linterry's blogger

i don't know why but recently i have not been liking music as much i used to. well i guess i have talked about this recently but i thin krecently it has really gotten to the point where i cannot enjoy anything mianstream anymore. i think i've just about heard enough "folk songs" to last an eternity. just about the onl tign left that excites me in the music world at this point is classical music. and the only rason why is because i don't really understand classical music the way I undesttand modern music.

modern music is too rigidly strucutred. yes there also exists avant-garde experimental musicbut i find that's not really pleasnat to the ears. i'm gonna sidetrack a bit and say that i'm fairly tired of all the TECHNOLOGY that surrounds msuic nowadays. this obviously wasn't always so. instead of computers and idigtal equipment galore... A/D conversters, mixers, amplification, blah blah blah, before all this stuff came out, it was just the uhuman and a simple, physical instrument. i will never tire of playign a REAL piano. but hell i will tire of any piano sample in two weeks.

i have actually developed a strong distate for the "reproduction" of music through a recording. whiel it does enable the ability to share music, and frankly without this technology i woudn't even have a job, i think it has also enabled the market to be oversaturated with redudant music. music is VERY redudnant at this point. there's too muhc of the same kind of shit floating around. i can't even tell which stuff i should like and which stuff i should hate. i gues that's what happens to peple liek john cage who go toa c oncert and do nothing but sit there for 30 minutes and play silence. man people just get jaded from overexplosure

i really hate it when i hear a track and i feel like i can hear each individual track scored in some kind of pro tools envrionment, i'm seeing midi data and waveforms and shit, and it's just CHEAP. i can't stand it! anythign that is going through some kind fo a sequencer just sounds cheap. exception. maybe chemical brothers. i still like that stuff. chemical brothers sounds good yeah. because it rarely uses chords. i'm going to try to geta way from straight chords in the next thing i make. no more goddamn chords. the other thing i really like now is classical music. but i'm a wannabe liker, not a real thing. i just like classical music for the aura. and the fact that it's arrangement and harmonies are so sophisticated that it makes modern music look like lego. that snot that lego is bad by any means but it's just lego. simple building blocks. clsasical music is like real concrete. n that's pretty dumb. never mind.

i like american coffee. i've been drinking that stuff like crazy this past week. latte days are fucking over. it's too weak. too milky. american coffee is the shit. and it's way cheaper too.

i think both basketball and soccer have become far more interesting to watch when i decide to focus on someone else other than the guy who's holding the ball. it's interseting because you can sort of get inside the guys' head. sort of get an idea of what's going on inside his head and stuff.

like yao. i haven't quite figured out the whole meaning of this in the grand design, but for the first 5 to 10 seconds of the possession, he seems to always set one or two screens, mostly near the perimeter. if he happens to be on the strong side, it will be for the ball handler, and then he rolls to the hoop. if he is on the weak side, he will look for a guard to run an off-ball screen. this actually seldom leads to someone scoring afterwards as the defender follows quite well, but 7/10 times, the guard will cut around and then receive the pass near the perimeter with his defender trailing a little bit behind. after yao sets a couple of screens, only then does he go down low and estbalishes position in the post. i have rarely seen this guy go down in the post immediately. it seems like he has a playbook "responsibility" to set screens before estbalishing position.

this is stark contrast to nowitzi, which 90% of the time, he will stroll into the post immediately... more like the "mid-post" near the sideline, then abruptly turn around, front his defender and call for the ball. well he is a PF i think, maybe that's why? anyways, not too sure. he then posts his defender up, and just by doing so it seems they are halfway towards scoring. he can go one on one easily with a virtually unblockable fadeaway, but if the double team comes he passes out and usually the guy who gets the ball can drive to the net and make another pass for the finish as the defense then has to struggle with rotations.

for the guards, it's always so cool how they intiaily position themselves right at the baseline, and then look for the opportunity to use any kind of screen (which might even be the opposing team's player) to "pop out" to the perimeter to get the ball. it almost looks like a cat waiting for his opportunity to pounce. again, this rarely directly leads to a basket, but it must have it's purpose otherwise it wouldn't happen so often. mcgrady does this fairly often, but nobody looks better doing this than iverson, who moves so smoothly with and without the ball. i hope i can still catch a philly game on tv. it seems the only comes here in taiwan are houston/dallas and seattle/sac. seattle is a fun team to watch cuz of ray allen. i just follow him for most of the game.

http://www.puretna.com/details.php?id=21646

For some reason after unloading with this clip I feel sort of strange, almost sad in a sense. This girl, who might be too skinny for some of you, apparently commited suicide in 2002 by jumping off a building or someting. One of the comments in the torrents caught me by surprise, that roughly 40% of girls involved in the porn industry end up killing themselves.

But upon some reflection, I can somewhat believe this. I think a lot of good porn, esp.some of my personal favorites that I can use over and over to unload, involve deameaning behavior towards girls. Eg. guys forcing their dicks down the girls throat so deep they end up choking. the girl sucks so many dicks in succession she hardly has time to breathe. the girl gets slapped really hard on her tits or ass till it gets red. yeah, it seems most of the clips i like to watch (including the one above), the girl is not enjoying herself at all. the guys are most certainly enjoying themselves, but not the girl. the more the girl enjoys herself the less powerful it is. some of the most interesting parts are when they interview the girl - sometimes you can feel how nervous she is, or how awkward the situation is. some girls seem to be more natural and they can enjoy the moment with a good laugh. but in the clip above for instance, it's no fun at all for tolly cristal. she doesn't enjoy it. and she probably feels like total shit when she goes home. well i wouldn't know, i don't have any friends in the porn industry. but i'd imagine it really feels like shit, to get treated like dirt on video. even if during off-camera the guys are friendly to her i'm sure the stuff that happens on camera will get too her as well. well it would get to me. i would develop a massive inferiority complex if everytime i went to shoot a video somebody kept slapping me and sticking shit in my ass.

yet for the cases like tolli cristal i think guys are all guilty. men are the reason for the existence of porn. if nobody wants to watch porn they nobody will make it. unforutnately pretty much every guy i know except allen watches porn. so therefore the porn industry exists. indirectly my love for treating girls like dirt is in fact contributing to the problem. i'm part of the porn industry's raison d'etre. in fact guys who watch too much porn are pretty much "losers" (like myself). they are too afraid to hit the girls themselves, so they sit behind their monitor and watch somebody else do it. thus they get probably 70% of the enjoyment but 0% of the visible blame.

i love animals. i go out of the way to feed stray cats near my house. i have never hit my girlfriend (but i have most certainly called her fairly bad names; she doesn't mind). i avoid conflict and i even have trouble maintaing eye contact with girls i find attractive. so why do i enjoy watching clips that insult women? i guess that's just a fundmetnal part of men. just like how girls want to get all the guys in the world to fuck them by looking unbelievably attractive, but not actually fuck. it's a part of how "sick" we are, by society standards. oh, am i the only sick one? maybe. i don't think so though. i'm probably sicker than average but i'm still well wtihin the middle of the bell cruve.

