I'm soy-free now, didja know that was a thing?

Yesterday I was in Einstein Bagels at closing time to collect a metric fuckton of free bagels for an event at my wife's latest non-profit job.  I love bagels, esp. Everything Bagels with the crunchy onion and garlic stuff on top.  I literally had a 13+ gallon garbage bag full of bagels, plus a separate paper bag of Everything and Garlic bagels, in the trunk of my car.   I wanted to eat *just one* so bad; my wife's workplace even said it was okay to take a few, but I could not.

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink...

I am both lactose intolerant and soy intolerant.  Lactose intolerance has been a thing I've lived with since I was 13.  It's not that bad.  Lots of people are lactose intolerant.  You have to be mindful of certain things, but in cases were I've either slipped, or wanted to indulge, I could always pop a lactaid tablet and be mostly okay.

Soy intolerance is a whole 'nother level of shitfuckery.

From the time I was 18 to about 31, I used soy milk as a substitute for milk.  I thought I was getting more and more sensitive to dairy around 2007 because it seemed like things I used to be able to tolerate, like milk chocolate, spicy ethnic food (mexican, indian, asian), and fried chicken from restaurants, were triggering reactions.  In my butt.  Or out my butt.

During this time I was working on the phones in a call center, so I attributed all my stomach problems to increased dairy sensitivity and stress at work.  By 2009 I decided that certain breads with extra grains/millet in them were causing me problems and was afraid that I might have an ulcer or something.  So instead of going to a doctor, like a rational person, I said, "white bread only!" to my health conscious wife.  (I had several bad experiences with different doctors until I quit going altogether when I was 18.)

In 2011, I was given a temporary administrative assignment off of the phones.  I began to notice that I needed to poop every 2 hours.  I'd eat breakfast (at this time cereal with soy milk), then go to work... spend my morning break in the bathroom, then back to work... spend 10 - 15 mins of my hour-long lunch in the bathroom, then back to work... spend my afternoon break in the bathroom, then back to work...  go home, go straight to the bathroom, eat dinner/watch TV and then poop one more time before bed.

It wasn't quite diarrhea, it wasn't watery.  But it also wasn't quite "right" neither.  I also farted - CONSTANTLY.  I could never fart enough.  I fart a lot, A LOT less now.

I must've been doing this while I was on the phones, but didn't notice.  Call center work can be so depressing that you just kind of lose track of life.  It becomes a blur and you feel like you're falling down a time hole.  I guess I just chalked it up to stress and a possible ulcer that I didn't feel like professionally treating.  But after two months of stress-free work off of the phones, I began to realize that I had a problem and I couldn't blame work-related stress any more.

My sister had become gluten intolerant a few years before all this, so the first thing I tried was cutting anything gluten-y out of my diet, but nothing changed.  I eliminated spicy foods, I stopped eating meat, I tried all kinds of stuff before cutting out soy.  I think I literally tried soy last, and I only thought of it because my mother had recently had breast cancer and was told to avoid soy because it's been linked to that. (Which is it's own level of what-the-fuckedness.)

Once I zero'd in on soy, I began to get better, but there was a long period of adjustment where I realized just how much stuff has soy in it.  I remember thinking I had a problem with eggs when the problem turned out to be the vegetable oil I was frying my hashbrowns in. The label on the front of the bottle said in big letters, "Vegetable Oil," but one day I randomly saw the back of it and it said, "ingredients: soybean oil."  Why not just fuckin' call it soybean oil, you fucking dicks?

From here I slowly realized that all restaurants use soybean oil. Soybean oil is the cheapest oil; therefore, any enterprise that is in the business of MAKING MONEY is going to use soybean oil instead of some other, more expensive oil - UNLESS it's a specialty restaurant that SPECIFICALLY eschews soybean oil for reasons of either health or authenticity.

Buffalo Wild Wings's allergen menu doesn't check off "soy" next to a lot of its sauces, but then if you look at the bottom there's a disclaimer that they all contain "highly refined" soybean oil that the FDA and/or USDA decided doesn't count.

Bullshit, it counts for me.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

(To be fair, there is a difference between "soy allergic," which is a respiratory reaction, and "soy intolerant" which seems to be an intestinal reaction.  The "soy allergic" can do highly refined soybean oil, but the "soy intolerant" cannot, I guess.)

Chipotle was always kind enough to openly state on their allergen menu that yes, indeed, their rice and tortillas contained soy, but Qdoba for the longest time did not (even though it sure as shit did).

