05.08.01
bassic wrote me requesting a phone call. Called him when I got home. He wanted to know about amazon's advantage program through which I sell bfm. His is an interesting story – before he moved from his homeland (Sweden?) to the US, he sold all his gear. He placed his music on MP3.com, made a lot of money thru payback & DAM CDs. Used a portion of the money to buy new gear and start creating music again. Great story.

The familiar feeling of being obsessed about a project I'm welcoming like an old friend. However, it is those close to me that suffer as my interest in doing anything outside of the project is reduced to nil.

05.14.01 – 17 weeks to Labor Day
Averaging two minutes of music per week. At this rate, I'll have the CD mostly done by my target of Labor day, but not quite.

Spent last week editing K11. I should post MP3s showing how the piece was constructed, from the tracks I sent Jamal to his response to my first batch of editing to my overdubs to the final product.

Artists have to have a little OCD. It takes an obsession to do the kind of work I'm doing now. The first round of editing on this piece was brutal and I didn't just edit the stuff I may need. I edited everything and threw most of the result out.

After two rounds of overdubs, I'm left with a lot of music. By Sunday, with k11, I'm staring at the proverbial marble monolith and a chisel away the parts that are not the sculpture.

POLAR was a pain this weekend – bad bug which prints the attack transient preservation in the wrong place. I had to go in with the waveform editor and remove the glitch from every take. Kind of defeats the purpose of working quickly with POLAR. This is the trade off with vocal recording for me. I get such small blocks of time in which I have the house to myself to record, but I can edit with headphones at any time I like, so I trade off editing time for recording time.

I spent all last week on K11. I started last weekend editing. I exported a copy to my powerbook and edited at lunch. I recorded some Warr Guitar at home one evening. Did not get a lot of work done in the evenings spent Tues., wed and Fri. evening with Ray & Elizabeth. Yesterday and the day before I began mushing the pieces together. Sunday morning had a problem with corrupted system file. Tracking this down took two hours as it triggered a cascade of failures.

I also spent a lot of time last week arguing with VST Wrapper/DP3/Pro-5. I really want the Peter Gabriel Prophet 5 sound, but there is some incompatibility with my system that prevents me from getting it working.

DP is feeling quite like how I believe an artist might feel about a canvas and paint and paint brushes. The tool is transparent, but I feel that the skill of using the tool is a very new thing.

Last week I also finished up my dat transfer project. I did a digital transfer of dats into dp, then saved the results onto data DVDs. Toast 5.0.1 being available in May. Had a real problem tracking down DVD media that would work in the superdrive, but the apple store solved this. Most of the material on the DATs is very bad – in all respects of the word – poor writing, poor sound quality, bad singing, bad lyrics, but I can hear dedication and continual refinement. Things got better gradually and at times, there was a fragment of a really good idea. Some of the material dates back to 1984 when I started putting notes to the computer screen. I made cassette tapes of the result and these were later archive d to a dat. I started regularly saving my MIDI sequences to DAT to keep a record of what they sounded like. This is a practice that stopped when I started working on the project level/digital audio and as a result a lot of music has dropped through the cracks – archived (to data CD-Rs not to DAT) and forgotten. The stuff I wrote about Lee was really embarrassing, but I can remember how devastated and self absorbed I was. By 95 I had traded self absorption for neurosis. (...or... some from column a and some from column b) The more aware I became of my own actions, the more neurotic I became about it. Or, to put it another way, the more sensitive I became to the feelings of others, the more l read into slights, real or imagined. Someday I'll export the data on the DVDs to audio CDs. At least I have it in a format where I can easily extract a sample.

I started composing in 1984 when I got my Mac and I got the cats around 1990 or 1989. The cats are still here. It is interesting to listen to the progress that was made in that time. Time is a very strange thing – getting faster all the time. I'm feeling the bad itch like when I was working on BFM. Like I'm racing against time again. With BFM I wanted to make at least one statement before I died (still not dead yet, but for some reason this does not seem like an eminent problem like it did before) or while I still had the opportunity. With the Jamal project I want to get this done before I have kids because I doubt that I'll have time to create music again after I do.

