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[May. 11th, 2009|09:57 am] |
( dream )
got my music code doing midi export, which enables me to plug it all into Reason, so I've been churning out these half-computer-generated simulations of mid-to-late 90s dolphin jungle left and right. the "new beat every day" experiment on twitter is good but I've only worked seriously on one fully-fledged track all year. it's kind of frustrating. I've got a bunch of ideas and with Archaeopteryx churning out MIDI I also have some powerful tools available to me.
the stuff I've been auto-generating with Arx, these are literally seven-minute tracks that take less than seven minutes to create. they have 128 unique drum rhythms apiece, but there's no thought given at all to structuring or ordering the drum rhythms. if I took the time to chop up the rhythms and sort them in some kind of interesting order - which is the whole reason I enabled MIDI export in the first place - it could have some really interesting effects.
right now I'm just saying, ok, give me 256 bars, switch rhythms every 2 bars. what I'm planning for later is generate a bunch of rhythms, then chop them up and move them around, because right now they're generated randomly, but obviously if you put them in some kind of order you have the ebb and flow of a track. start off with something basic; then go to something more complicated; then something very spare and minimal for the first breakdown; then build up again; et cetera. the thing is, you don't just have to use them as central drumbeats. you can have these rhythms drive all kinds of additional percussive instruments, or just drumkits with effects on them. because of that, and the dubby/techy effects it can engender, I'm seeing the possibility of full-length tracks containing hundreds of unique rhythms - maybe even a thousand. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 30th, 2009|04:16 pm] |
so I had more heart surgery. the weird thing is by this point I'm getting used to it. it's really weird being used to heart surgery. now this was stent implantation and angioplasty, where they just cut into your leg and put a tube up your vein and use it to put a little metal tube inside your heart's artery to prop it open. this is scary, sure, but it's not like "hey I just had my third bypass." in a bypass they cut your chest open and it's like a goddamn Aztec ritual.
still, it was weird being like, hey, whatever, I've done this before.
the weird thing is that my radical vegan diet (no meat, duh, also no bread, no grains, no fruit juice or dried fruit, no refined carbohydrates or animal protein of any kind) brought my risk factors way the fuck down. I blogged this elsewhere but basically my cholesterol and triglycerides are now better than the average American's, except for my HDL, which is still a problem. What's remarkable about this is my dad and my uncle saw the same results, but they saw it after ten years of statin drugs. I saw it after three months of taking statins and going vegan. My blood pressure also went from dangerous to great. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 9th, 2009|07:53 am] |
duuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh! I figured out why I got sick such a long freaking time. after my surgery I didn't do jack. then I felt I had been lazy so I overworked to overcompensate. then I got sick for a hella long time. moral of the story, when people do surgery on you, give yourself plenty of time to recover. also, avoid surgery when possible.
prompted by concerns about my immune system I took to reading up on it and got scared shitless of any kind of meat. read the china study, you'll shit your pants. standard western diet is a very unhealthy thing. reason I have heart disease and my cousin has cancer :-( |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 8th, 2009|06:23 pm] |
cheese! I post a new mp3 on twitter every day. today: dubstep. mini-mix. two bootleg remixes of cheese from days gone by. one cheese from the early 90s, you're oooooooold-school if you remember it. the other more recent cheese that anyone and everyone reading this will probably recall all too well with a painful wince from the late 90s. trance hit you couldn't go anywhere without hearing.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/giles/experimix_040309/dubst.mp3
it's only two tracks because I'm finding Live an absolute fucking nightmare for DJing. fantastic production and rumor has it great for live too (duh), but no fun for me when it comes to DJing at all. just the wrong interface. probably going with Traktor at some point. who knows. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 3rd, 2009|06:25 pm] |
I've been vegan about two months. I got sick and have been sick for weeks. This happens to me sometimes but this one's unusual. Even now, I'm tired and sniffly. I eat a lot of beans and a staggering quantity of veggies which should in theory meet my protein needs, but I experimentally bought a chicken burrito, ate it, and felt a surge of energy which lasted a couple hours and then evaporated. Has me worried, because I went vegan due to several books by MDs, mostly cardiologists, and one specialist in nutritional medicine. Going vegan should be bringing my cholesterol way the fuck down and that's what I want, but I've been sick a crazy long time and I'm still feeling fatigued. I kinda want to get another chicken burrito and see if it's a consistent result. Although for what it's worth I also cheated with a box of nigiri from Whole Foods and it tasted greasy and sugary. That's when you know you've adjusted to eating vegan. It was an odd sort of shock.
Ambivalent. Especially since in 2007 I got this sick for this long and didn't have any veganism to blame it on at the time. Always had a highly vulnerable immune system, got sick at the drop of a hat, etc. Meh. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 16th, 2009|10:35 pm] |
I got a terrible weakness for cheeseball pop music. I got this track from my gym. It's awful but I like it. To my eternal shame.
Became a vegetarian, and I'm in the gym almost every day. Losing weight, which is good. Been tracking it only a short while. Lost six pounds in seven days, then rebounded nearly three pounds up, then "lost" those three pounds the next day. Conclusion: piece of shit scale. It's the one from my gym, it's all digital and magically self-calibrating. Maybe weight fluctuates way more than I had guessed. I know it does fluctuate somewhat - you can weigh yourself at different times of day and get different results - but those readings are crazy. Most probably I'm losing weight but the readings from the scale are just electronic guesses.