jimmy from south park:
"why does god make it so that my penis gets hard if girls don't want to have it in their vaginas? it's like a cruel joke!"

hahahah. okay so he's talking about 4th grade girls. but still. i could somehow relate to this one. girls are really twisted when it comes to sex. they want it and they don't want it at the same time. you ever see a girl dress up like a skank, and then if she catches you lookig at her she stares at you like you're some kind of indecent pervert? that's what i'm talking about. let me explain this further with a hypothetical question:

ask a girl this : "let's say i could see into the minds of all your guy friends, and I compiled a list of all the girls they would want to fuck. you discover while many girls that you know are on the list, you aren't on anybody's list. would you be hurt?"

any girl with any sense of honesty would say yes. yes they would be hurt. EVEN THOUGH the prospect of sex with any of their male friends would be met with a reaction of disgust and revlusion, at the same time, they can't bear the thought that none of them would want to have sex with them! it's a kind of strange sexual paradox! it's like going shopping, getting all pissed off because a product you know is sold out, but the next day when you find it there waiting on the shelf, you don't buy it!



now how about guys? yeah they'd probably be hurt just as much as girls, but the difference is, if you asked them whether they would like to fuck those girls, they'd say hell yeah. so basically men are very simple and straightforward. if the notion of a girl not wanting to fuck them would hurt their feelings, it's almost a guarantee that given the chance, they would fuck that girl. it makes sense. you care about whether or not they want to fuck you, so that means you would want to fuck them. i mean if a fat girl with greasy hair and loads of acne says she wants to fuck my friend but not me, I'm not going to lose any sleep over that. but if someone decent looking says the same thing says the same thing, they I WILL lose sleep over that.

but not girls. while they also care about whether or not you want to fuck them (as long as you're not totally revolting), at the same time they don't want to fuck you. unless you take them to italian restaurants and pretend you are a good listener. damnit that episode was downright hilarious.

i have a new method of composing music now. i compose everything through these really cheap $10 headphones that my aunt gave me. (they make almost anything sound decent). I also use the SC-8850 patches exclusively and restrict myself to using a maximum of 16 patches (this was the maximum for the old .S3M files in the past I believe). i also try to keep the number of simultenously playing tracks to 4 or less.

this is my rationale for the "self restriction": if I have too much freedom in too many dimensions, I am constatnly burdened with the problem of which direction to optimize in. if i close down choices all of a sudden all my mental energy and creativity can be focused, very focused....in one direction. for me i want to be focused on composing. it's not easy to remain focused on composing if I am listening to speakers that ruthlessly expose how bad my patches/mix is, or if I am free to use all kinds of VST's.

the first piece i made with this method was quite successful! well at least i think so. by self restriction i was able to sustain a continued stream of focus towards the actual composing. i was visualizing A/B patterns, varying tension levels, creating interplay between various instruments, and tried to be mindful of how the music underscores the lyrical content. getting a "Full sound" is always a problem, but fortunately with just a piano, strings, a drum kit, and a couple of synth leads, it wasn't too hard.

even with all the focus on composing, i still made it a point to restrict myself within the domain of composing itself. that is, I tried to give myself a core direction. i am going to do this from now on with every song. what i do is read the lyrics over and over until ideas pop in my head and i write them down. a good idea will most likely put a heavy restriction on what kind of song it will be. for instance, for a song entitled "let's run", where two rabbits are running frantically from a snake who wants to eat them, the best idea I put down was "Something that resembles final fantasy one battle music". this automatically gives the song a foundation - i happen to know hwo to play the entire final fantasy 1 battle song (most parts only use Cmin, Dmaj, Emaj, which is foundation of that song itself), so this makes picking chords a ton easier. there are a zillion chords in the world of music, but if i force myself to only use 4 or 5 in a song, i can become a lot more creative and tasteful with their use.

i also sectioned off the song into various sections, and within each section i would group sentences into "patterns". so i might have a fast alternating A/B/A/B pattern in one section, or i might have a A/A/A/A for others. it's a lot easier to see whehter my design is interesting or not when it's just pen an paper, humans can visualize a jillion times faster than they can muck around with a sequencer to test ideas. of course the final product rarely coincides with the original design, but without an original design it is that much harder to reach the final product.

composing is really fun . it's a lot more fun than the concrete scientific world of engineering and production. composing is just you and the music. but engineering and production involves a lot of equipment and a lot of "know-how" with little room for any creativity. all bass needs to be compressed. all kicks need to be compressed. if bass and kicks hit simultaneously it's best to use side-chain compression to make the bass and kicks blend better together. these are rules. you can get creative with engineering like using a wild ass effect on the drums but in general most of the creativity lies in composing. notes, harmonies, arrangements. score sheets. these things make more sense to me.

the final thing i have kept in mind is to not engineer or tweak the arrangmeent during the composing phase. this is where the cheap $10 headphones help. you can't really tell the difference between a great mix and a so-so mix - it's a sonic nullifier in a sense. which is good because it helps me keep focus. i'll turn on the yamahas when the song is completed and i need to tweak the mix at the end. the fact that i have to disconnect audio cables to switch between the two is great because it prevents me from impulsively turning on the montiors and "Checking" the mix. it's tempting when it's just a button press away but if i have to switch audio cables it's a lot easeir to stop myself.

Ibiza (~1MB mp3)

another attempt to making something sound commerical.

i think i did a pretty decent job this time. i think it's better than all my previous work. but then again i almost always feel that way. but this time, maybe the results are better due to the fact that I have actual monitors that will let me hear any mix problems right away. i really focused on getting the bass and kicks top notch - used compression and a software "harmonic enhancer".

while i was trying to sleep and thinking about random thigns one idea that came up in my mind is how basketballi ssimilar to music. it's f ar fetched correlation but i believe there is some kind of connection... in the sense that they share similar propretires

basketball is interesting one on one, just as music can be intersting with just one instrument. however it is only when you play team basketball where things start to become complex. the same can be said about music. when you are playing a solo piano everything about it is simple - you just focus on your performance and make sure you play the damn thign right. but when you add a bass, drums, and various backing instruments, that's when it gets complicated,. because now you have to worry about how they will interact with each other.

singular enttiies are simple. however when you mix these entities together the question fo synergy comes into play. certain players play well with other players. certain instruments sound good with other instruments. certain instruments actually sound so bad by themselves it almost feels liek they designed to be played with accompaniment eg. the violin. the same can be said about role players on a basketball team. they can't do shit in one on one, they can't do shit if they are expected to be the star player, but tell them to do just one thing and they will do it well and it will benefit the team more than if he really was a star player.

