It didn’t take very long to get the hang of how things worked and for all of 2010 I continued to study tutorial videos, books, watched interviews with experienced engineers who talked about tricks they pull in the studio and I’ve come to feel pretty comfortable with understanding the fundamentals.  The basics involve common types of sound equipment and tools used in studio production; stuff like controlling dynamics with compression (as well as knowing when and how to use side-chain or parallel compression), EQ, building complex effects from scratch, tweaking synth presets to reshape the sound to something specific, use of things like arps, CV splitters, sequencers and so on.  Reason and the official tutorial videos on YouTube served as a great platform for learning.  A year after returning home and working on all this stuff something happened that I did not expect.

Early in 2011 a favorite band of mine (Younger Brother) decided to release a new album of theirs on a site called PledgeMusic.  The way it usually works is a band will create a fund drive to raise a certain amount of money to pay for the production of their next release (a portion of which goes to a charity) by selling things like limited edition lyric sheets, signed copies of the album, VIP passes to any show you could make it to, extremely limited lithograph prints signed by the photographer (in this case Storm Thorgerson, best known for his Pink Floyd cover art) and, not lastly, a few seats to participate in a studio workshop with the primary members of the band, Simon Posford and Benji Vaughan who may be better known for their own solo projects Shpongle and Prometheus, respectively.

The workshops were set to take place in London at an unspecified time in the future, and given the number of seats originally made available, the sessions were meant to occur over a string of days (which ended up being scattered widely over the next year).  Apparently they overbooked themselves and with a lot of touring coming for Simon and Benji, some sessions had to be postponed indefinably.  I slightly regretted telling them “the later the better” when asked when I’d be available to go on such a trip.  A whole year went by until they checked back with me and asked if I would be available in early March this year.  You bet I was. 

I left on a Thursday afternoon at about 2 p.m., arriving in Detroit and departing at about 7:40 p.m..  When I arrived in London it was about 8:15 a.m. local time and I snapped this picture just before we landed in some very thick fog:

Unfortunately I barely managed to get more than 20 or 30 minutes of cumulative sleep on the way.  By the time I transited the subway station from Heathrow to Blackhorse Road station and then walked about 8 blocks to the house I was staying in it was about 11 a.m. local time, and I was starting to feel some severe jet lag.  Every time I took a step it felt like the ground was bouncing under me.  I couldn’t remain awake any longer.

I stayed in a spare room provided by a couple named Jess and Luke, who among many others offer their rooms for rent at a website called airbnb.com.  Anybody can use the site to offer up (or find) a place to stay for tourists and it was perfect for me; far far better than the idea of staying in a hostle with a bunch of strangers sharing a dorm filled with bunk beds and one shower or something.

I woke up that evening at about 8 p.m. and really didn’t have much choice when it came to doing any site seeing because it was already dark.  After getting some frozen pizzas at a grocery store that seemed to be less than a block away as well as some Jim Beam whiskey for good measure, I sat down trying to decide if I wanted to go out late anyway just to try and see something, anything.  After a lot of indecision I decided to try and trek my way back south west and see if I could make it to the Westminister station and see Big Ben at night, before the tube stations closed.  I barely made it in time to snap a few pictures and turn right back around to head back to where I came from.

While standing there I ironically used my watch to check the time…

When I got back to the station I started at, the train I got off of just happened to arrive at the same time the last one was departing.  That was a close one.

With my sleep schedule royally messed up I couldn’t get back to bed, no matter how much Jim Beam or pizza I consumed.  I slept in until noon the next day.  I learned that the primary subway line I was planning to use that weekend was going to be shut down for maintenance the entire time.  The TFL website suggested I take a bus from the shut down station about half a mile to another train station, but that was because I searched for a route starting there, instead of where I was staying at.  Had I put in the actual address I would have discovered there was a train station not more than 3 minutes walk from where I was… A big waste of time to kick the day off but I eventually made it to the famous Portobello market, had breakfast at about 4:30 in the afternoon (a sirloin steak, which was unremarkable by this Kansas boys’ standards) picked up a few souveniors, and then made it to the London Eye.

And from up on top of this thing, I managed to snap some very cool pictures, like this one of the Waterloo train station…

I took several others but there really isn’t any room in here for them.  The end of the night involved me going to the wrong address trying to find a night club called The Fabric.  The city guide app I was using on my phone to get around had the wrong address cached, so I had to ask directions at a small pub.  In retrospect I wish I had just stayed at the pub.  Long story short, there was a fair number of very creepy people wandering the streets surrounding that club and by the time I found the place it was almost time to start trying to find my way back home for the night.  The subway route I attempted to take to get home  was partially down for construction and I had go back to where I started to take a very long way around to find my way back home.  Again, I wish I had known about the train stations that aren’t on the standard tube maps.  If you ever go to London, use this map.