Another thing I did last week was send out three half hearted demos to short features. I'm not sure why I would get involved in a production now that I’ve told Ogi I’m not interested in Password until he is done shooting, but I can’t turn down an opportunity for something that I seem qualified for.

Last week we finished up the DP3 manual. That was a serious pain. I’m awaiting a second proof for the DP3 box.

Another thing I started last week was the construction of a Battery kit of single hit Jamal samples. This is almost complete. I’m going to take the vocals I recorded on Saturday, bring them into soundhack (another beta) and see if I can extract an interesting vocal kit that I can lay into the Kurzweil. I wish keymapping on the K2500 was as easy as Battery.

Password is exonerated from my hard drive, making room for Jamal. Project is currently weighing in at 5GB.

I’ve been busy, but I have little to show for it.

05.15.01
I downloaded the current Virus OS from the access web site. I was just going to wait until 2.8 was released, but I did it anyway. I also downloaded some sounds, even though most were intended for Virus b/4.0 OS. I found a patch that served as a decent spring board to be tweaked into a Prophet 5 sounding pad.

05.16.01
There is way too much to do on the project for me to be able to hold it all in my head at one time. When I was working on bfm, I would spend a lot of time composing in my head while l lay on a couch in the studio. Bosch enjoyed this time and in retrospect it was an extreme luxury. (Actually, I was aware this was a luxury at the time which may also serve to explain some of the driving need to get the project done.) The downside was the act of realizing the music felt more like manual labor. I had already acted the whole thing out in my head and to certain corner of my consciousness, it was already done – time to move on to other things.

To some extent, I get to spend some time visualizing music while I eat lunch in Harvard yard, but there is no getting around the latency of getting into the mode of consciousness where this process is made possible.

Did not get a lot done last night. Some minor sound design. Farted around with Prophet 5 simulations on the Virus. Found a Prophet 5 on ebay with a starting bid of $900 (reserve auction) HA! I can hope I'm the only bidder and the seller chooses to contact me when it does not sell. I created a patch called Gethsemane on the Kurzweil based on transposed flute samples and lots of reverb. Speaking of which, I placed an order for Passion Sources which I'm embarrassed to admit I don't have already.

05.17.01
Wrote eight bars of a new unnamed piece last night using the new Prophet 5 patch on the Virus. Did not get a lot done with the season finale of The West Wing breaking up the evening.

It occurred to me last night the there may be an incompatibility with VST Wrapper and the Radeon video card. I tested the theory this morning at work by verifying VST Wrapper worked with an ATI Rage 128, then swapping it out for a Radeon. This crashed as expected so I sent a back trace to Peter.

Speaking of crashes, I just dropped my powerbook.

You would think software simulations would put a crimp on the demand for vintage instruments. I got outbid on the Prophet 5 on ebay. I waited until shortly before it closed last night and entered a new maximum bid of $1010.63. This brought the bid up to $940, but did not overcome the reserve price. The person who is selling it is selling an entire studio including a euphonix console. I'm hoping he'll choose to contact me just to get rid of it. $1000 is a reasonable price to pay for such a notoriously finicky piece of gear. At least this is a rev 3. I'm still smarting from when I tried to buy a rev 2. The thing is such a product of the late 70s. Massive green circuit boards populated by hundreds of chips. Further evidence of why I believe 1978 should have been 2000. Visually, this was a far more interesting year than what we had. The major technological icons of the year 2000 did not visualize properly: the internet and biotech. In the late 70s we had the following emerging technologies: projection televisions, cable TV, laserdiscs, personal computers, video games. Optical storage technology is everywhere these days, but a big disc containing video was really out there. Saw a great quote recently: Video games don't affect children. If my generation was affected by video games, we would run around dark rooms, munching pills and listen to repetitive electronic music.