you can mix a bunch of star players and it won't give you an invicible team. real madrid, the lakers, yonmuri giants we have seen this pattern before. the same thing applies with music. you mix a bunch of lead instruments that are so rich they occupy the entire frequency spectrum and you end up with something that is TOO rich to the point where it just sounds too noisy. it's far better to just mix a few lead instruments with a bunch of backting tracks. the backing tracks are almost invisble to the ear, nobody ereally listens to the backing tracks themselves, but if you took them away then you'd notice how much they're missing.

the question fo harmony = how do differnet elements mix with each other. not everybody gets to play the meldoy. everyone WANTS to play the melody because that's the most important part of a song, but someobdy has got to play the harmony and bass and rythym otherwise nobody wants to listen to the melody.

i watched a lot of tv today. actually i watched a lot ofsports. two soccer games and one basketball game. the soccer games were not that intersting but for somer eason i love watching a huge green field with players running around and kicking a ball around. it's just relaxing. the baksetball game i watched was of higher significacne but i find i can't stand the start/stop nature of baksetball games... it seems every few second sa foul is being committed or yet another timeout and shit. in soccer you cannot call timeouts, the only time play is stopped is when thwhen there is a foul or someone is injured. but in basketball play gets interrupted like a jillion times in a quarter, it's quite nnoying. i guess it's good for advertisers, cuz you get alot more ads in a basketball game than you do in a soccer game.

now about the basketball game, it was houston against dallas game 1. i wactually only watched bits and pieces of it because newastle against manutd was on at the same time and i found that more relaxing. but i still caught glimpses of the game. when i watch basektball games now i try to zone out. i try to stare at the centre of hte tv and not follow the ball. rather i try to focus on teh big picture... the players running around like a kind of poetic motion, and trying to find anything interesting. i really like seeing screens. it's cool cuz you can almost feel what the palyers are thinking as they move around the court. like dikembo mutombo. i'm not sure if was ordered to do this but i've noticed this guy just loves to set picks, esp. for mcgrady. this guy, if he sees mcgrady with the ball on the same side as he is, will come outfrom all the way under the net to the top of hte perimeter jjust to set a pick for mc grady. i think i caught him doing that at least 3 or 4 times for hte duration i was watching.the funny thing is he rolls nicely to the basket and even puts his arms out to signal for the pass, but mcgrady, after driving tho the hoop, never passes it to him. instead he passes it to the far corner and then the guy on the wing passes it again (the extra pass) and usually houston gets an open look at a three. it all starts with mutombo's pick though. i didn't catch yao doing the same thing but i didn't see yao all that much actually.

i wonder if houston is going to do the exact saeme thing again next game. it's funny how many picks mutombo set.one thin gi noticed about hte lakers is that they (used to) never set picks for each other. i guess that's the triangle offesnse. not many picks.

too many mostquiotts biting at me. will heave to go to the bedroom now.

recetnly all that has been on my mind is music. music music music. whenever my gf and i sit down for dinner or coffee that's all i talk about and she obligingly listnes. actually it's more moaninga nd graoning about music production - about how diffifcult it is to get a satsifying sound that will match the impact of professionsals.

i think that perhaps by prying open into the nature of msuic that i have also derpived myself of the ability to enjoy it. when i listen t music now i don't listen to music, i aggressively decompose it in my head. i listen to for intersting bass lines, interesting progressions, intersting sounds. ivisualize the sequencer track. i visualize the effects racks that are being used. i do everything but focus on the whole picture. i dissect instinctively. and i say this and you might think i am proud ofr bragging but in reality it is a tradgedy. i haven't been moved by any pieceof music for hte last... week or so. well that's not entirely a lie. i've been movecd by britney spears music. just by the sheer quality of the production, it just astounds me that such sonic quality is achievable.

sometimes listening to music through cheap headphones or speakers is probaby better than antying else really. because when you have sucha low quality system the production quality is far less significant - what is more important are the ideas that go into the song. the more abstract things in the domain of composing are highlighted. but listen to music through a pair of flat frequency monitors and all i will focus on are the sound quality. it's really awful. i don't know i have become like this, but it's not fun. well it's fun but not as fun as listening to msuic with a fairly virgin ear. i remember many many years ago back in hgih school when i first discovered mp3's i would listen to so many of them through a 486 dx2 (i woul dhave to disable stereo mode because it would cripple my computer), and it was just mimndblowing. but back then i really listened to music. i didn't concern myself about things like Eq and compressors and shit. it was just the music. and now for fucks sake i cannot get this whole engineering thing out of my head. it's like i know i shouldn't touch engineering but without engineering none of the ideas you have musically will ever come to fruition. well they will but they will sound really shoddy. can a really great song still catpure your attention even with a shitty rproduction? i don't think so. people only listen to top dollar productions nowadays. that and people who are obsessed with certain auras surroudnign certian genres of music. like classical. people are not really soni cally attrracted to classical music, it has few frequencies and lacks a rythmic drive (well at least for piano pieces). but the auras is enthralling. soo people flock to the aura.

i really wish i could know what were the secrets of the pros. what elements in the rocrding/mixing/mastering chain are the most essentail. there are too many rumors and gossip on the internet to learn from the net.

sometimes i wonder whether i am taking myself too far into music. it makes sense that if you like something, then you should make a career out of it and puruse it further, but i wonder whether there is apoint where you can purus eit to far.

i have been scrutinizing so many mp3's over the last few days with my new magnifying glass, the yamah msp5's. it's been interesting at times, but there's another feeling: a feeling of hopelessness. because whereas before, on the old Klipsch 2.1 Promedia speakers, you couldn't really tell the difference between good and bad mixes, other than the fact that a good mix just sounded mroe pleasant,... on the yamaha's, the distinction between a goodand bad max is as clear as night and day. which only serves to remind me of just how far i naway i am from achieving the same sound quality as the pros.

i wrote before that i see myself as a composer. i don't think i'm really that great of a composer, but i've my share of glory moments with KK. i feel that i'm improving steadily as a comopser - my most recent work includes a whole bunch of jazzy chords that flow smoothly like something out of a musical... of course the hooks aren't as good, but you know, at least i've got the funky accidnetalls all over hte place and they sound pretty nice. but still, even despite that, the end result is disappointing - the final sound just isn't smooth, silky, powerful. it sounds great if you just listen to that track a hundred times in a row. but play anything that has been professionally mastered/mixed, and it all comes crashing down - now with these new yamah speakers, the difference is just so stark that it makes me not e en want to try.

i mean after all, such great results can only be achieved by having the right requipment int he first place. some of the stuff that they use is just scary... like there' sa piece of equipment that supposednly adds an analog "warmth" to any signal. well that's just so fucking complicated for anybody whoo's an optimizer. are you gonna run that thing on every single track to get a better sound? or can you run that thing on the end mix only and get the same results? how much of the effect is needed? now all these different factors come into play in optimiznng the sound. and that's just one piece fo equipment, which is generally out of the financial reaches of most home studios - well you could buy it, but it would set you back quite a bit for such a small fucntional gain. and let's not even get to things like hardware compressors and eq, which supposedly always produces a warmer, natural sound than any conceivable software VST plugin. i'm sure the difference between a real llexicon reverb and your standard reverb plugin that was sundled with sonar - it's not going to turn a shit track into a good one, but using the reverb AND all the other red carpet treatment stuff on everything IS.