The next day I woke up extra early because I had a bad dream that I had actually managed to sleep in until 3 PM, which would have meant I had completely missed the studio workshop.  I got up, had a traditional english breakfast with Luke and Jill where they made me some toast with marmite on it (which I thought was great) a boiled egg and some cereal, juice and coffee.  By 10:30 I was ready to start making my way from the quiet Walthamstow residence and into Ladbroke Grove, giving a beggar some spare change along the way before finally arriving at the Saga Centre and met by Benji Vaughan.

He showed us up to a room on the second floor which was quite small but equipped with all the necessities, including a sound proof booth with a mic inside.  We (another gentleman from Norway had, like me, purchased a seat and it was the two of us attending the session today) were given a quick overview of all the outboard equipment Benji had his iMac attached to.

Simon appeared a few minutes later and by that time we had already decided that what we were going to spend our time that day remixing a Younger Brother song (Crystalline) for a yet to be released album.  It was either that or try to write a song from scratch and according to Benji the last sessions that opted to go that route kinda went south, so it was nice to know that what we were going to be working on was something that actually needed to be made.

We started off by muting a lot of the original tracks to make space for some new ones.  The first thing Benji did was come up with a new drum beat using his new Maschine, which was kind of difficult to do without making it sound exactly the same as the original beat that we had muted.  To give it some variety a kind of hollow reverb was applied to the snare and the tone of the reverb itself would slide upward and reset every two measures; just one of many subtle touches that give an electronic atmosphere to the track.

Simon decided to pull out a bass guitar, which proved to be a bit of a crap instrument.  If you had your open string tuned correctly but then played the same string on the 12th fret or something it would become slightly flat.  But that was fixed later by using the Grammy winning software plugin Melodyne, which was one of the most incredible tools I’d ever seen.  We recalled first seeing a video for it years ago; I told them that when  I first saw it I thought it looked like a concept pitch to potential investors.  Turns out that today it’s quite real and quite awesome!

While recording the bass guitar the sound card crashed partially and recorded the bass as more like a robotic, extremely distorted mess.  We decided to KEEP this awful sound and try to turn it into something cool with Melodyne.  Then we sent that tuned, slightly cleaned up noise through some effects, and they had a LOT to choose from.  I couldn’t remember every one we played with but I did remember using Effectrix, Buffer Override, Buffeater, Automaton and an assortment of effects by Universial Audio.  A lesson learned while messing around with all this stuff was that it’s important to just mess around for the fuck of it.  We never knew entirely what to expect when playing around with these kinds of effects and it just went on to demonstrate how you can have happy accidents if you just stop thinking about the song itself and just have a go at it.

A lot of the sounds that end up in any given track of theirs start off outside the computer, such as from an analog synth like the classic OSCar in the lower right.  Benji played a little melody into Logic which would push MIDI data back out to the synth which then allowed him to go to the mixer and start a feedback loop between the console and his Eventide Harmonizer, which was set up to create a reverb or ping pong echo or something.  (Speaking of Eventide, the fellow from Norway reminded us that there’s a shot of an Eventide Harmonizer in the movie Contact and Simon went on to point out that Eventide gets a lot of their dollars by selling specialized sound processors to the US military; quite a weird company).  It’s a simple effect Simon demonstrates in this video.  You can get a lot of weird stuff to come out a setup like that by very carefully feeding sound back onto itself while looping through an effects processor of some kind.  One of a few ways in Reason that this can be achieved using the new Echo rack device and using a high percentage of feedback while playing with the frequency and resonance knobs (you can hear me do this to a bit of flute in the latest rough draft of Chill Grill; just click the play button below).

Simon often helped break dull moments by sharing videos he recorded on his iPhone.  What does Simon Posford like to record with his phone you ask?  Well in this case, his television screen when he was watching the original Batman and Robin series the previous night at home, which if you’ve not seen Batman in a good thirty years or more you don’t know what you’re missing.  That show is over the top hilarious from time to time.  He liked it so much he decided to hook his phone up to the mixer and sample an audio clip from the show into the remix.  Hard to say what will stay in the final mix but I wouldn’t be surprised if Robin exclaiming “Holy Hi-Fi!” manages to stay in.  They joked about telling Ru Campbell (the vocalist, who wasn’t present) that the remix wouldn’t contain any of his original vocals and that instead the song was now Batman based, saying he would be shocked if told that.