After 2 years, I finally got the hang of what does and doesn't include soy, but every once in a while I'll eat something that will catch me off guard.  I had sushi with masago last Christmas, knowing that masago was fish eggs.  What I didn't know until afterwards was that masago is packed and shipped in soy sauce. I had Jenny-O turkey brats on a family vacation in July which got me, even though nothing on the label seems to indicate anything soy related.  I guess I have to watch out for "Natural Flavors" now. Wonderful.

These days, I drive over 20 mins each way to shop at the nearest Whole Foods, because the normal grocery store just down the road doesn't have a single brand/type of bread that doesn't include un-specified vegetable oil.  (If it doesn't specify which "vegetable," it's definitely soy.)  At the regular grocery store, lunch meats include various soy fillers, juices contain non-specific vegetable oil to help with coloring/appearance, and any quick-and-easy boxed/frozen dinner thing?  Forget about it!

I eat out a lot less and cook a lot more at home, which is probably good for me, but there are certain things I just can't make/replicate - like Everything Bagels with the crunchy stuff on top.  And Buffalo Wings.  And Chinese Food, my favs were always spicy chicken dishes like General Tso's and Kung Pao.

My soy intolerance has gotten worse since I discovered it.  I wonder if before, when I was regularly eating soy, the reaction was constant but less severe. Now that I go without any soy for months at a time, the reactions are a lot worse.

On the other hand, maybe it would have still gotten worse even if I kept pouring soy milk on my cereal every morning and I just would have withered away and died by now.

Here's what happens if I ever eat soy now:

(WARNING:  This is gross)

If I ever inadvertently eat soy, after about 2 hours I purge EVERYTHING out my butt.  It's bad.  It's painful.  It makes me want to die.  After that, anything I eat for the next day will fall out my butt in about 2 to 3 hours.  It's like my digestive system just says, "nope, see ya'!"  Now that I am familiar with this, during the first day I only have water, and even then, I end up pooping out "stragglers" in my digestive system.  My intestines are swollen during this time and I'm visibly bloated.  I have to wait a full 24 hours before eating again, and even then, I need to keep it restricted to apple sauce and soft fruits without seeds.  By the third day, I can usually start eating meat and soft noodles.  It takes a week before I feel completely "back to normal."

Right now, I haven't had a problem since the turkey brats in July, and that's probably the longest I've gone without an attack.

***

I actually saw a doctor about something else last January, the first time I'd been to the doctor since I was 18.  I was 32.  I only went because I had discovered 2 lumps that I didn't have before - one on my right arm, one on my left leg.  It turns out they were harmless lipomas - benign tumors made of stray fat cells.  He decided since I was there, to ask me questions to establish a medical history.  When I told him about my soy problems, he seemed skeptical.

I am absolutely convinced that if I had gone to a doctor before I had figured this out on my own, at best I'd have been diagnosed with the catch-all "IBS," and at worst they would have removed my colon and I'd be wearing a colostomy bag right now.

Everything I've learned about this shit, I researched myself on the internet.  It's not always easy, sometimes I get lucky and just happen to find things.  I try to imagine what this would be like for me in the 80s or 90s.  My dad always had stomach problems/ulcers, but he was an alcoholic and drug addict, so it's hard to say.  My mother has an aunt who literally hated eating, and was known for barely eating anything. Everyone thought she was nuts, but now we kind of wonder if she had some kind of gluten and/or soy problem that was never diagnosed.  I mentioned my gluten-intolerant sister, she was a lot of help early on and had some helpful suggestions (like eating apple sauce and mashed potatoes to help reduce intestinal swelling after an "incident").

I know I come across as very anti-doctor, but I'm not an anti-vac'er or new ager or something like that.  I believe very strongly in science and its power to enrich humanity.  But somewhere along the way, commercial medicine, where people have ailments and pay doctors to diagnose and treat them, has gone way wrong.  Regular ol' doctors - the kinds that you and I get to go to - don't seem to link what people eat to what ails them, and instead try to ward off every symptom with some drug or by cutting out some organ.

I also suspect that my soy intolerance is due to consuming so much soy over 10+ years.  Maybe if I hadn't had all that soy milk, I would be able to tolerate soybean oil better?  Impossible to know for sure without years of scientific study, and I hate be conspiracy mongering, but I also wonder if Genetically Modified soybeans might be part of my problem, too.

