities who have heavily invested in American stocks, the value of our stocks will be found to have been overinflated. By acting as though money owed is somehow money made, American corporations have set us all up for a spectacular economic downfall, where even those of us who manage to stay out of debt will be affected in the form of job losses. Those with debt, both legitimate (sensible mortgages, car loans, student loans, etc.) and illegitimate (credit card debt, loans that cannot be paid off at one's current income level) will all be in the same boat as these companies, in a mad dash to become solvent again, aggressively do everything they can to get what is owed as quickly as possible - at a time when many more Americans will find themselves out of work and unable to get work as these companies slash payroll in attempt to get out of their, self-imposed, debt.
Which brings us to an old pro-capitalist/pro-business/pro-libertarian catchphrase: "Rational Self-interest." Where is the "rational" self-interest in the scenario outlined above. If Tom owns his own restaurant and Joe skips out on the bill, Tom won't let Joe ever eat there again. But a typical modern American corporation these days is willing to take a look at Joe, consider how much he already owes, and bring him the most expensive dish in the house (but Joe can't have silverware, he'll have to eat Filet Mignon with plastic utensils.) Joe finishes his meal, walks out on the bill, and the corporation figures in a few months, they'll let Joe back in. You never know, maybe one of these days he'll not only pay his bill for *that* meal, but he might also pay up for the last three meals he skipped out on.
Joe's never going to pay up. If he ever intended on paying, he would have by now. And while he may be responsible for his own actions, it is the company that has allowed him to put the company in debt - multiple times. The problem is, it's all the rest of the customers who are going to have to pay Joe's bills in the end.
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Today's businesses are not interested in making money, they are interested in the price of their stock. The more a stock is valued, the happier shareholders are. It would seem like the best, most logical way to make a stock comparatively valuable would be to maximize the amount of money the company makes. Not so, anymore...
In the past few years, since Enron collapsed, more and more businesses appear to be content to count money owed as "money in the bank." The money owed to a business is reported essentially as gross profit, making the stock look better, but the fact is, that money simply isn't there. Consumers who have a history of not paying off debt, or even consumers who have outstanding debt with that very same company, are encouraged to sign on as "new" customers, perhaps with some limitations or strings attached. These "chronic" debtors then repeat their pattern of not paying for their goods or services, and the company counts what they once again haven't paid as revenue. More customers + more "hypothetical" money made = more valuable stock. A stock perceived as being more valuable attracts more investors, the more investors who want said stock, the more valuable said stock becomes.
One major factor leading to the infamous stock market crash known as Black Tuesday that heralded the start of the Great Depression was investors buying stocks on credit. The more investors who bought the stock, the more the stock was valued. When investors buy stock with money they don't have, that stock cannot possibly be worth what it was supposed to be worth if the investors were good for what they owed. Hence, when it comes time to "call in the chips," many of the investors don't have what they represented themselves to have had, and the stock takes a nosedive as more and more people come to the realization that a stock's value was overinflated.
If our chips are called in within the next few years, likely by foreign entities who have heavily invested in American stocks, the value of our stocks will be found to have been overinflated. By acting as though money owed is somehow money made, American corporations have set us all up for a spectacular economic downfall, where even those of us who manage to stay out of debt will be affected in the form of job losses. Those with debt, both legitimate (sensible mortgages, car loans, student loans, etc.) and illegitimate (credit card debt, loans that cannot be paid off at one's current income level) will all be in the same boat as these companies, in a mad dash to become solvent again, aggressively do everything they can to get what is owed as quickly as possible - at a time when many more Americans will find themselves out of work and unable to get work as these companies slash payroll in attempt to get out of their, self-imposed, debt.
Which brings us to an old pro-capitalist/pro-business/pro-libertarian catchphrase: "Rational Self-interest." Where is the "rational" self-interest in the scenario outlined above. If Tom owns his own restaurant and Joe skips out on the bill, Tom won't let Joe ever eat there again. But a typical modern American corporation these days is willing to take a look at Joe, consider how much he already owes, and bring him the most expensive dish in the house (but Joe can't have silverware, he'll have to eat Filet Mignon with plastic utensils.) Joe finishes his meal, walks out on the bill, and the corporation figures in a few months, they'll let Joe back in. You never know, maybe one of these days he'll not only pay his bill for *that* meal, but he might also pay up for the last three meals he skipped out on.