I also got to sneak peak a few very cool things, such as a new unreleased Shpongle track (it was quite good), what the “Shpongletron 2.0″ stage is going to look like, and the Younger Brother Vaccine sketchbook which fans have been waiting on for a long, long time.  It is very beautifully laid out and features information about all the audio equipment used in the making of the album, the making of the cover art (which involved throwing tennis balls at Ru to get him to flinch and cover his face), photos from the recording sessions, a picture from Simons backyard in the middle of winter, a picture of Benji and a gypsy working in the studio; it all looked great!  Benji is going to try and get an interactive digital version of the book published online for download.  They also told me what little they knew about Twisted Records newly signed artist In:terlaken, which was almost next to nothing at all.  They’ve never met him.  All they know is he’s a perky young buck from Switzerland whose father would of preferred seeing him grow up to become a watch maker.

Day turned into night and the light rain never ceased.  What was originally supposed to be a session that was to last 5 hours went on for 7 and a half hours.  Most of the time was spent experimenting with plugins, recording different sounds, composting, eating a sandwich Simon shared with me, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and otherwise trying our best to come up with ideas for stuff to put into the remix.  Coming at this with a background in Propellerhead Reason most of the hardware we were using weren’t particularly interesting to me, save for the synths themselves; they have a uniquely beautiful quality in their sound and it was nice to have something like that you could just reach over to and grab a knob and start tweaking.  But I think the thing I most appreciated seeing were the VST plugins.  Being a Reason user, I’d never touched or really had the ability to use VSTs before, but since my return I figured out how to do it with the help of Ableton Live and Rewire and look forward to experimenting with them more while actually using this as an opportunity to become more familiar with Ableton.

Like I said before, I think the best thing I got from the session besides exposure to a lot of cool VST plugins was the message that it’s best to walk into a studio with nothing in particular in mind and just start banging on stuff randomly and accept the fact that you’ll probably produce a lot of rubbish, because rubbish is still a lot better than nothing at all.  Also, it’s best to not to over think things or try to plan out a concept for a track in advance or else you’ll likely set yourself up for failure.  This coming from a couple dudes who insist they have no idea what they’re doing.  Cheers!

Latest tracks by David Steinlage

A few notes about the most recent additions:

• Sleepy Daemons:  Added just before the new year, this track started as a non-percussive ambient, creepy thing.  Out of the blue I decided to add a lot of fast drums to it and things just popped to life.  Not sure where it will go next but I’m waiting for auditions for vocals to come in.
• Untitled Doodle/Ringtone:  I did everything in it but wouldn’t consider it finished just yet.  It features my first guitar performance recording and some cool effects processing.
• The Hare:  Again, 100% self-produced.  This one primarily features a new filter effects found in Reason 6 called The Alligator, an effect that’s more formally referred to as a “trance gate”.
• Delirium:  This started as a simple piano melody, which I put through the Alligator.  I then added a somewhat hiphop drum loop which I played with using a roll-echo effect to ramp the echo on and off.  This was eventually replaced with live drums, performed by r00m237.  Vocals came in by complete surprise thanks to a lady in California who goes by the name Deanna (thank you!).
• Document 22:  This features flute by Matt Unger and some guitars by Matt Christensen.

All my music is available for free under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.  You are free to download, share, remix and use this music for non-commercial purposes.

You can read more about the show by clicking here.

After hours of drinking stimulants and skipping sleep, this is the result, weighing in at roughly 13 minutes in length.  It is actually a combination of a new song with an old one that I originally wrote while living in Iraq during the later half of 2009.  It is a long song so you might wanna go to the restroom before you hit play.  Feel free to download the WAV of this song for top notch quality.

Magic Show by David Steinlage

Side Scroller by David Steinlage

1.  I already own this album (in fact I own every Nine Inch Nails album; I’m what you would call a “loyal fan“).
2.  The album was published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.  This means I could give you a copy of the song because I purchased it.  Look out for musicians who publish their works under licenses like this.

So let’s get to using this Youtube Downloader thingy!

First, download the software from Download.com by clicking here.

Run/Open the file once you have downloaded it to install the software.  Once installed, you’ll have a new shortcut in your Start Menu.  This is what the program looks like when it’s running:

Leave this window up and go visit Youtube.  Find a video you like and then copy the URL from the address bar at the top…..

…into the first box in Youtube Downloader, like this:

Now click Download.

Once the video is downloaded you can convert it to an MP3 by changing the selector at the top from “Download a video…” to “Convert or play a video…”, like this:

Now all you have to do is click the Browse button to search for the file you just downloaded, and change the “Convert Video to:” box to read MP3, like this:

Now click Convert.  It will ask you about quality settings (and of course it’s best to just leave it on “Best Quality” and click okay).  That’s pretty much it.  A conversion process will happen, taking perhaps 30 seconds,  and you’ll be given an MP3 file that you can play on pretty much any portable audio player out there.  It’s up to you if you want to delete the original video file.