I started to get an RSI flareup two weeks ago when Jim and I were trying to crank out the DP3 manual. I cant work frantically at work, then go home and perform copious digital audio editing. Once it flares up, it is difficult to put down. Been taking lots of vitamin I.

Finished Pixel Juice last night. I unsure what to start next. I'm dubious about reading yet another Banks novel, but I brought Inversions with me for lack of a better idea.

I've forgotten how much material I throw out in the course of production. The urge is to want to use everything, but by the time a piece is finished, I've been fairly merciless with my virtual razor blade. Things are a bit different when editing someone else. I feel like I'm being unfair to Jamal by throwing out great sections of playing, but really, each composition does not need to be 8 minutes. I like the idea of a bunch of smaller pieces of music. Better for those that like to flick through a CD to preview it and more interesting on shuffle play. I believe Passion has 21 compositions. It flows so naturally as a CD, one hardly examines the smaller pieces in isolation. I may have to get my hands on WaveLab (gasp!) to master it. I can render all the mixes in 24-bit, and use WaveLab to sequence the CD, add PQ codes and little connecting bridges to make the entire thing segue seamlessly...

05.18.01
I expanded the section I wrote yesterday with some edited Jamal loops. I slowed the tempo down to 92BPM. It is a challenge to expand the tonal vocabulary of the doumbek to each piece – even more so if I want lots of tiny pieces that flow into each other. In DP I used delays and filters, exported the result to Spektral Delay, which is itself delays and filters and then back in to DP for one more HPF until I got something that sounded like a shaker. I doubled the low note of the main chord motif with my tweaked JV ‘101’ bass. I could use some lead instrument overdubs on this piece.

It seems I'm reading two books now. Inversions at work/lunch and EGB at home.

The ebay seller did not bother to contact me. I'll bet his reserve was $1700 or something silly.

05.19.01
Received some CDs from CDNow yesterday. Notably, Passion Sources. I was able to cull come single note flute samples from the CD. I used SoundHack to extend the length of some notes slightly while interpolating the pitch of in-between notes. These were spectrally convolved to make the transition less jarring. The results were, while interesting, unsatisfactory for what I want to do. Still useful, though. I’m going to try adjusting the pitch with PureDSP today.

Also in the package was Oxygene by Jarre. I stuck this in my order after someone on the analogue-heaven mail list was gushing about it and I felt guilty about not having something that is considered by many to be a pivotal work in electronic music. Yawn. I don’t know what the big deal is. Sounds like a French version of Tangerine Dream or something you would play in a planetarium. It was not offensive, so I’ll give it a few more listens. I hate wasting a CD. Also got the new new Depeche Mode. They simply can not restrain themselves from at least one "fire/desire" per album.

Yesterday Dave found a CD of samplitude impulse responses of Lexicon 480 and TC M5000 units in the office. We converted the .wav files to non-interleaved SDII, put them in the Altiverb folder and THEY WORK. I’m delighted.

I programmed the new Gethsemane II patch into the Kurzweil with the new samples. While I love the Kurzweils, my least favorite aspect of programming is naming patches. The architecture is sufficently complex to require several levels of objects to be named: samples, keymaps, layers, programs and the disk OS file name. Good housekeeping is a must with 100s of objects to keep track of so unique names are quite necessary. Unfortunately, one has to type all this in via the 10-key pad. Naming patches takes longer than creating the patch itself if you are sufficiently competent with the instrument. E-mu had the right idea with the windows-hardware standard keyboard input port. I don’t believe Kurzweil corrected this problem with the K2600.

05.21.01 – 16 weeks to Labor day
Called Wendy last night. I feel a lot better now. By the end of the conversation we were talking about other matters and she sounded like her old self. She is even talking about creating new music. The goal is to write music to please herself and I feel that is the right thing to do. The conversation turned from cats to cat DNA and from DNA to physics. She shared some of her theories of subatomic particles. Actually, particles is not such a good word.