Dude in my acting class toured Japan spinning psytrance, runs his own label. Nearly went to a psy party for the first time in years last night. Mad nostalgia talking with him about 550 Barneveld and the goddamn blue fire engine Blue Room had.
Haven't seen Watchmen yet. Very divided. Dug the comic in high school or whenever it was I read it - maybe junior high - but V For Vendetta was such a better comic and I was so disappointed with the movie version. I'm much more excited for Monsters vs. Aliens - I really like stupid movies because they're unpretentious. Seems very honest.
Been buying lots of MP3s. Totally confused whether I should stop and buy vinyl instead or what. Gaaah. My AI music thing is also completely stalled due to a lack of focus and general shifting and confusion in my life. Got it doing some cool stuff but I need to do some serious work on it to make it more useful. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 23rd, 2009|11:08 pm] |
been churning away at some music. got this thing where I twitter a new beat every day, it's keeping me entertained. I turned one of those one-off beats into a full-length track, and tweaked it pretty obsessively. it's pretty odd - the beat was a dubstep beat, and technically it still is, but combined with that minimal wobbly ketamine aesthetic that makes dubstep dubstep, it has this lush, overproduced, highly commercial epic trance sheen to it, with loads of samples and filter sweeps and a ridiculous breakdown in the middle that just goes on forever. I used to hate those kinds of drops on the dance floor, but I haven't been dancing much in ages, so maybe there you go. think I've got to fix that, but anyway, the result is still kind of interesting. it's quirky, and I suppose that's something.
I also experimentally did a release on iTunes of another dubstep track, this hasn't churned its way through the iTunes approval process yet, but it's all New Agey strings and shimmering. very much what Andy W used to call the dolphin style, except it's not drum and bass but dubstep. I'll have to promote that once I release it, I guess.
oh yeah and the dubstep one has a bassline that turns into an acid line for no reason at all. I have a feeling I'm going to rework this track completely, just for the fun of completely destroying all this work. make something darker out of it, more minimal, more dubsteppy, or maybe just brainfuck it into oblivion. it's quirky enough that with enough work it could go all weird and squarepusher. right now though it sounds more like sasha. I don't know what happened. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 23rd, 2008|12:16 am] |
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I've been making all these trancey d&b loops. I'm enjoying it, but I don't see it working out. trancey drum and bass? what am I thinking? |
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| jenny holzer |
[Dec. 18th, 2008|10:17 pm] |
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slipping into madness is good for the sake of comparison |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 14th, 2008|04:27 am] |
so I get this UK DJ magazine and it comes with a CD every month. so I listen to this one mix and it's really kind of all over the place but there's this one fantastic moment, this track. so I find it on Myspace and listen to it a billion times and I realize, it's all over the place too. it's just got this one great hook, this melodic line. not only does this one great melodic hook carry the track, despite a ton of weird mis-steps in the overall arrangement, it also carries the first twenty minutes or so of the mix. the mix is really not that great, it just wanders with no point at all, it's basically competent but uninspired. this one melodic hook takes the formless mass of the beginning and makes it all seem as if it makes sense, and it really doesn't, it's just this one hook is so great that if the other tracks just blend at all you're good to go.
so I'm doing this thing where I cook up a new beat every day and tweet it (@djgoatboy), and I realized this several days ago, and when I did, I spent some time doing stuff just to have hooks. results included some cheese and some randomness, but on the whole reactions on Twitter were very positive. (in addition to the mp3-only account I'm also tweeting on my main account, which has approx 850 followers.)
I actually only noticed this in the d&b track after reading in a different UK mag a producer saying up-and-coming producers don't pay enough attention to hooks. I'm really sold on that point of view. guy who said it was Dave Spoon, who got into the UK top 40 with a house track he made in Reason - no external hardware, no other software at all. I've noticed a lot of my own beats have good stuff going on but no real hook at all. it's definitely making my shit more dynamic. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|06:12 pm] |
holy shit, forest got married?
it's official. I'm fucking old. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 1st, 2008|06:44 am] |
crazy dream. I was Dennis Hopper, sponging off Britney Spears and kicking her out of my treehouse. Nick Seiger from JRuby and this other guy I didn't know were inspired by my talks at tech conferences and wanted advice about throwing a secret party in the woods (Nick) and leading his church or something (the other guy). we were in this treehouse over the lake on Nick's land. we got there because my friend Josh told me about a Web comic about being trapped in Microsoft hell, and it was just a description of a boring hellish landscape, with piles of skulls and bad weather. I had been looking for a way to use the Basecamp API to filter people by their hopes and dreams.
I realized Britney was hiding from the paparazzi, and I felt bad for her, but then I kicked her out anyway. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 18th, 2008|01:07 am] |
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from observing my parents, I'm guessing the secret to a successful marriage is to bicker at all times. even when asleep, if possible. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 14th, 2008|01:00 pm] |
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weirdass goddamn demon mojo |
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| mood |
[Oct. 13th, 2008|04:29 pm] |
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