i guess what really want to say is that... in the music production world, it's a fucking messy jungle. it's not just as simple as picking up an instrument and playing shit and singing. that will get you as far as... entertainig yourself and maybe a group of sympathetic friends. if you want to create UNIVERSALLY appealing music... it takes SO MUCH.... FUCKING WORK. it's unvelievable. one would wonder just how much treatment a bassline can get. it gets a lot. it's not just enough to write a nice bassline. you need to massage it with a smaorgasboard of compressors, eq, and what now... even maybe sidecahin compression to make it fit with the kicks better. you don't HAVE to do all this, but if you don't, the momoment you play your track next to a professionally nmastered one... it all comes crashing down.

it would be so nice if it could jsut be the piano and me. ok, and maybe a beatdrum machine and a bass thingy. well as far as composing goes that's usually how it all gets started, just the piano, bass, beats, singing. keane does it like that. i think i could write something like keane. what i CAN'T do, is make it souund that fucking amazing on a mastered track. i could literally play back keane's everybody's changing on the piano on the first take. it was in fricking c major for christ sakes. but the engineering behind that track. holy fucking shit. it's so goddam hot. maxmaximieed, eq'ed to perfection. it sounds huge, large, vast, expansive, that track is 90% engineering and 10% anything else. that goes for almost any kind of mainstream musci nowadays. i mean look at norah jones. and that song sunrise. it does not take a genuis to come up with that ooh ooh ooh ooh ... do you part... compostionally. what IS difficult, is to take those harmony vocals and make them sound so sweet and smooth together. it is FUCKING difficult to do that. you need incredible equipment, incredible know-how, and the right environment.

i wish i could lower my expecations to back when i was jsut starting out in music. because for some reason, i just can't let go of the fact taht I must get one of my tracks to one day, sound like ht epros. but it's so stuipd, i don't even have the technical resrouces to do so. even if I paid the money to say amp labs (who does the KK songs, engineering and productions), they couldn't even compete with say britney spears studio... who can turn anything into sonic gold. they ware hte real wizards behinds the success of britney's music. that and the pop marketing machine.

there are so many wannabe engineers and wannabe studios it's scary. that only excabrates the difference between my present situation and the ultimate goal - to make a track sound like something off a britney spears cd. i know y'all jeer at her music, and i'm not foo fond of the whole pop thing either, but the track is SO GODDAMN PERFECT - the bass, the beats, the arragnement, the vocals... it's so FLAWLESS it's just arrrgh.

wow,
i never realized how horrible i sing. until i listened to it played back through the new yamahas. now if i sing really softly it's ok (like... barely ok). but if I try to sing naturally, with some degree of force, the results are so irritating. no wonder why my girlfriend keeps telling me to shutup whenever i sing out of the blue. in fact remember that blog when i said i sang christina aguilera's beautiful like a million times? my girlfriend was next to me in my room, and she told me to shutup a million times. you know my pride got hurt really bad there, because I thought I was singing really well. so I sulked for like an hour after that. but my girlfriend is right. i sound like shit.

it's nice to know i got horribly screwed in this aspect dna-wise.

these yamahas are really interesting. listening to anything with them is like an exercise in audio dissection. it really separates the good mixes from the bad. good mixes sound stellar, but average mixes really sound ... blah. i think britney spears has possibly the best producer/engineer team in the world. no idea what kind of equipment or methodology is used, but a track like toxic just sizzles quality - from a production/engineering standpoint.

i'm really shocked at how good these msp5's are. there was one aspect to speakers that i have never realized before, and that is stereo imaging. i am not quite sure what properties of a speaker produces good stereo imaging, but when i listen to music through the yamahas, and i stare in front of me at the monitor, it really sounds like there's an illusionary speaker behind my monitor! it's really freaky! it's really really sounds like someone hid a speaker behind my monitor. i really wish i had these speakers when i was doing work for CMUSIC, because this makes identifying panning information a total cinch. i can easily differentiate between pure mono (centered) and stereopphonic (very simliar instruments doubled to the left and right). this was not always so obvious on the klipsch.

for instance, listening to utada hikaru's easy breezy, just by casual listening I can tell that during the chorus, hikaru's voice is panned stereophonic, and then when it hits the verse, it closes back into center mono. i'm sure that if i tell you this and you focus when listening to the song on any pair of speakers, you could probably also pick it up, but with these speakers, you will notice these kinds of effects without even looking for them. it's freaky because sometimes it feels like somebody is actually singing behind my monitor! the imaging is just unreal

so this is what stereo was supposed to be like all along.

oh fuck yeah at long last these pair of babies are mine. they sound absolutely amazing. now intially when i hooked them up it was rather disappointing. something sounded wrong, especially with the bass. at certain frequencies it seemed to almost double in volume. i immediately suspected room acoustics. and i was right. a little research turned out that i had a standing waves problem. apparently at certain speaker placements and listening positions, certain frequencies will either be DOUBLE in volume, or cancelled completely.

i played random bass notes on my keyboard and it was un-fucking-believalbe, the Bb note, in all octaves, seemed to resonate in the room, creating a super "boomy" effect... but ONLY on that note. it was so shocking that simple room acoustics could alter the final perceived sound THAT drastically. so what I did was shift the table around. more un fucking believably, just by shifting the table like 1 ft away from the wall, the problem pretty much disappeared completely. and now the speakers sound like they should. i actually still hear a little bit of emphasis/coloration on the Bb note but i don't think i can ever fix that completely, apparently they are propreties of the room dimensions. but by shifitng my desk it seems that the problem has be alleviated.

today at the studio i sort of made an interesting observation... we were recording the vocals for one of m projects for kaiser kastle, and while we were going throught he motions, I notifd that it was very difficult for me to listen. now this needs a little explaining i guess. while i can hear equally well both at home and at a foreign studio surrounded by people I know but are not totally comfortalble with, at home I can REALLY listen, whereas at the studio I am just hearing the sounds, if that makes any sense.

i don't know if you feel the same way, but whenever i am in the presence of people that i am not totally familiar with, and by saying that I pretty muhc included the whole world except my girlfriend and my paernts, I find that my mind will elevate to a new tension level. insetad of feeling totally relaxed, a lot my mental energy will be directed towards the presence of these people, whether it be friends, acquantaces or workmates. it'slike my brain automatically allocates a significant portion of my available mental energy to the presence of other people.

i have noticed that deep thought, deep reflection and deep analysis of the senses can only be realized when one is alone or in the company of people whom he or she is completely familiar with. now the exception is if you spend a great deal of time with people you may initially not be comfortable with, but afterl ike 5 hours your mind seems to settle in a bit.