We got on the subject of DP3 for a bit. I’m worried about what she is going to think of the UI redesign. I’m afraid she’ll hate it. Change for change sake – that sort of thing. Makes me nervous. At some point after we ship, I'm going to get called into my boss's office regarding user complaints about some change we made. I’m vandalizing a sacred cow. Perhaps I should go hide until the user backlash cools down. I’ve been using the software for months and I know they’ll get used to it. DP3 looks great on LCD panels and powerbooks. As Apple makes the transition to an entirely LCD based product line, I feel this is a good thing.

Actually, I’m worried about what Wendy will think about anything I release publicly. This music is particularly troublesome. It is not exactly her cup of tea. I wonder if I can release the CD and have her not find out about it? Dwelling on her scrutiny can result in paralysis.

Quite a productive week. Created about six minutes of music. The new compositions might get trumpet, flute or vocal overdubs later. I spent the weekend interleaving working in the studio and lounging outside with EGB. The weather was a beautiful 60-70 degrees – cool, but hot if you sat in the direct sun. Seems like a waste to spend the weekend inside.

Recorded a short bit of interlocking Warr Guitar for one new piece. It is by far the finest stringed instrument I own. Such an astonishing vocabulary of rich tones and exemplary playability. It is a pleasure to play.

Added some additional percussion to the new pieces. Recorded an egg shaker and tambourine cymbal. I eq’d the snot out of these tracks. I’m getting better at EQ-ing a track so it sits in a mix better.

Julie is coming to grips with the fact that I have to make a mess to record. Mics get set up, cables get strewn, instruments get taken out of the closet. At the end of the weekend, everything gets cleaned up and put away. Ta da!

There is no force in the universe stronger than the attraction of cats to the inside of guitar cases.

The flute patch turned out great, but I have not used it in the manner that I wanted. Attempted a doudouk and double violin patch, failing miserably at both. There is a nice solo doudouk piece at the end of Passion Sources. I sampled a section where the doudouk lands on the drone note and used that to see if it would work. Before I transferred that into the Kurzweil, I also experimented with Ionizer to see if I could get rid of the drone note so I could have some samples of other notes. I could do it, but not without seriously compromising the sound. Whenever I use Ionizer, I get the sensation of hundreds of frequency specific gates flipping on and off. Perhaps I need more experience with Ionizer. Anyway – it was not worth doing because the test sample on the Kurzweil sounded like hammered crap.

Worked on a 12/8 spine to shift between duple and triple feels. It getting a bit tiresome working in 4/4 all the time. Limited success. Needs more work.

On Friday, the ebay seller for the Prophet 5 contacted me to ask if I was interested in the unit. I told her (yikes, assumed this pile of gear belonged to a man) that my maximum bid was $1010.63. She wrote me Saturday morning indicating that she would probably do this and would look for the road case (!) Hot damn!

-=-

When a company makes master keyboard controller, they tend to design it from the perspective of a live performance keyboard. They pack in lots of features to control racks of modules with sophisticated splitting, layering, velocity cross switching etc, etc… I hate this. In fact, I don’t know anyone who uses the performance features of a master keyboard. I need a master keyboard that has a rich set of controllers (breath control input, aftertouch, some faders, release velocity, etc…) but with no brains. I can do all the controller mapping on my computer, thanks. In order to get a nice assortment of controllers, you have to buy a keyboard that has all this other stuff in it that makes it behave in strange ways. Of course, you can save the behavhior of the keyboard as a patch. Change a patch and you change the way the keyboard behaves.

The problem is this: Bosch’s favorite technique for getting my attention is to put her face in front of my face. To do that, she places herself between the computer monitor and myself. The best place for that is on top of my master keyboard.

I don’t know how she does it, but getting there usually involves the following: First she places the keyboard into a mode where the patch buttons do not change the master controller patch, but send patch change information out to the MIDI modules. Then she sends a few patch changes out. The computer is usually routing this to a module with a modified edit buffer, thus blowing my changes before I’ve saved them. She also covertly enables the master keyboard’s layer function, which sends four MIDI events for every single MIDI event. I usually don’t notice this until I’ve recorded 23 MIDI tracks into DP. The remove duplicates command is a blessing.