Joe's never going to pay up. If he ever intended on paying, he would have by now. And while he may be responsible for his own actions, it is the company that has allowed him to put the company in debt - multiple times. The problem is, it's all the rest of the customers who are going to have to pay Joe's bills in the end.
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
I am a gear whore fuck bunny fuck buddy
Logic 8 is out and the cost to upgrade is "only" $200.
I bought Logic v.4 Gold back in late 2000 for about $350. Back then it was by Emagic, and they had three different "levels" of Logic; Silver, Gold and Platinum. I soon dropped another $90 on the ES1 software synthesizer, which was ass and poo, and another $250 on the EXS24 software sampler. Back then I was also using Windows98.
In July of 2002, Apple bought emagic and announced that it was dropping Windows support effective Dec 31st of the same year. At this point my only experience with Macs were the crappy G3 computers running OS9 at school - I had no intention of "making the switch." I tried and absolutely hated Cakewalk/Sonar and Cubase and I hadn't heard of Ableton. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to buy a package that included Logic 5 Gold and the emagic emi 6|2m audio interface for ~$400 off of ebay. The emi 6|2m interface was pretty poopy, six audio inputs, two audio outputs, all of them RCA. That's asstastic. Logic 5 also wouldn't run on anything past Windows 98, so I had my computer dual boot Win98 and WinXP.
In the Spring of 2004, I got it in my head that I needed Logic's ES2 synthesizer and EVOC20 vocoder. Logic 5 had a feature where you could demo any of the additional Logic software instruments for 30 days, so I did that and then placed a bid on the Logic Synthesizer collection on ebay. This was a disaster. The Logic synthesizer collection included the ES2, EVOC20 and a filterbank plug-in that I can't think of the name of right now. What I didn't realize was that Apple was no longer allowing people to transfer their licenses - to be fair, I don't think the ebay seller I bought it from did either, but when I found this out, his solution was to attempt to avoid it altogether. Fortunately, I was able to make out the guy's cellphone number from the FedEx label and after I made it clear to him I wasn't going to stop calling him, he sent me my money back. I offered to ship him the box of invalid software licenses and manuals (No CDs, all this stuff was *in* Logic 5 already, you just needed activation codes), but he declined and told me to keep 'em. Maybe he thinks I scammed him, whatever. In the end I dropped $125 on the synthesizer collection new from some place in the UK.
Math break: $350 + $90 + $250 + $400 + $125 = $1215.
In the Summer of 2004, the music department at college got funding for a massive music studio upgrade and I was hired on to help sort it all and put it together. Not much got done, because many integral pieces of equipment quite frankly never got there by the end of the summer, but I did have a chance to set up some hot new G5 Macs with OS X. Wow - huge improvement. I absolutely despise, to this day, Mac OS 9, but OS X had me reconsidering my entire opinion of Apple Computers.
In October of 2004 I was commissioned to compose music for a ballet via the school, so I was laying things down on my Logic 5 Windows set up at home and then bringing them to school to work with the Macs running Logic 6. After the ballet came and went in February of 2005, I took the plunge and got a refurbished, last gen G4 12" Powerbook with Logic Pro 7; the cost to upgrade Logic was $300 + $10 to upgrade to the latest version, 7.1. It should be noted that Logic Pro 7 came with all the previously sold separately software instruments included!!! Had I never bought es1, es2, evoc20, and exs24, I would have gotten them for the same price anyway. That always feels nice.
In April of 2007, I had some money saved up from working my first *real* job, so I splurged on a refurbished Access Virus TI. Unfortunately, in order to get the full use of the Virus TI's ability to "Totally Integrate" with Logic, it turned out I needed to upgrade to Logic Pro 7.2, another $50.
Mathbreak: $1215 + $300 + $10 + $50 = $1575
Logic 7.2 Pro sold new for $1000. Logic 8 Studio sells new today for $500 and includes all kinds of extra stuff above and beyond everything Logic 7 included.