So, yeah...  that's my life now.  I'm soy-free.  But I can eat all the fuckin' gluten that I want, bitches!  *knocks on wood*

addendum to previous post

In my previous post, I mentioned my wife's former employer not paying the health insurance company, even though they were deducting health insurance from their paychecks.  We just found out that a coworker of hers who had a baby in November just got billed the full costs - meaning that the employer likely was not paying the health insurance company at least since October.  Holy shit.  That's, like, tens of thousands of dollars.  That by all right these new parents should've been covered for.  My wife was laid off Feb. 21st, so from October to Feb. 21st, these sacks of shit were deducting health insurance costs from everyone's paychecks, and not paying the health insurance company.

Fortunately, my wife didn't need anything medical during this timeframe.  She did get new glasses and contacts though, and we did get billed twice for it, but both times, the vision insurance, VSP, told us it was a mistake.  Wait and see, I guess, we may get stuck with that bill in the end, but at least it's "only" $300, and not $10,000+...

Dear rich people who wonder why so many people hate the rich...  when this is all said and done, the owners of this fucked company will somehow still be rich, maybe not by their own standards, but by the standards of 90% of the population.  Meanwhile, hundreds of workers are stiffed and some of them, like this new mom, will probably end up having to file for bankruptcy due to the owners' malfeasance.  We have a problem with wealth incumbency in America - due to LLCs, and bankruptcy, rich people don't become paupers anymore - they aren't financially ruined the way they once could be.  When you fuck this many people over and still get to live like a king, even after a brief stint in minimum security prison, the pitchforks and torches will eventually come out.

I posted nothing in 2013...

I'm thinking about coming back to this because my posts are too long for Facebook, let alone Twitter.  I'm a wordy old fart. As I get older, Facebook has less friends and more family and former co-workers. I don't feel comfortable posting my leftist rants there, which is bullshit, but whatever. Also, I post music I like there and get crickets in response. Not saying I ever got a huge response here, but I never minded.

Originally, this "blogspot" was a way to communicate with the woman who would become my wife when we were living 6 hours apart. When we moved in together, there was less of a reason to post here. A couple weeks ago, Facebook said my wife liked some local realtor's listing for a 3bd house around here. I asked her why she was liking that, and she said she didn't. Turns out it was a "sponsored post," where Facebook impersonates my wife and tries to influence me. That's not advertising, that's infiltration.

I wanted to delete my Facebook account, but there's a guy with my same name in my general area, and listed in his publicly available profile is that he and his wife are swingers. My sister thought I was him years ago because his profile pic was a pair of speakers and I'm into electronic music, so therefore...

In this age of corporate totalitarianism, one wants to avoid all controversy, lest one lose out on employment, promotions, professional esteem, etc...

Speaking of employment, my wife is newly unemployed as of this week. It's actually a fucked up story. She wants to be a good person and do good-people-type work, so she started volunteering at a local hospice. After a year or so, there was an opening in her field of work, and she was encouraged to apply. She landed the job. Her salary went from ~$25k/year at her old job to ~$34k/year at this new one. We were actually thinking about buying property (probably a 2bd condo, not a 3bd house).

But here we are, just over 6months later, and it's turned to shit. Turns out, the company was defrauding Medicare for a few years, was investigated in 2011, and the CEO/owner was indicated this past January.  This is real - check it out.  No one knew he was being indicted. My wife happened to be working from home due to a bad snowstorm, and was checking the local weather, and there was her boss's boss, right on the front page of the Chicago Sun Times website. My wife's boss didn't know. No one in that office seemed to know.

Within two weeks, there were layoffs. That group of people were the lucky ones. They were laid off that payday, a Friday, and we were surprised/relieved to find that there was indeed a paycheck that week.  The following Monday, Medicare officially refused to pay the hospice anymore. There were rumors that a national hospice chain was going to buy them out. On that Weds, my wife's coworkers were being rejected when they tried to give doctors and pharmacists their health insurance card. It turns out that the hospice had been deducting health insurance costs from everyone's paychecks, but had not actually paid the health insurer in months.

During this period we had learned that the hospice - which doesn't have it's own medical facility, but instead specializes in "renting" space and equipment from the nursing homes that the patients were already staying in (Apparently this arrangement is the "new thing" for hospice care.) - had not paid many of it's nursing home/landlord/clients since 2012. Many of the nursing homes in the area had pretty much blacklisted this hospice for non-payment. As you can imagine, no company wanted to buy this huge pile of debt obligations - it would cost too much even at a price of zero dollars.  Hell, they could PAY YOU to take the company and you'd still end up screwed.

So! - after not paying health insurance for months, after not paying "rent" to nursing homes that it depends on for business for over a year, after not paying its freaking PHONE BILLS and being told the phones were about to be SHUT OFF, the place was going down fast. Supposedly there's a law that anytime an employer in this area lays off 50+ employees, it must serve 60 days notice to the state. The hospice did not do that. The hospice also did not have any contingency plan in place to take care of/transfer it's hundreds of remaining hospice patients.