-=-

The most significant change in my life in the last decade, with the exception of marriage has been the addition of tea. Tea has changed me the way scientology or religion changes others.

As I work at a software company, my boss has years of experience directly managing a stable of quirky employees. He understands that each individual has a unique set of needs so a fairly wide degree of latitude is permitted in the area of personal habits. However, even in this liberal context, he finds my tea drinking peculiar.

I’ll admit that my tea habit, while considered normal by other passionate tea drinkers (I haven’t met one in person, but I know they exist; I’ve read about them) could be categorized as odd by those around me. Certain members of my family are prone to obsession. Not in a dangerous way, it simply is a matter of latching on to a good thing and ruthlessly exploring all methods of getting the best out of that thing. Of course, we all point to each other’s obsessions and call the other person crazy.

I drink green tea almost exclusively these days. I started out in the area of oolongs and other Chinese semi-blacks. From there I moved gradually to less fermented teas where I settled in the area of Chinese and Japanese Greens. By the time you rule out gunpowder greens which I do not drink, what you are left with are a handful of oddball Chinese greens and a mind numbing array of Sencha grades. I have long since gone through the tea I brought back from my last trip to Japan, but Kayo has promised to take my shopping list with her the next time she goes.

05.22.01
Last night was a bust. I flailed about in the studio getting little done. Attempted working on a 10/8 section ala Radiohead (actually 6+4/8, but DP does not think this way) with little to show for it. I’m trying to warp some Jamal loops into this context, but the tempo makes this difficult. I might try thinning out his playing by deleting hits in the waveform editor.

Shelly did not contact me yesterday. Again, I assumed wrong. Shelly is indeed a man, not a woman as I assumed from his first name. He apparently is a fairly successful commercial music guy – responsible for some meow mix commercials, the Martha Stewart show theme and the music for Spin City. I think Spin City is kaput, so that may explain why he is packing it in. I’ll send him a missive this morning and see if I can extract more information.

I found it difficult to concentrate at work yesterday. Distracted.

05.23.01
I sealed the deal for the Prophet 5 yesterday. Shelly was busy on Monday and did not get a chance to write. He declined to answer my questions about why he is selling his gear, so I don’t have any more information in that area. He told me it would be $75 for shipping. This would not have gone over well had we been talking face to face. Checking with our shipping department, a 50lb package costs $12 to ship from New York, plus insurance.

If I were him, I’d take the keyboard down to mailboxes etc and have them take care of it for me. This may indeed turn out to be $75 by the time all the charges are racked up. I wrote him back letting him believe that I thought he was quoting UPS red or FedEx overnight. I’d prefer UPS ground at $12 and I could issue a call tag. He told me that was okay, but I’d have to add $20 for packing materials. Fine. I told him I was willing to pay the surcharge to ensure a professional packing job. If it does not work when it gets here, it is his fault. If I’m lucky, I’ll receive it tomorrow or Friday. Perhaps the processing of the call tag will delay matters.

There was a condo meeting last night. Julie had an axe to grind so I let her represent us. Personally, I’d prefer to have all my teeth extracted one by one by the brute force of Janet Reno’s clenched butt cheeks than attend a condo meeting. I worked on the project while she was away. Worked some more on a 10/8 groove. A bit more success. Am becoming addicted to the combination of a bass note on the JV with the Prophet 5 simulation pad on the Virus. Created a nifty 10/8 doumbek groove – you can hear headphone bleed of the original tracks, but this only enhances the loops in a strange way.

I have a new friend for my walking commute to work. I bought a used Nomad II mg around the first of the month. I hate the sound of MP3 compression, but when you buy an MP3 player, you are not buying sound quality, you are buying convenience. The Nomad II mg integrates cleanly with iTunes – you pop it in the dock and iTunes ‘mounts’ the device. At this point, you can drag and drop tunes from your library or from the desktop.

I wish iTunes had a random load feature that would purge the memory of the Nomad and fill it with random songs from your library. I also wish you could drag and drop songs from a mounted CD. iTunes would import the song to a temporary file, convert it, load it to the Nomad and then delete the temporary file.

