Rock Band drums

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I finally got to play the drum pads with Rock Band the other night. Aside from the often illogical beat simplification on the easy difficulty (where’s the goddamn kick drum?), I found it fun overall. Since I have a set of electric drums in my room within spitting distance of my PS3, I started looking in to ways that I could play Rock Band or Guitar Hero World Tour with them on the cheap. I initially thought that I could just get a MIDI-USB converter and run it straight into the Playstation but according to some forum posts, it’s not so simple. The Guitar Hero World Tour drumset has a MIDI in, but it would be very silly to purchase a toy plastic drumset so I can use the set of drums I already have. There is a device to translate midi messages into controller messages but for a pricetag over a hundred dollars, that’s out of the picture as well. I’ve been messing around with PD and I’m wondering if I might be able to bang something out in it using MIDI note ons from the pad hits.

July Music update

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I’ve spent the holiday weekend working on a new Caustic Reverie album with a fair amount of throwing candy at children yesterday morning. It’s staggering how many great presets came with the synth vsts in the Komplete 5 package, but I though it would be more fun to try and build the sounds for this album from the ground up, starting from a single oscilator whenever possible. It probably would have helped to look at a manual, as Absynth and FM8 are some of the least inuitive plugins I’ve used in a while. The new album has a working title of Rented Spouses, though I do like the ring to Rudeness Poets.

Experiments in a Holographic Universe

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Released June 23rd 2009, the first Shufflebrain venture is a fusion of noise and ambient. Tortured vocals, heavily processed guitar, and chaotic synthesizers were utilized in these first five experiments. There was a disc crash during the recording of Experiment 4, and the three remixes are alternate reconstructions given the remaining files. It is also available to download from Jamendo.

1. Experiment 1: A Hologramic Theory (4:21)
2. Experiment 2: (redacted) (6:55)
3. Experiment 3: Sense Intensification (4:30)
4. Experiment 4: Memory Overflow (12:15)
5. Experiment 4.1: Memory Recall (6:38)
6. Experiment 4.2: Memory Recursion (4:27)
7. Experiment 4.3: CRC Error (2:51)
8. Experiment 5: The Hologramic Mind (6:31)

More new toys and a new album

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I’ve picked up a bunch of new gear in the past few weeks including a Korg Kaossilator and the Native Instruments Kore 2 hardware/software package. I also got the Komplete 5 but I’m having issues getting it registered at the moment. I’m very impressed with the inclusion of paper manuals for all of the plugins and instruments, which also explains why the packaging weighed about ten pounds.

I’ve uploaded the first Shufflebrain album, which is entitled Experiments in a Holographic Universe. It consists of five “experiments” and three remixes. Look for a more detailed post sometime this weekend.

New gear

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If it’s been quiet lately, it’s because I’ve been noodling around on my latest instrument, a six-string fretless bass. It’s taken some getting used to, as there isn’t much tactile feedback if I’m on the right note, but I find it’s a lot more musical and expressive. Plus, it has a nice ringing quality to upper register that reminds me of a sitar without the drone strings.


Spider

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Fear came to me with seven legs
scuttling on tile at 10:40 PM
A flurry of brown and then gone

I waited, unsure what I’d seen
This phantom a symptom of
weary eyes and worry?

I stared, vigilant
Every hair tingling
as if tickled by silken thread

The invader remained unseen
When did it creep into my sanctuary
and did it have scurrying friends?

The night wore on
Every corner and crevice
in the dark an ambush

My mind’s eye busied
weaving tapestries of bites
and ballooning purple flesh

Slowly
Deliberately
a shape ascends my wall

His name is Jagadish

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Aside from getting more releases published on Kunaki, I’ve been taking a break from Caustic Reverie. I’m getting back into a more rock-based songwriting mode. There’s a contest on the SA forums to write a song based on a random Wikipedia entry that I’ve entered, so the past week or so I’ve been trying to put something together.

The lucky article: Jagadish Chandra Bose, a noted Indian physicist and Royal Society member who may have beaten Marconi to the punch on wireless transmission; a man who didn’t rest on laurels (or patents) and ended up devoting some major study to biology and plant growth.

This theme turned out to be much more workable for me than the Panama Canal was in the last contest. I’ve written a song about one of his books entitled Response in the Living and Non-Living. Below is the work-in-progress demo with scratch vocals and some VST instruments that I’d like to replace.