So what's an unethical, morally bankrupt, private, for-profit corporation to do? Make everyone left, including my wife, work an extra week, knowing full well that you will not be able to pay them come payday!  We kind of figured this, but many of her coworkers had no idea that was even a possibility. Many of her coworkers did not know just how dire the situation was. Everyone knew the company was closing down, everyone knew they'd be laid off "soon," but no one thought that the people left running the company (the owner/CEO was barred from having anything to do with the business by judge's order) would have them work knowing full well they could not pay them.  They even made a point to let everyone know that if they quit showing up to work, they would be "fired," and that being fired means you don't get unemployment benefits.

But can you really fire someone for not working when you have no intention of paying them?  Sure enough, the following payday, there was no pay, just lay off letters.

Now at my place of employment, which is a giant company, the paychecks we get on Thursday pay us up to the previous Saturday.  Unbeknownst to me, (but known to my wife), this place paid an extra 2 weeks behind.  So when she started working there, it took her a month to get paid, and when she didn't get paid last Thursday, that was actually for work from 3 and 4 weeks ago.

So we are screwed out of 4 weeks of wages, PLUS the health insurance money that was deducted but not turned over to the health insurance company, PLUS her vacation pay, which by law the company is required to pay everyone, but there's NO MONEY.

Sadly, it's not even worth suing for.  The corporation, the LLC entity, is busted.  $0 balance. Owes EVERYONE money.  The owner will likely be found guilty, and the government will demand restitution of the stolen Medicare funds which are more than his entire estate I'm sure.  His father, who is also part owner in the company and also runs a chain of nursing homes, is also supposedly being investigated AND rumor has it has defaulted on 2 nursing homes and recently put his house up for sale. I have a feeling suing these guys for lost wages will be like squeezing blood from the turnip, especially since, if I'm not mistaken, the government gets its money first. (Which I understand, and I'm not shaking my fist at the government over this).

Fortunately, I'm off wiener duty, and the company I work for is robust and expanding. I like my new job, I'm a data analyst of sorts (and I'm sure I could never be an analyst for any other company), it pays well, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I think part of the reason I quit writing was that being on wiener duty crushed me to the point where I felt like my thoughts, opinions, likes, dislikes, etc. didn't matter. I think I can honestly say that I've talked to a million people in the last 7 years, and that can really screw with your sense of self, especially when you're in a role of subservience to the general public. You have no idea just how dumb people can be until you've plunged yourself face first into a flowing river of dicks everyday for years, and years, and years...

Blofeld vs Largo vs Camel Audio Alchemy

I've posted before about my indecision between Waldorf's Blofeld hardware synthesizer and their Largo soft synth. Eventually I bought Largo, but I never really used it in anything. I also found myself using the Blofeld less and less - even with the knobs all fixed. I finally sold it.

Recently Camel Audio had a sale on Alchemy and I bought it after checking out their tutorial videos.

Damn! If only every synth company did this thorough of a job teaching you how to use their stuff... I'm sure Waldorf could especially benefit from that kind of outreach.

Is it fair to compare a wavetable synth to whatever it is Alchemy does? Yes, I think it is simply based on this criteria: there is a place for Alchemy in everything I've done. I can't say the same for Blofeld or Largo.

I haven't posted anything in a year...

The old name was stupid, so I changed it. The new name is stupid, but less so.

Waldorf Blofeld Bad Encoder Fix

For over a year some of the knobs on my Blofeld have gotten a bit eccentric. At first it was just a bit of jitter when turning the fourth knob (Osc Level / Filter Env Amount / Env Release / LFO 2 Speed / Matrix Destination / Arp Clock), but eventually it got so bad that turning the knob clockwise would result in it going 2 steps up, 15 steps down, 4 steps up, 10 steps down, etc... until it took 5 minutes just to go from 64 to 90 on the damn thing. I dealt with it for a while, but then some of the other knobs started acting up, including the "Bank" knob which also doubles as a value knob for pretty much every parameter that's not on the front panel. After a bit of frustration I kind of quit programming on the Blofeld. I thought about designing some kind of software editor either in Mainstage or Logic's Environment or Reaktor, but these days I don't have time for anything.