I usually load the Nomad with a random selection of songs – clicking on files without looking at what they and drag them to the Nomad. After arranging the Prophet 5 deal last night, I left work and pressed play on the Nomad. I was greeted with Ghosts by Japan – off of David Sylvian’s Everything and Nothing CD. I had not thought about it until then, but, unless I mistaken, this song is a whole Janet Reno buttload of Prophet 5.

05.24.01
Did not work on music last night. Spent the evening tracking down Capybara components and a arguing with Kyma. I did have an interesting idea this morning which is, to make trance remixes of the CD material for the web site. ‘Trace’ being a descriptive word in the broader sense rather than the genera sense. I feel the same way about the genre ‘trance’ as I do about ‘acid jazz’. The names conjure up such glorious expectations… Anyway, the pieces would be longer, repetitive and without jarring transitions. Music to be experienced on a subconscious level.

Thought about artwork for the CD. Took the Nikon Coolpix 950 home for some photon sampling.

05.25.01
Argued more with Kyma last night – narrowed it down to a hardware problem. This week has really been a downward spiral of non-productivity and loss of concentration. Stupid errors like printing out my to do list and leaving it on the printer for 18 hours or replying to mail I should have forwarded. Dumb dumb dumb.

The Prophet 5 did not show up yesterday, but Glenn’s Balafon did! Currently suppressing urge to sample it. There is some problem with the issued call tag for the Prophet 5 that has prevented it from being picked up yesterday or the day before so I know I won’t get it today for the long weekend.

Yesterday on analogue heaven Tom Moravansky had a Prophet 5 knob and pot for sale.. $8 total for the parts. This is exactly what I need to restore the only problem with the unit. I could get the same thing from Wine Country for $40. At this rate, I may get the replacement parts before I receive the keyboard.

BFM got added to the galaris web site. It occurred to me that there is no reason I can’t sell direct and take payment via paypal. I added links to galaris and paypal to the buy section of the BFM page.

Yesterday, Jason remarked that he went to the Apple Store in VA. They arranged the store by interest, rather than product. For example, there was an iTunes section with MP3 players and many models of Mac – mostly iBook. An iMovie section with Firewire camcorders. There was also a Microsoft Office section populated by iMacs. I believe we have really reached the end of evolution of the word processor. Computers do not really need to get any faster or more sophisticated for this application.

Storage is another issue. I spend far too much of my time managing audio data. I need a cheap, portable, indestructible, instantaneous storage format that will hold a few terabytes. That way I could carry all my samples, projects and uncompressed CD audio with me at all times.

05.26.01
Hooray! The long weekend is here! Things finally came together last night. I can see that the Prophet 5 shipped yesterday and is currently at the Massachusetts Watertown hub where it will sit for the next three days. Sigh. Had UPS picked it up one day earlier…

I fixed the Kyma system. I came back from work and relaxed with a glass of wine, reflecting on the day. Symbolic Sound had finally got back to me with the password to access their FTP site – something I asked for three days ago. However, by Friday I had convinced myself that I had a hardware problem and had consigned myself to unknown repair charges or junking the entire thing. I decided to give it another shot with the updated software and… it worked! One component, the PCI card, got revised within the last two years and it was not compatible with the original Kyma 4.5 software, but the error messages I got were "can’t communicate with the Capybara – turn it on" sort of thing. Now that this is out of the way, I can get back to the task at hand – provided shipments to and from are successful.

Ray and Elizabeth came over for bridge and brought their new puppy who runs and runs and runs and runs and then falls over asleep – just like Julie. She is so beautiful when she sleeps. She’s just plain beautiful, but when she sleeps there is a stillness and innocence that overwhelms me. I can’t believe she is my wife.