i can't really say why this happens. i guess by nature we are programmed to be alert and attentive to people's presence, particuarily if we don't seem them often (by often I mean like every day of our lives, so this only really includes family). this alert and attentives comes at a cost though, our own inward reflectiveness and deep thgouhts. in other words we cannot have both at the same time. personally i really dislike the fact that i feel like ... i feel sort of in an elevated tense state whenever i'm with other people. such as in the studio. tehn i will not be able to listen very carefully to what i'm hearing, because half my brain is worried about ,... i should say concerned about... what his happening with the people around me. i try not to care because that's the cool thing to do but i can't do it... i naturally care. i really really wish i didn't care but i do. i suppose if at the very beginning everyone gave me a huge hug and told me how great i was, and i actually believed it, then i would settle down much more quickly. i gues it's an affimration thing. whenever i meet people i guess in the back of my mind i am totally concerned with wheterh they approve of me nor not. even thought i may not be focusing on such details, i know something in my brain is doing all that behind my back.

it's difficult.. no impossible to achieve the same kind of mental state of when you are alone than with the intial hour of when you are in the presence of people you don are not totally familiar with. i suppose this is why some people really don't like social events with many people they do not know extremely well. it puts them in a stressed, tense, uncomfortable mental state whreby they cannot really enjoy themselves.

i have also noticed that most conversations in such socail siutations are based on the need fo approval. to ssoilcity approval. it's not paticuarily obviuos but i get a vibe of sorts from the nature of what is said. there will be people who talk a lot but most of what they say is rather approval socliiting in nature. then there are those who keep smiling and trying to entertain conversation but they too wish someone would approve of them, except hey are too lazy or feel out of the game so to speak in the rat race fo approval. i guess it's alla bout approval. no amount of approval is enough, it is like food. you cannot eat a lot of food today and not have to eat for hte next year. we don't work liek that. we need food everyday. we need sex every... few days. and we certainly hneed approval every few days to ensure our cotinued mental heatlh and self confidence. i supppose.



i have started to play winning eleven 8 gagain. i started a league season in the spanish league wth real madrid. i always play with player lock. i don't think i can ever go back to playing a sports game where i am in control of everybody. it's not a very good control scheme in relation to giving you an accurate psycholgoical picture of what it feels like to actually be on the field/court. no person in real sportrs can "be" every player on the team and do eveything. iin soccer or basketball, most of your time is spent without the ball. how you focus your attention and mental energy during these times is important, perhaps even more improtant, than when you have the ball. if you play with the default control scheem you will get ZERO immersion in this aspect, you will never know how it feels to move around without the ball. this is probably one fo the weakest aspects of most pickup games i see today. nobody moves well without the ball, and yet surprinsigly with the proper muscle motion training you can accomplish so much. in 3 on 3, you could run endless off-the-ball screens to free up guys and conufse the dfense, yet people are always looking at the balll, waiting for hte pass. it is waful. everybody is selfish. i guess me too. but that's because i don't have a consistent partner or team to play with. if i did i would practice all these off-the-ball motions because i know wthat will give us the edge over 90% of the teams out there.

anyways the off-theball thing is so great in sports games (video games). it feels just as good to score as it does to make an assist. i love the feling how you make an assit, and the scoring is left to someone else. it feels like you've helped out, you've contirubted in a big way. you don't always have to be the scroer to feel like you've accomplished something. if you can break down the defense, free up a teammate for the shot, and successfully get a pass to him, then you have accompished more than the scorer. this applies both to soccer and absketball alike. with owen o madrid, i try to beat my defender, but that doesn't always lead to a goal, but i usually manage to draw an extra defender on me, which will lead to some kind of an opening. the pass is the method to utilize the opening. if i looked to score everytime, the results are poor. this is why i think a player like kobe will never really be great. he has a seefish me first attitude - even though i see him trying to pass and assist, he does this as a "Forced" thing, it's not in his nature to pass, his nature is to score despite all oodds. whereas i was watching iverson the other day, (against miami) and wow this dude breaks down defenses like that. he makes great passes, he runs so many screen rorolls with mark jacson, it was beautiful. his movement on the court was so fluid and so beautiful, and the way he breaks down the defense is just exquisite to watch. and yet at the very end to capitalize on the penetration he will pass to set up his teammates. it was a joy to watch.

tomorrow i will finally get a new pair of monitors, the yamah msp5. i hope they are good. they sounded good at hte store. hopefully they will bring a renewed intersting in music making.

today i am going to write in a new style - pitch dark at night with my monitor turned off. this way i can focus my mental energy completely on my inner thoughts without disturbance from the outisde world.

first off i saw this really great movie called "love the hard way". it was simply fantastic. i actually caught this movie at break time in the studioa week ago. even back then i felt that something was simply great about this movie. not knowing much about cinematography, i often wonder what exactly creates the intial "punch" and "attraction" when a viewer sees a movie. with the extremely fast rates we flip through channels nowadays, it's even more important to create a picture that will captivate the audience's handiscapped attention spans. for this movie i would guess that the colors are done very nicely - it sort of has a subtle gritty, harsh edge to it, and the unbelievable screen presence of Adrien as the protagonist Jack. I dont know exactly why I like this guy so much, but his face is really something unique - that big nose and strange mystical eyes, and at least for the movie, a crazy-ass hhair-do.

the problem with recommending movies to friends is that the moment somebody says a movie is good, your expecations shoot up and it somehow becomes our instinctive responsibility to prove the recommendation incorrect. usually we will be double as scrutinizing when it comes to the film's faults. this is why when you catch a random flick on tv, you are far more forgiving - oddly enough, this is contrast to the fact that anytining on tv only has 0.5 seconds to catch your attention before you flip the channel. but if it caches your attention, you will be more forigving, usually.

i've been thinkigna botu mental states. i think during the course of the day, we undergo a series of transitions from various mental states - states that really cannot be described via words. the only way to build awareness of them is by simply looking introspectively at oneself. certainly for me, things like a cup of coffee or a nice nap will enhance my mental state more often than not, well i suppose that it for anybody. i suppose this is really hard to explain. hm. well let's say i'm trying toc ompose music, usually the final quality of a composing session is ultimately determined by my mental state. you cannot force composing out of oneself, it has to come naturally, well for me it does at least... and how well the music comes out is most likely a combination of the many factors relating to the mental state. it's strange how sometimes you feel like singing all of a sudden in the middle of the road. why that time? why sing... now? why not sing all day long? well we only feel like singing sometimes. very occasional or never for some people. but when that moment comes you will sing and it will feel very good. those kinds of moments are when i compose the best i suppose. but these mental states cannot really be maniuplated. like i can't maniuplate myself into getting into a great mental state.