Here's someone else's video demonstrating what my Blofeld was doing:


Originally I had tried opening up the Blofeld and spraying some air underneath the knobs, but that didn't help. Then I asked a friend who does synth repair in New York what he recommended, and he advised spraying some tuner cleaner under the knobs instead of air. That also did not work. A few years ago there was a post on matrixsynth advising replacing the encoders. I looked at the encoders in the Blofeld and decided that was not something I was comfortable doing (and I had built a PAiA 9700s before).

I was kind of stuck. I had this Blofeld that I couldn't really use the way I wanted to, but I couldn't really sell it the way it was for a price that I was willing to settle for.

Luckily, I happened to stumble upon this youtube video which, while not useful in and of itself, included a link to http://synth.stromeko.net/DIY.html, which contained some very useful info about how to fix this problem.

Basically, according to stromeko, the problem was that the encoders needed additional capacitors. He advised capacitors that were "not much larger than 1nF." I checked RadioShack's crappy website and found they don't really measure their capacitors in nF, but I was able to find this chart which shows that 1nF = .001 uF, which RadioShack did carry.

So tonight I went to RadioShack hoping to get seven pairs of .001 uF capacitors, but of course they only had four pair. Whatever. So far only two of my knobs were unusable and another two were just flaky, so that worked. I had big dreams of doing a short, succinct youtube video, but my camera sucks at up close, and the Blofeld's display just does not show up well on it, so FUCK IT.

Long Story Short: I did the mod and my two unusable knobs are now as good as new, and the two flaky knobs are fine too. It's relatively easy to do if you're an experienced amateur like myself (over 40 hours spent soldering on the PAiA 9700s plus a few other projects) and know to watch out for solder bridges and to keep the iron away from anything it shouldn't touch.

So far so good, but if my Blofeld starts smoking or explodes in the next few days, I'll be sure to update.

I tried taking photos, but it didn't work out so well.

Before


After

Access Virus TI OS4

Access finally added a way to make the Arp serve as a step sequencer for modulation. They also added some nice guitar pedal style distortions and a comb filter.

Os4 by mikeoday

Here's one where I use the arp to modulate pitch in a style similar to old analog modular synths. Way back in college, I got to play with an Arp 2500 and do stuff like this with its 10-step sequencer.

Os4demo2 by mikeoday

Waldorf Blofeld Vs Waldorf Largo

Waldorf Largo is a soft synth that is similar to the Blofeld, but Waldorf insists it is not a soft synth version of the Blofeld. They are very similar, the only differences are that the 3 Largo oscillators each have a sub-osc, the Blofeld oscillators have a Brilliance parameter, and the Blofeld has a PPG Low Pass filter setting. Pretty much everything else, in my experience, is the same.

I am of the mind that you would either have one or the other, there is no reason to have both. Some would disagree - I think those people have too much money.

I've been thinking about selling my Blofeld and picking up Largo instead. I like the Blofeld, it definitely has its place in the mix, it's by far my brightest synth and I wouldn't want to do without it completely. However, it is a pain in the ass to program. I do not like the layout, and one of my four programming knobs is buggy - if you twist it, say, clockwise, it goes up by about 10, then down by about five, then up another 10, then down another five. It's very annoying. Even without the buggy knob, it takes forever for me to program and tweak a patch, whereas with the Largo demo, I'm throwing shit together in five minutes.

Waldorf has a very generous demo thingy for the Largo where you get to try out the full version for 30 days. You can even bounce it and record it - so say I'm working on a song, I can throw in some Largo stuff, bounce it, and I'll still have it in the mix as an audio file when the 30 days expires. I think that alone would make someone more inclined to buy it.

***

Today I put together some Blofeld vs. Largo comparisons. The idea is to throw something together in Largo, then recreate it exactly in the Blofeld. At first I thought it'd be hard, but it was actually really easy. It's almost like the Largo would be a great sketch pad or visual reference for programming the Blofeld.

The first track is a pad with lots of delay.
Blofeld vs Largo 1 by mikeoday
The Blofeld is first, then Largo right after 2:03. The biggest difference is the delay, the Blofeld delay turns to flat mush, but the Largo delay maintains separation, giving it an animated, rhythmic quality. Largo definitely wins this one, I kind of hate the Blofeld half of this, but I think the Largo half is very nice. There's no compression on either recording.

The second track is an old school EBM percussive bass sound.
Largo vs Blofeld 2 by mikeoday
First half is Largo, second half is Blofeld. For this patch, Blofeld has a bit darker, thicker sound, whereas Largo is brighter and less chunky. This one is a toss up as to which is better, I'd be inclined to go with the Blofeld one, but I have a feeling I'd be rolling off those lows when it came time to mix this down in a track with a kick drum and stuff.