For a while it looked like we would not get a chance to revisit the new plate reverb before we shipped DP3. While Elron and I were excited to begin the new project, I had to take a step back and push to finish tweaking the plate because we had time to do so. I’m glad I did. I sent him some impulse responses of plates and also provided some percussion samples to work from. He worked on it all this week and by Friday afternoon it was much improved. By 6:00pm it was sounding very good. The best part is long reverb times. Usually, when you change the reverb time on a digital reverb, you space out the reflections. When you increase the reverb time on the plate plug-in, it actually sounds better. When I asked Elron what he did to fix it, he started talking about pyramids. I’m not sure if he was joking.

Looking forward to three days of music making.

05.27.01
Worked on two project yesterday. The first was to add some guitar and Warr Guitar to the piece that I created the flute patch for. The composition is in 4/4, but the guitar figures are in 6/4. It just turned out that way. I might add voice singing the melody line the next time I get to record vocals.

The second was a 10/8 piece of music I started last week. I worked primarily in the area of MIDI and what I thought was a transition section turned out to get a bit more substance. I need to add a bit more Jamal and record some additional percussion. I might break out my trigger triangle for this.

Listened to Pat Metheny Watercolors while I folded clothes. Spent a little time reading EGB outside. Beautiful day.

05.28.01
My eyes are red, my throat is itchy, my nose is running and I’m sneezing like crazy. The alternative is to have my consciousness seriously altered by Benadryl, which is what I did yesterday. I ended up napping for 90 minutes. It is around this time of year that I remember that I wanted to create a series of compositions based on how over the counter drugs make me feel.

Recorded vocals, triangle, shaker in-between bursts of jackhammer work from across the street. Printed the MIDI tracks to disk. Also recorded a vocal overdub for the flute sample piece. Now that all the tracks are in rendered as audio, I am finding the mix is crowding the headphones. Time to start cutting things away with EQ. Everything sounds good on the Genelecs, but some have criticized them for this. The reason they sounds so good is because they can reproduce crowded mixes like this effortlessly. The trick is to know what to do to get the mix to translate properly. Like any instrument, it takes practice.

It is astonishing to unplug my guitar from the Pod Pro, and plug the Warr Guitar in. What a different sound. Richer, fuller – more heart. This is quite different from the Stick where it takes everything you have to get a tiny little sound out. Or – to put it another way – a Stick has less tone than a guitar, but the Warr Guitar has more tone. I would never have expected that from a touchstyle instrument. There is only one thing I don’t like about the Warr Guitar: I stand a fairly decent chance of whacking my head with the headstock whenever I put on headphones, due to an how the strap works. The physical action of putting headphones on moves my shoulders in a specific way that causes the instrument to shift to its most vertical position. This usually means a sharp whack to my temple from a tuning peg… a small price to pay for a touchstyle instrument that you can play without pants, though. The Stick forces you to put a clip into your belt to support the instrument. The last thing I want to do first thing in the morning is put on a belt.

Today I’m going to work at that EQ and perhaps start a slower, more minimal piece.

Took a beautiful picture of a flower from Julie’s garden that I intend to use on the CD album cover.

I read in the Sunday paper that Cambridge is giving out $500 grants for people who want to throw a block party. I keep turning the thing over in my head and can not come up with a reason not to do it. I’m thinking… Labor Day weekend…

05.29.01
I’ve forgotten the downside to working on a project like this. By the time you are done with it, you never want to hear it again.

(my workspace - taken on 05.29.01)

I was a bit over enthusiastic in my estimates of what I was going to get done yesterday. Much of the day was spent in an enjoyable memorial day gathering for people in my condo I instigated and a quick trip to MOTU to drop off Kyma components. I did get to spend some time working on the piece I was working on the previous day – adding some Warr Guitar and transition noises. I have to pull back on the guitar and Warr Guitar and use it more sparingly. It is starting to shift the feel of the music into another area. I recorded a very nice melodic line on the Warr Guitar that I have already edited out because it sounds too fusion-y.

The day was capped by the news that Representative Moakley succumbed to leukemia. This was particularly sad for us because Moakley took on the INS on behalf of Julie. He was a very special man who truly worked for the people.