I'm not posting this as a rant against Apple or to say any of this is unfair - it's just how professional/productivity software is. Logic 8 as of today still doesn't work completely the way it's supposed to with the Virus TI, but that's something that Access is going to have to figure out, I guess.
Mathbreak: $1575 + $200 = $1775.
Rock on.
I bought Logic v.4 Gold back in late 2000 for about $350. Back then it was by Emagic, and they had three different "levels" of Logic; Silver, Gold and Platinum. I soon dropped another $90 on the ES1 software synthesizer, which was ass and poo, and another $250 on the EXS24 software sampler. Back then I was also using Windows98.
In July of 2002, Apple bought emagic and announced that it was dropping Windows support effective Dec 31st of the same year. At this point my only experience with Macs were the crappy G3 computers running OS9 at school - I had no intention of "making the switch." I tried and absolutely hated Cakewalk/Sonar and Cubase and I hadn't heard of Ableton. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to buy a package that included Logic 5 Gold and the emagic emi 6|2m audio interface for ~$400 off of ebay. The emi 6|2m interface was pretty poopy, six audio inputs, two audio outputs, all of them RCA. That's asstastic. Logic 5 also wouldn't run on anything past Windows 98, so I had my computer dual boot Win98 and WinXP.
In the Spring of 2004, I got it in my head that I needed Logic's ES2 synthesizer and EVOC20 vocoder. Logic 5 had a feature where you could demo any of the additional Logic software instruments for 30 days, so I did that and then placed a bid on the Logic Synthesizer collection on ebay. This was a disaster. The Logic synthesizer collection included the ES2, EVOC20 and a filterbank plug-in that I can't think of the name of right now. What I didn't realize was that Apple was no longer allowing people to transfer their licenses - to be fair, I don't think the ebay seller I bought it from did either, but when I found this out, his solution was to attempt to avoid it altogether. Fortunately, I was able to make out the guy's cellphone number from the FedEx label and after I made it clear to him I wasn't going to stop calling him, he sent me my money back. I offered to ship him the box of invalid software licenses and manuals (No CDs, all this stuff was *in* Logic 5 already, you just needed activation codes), but he declined and told me to keep 'em. Maybe he thinks I scammed him, whatever. In the end I dropped $125 on the synthesizer collection new from some place in the UK.
Math break: $350 + $90 + $250 + $400 + $125 = $1215.
In the Summer of 2004, the music department at college got funding for a massive music studio upgrade and I was hired on to help sort it all and put it together. Not much got done, because many integral pieces of equipment quite frankly never got there by the end of the summer, but I did have a chance to set up some hot new G5 Macs with OS X. Wow - huge improvement. I absolutely despise, to this day, Mac OS 9, but OS X had me reconsidering my entire opinion of Apple Computers.
In October of 2004 I was commissioned to compose music for a ballet via the school, so I was laying things down on my Logic 5 Windows set up at home and then bringing them to school to work with the Macs running Logic 6. After the ballet came and went in February of 2005, I took the plunge and got a refurbished, last gen G4 12" Powerbook with Logic Pro 7; the cost to upgrade Logic was $300 + $10 to upgrade to the latest version, 7.1. It should be noted that Logic Pro 7 came with all the previously sold separately software instruments included!!! Had I never bought es1, es2, evoc20, and exs24, I would have gotten them for the same price anyway. That always feels nice.
In April of 2007, I had some money saved up from working my first *real* job, so I splurged on a refurbished Access Virus TI. Unfortunately, in order to get the full use of the Virus TI's ability to "Totally Integrate" with Logic, it turned out I needed to upgrade to Logic Pro 7.2, another $50.
Mathbreak: $1215 + $300 + $10 + $50 = $1575
Logic 7.2 Pro sold new for $1000. Logic 8 Studio sells new today for $500 and includes all kinds of extra stuff above and beyond everything Logic 7 included.
I'm not posting this as a rant against Apple or to say any of this is unfair - it's just how professional/productivity software is. Logic 8 as of today still doesn't work completely the way it's supposed to with the Virus TI, but that's something that Access is going to have to figure out, I guess.
Mathbreak: $1575 + $200 = $1775.
Rock on.
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