I'm still a bit up in the air at this point. If I did not own a Blofeld, I'd definitely go with the Largo. But if I'm going to go with Largo, I'd definitely want to sell the Blofeld, which would be a huge pain in the ass without the buggy knob, let alone with it.

Because... ZOMBIES!!!

Plants vs. Zombies from popcap!!!


WOOOOOOO HOOOOOOO!!!

...

I'm retarded.

PS. Popcap sells it for $19.95, but you can get it on Steam for $9.95

DAMN YOU, google maps!!!!

Thanks to that, we missed the start of the Angelspit concert, plus running around in the cold and the rain made my wife's cold worse.

I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!!!**

**Dear google, please don't delete my free gmail account or my free blogger account. K, thnx, bye.

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.

Since I'm plugging books, I may as well plug some music

I'm always looking for Industrial (aka Electro, aka EBM, aka etc.) music that doesn't suck. A few weeks ago, I decided to check out some Wumpscut. I'd heard a few Wumpscut tracks, it's hard not to when you're a fan of these genres, but it never really made an impression. I downloaded Wreath of Barbs and Fuckit from Amazon.

Wumpscut doesn't tour or play live shows, it's one guy churning out a studio album a year, plus singles, remixes, etc. Both albums have some good songs, but a lot of the material is just kind of blah - perhaps even underdeveloped. Fuckit is also mastered super loud; I'm willing to bet that if I plugged it into Logic and measured it with the multimeter plug in, the RMS would be -6dbs. I could try to explain why that's bad, but just google "Loudness Wars," and you'll find articles with nice graphs and charts demonstrating why -6dbs is ridiculous.

***

Saturday night I was drinking, surfing the internet and listening to music when I decided that I felt like checking out some music I haven't heard before. I've had pretty good luck discovering new bands via the various remix albums I own. I think I only really buy remix albums of Haujobb and Seabound, but so far, so good - so whatever. I was listening to tracks from Seabound's When Black Meets Blue and decided to check out Die Form. I'd heard the name of the band before, but couldn't place the music. Turns out they've been around since 1979 and have been very active and releasing an album every year or two for more than a decade.

It's kind of weird - which is saying a lot for this genre! Very electronic, with pleasantly abrasive squelches and squeaks, and repeating sequenced EBM bass synth sounds (reminds me of old D.A.F. tracks), with a female soprano singing in a very Classical/operatic style. I would have hated it for that last point when I was 18. It took me a long time to get used to operatic singing in college. Once you listen to enough opera, however, it doesn't come off as obnoxious as it does when you are uninitiated (your mileage my vary).

I decided to go with their Best of XXX and Noir Magnetique albums. Both CDs are super expensive (the "Best of" is over $90!!!), but the mp3 albums are the same price as anything else. I have to wonder, are downloads more profitable than CDs at this point? No cost of plastic, I figure that might help - maybe not. All I know is that I'm much more likely to impulsively download albums than mail order the actual CDs; cost is a factor, but so is instant gratification. On the other hand, I'm also the 1% of the population that actually pays for what I download instead of using torrents and shit like that. I love music, and I love albums instead of just single tracks. In fact, it doesn't matter if someone wrote the best single song in the world ever, if the rest of the songs suck and the album overall sucks, then the band sucks.

Besides, I already have hundreds of CDs and their cases cluttering up my living space. I actually like not having physical trinkets for every fucking thing.

Anyways - overall I like both Die Form albums a lot, but I fully understand if the operatic soprano turns people off. Definitely worth listening to the free samples on their myspace page; start with "Bite of God" if you're not sure you'll like the soprano singing, then expand from there.

Reading is FUN-da-MENTAL

From 2003 to July 2009, I believe I read a total of 4 novels: Catcher in the Rye, Nightwatch, Daywatch and Twilightwatch. Those aren't the only *books* I read during that time necessarily, just the only works of fiction. Instead, I read a fair amount of textbooks, technical manuals and books about making electronic music. I also read Sun Tzu's The Art of War in June 2009, for whatever that is worth. (Nothing.)

I have two "songs" written, except for lyrics and vocals. For some reason, I'm just at a total loss. I don't really pay attention to lyrics anymore; to me they're just another texture to a track. Words are meaningless. On the other hand, the last thing I want to do is write bad lyrics. I'm not trying to be profound, but I also don't want to be retarded. It probably doesn't help that my favorite genre of music is dominated by Germans for whom English is a second language. (Example lyric from Destroid: "Life is too short for mourn.")