i think a lot of things in this world depends on our staes. like umm... say baksetball. the perfroamnce of a baksetball player seems to be dicated by more than just his raw abilities. it's more than just the technical stuff. the way the player views himself, the way he feels aobout the situation, his teammates, his caoch, these will all have a singificant impact on his overall performance. only truly spectaular players like say O Neal can thrive in a very forgiving set of environments. other players require a certain environment to proudce a speicfic mental state in order to thrive and succeed. i guess somenoe like dwayne wade? anyways that's wshat's so intersinteresting about basketball i suppose... it's both tangible and intangible at the same time, if you know what i mean.. i mean we all know who are the good players and bad players, but the intricacies between them are very difficult to grasp. like who works well with who , and etc.. .etc..

so anyways, back to mental states. it is amazing how a various amounts of ... scratch that... it is amaizng how different situations can produce different mental conditions within us. like whether or not i write this blog with all the lights out and thhe mointor off and whehter i do. of course, to you this will probably mean a lot f spelling mistakes and incohesiveness, but at the same time, it will also change the nature and content of this blog. because my mind will be allowed to wander more freely instead of constantly self-checking for errors or whether or not i'm insulting one of my potential readers. so just by turning of fmy monitor, i have severely altered the content of the blog. also it is strange but if you type a long time with all the lights off and closing your eyes, you feel like your head is floating in air os eomthing. really fucked up.

this si sorta fun. btw i have decided that i will try to restrcit use of the computer for aimless gratifyign purposes. i know i've said this before i think. but constant use of the computer, i have observed, seems to overdrive our nerves and put us in a jumpy, neurorotic state. at least for me it does.

i goddamn hate my biological clock. it seems to be tuned to a 26 hour day or something. i don't know why my entire life I have had extreme problems sleeping and waking up at regular hours. my sleep schedule, if left undistrubed, will gradually shift later and later. there have been a couple of times during univeristy when it got so out of hand I pretty much cycled through an entire day.

what double sucks is that trying to sleep when you're not tired = pure agony. it's like sitting down with writer's block trying to write something. the harder you try the worse it gets. imho that line of thinking applies to so many things in life, it's pretty surprising. the more I fight with reality, the more I suffer.

so i guess it comes as no surprsie that I sleep best when I know I don't have to sleep. i'm sure this is a caveat or something - if I don't feel like sleeping when I don't have to sleep, then I'll just stay awake. so obviously anybody will sleep well when they don't have to sleep, otherwise they'll stay and there's nothing to complain about.

sometimes though my girlfriend gets really pissed off when i'm tossing and turning endlessly next to her in bed at 5am in the morning, she'll just tell me "if you don't feel like sleeping, then don't frickin sleep. get up and do something!". the problem is, i feel guilty if i don't try. i feel like I'm betraying society or something, that I don't have my act together. that and the fact that if I HAVE to get up early tomorrow, I feel like i'm wasting precious seconds to fall asleep. like tomorrow i have to get to the studio before 1pm. and it's 6am now. not good.

i've tried the meditation thing, breathing deeply in and out, but unfortunately that does not translate into falling asleep. instead i'm awake but totally relaxed. i actually start to want to wash the dishes.

really, the only thing i can do, is just stay awake until i'm so tired i will naturally want to go to bed. unforutnately that could be hours from now. but i guess there's no choice. i cannot control when i fall asleep, so i just have to accept the fact that i'll feel like shit tomorrow waking up at 12pm.

Amazingly, I've finally found a game that is worth playing after my affair with World of Warcraft. It's called God of War. I love it because:

1. You basically don't have to think. You just press simple buttons, watch the gorgeous animations as your character kicks ass, and admire the scenery. It's a very reaction oriented game. The character Kratos is super responsive and the controls do not betray your senses. You can kick a lot of ass without much practice, but with some practice you can kick ass much more effectively. The learning curve is perfect.

2. There are very few decisions to be made. Aside from allocating your powerups, no "goddamnit, what should i do now?" moments.

3. It is soul food for anyone suffering from ADD (attention deficiency disorder). There are practically no moments when you would rather flip the video signal back to your cable tv. The action is intense.

4. Yet despite intense action, it gives breaks where you are just walking around and admiring the scenery. Much like a piece of music needs to vary the intensity over time, this game makes it a point not to overwhelm your senses with endless action. The pacing is flawless.

5. No bullshit. You die, you start at the last checkpoint, and checkpoints are EXTREMELY frequent. The difficulty of the game has been precisely tailored so you are not meant to die the first time through an area (unless you really suck). Puzzles are not archaically difficult. Saving only takes 3 seconds tops and there are generous amounts of save points. Net result is that frustration is kept to a bare minimum.

6. There is nudity and anytime i can see nudity that is a good thing.

I tried Devil May Cry and I didn't like it at all. God of War is just that much better in terms of game design, sometimes in criteria that are not very tangible. But I love it. It allows the player to zone out very quickly without giving him worries and mundane decisions.

i am pleased to announce that I have officially retired from the World of Warcraft world. it's been three days (gasp!) that I have not double clicked the WoW icon on my desktop. Well, to be fair, I actually removed WoW from my hard drive, so the icon wasn't even there.

Well i have to say, I did the right thing. It's quite interesting how WoW, or any type of strongly addictive mentally stimulating game for that matter, has a profound effect on our mental state. In the past it could have been games like Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo... From self-observation, I have found that I usually go in playing these games with an alert mind and healthy energy levels, but after I finish playing (which can be up to five to six hours later), my mind has turned into total mush and physically I feel like complete shit. Usually I'm not even aware of this because well... my mind is total mush.

These kinds of games are what I consider "Brain drains". Basically my brain has a bunch of pent up energy, and I want to release it somewhere, but unfortunately I got jack shit to do. This is statistically, the most likely time for me to say "oh what the fuck" - and double click.

So I fire up one of these games and I pour my mental energy into it - my mind is stimulated and satisfied. It's really unfortunate though that these kinds of games only exercise my mind and not my body. I know that playing a grueling game of basketball can leave me EXTREMELY satisfied afterwards, and while my body might be aching my mind will feel fresh and rejuvenated. It's like the complete opposite with video games... no wait... actually, it's not the opposite, becuase both my mind and body feel like shit afterwards.

Anyways, balance is very important in our lives. You need to have the right balance of both mental and physical stimulation, unforutunately it seems video games are set by their very nature to disrupt this balance. As a result I think people who play too many games will put their mind and body in an unhealthy state whereby they are jittery, overactive, and will have difficulty calming their senses down and focusing their attention. At least that's what happens with me.

On a side note I have officially busted my Klipsch speakers. I think it was because I loaded up some sound effect of a dragon breathing fire and unknowingly compressed and boosted it by 10dB when it was already normalized.... which probably fucked up the amp. Well it really shouldn't have, but I guess it was on the brink of collpasing. Now everything that crosses -5dB or so gets distorted. Well, in a way this is a good thing, I've been wanting to replace this piece of consumer audio equipment with something more suited towards music production: a pair of studio monitors. Unfortunately I approach new purchases with a fair bit of apprehension - with every purchasing decision there is a veritable mountain of worries and concerns which I really do not need disrupting my daily rythym. But it's a necessary step and I will take it.

there's this really great show on one of the japanese channels here, done by this comedy group "london hearts" - it's called "kakuzuke shiau onna tachi". then bring in 10 girls, often very famous people (like iijima ai, some of you may have seen av pics of her years ago) and then they proceed to rank them on different categories, such as "most likely to change personality in front of men". it's quite funny even though I can't undersatnd half of it

http://www.tv-asahi.co.jp/londonhearts/pc_backnumber.html



anyways there's this girl that came on the show, morishita chistao. omg i fell in love immediately. she looks so smart and astute... here is an awesome website with tons of awesome pics of her.

mmmm, goooood!