05.30.01
This thing is creamy.

I knew there was going to be a difference, but I was not prepared for the reality. This is what I’ve been searching for, only better. Playing it is like evoking memories from another lifetime. It is not just the sound, there is something about the sound coupled with the look of the thing that drilled itself into my brain.

There are a few things wrong or misrepresented with the unit that can be easily corrected. First, it is extremely dirty. I would at least dusted the thing before I sent it out to its new home. The Battery is dead. There is some sort of remnant of a nasty adhesive – like the business side of duct tape that was unsuccessfully removed. There is an F# that is mistriggering – I’m hoping a simple cleaning or adjustment will fix that. The filter cutoff frequency pot and amp env attack is sending out erroneous values. I’m hoping a cleaning will fix it, but in a worst case scenario I can replace the pot. There is a cigarette burn on the top B key. Totally functionally but disagreeable with my aesthetic sense. The filter amount poly mod knob is the broken/missing one, not the volume control. This is better in a way because volume knobs are silver and difficult to find a replacement for. The black knob/potentiometer I ordered from Tom arrived yesterday as well, but I’m saving that project for when my other parts arrive (Battery, key) and I’ll do that all at once. I also need to buy a replacement part for the wah pedal I received in a recent gear trade deal and I’ll do that at the same time. I’m not sure how difficult it will be to desolder the broken potentiometer. I had a hell of a time desoldering the defective capacitors when I repaired my dead Airport – but those components were far more delicate.

There is something about the proportions of the Prophet 5 which contributed to its success. There is the physical proportions of the keyboard to the rest of the physical package. The proportion of the number of functions to the front panel. The proportion of flexibility to cost to complexity. Everything is totally right.

I hope the cigarette burn was there a long time ago.. If it happened recently, then I might come close to being offended. There are a finite number of Prophet 5s in the world and being in possession of one makes you a protector of a piece of history. Careless regard for the instrument in the form of resting a cigarette on it I almost find offensive. Like the Mix magazine article about recording Marilyn Manson singing out in a thunderstorm which resulted in the destruction of a Neumann U67 microphone. There goes another one. Was it worth it?

On the plus side, it is a rev3. The only possible option I could add to this is the MIDI kit which I may or may not do at some point in the future.

I spent most of the evening alternating between cleaning and playing the instrument. It took a very long time to get the adhesive off, but I managed to do so without leaving any trace or damaging the instrument. Thankfully, I’m working with painted steel, not plastic, but I did not have to resort to a nasty thinner like goo gone which might have removed the paint as well.

It really took hard disk recording for me to become interested in analog synthesizers. With hard disk recording I can manipulate the output of non-MIDI legacy device fairly easily. Being a home owner helps, too. I would not want to be moving around frequently with a collection of easily damaged instruments. Plus, with the extra space, I have a place to store these things when I’m not using them.

I ran across an amusing quote regarding the Prophet 5 recently:

"I think it is the inherent classyness of the Prophet 5, from the standpoint of class in the socioeconomic sense: from its beautiful wooden panels to its Bang and Olufson knobs, it reeks of hefty recording advances, 1970's California fern bars, and cocaine."
-Sean Costello

05.31.01
Yesterday I went to Digiworld. Took in two master classes: Charles Dye, who was somewhat interesting and Paul Caruso who was a waste of time. He detailed the technical excess involved with making the most recent Aerosmith album. They tracked direct to ProTools, but mixed through a console. The final result did not sound so great.

Aside from adding or modifying a handful of automation points on the latest piece, and testing the mono to stereo plate plug-in and DP3 (D53), I did not work on the project. Mostly I played the Prophet 5. I’m quite sure future studies will reveal analog synth receptors on the dopamine neuron membrane, or, in other words, gaaaaaaaaahhhhhh.

Perhaps using Wavelab to master the CD is not such a grand idea. I would need a beefy windows computer and if I’m adding additional elements that would mean I would have to have this thing in wavelab for future compatibility. I don’t think so. I think I’ll construct the flow in DP and use Jam to assemble it.

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