I've had a copy of On Writing by Stephen King sitting around since 2000 or 2001. My mother bought it as a gift for me because she always wanted me to be a writer for some reason. (Writing is probably a far less expensive endeavor than electronic music - and equally unprofitable!) I never bothered with it; I used to read a lot of Stephen King and Clive Barker from the 4th grade up until I was in 9th grade. The last Stephen King book I read was Insomnia, and I didn't even read all of it. I don't think I got halfway through it before putting it down out of boredom. (I guess old people with insomnia and hippie-ass aura shit put me to sleep!)

Sometime after August 1st (I know this because it was after Gemma and I got home from a vacation to Door County, WI with her folks), I read through On Writing for inspiration about lyric writing. (Reading a book about writing prose for inspiration on writing lyrics is pretty assbackwards - but that's just how I roll). I don't know if it helped, but it did get me interested in reading Stephen King again. Sometimes reading about someone's creative process can spark an interest in their output; it happens all the time in music, especially when I was in college studying Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg and Philip Glass. Along the same lines, reading Tom Shear's blog, Waveformless, has gotten me more interested in listening to Assemblage23 than I had ever been before.

Gemma and I each brought a shitload of books to this marriage. She had a couple of Stephen King books I had not read before. After reading On Writing, I started off with Bag of Bones. I finished it in a few days. I was then going to read The Drawing of the Three, but it turned out that was the second book in King's "Dark Tower Series." Being totally anal, I wanted to read the first book in the series, The Gunslinger, before I read the second book. I had the same neurosis for the X-Men movies. I never really wanted to see them, but I won a DVD of X-Men 3 when I worked for the pork plant. I didn't want to watch the third movie without having seen the first two, so it sat on my shelf for 3 years before I watched it. I still haven't seen X-Men 2, but that's okay because I think X-Men 1 and 3 are ass.

I went to a bookstore to pick up The Gunslinger, as well as The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White (the latter wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little of all things). King mentioned this book in On Writing as an essential tool for writing; his description of its rules of grammar and style caught my attention. One of the "lessons" that made an impression on me is to avoid using adverbs. This intrigued me. In all my years of schooling, from kindergarten up through grad school, I had never heard that piece of advice - yet, once revealed to me, it made a lot of sense. I tried counting the number of adverbs King used in 600 pages while reading Bag of Bones, and I counted four (not saying that's all there is, but he really does avoid them!). The Elements of Style is a great book for anyone who writes or for those who just find the English language interesting; it also has some amusing examples of how we mangle our language.

I found the two books I was looking for at the bookstore and also picked up Gerald's Game on a whim; call me a perv (because I am) but for some reason a horror novel about a woman handcuffed to a bed sounded interesting. In a matter of days, I had read Gerald's Game, The Gunslinger and The Elements of Style. It probably helped that I was sick and ended up taking two days off from work.

Next, I read a copy of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend that I've had lying around for a couple of years. Right before the movie with Will Smith came out, I had asked Gemma to give it to me as a gift, either for our anniversary or for Christmas - I don't remember which. I had just watched The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, which was the first movie made that was based on I Am Legend. I finally got around to reading it about a week and a half ago. Then, satisfied that I had read The Gunslinger, I plunged into The Drawing of the Three without fear of missing some crucial plot point from the first book of the Dark Tower Series.

Last Saturday, I caught Hellraiser on TV. This inspired me to reread Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, the novella that Hellraiser is based on. I've had it lying around since I had last read it back when I was in middle school. It's short, under 200 pages, so I finished that in a night. Clive Barker uses a lot more adverbs in his writing than Stephen King does. I hadn't realized it until last weekend, but I had read everything Clive Barker published before 1994 back when I was in middle school. No wonder my mind is so fucked up. (For reference I was in middle school from 1993 to 1995).

Recently, I have taken another trip to the bookstore and picked up the third book in the Dark Tower Series, The Waste Lands, as well as Salem's Lot. I'm reading The Waste Lands right now, but I don't seem all that interested in it and may put it down for Salem's Lot instead. Gemma also has a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I intend to read while I'm on this roll. However, I tried reading it earlier this week and I just wasn't feeling it. It may the language, I don't know.

It's strange, having done so much reading after not really being interested in fiction for such a long time. I had not realized how much I used to read when I was a kid until now. I remember it used to take me weeks to get through a 600 page book, now I can do it in a couple of days. I'm sure college and grad school sharpened my reading skills, but it just feels so weird. It's like being thirsty for years and not realizing it, and then all of sudden drinking a shitload of water; or not running for years and then all of a sudden breaking into a sprint.

As for lyric writing - I still have not written shit.