Corporate Espionage (2.1MB MP3)

Featuring:
- NI Absynth 3.0, NI Battery 3.0, Trilogy - only 9 total tracks
- Extensive synth layering for a moody, atmospheric sound
- -2.0dB threshold multi-band compression for a touch of commercial sound
- Improved EQ technique to avoid the typical "muddy mix" syndrome
- Will peak all the frequencies in Winamp.
- An actual song structure, with buildup, climax, and denouement
- Fairly commercial soundscape. Will hopefully impress.

recently i've been contemplating on trying meditation seriously. i find that the vast duration of the day, my nerves are incessenatly frazzled when really, there's no reason for them to be. i'm tense, high strung, and i want to accomplish everything as fast as possible.

today i tried a simple exercise. it wasn't full blown meditation, but something simple you can do pretty much anytime you're alone. i closed my eyes, took deep breaths, and concentrated solely on my breathing. the importat thing is to focus on your breathing, this is something i gathered from a couple of meditation web sites and from phil jackson's book. i can't say that something totally awesome occurred, but i did experience what can only be described as "altered state of mind", if only for 5 minutes. in other words, my consciousness seemed to drift into the background and i fell into a sort of mini rythym trance, if you will. it was good. i think this is a very good way to start the day. one of the WORST ways to start the day is do engage immediately in a mentally stimulating activity like say, playing world of warcraft. for me, that guarantees that i will be edgy, nervous, and high strung for pretty much the whole day.

by the way, i found a couple of intersting NPR shows with Phil Jackson where he talks about his book - the last season. i really like phil jackson. just listening to him speak soothes the mind.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4144546
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4144156

it's really not the content of what he says that interests me, but rather the way he presents the information in a relaxed, deep, soothing voice. also he has this fairly unique vocabulary set - i learned the word "vitrilous" from his interview. good one!

a few hours ago i saw this unidentifable movie on tv. it was about these bunch of high school kids who went to rome on some kind of study trip. as expected, a handsome guy and a cute girl develop a romantic attraction for each other. it was so heartwarming i actually smiled in complete bliss after seeing them kiss for the first time. i don't know why this simple, cheezy movie moved me so much. i guess in some ways i long to start another romantic relationship. i'd like to deny it and say that my girlfriend satisfies me and in many ways she does, but, there is just something irreistable about that phase in the relationship when you just start getting to know another person you find attractive. life feels so fresh, so meaningful during this period of time, everything around you seems to make sense.

i also caught a random video clip of coco lee singing an english song. i didn't know she sang english songs but then again I'm not exactly up to date on the music scene. i watched for about 5 seconds and then changed the channel. i don't really know why i didn't feel like watching the whole thing, i mean, i'm sure a lot of talent and effort was put into making this poor video. but yeah 5 seconds. i think's that's pretty normal nowadays. i think it's absolutely incredible how difficult it is nowadays for a music video to get your attention. then i realized, hrm, maybe there's just too much music in the world. maybe there's too much of everything, it's hard to get excited about anything.

As a modest attempt to illustrate to anyone who visits this blogger the effect of "Big sound processing", I have produced a quick and dirty demo:

cheezy1.mp3
cheezy2.mp3

it's best to download both so you can do a quick a/b comparison. one has been heavily processed by "Waves Multimaximizer L3", a very good multi-band compression tool that is used at the mastering stage to make a track sound more... well... "commercial". there is very little handiwork involved, you just load the plugin, select one of the many available presets, and let the final mix run through it. it's very much like monosodium glutamate. you only have to worry about how much to add.

what i find funny is that if you haven't been listening to any music for the last hour or so, the non-processed one will sound loud enough, and yet once you listen to the processed one, you can't go back. it's strange how our aural senses are naturally attracted to "full frequency loudness". you can also check the peaks on winamp, the non-processed one does a fairly good job at peaking a fair bit, but the processed one is even better. as a result, the processed one will sound "larger", "stronger", "punchier", and more "in your face" - all a result of "multi-band compression".

however there are some artifcats. I purposely overdid the effect on the processed one, thus you will probably experience "listening fatigue" if you play the track more than 2 or 3 times. i think good studios carefully control the effect and may even vary it over time to ensure that the track is listenable over long periods of time. but you can listen to the unprocessed one as many times as you want and it will not tire your ears (it might tire your brain if you hate cheezy euro-beat music).

it's important to note that the processed one is not just some simple "Add volume" operation. the unprocessed one, believe it or not, already peaks near 0db all over the place. if you added say another 3db of volume those peaks would clip and you would get nasty distortion. the "loudness" in the processed one is more of an illusion than anything else, this is what is so "magical" about it. what compression does is lower the volume of loud parts and let the softer parts pass through untouched, thus giving you more headroom to add more volume globally. multi-band compression (aka maximizer) is even more complex, and does this operation on multiple frequency bands to ensure you get full loudness on ALL frequencies. again, both versions are hitting the maximum volume that 16-bit audio can afford, it's just that the processed one is make sure it's hitting the maximum volume as OFTEN as possible in ALL possible frequencies. this the illusion of loudness and power.

lately i've developed a more profound respect for classical music. i guess this is partly because i'm too aware of the "big sound trick" that studios produce, and i think my ears are tired of it. there is a time and place when you want to listen to that "wall of sound" that almost every big name production studio strives to produce. but i've found that it's a lot like mcdonalds... it's more of a "fix" than an active attempt to appreciate a work of art.

i guess it's really a testament to our overloaded senses that nothing but the biggest and punchiest sound will grab our attention anymore. i finally got around to listening to keane's hopes and fears, and while it was a catchy album, it was too loud. before people just say "well just turn down the volume level, duh", let me inform you - there are two kinds of "loudness", one is by turning up your volume on your speaker, the other is by heavy use of "multi-band compression" to maximize the decibels in every frequency range on the source material. 16bit audio affords you a lot of dynamic range yet after a piece of music is processed through this kind of compression, you really only use the top 6db or so. the idea is that no matter what volume your speakers are set at, the audio going through it is using the maximum energy levels for the longest possible times at all frequencies - thus producing punch and impact. the most convienient way to recognize this effect is to check the winamp's frequency analysis, if the song can manage to peak everything from low to high for long periods of time, the track will be "hot and sizzling".

