What comes next?

Republicans accused liberals of being crooks and thugs. Then they gave us Watergate.

Republicans accused liberals of media bias. Then they gave us the Fox News Channel.

Republicans accused liberals of election fraud. Then they gave us Florida in 2000.

Republicans are now accusing liberals of plotting to create re-education camps and death panels.

What comes next?

Butterflies on Shit

Say something profound.

"Something profound."

ohGr - Devils in my Details

This CD actually came out last October, but I never picked it up because none of the music "previews" or whatever really grabbed me. If you listen to the two tracks posted on the ohGr myspace page, you have two songs that both start with weird spoken word things, and when the song starts, the first one "Timebomb" is kind of a samba style thing, and the second one, "Feelin' Chicken" is like circus music with random chicken noises in it. Based on those two songs, it comes off as an album by one of the leaders of the industrial music genre, whose solo work has had kind of an electro/synth-pop flavor to it, apparently doing every other random style of music that is not industrial.

This album was released right after Repo: The Genetic Opera was in limited release in theaters, which niveK Ogre aka ohGr had a role in. Based on these two tracks, it isn't entirely unreasonable to deduce this album is somehow influenced by - well - musical theater or some shit. I also listened to the 30 second samples on Amazon.com, but nothing there really changed my mind. It seemed like, for whatever reason, ohGr decided to do an album of industrial tinged show tunes. That's great, I'll pass.

As time passed, I noticed a lot of industrial reviewers gave the album high marks. Regen Magazine even went to so far as to call it the number one album of 2008. (Angelspit's Blood Death Ivory should be way higher on that list, possibly even number one.) I wanted to check the whole album out, but I didn't feel like spending $10 or whatever in case I hated it. (And I don't fuck around with piracy, no bit torrent, none of that shit). So I put it on the back burner until recently when Gemma and I happened to get an amazon gift certificate from an extended family member of hers.

It's really fucking good.

It's not a collection of songs, it is an album. You listen to it from beginning to end. Each song blends into the next. Unfortunately, the Amazon.com 30 second samples tend to fall on the in-between portions of songs, so you get a lot of Bill Moseley saying weird shit. And "Feelin' Chicken" is probably the last song that should be used to promote this album. It's not bad when it's played in its place on the album, but out of context it's just WTF.

Another thing I love about this album: it opts out of the Loudness War. It's beautifully mixed and mastered. The first track, "Shhh," intentionally lacks the highest frequencies (aka "sparklies") - why? So that when the second track, "Eyecandy," comes in, it has those upper-upper frequencies and it creates DYNAMIC CONTRAST and therefore MAKES AN IMPACT. Y'know, like music is supposed to. Music needs to be quiet sometimes so that the LOUDNESS means something - everyone who mixes and masters knows this and yet we all feel pressured to accommodate record execs (and consumers) and mix for maximum loudness all the time.

Musical "volume," aka dynamics, are not meant to be static, however record execs, radio programmers and consumers are increasingly demanding the music be LOUD all the time. Some Amazon reviewer called this album "poorly mixed." Wrong, bucko, all music should be mixed/mastered like this. The industry standard for movies is an overall dynamic range of 24 dB - meaning that the quietest part of a movie can be 24 dB less than the loudest part of a movie. In music, the standard is inching from 8 dB to 6 dB.

That's bullshit.

Decibels are not a linear measurement, it's logarithmic. That means a dynamic range of 12 dB is NOT twice the range of 6 dB, it's actually exponentially more. So 24 dB of dynamic range is actually far more than even four times that of 6 dB.

What does this mean? It means we're losing a lot of quality and fidelity in music. Why? Well it all started with the idea that, on the radio, the louder track grabbed people's attention and therefore sold more singles/records.

But does that even fucking matter anymore? Who listens to radio for music nowadays? No one I know. And what station is playing ohGr? Probably not a single one, probably not even college radio anymore. So why play the LOUDNESS game? Why not opt out? (I guess in the industrial genre, there's being played at clubs, but I digress...)

So yeah, this album is awesome. The music is great, the mixing/mastering is bold and refreshing, and if you're on the fence about it, my best suggestion is just to listen to the first two tracks, "Shhh," and "Eyecandy" back-to-back.

Logic Pro Pedal Board and Amp Designer demo

This is the same ~45 second recording I made of my guitar going straight into my MOTU 828mk2, ran through four different Pedal Board/Amp Designer combinations. I'm blown away by how good it sounds, but then I never had a really good, quality amplifier.

GuitarTest by mikeoday

Logic 9: Pedal Board and Amp Designer

Pretty much awesome.

Anyone want to buy a Fender Roc Pro 1000 Head and Cabinet?


(Not actually mine, just a random image of one I pulled from Google. My actual amp head has a hole cut in the front of it by a previous owner. A very stupid previous owner.)

Apple Logic Pro 9, OS 10.6

Yesterday I had one of my manic days and ended up running to the Apple store to pick up OS X "Snow Leopard" and Logic Pro 9. I had just paid off some car repairs and felt like "celebrating" by putting some shit on my credit card. I'm such a dick.

OS 10.6 installed flawlessly on Gemma's MacBook. No problems there whatsoever. However, on my iMac, it would not install. The instructions suggested first unplugging all peripheral devices, and I have a lot: Virus, MOTU 828mkII, USB hub, two FireWire external hard drives. I did all that, still no luck. Next suggestion was to run Repair on the hd. It found no problems. Finally, the last suggestion was to erase the hard drive. Fuuuuuuuck.

Even though I put all files that I have created on the external drives (song files, sampler instruments, etc. etc. etc.), that's still a huge pain in the ass. I did it, and once the hard drive was erased, Snow Leopard installed, but then I had to reload everything once again - Firefox, iPhoto, Waldorf Attack, Virus Control... I was working on this shit from 2pm to about 7pm (a lot of that time is failed SL installs.) Then once that was done I had to install Logic Pro 9, which took forever because all the Logic 8 shit was gone. (I also install all the jam pack bullshit, I'm big on sample fuckery/destruction and it's nice to have lying around.)

Anyways, everything's finally working now. I played with Amp Designer - it's actually pretty neat. Not $200 worth of neat, but neat. I haven't done shit with flex time yet, haven't converted an audio region to a sampler instrument. I tried Bounce to track on the Virus, but there's no "real time" option, so it didn't work. That's alright, it is easy enough to just route Virus output to a bus and then use that bus as an input on an audio track. I'm sure bounce to track will be great for other things.

The only bug I've noticed so far is that every time I bounce a project that has a Virus plug-in, even if I bypass the Virus plug-in during the bounce, when I close the project and open a new one the audio is garbage (out of sync or some shit I guess). I have to quit Logic, then relaunch it. Then everything works. It's a minor annoyance and not a show stopper, so I can live, I just hope we get a 9.0.1 update soon.