Logic 9 - Thoughts on the new features

I'm looking over the "What's New" page for Apple's Logic 9 and decided to post my random thoughts. For science.

"Flex Time" - This is essentially Apple keeping up with the Ableton's and the Digidesign's - it was going to happen eventually. I must admit I am curious about Ableton Live just from word of mouth, but I actually have a demo CD for it lying around from when I bought a UC-33 Evolution MIDI controller and never bothered to install it so - not that curious. The idea of being able to use the "Flex Tool" to click and drag to change the timing of audio without making cuts might be interesting. On the other hand, the ability to "quantize audio" and use "Varispeed" to slow down a track while recording and then speed it up again for playback just seems stupid and evil to me. I'm no virtuoso, but I hate this shit. However, I understand Logic has to put it in there to keep up with ProTools, so there it is. Under this category, "Speed Fades," seem pretty cool - I mean, I've often found inspiration by using the Scissor tool to scrub a track or thought to myself "Oh man, if only there was an easy way to record this!!!" I think this category is what makes the update Logic 9 and not Logic 8.5, but it's not really stuff that I'm interested in. I give it 5/10.

"Production Tools" - I never even used quick comping in Logic 8, but that's likely to change whenever I actually start laying down vocal tracks so I can't really evaluate the the new editing stuff they show off. However, I've never thought to myself - "Oh man, if only I could import entire tracks and settings from this other song!!!" so that whole "Selective Track Import" seems like a waste of time to me. Selective drum replacing, however, I could see as useful. But the big dick daddy in this category is the "Convert to Sampler," I've wish for that before so I'm actually pretty excited to see it. It's not going to get me to be an early adopter of Logic 9 - shit, money is so tight nothing short of a bag of it falling in my lap from the sky would change that - but maybe after 6 months to a year I'll actually upgrade mainly for this. Bounce in place could be useful, but I tend to just use buses for this kind of thing... a trick I learned from SFLogicNinja. For example, the Virus TI can only be bounced in real time, but what I do once I am happy with my Virus tracks is I'll route the Virus output to Bus 1, then create an audio track whose input is Bus 1 and then just record it. This way I can do one instrument at a time and then apply effects (compression/EQ) independently. Whether I bounce or whether I record it to an audio track, it's real time, and with my current computer (iMac from last year) I've really never had any slow downs or anything like that, whereas with my G4 powerbook and my old Windows98 PC, I would constantly need to bounce tracks down to save processing power in a project. Enough rambling, I'm giving this category 9/10.

"Guitar Gear" - From my first impression of Logic 9, this is the category that Apple's marketing seems to be emphasizing the most and I can't understand why. Guitar amp simulation is such a fucking hornet's nest, and as a guitarist who owns a tube amp head, a 4x12 speaker cabinet and a collection of Boss pedals, it just is not for me. Unless the simulations end up being, like, godlike and not just a shitty compromise like every other attempt at amp simulation I just think this is a big waste of time. Now I may be proven wrong on this, it may end up being that these amp simulations and the pedal board effects become the next big thing for electronic music and everyone's going to route their synths and samples through them. Conversely, this combined, with mainstage might usher in a whole new era of guitar bands not using amps. I just think it's highly unlikely. I give this a 3/10.

My over all impression? 5/10 + 9/10 + 3/10 divided by 3 = 5.6/10, so I guess I'm quantitatively more excited about than I initially thought. Mainly that's the Convert Audio Track to Sampler feature, I think. I just look at this like, take out the amp simulations, take out the Flex Time, and give me the new Production Tools category as 8.5. But that's just wishful thinking, that's never been how this whole music software thing works. I've been spoiled by the Access Virus upgrades over the past few years, I think.

Full circle (jerk)

My first blog post ever was me agonizing over the upgrade to Logic 8 and counting up all the money I've spent on Logic software since I started with Logic 4 back in the day. Now Apple has announced Logic 9. I'm not linking to it. Seriously, fuck off Apple.

Logic 8 came out 2 years ago. It was a huge update, added a bunch of nice shit to Logic and redesigned the interface. It was $200. Now Logic 9 is here and it adds a bunch of guitar amp and pedal simulations. Yay? It is also $200.

Right now, I have everything in my studio working together and playing nicely. Plus I'm broke as hell and work one of the worst jobs in the world. I think it is best if I opt out of this upgrade.

Inevitably I'm going to end up upgrading - it's the nature of the beast. There'll be an update to the Virus software or some shit, and I'll "fucking NEEEEEEEED" Logic 9.

Until then - Fuck off and die, Apple. Just fuck right the fuck off.