the problem with such methods is that like anything else that gratifies the sense, the human ear will adapt and normalize, thus the effect will eventually be totally lost. it's value is really only realized through comparison, if one stuido uses the effect and another doesn't, then there will be a clear "winner" and "loser", at least in terms of grabbing the audience's attention within a 0.5sec timeframe.

well turn to classical music. no snares, hihats, drums, kicks. just notes, on one instrument usually. there isn't much you can do in terms of power. but in terms of creating atmosphere, of blanketing the mind in pure music, not whoop-ass-sounds. it's easy on the ears and great for the soul. i can turn the volume level way up and it still has a sense of peace, of quiet. make any sense? it's like a homemade sandwich compared to say a bigmac from mcdonalds. sometimes you just want the simple, natural, non-chemical stuff.

well i finally got around to playing this game. and you know what. i think it's awful. no doubt everything about it screams extremely high production values. the graphics have the kind of immaculate detail that only the most scrutinous of scrutinous people could have made, the sound effects are top notch, there is even a very well made "james bond" intro music... then you have the over the top characters that scream personality, and an overload of "poetic action shots"

but the problem lies in the core mechanics of the game. first of all, the abrupt swtiching between third and first person view is totally disorienting. they put so much detail and effort into the controls, am I the only person who finds the inability to move in first person mode TOTALLY ANNOYING? what's amazing is that in third person view, it's so zoomed in that you are often blindsided by a guard in FRONT of you. that's just utterly retarded. solution to this is to hit R1 every 10 steps or readjust/lock the R3 camera everytime you move in a different direction - ANNOYING!

then there's the fact that knowing what happens in a particular area makes getting through it 100 times easier. what's the point of moving unbearingly slow through an area when all you need to do is run around like a suicidal maniac, trigger all the attention of the guards, note their positions, then down a fake death pill and go through the area again with 100% confidence of their location. totally unrealistic. yeah you probably will get a crappy end game rating but then again who goes for high ratings their first time through the game.

what i find almost strange now is that a totally simple game like snood21 on my motorola phone can be more gratifying and pleasurable than a 500,000 man hour production game like mgs3. i want to play mgs3 because i want to see all the production values they put into it, but unbelievably the core game is so annoying i've already given up! i got as far as the sniper boss "the End" which was the pinnacle of annoyance. what's the gratification in running around through three different areas trying to locate some old man who falls asleep half the time.

in the end mgs3 is nothing but super high production values covering up a very annoying piece of work. yet checking gamefaqs ratings EVERYBODY has given it high marks. i must be missing something crucical. because cell phone games are more entertainig than this.

anyone who reads this chaotic directionless blogger will have noticed that I've been yapping about music production over the last few weeks. is there a reasno for this? of course there is. the reason is: i have lost the ability to derive gratification from World of Warcraft.

yep, the goddamn normalization/hedonistic adaptation thingy has finally caught up to me - for WoW. sometmies I find it INCREDIBLE that I login to this game, find myself in Orgrimmar, lv50, my inventory's a complete mess, my hard drive's thrashing as it's loading the armor/weapon textures of zillions of horde skimpering around like ants... and then you know what's the first thing I do? I type /quit. it's too fucking complicated now... I have to make too many decisions... where do i grind? should i level up my mining? my engineering? or do i go to the auction house and ponder over the ideal price to sell some trash greens? do I want to group for an instance? no, that's too many decisions. i just want to godadmn relax, to zone out, and decisions = stress.

5 months ago (wow, has it been that long?), I remember, just being in somewhere like Orgrimmar would give me the chills. climbing up a random mountain in the Barrens would give me the chills, seeing this vast undiscovered world before me, just waiting to be discovered.

now that i've pretty much been everywhere except for high level instnaces like the molten core, that mystique is completely gone. there is no magic left. surprisingly, what is left is the key element of diablo: upgrading your weapons and making yourself more powerful. you would find it strange that with all the human effort behind the art, fantasy and lore of warcraft - that nobody really gives a shit about it anymore! instead people only care about talent point specs, getting the latest weapons and equipment, and grinding to 60 as fast as possible. one glance at any WoW forum will tell you that 95% of the posts are concerning how to become uber, how to kick ass and get 30,000xp/hour. who the hell cares about the lore? it's sad in a way, because it seems the lore is very well done, except... nobody cares.

in a way, this kind of hedonistic adapation is a double-edge sword. it kinda sucks that as humans we are incapable by nature to derive endless gratification from a static situation, but at the same time that is exactly what drives us to pursue new opportunities, to improve ourselves and reach the next level. the biggest illusion that we can fall prey to is to believe that the desintation has meaning. in fact the destinatino is meaningless compared to the journey. an old cliched adage i know, but its truth radiates.

you all remember prodigy? they released that massive album fat of the land which I thought was just kickass from beginning to end. and then after that, they kinda disappeared for years, and then came out with some new tracks that just... didn't quite seem to cut it anymore.

you know what really happened to prodigy? well it appears the brains behind the original fat of the land was in one person: the keyboardist/synth guy Liam Howlett (i think that's his name, but it doens't really matter).

keyboard magazine interviewed Liam in a recent issue and you know what happened to this guy: after the success of fat of the land, he had too much money, so he started to buy all the music gear he ever wanted. not only that, but many synth makers went up to him and just gave him all the latest stuff for free. when he came back home after a one year break, he had a room chock full of new gear and the one thing that came over his mind was:

"where the FUCK do i start"?

yep... all that new gear, didn't liberate him, but actually CRIPPLED him from making music. you wonder how that is so, as more sounds = more versatility = better music. actually, that couldn't be further from the truth. the problem with owning too much gear or downloading too many VST instruments is you start to spend more and more time in the patch selection than actually playing music. the more time you spend in the patch selection, the less mental energy you have left towards other things that are crucial towards a good song: a well balanced mix, good song structure and chord progressions etc. etc.

i find that when making music the less instrusive the instruments are, the better. that way you spend less time dicking around with the instrument just to get a good sound, and more time using the instrument to making music. the intrusiveness of an instrument depends on two things: how complicated the instrument is, and how familiar you are with it.

this is why I feel some of the old video game composers were blessed in some ways. yes the nes had a very lousy synthesizer, but the challenge was to work within that framework to create something that is at least musically palatable - this is quite fun! I would just LOVE it if somenoe told me the instruments he wanted in a song, and said I coudln't use any mroe or any less. that way one dimension of complexity is reduced and I can focus my mental energy more on where it counts, writing a song.

the other day, i was up at 4am. alone in the computer room, just sitting in front of my pc, half stoned... feeling... empty, morbid, like I had all these bottled up fucked up emotions stirring inside - well that time instead of just masturbating or repeatedly clikcing on a billion xanga pages like i normally do, I fired up sonar. then i just played on my lameass m-audio keyboard whatever came into my mind. it felt good - almost like a release, like taking a dump.

well here it is:
alone at 4am having nothing to do but to fester over your own thoughts (1.8Mb MP3)