A word about piracy/file-sharing

Piracy/file-sharing can be a very polarizing topic to talk about, especially when the conversation occurs between professional musicians who make their living off writing music.  On one side of the fence you’ve got your Lars Ulrich and Gene Simmons who see piracy of their music as a direct threat to music sales and thus their paycheck.  On the other side of the fence you have bands like Radiohead and musicians like Trent Reznor who see the sharing of their music as a marketing platform that can increase band exposure, increase their fan base, and subsequently increase their physical merchandise and ticket sales.  Both sides are entitled to their opinions but I lean towards the latter group when thinking about this stuff.

Along the lines of music piracy is software piracy.  There is a software developer who goes by the name Notch who created a computer game called Minecraft by himself that has earned him nearly one million dollars in under a year, and it was still in the Alpha stage when it hit that impressive number.  He has a very keen insight into piracy and I would like to suggest you check out his blog post about the topic if you have the time.  It mostly boils down to distinguishing (or debating) the difference between the loss of potential revenue versus actual revenue lost, determining a fair way to measure the differences.

In marketing there is a strategy known as “loss-leader” and pirated music could be thought of as a loss-leader for a musician who has additional products to offer, like vinyl, or limited “deluxe edition” packages, not to mention concert tickets and who knows what else (one of my favorite musicians offers up everything from autographed cover art by Strom Thorgenson to 5 hour long studio workshops with the band and their very own equipment).  Then there’s new, up-and-coming musicians who don’t yet have anything better to hope for than a chance to be listened to and are willing to let people preview their entire collection in the hopes of turning them into a loyal fan who will go buy all their albums and other merchandise someday down the road.

Shameless plug: Check out my Kompoz profile to listen/download/pirate my music.

I had a major streak of creative energy after lifting weights earlier today and made this in about 5 hours time.  It’s a work in progress.  It’s easily in there with the Psytrance genre.  Enjoy!

Some of you might know me to be a bit of a Linux geek who is a sucker for the open-source philosophy and culture.  It sure is a beautiful thing in the world of computers; using software that’s free of charge and free to modify because a bunch of people decided to give it away to the public and do whatever they want with it.   This has worked out VERY well for Linux since it began, with bored programmers using the Internet as a global workbench to approach and tinker with any software they wanted and the best results would come to the surface as a new standard, often with no money changing hands.

It’s difficult for most people to imagine doing something like this because we don’t know a thing about computer source code.  We sort of have a foggy idea about it and could boil it down to “a list of instructions for a computer to follow” and add that those instructions can be edited and improved upon by anyone.  Any description more complex than that and it starts to sound like Greek… but for this post, it’s good enough.

Now  imagine you took this model of open-participation and applied it to music production, doing it all on the Internet.  You’re a musician, you play an instrument or have a singing talent and want to find other musicians who share your musical taste.  This is difficult to do in the real world, especially if you’re stuck in Kansas like me.  Sure, it’s easy to find a Kareoke machine on any given night if you look hard enough but finding good, original, local musicians is hard.  So the next best thing is to go online and (in a way that’s reminiscent of posting personal ads looking for a significant other) post your own creations/recordings to be judged by others… perhaps even loved by others, modified by others, built upon by others until eventually the little tune or melody you started with turns into a fleshed out composition that sounds very professional.

This is exactly the kind of situation I’ve found myself in during the last 3 weeks after I did some searching on google for “online music collaboration” and discovered Kompoz.com and indabamusic.com.

I signed up for both at the same time and uploaded the same music (three songs of my own) to both sites.  All I had to do after that was sit back and wait for others to possibly like my music and wish to add something to it, or not.  Over on Kompoz, in a matter of just 2 or 3 hours, a fellow from Latvia named Nikitt had uploaded a new guitar track to one of my songs on Kompoz.  Within a few days after that I was getting emails from people wanting to perform lyrics to the track.    A few days later, another astonishing guitar track was added by a dude from Florida who calls himself Grumpy.  And in all this time, none of the tracks I uploaded to Indaba got even a hint of attention or interest from anybody.  So either they think my music sucks over at that website or (more likely) the user interface for indaba is a mess that makes it difficult for bored musicians to find new projects.  So  maybe Indaba would work for you but it certainly didn’t work for me.

But enough about Indaba failing me.  Kompoz on the other hand has really bolstered my dream of writing a lot of good music.  It’s just so much easier to be able to upload something and for someone else to come along and add an idea to it.  It really is a lot of fun; I would tell my fiance Kristin that it’s like Christmas every day because you never know what you’re going to get.  This happens in part because some of the people who use the site live on the other side of the planet and leave stuff online while you’re asleep and when you wake up you might be surprised to find new recordings uploaded or at least some productive comments.

So this is what I’ve been doing with some of my spare time lately and just wanted to share.  You can check out my Kompoz profile and projects by clicking here.  If you happen to be a musician I encourage you to join Kompoz.com with a free membership, but if you’re serious about music production it pays to get a premium membership for $50 a year so you can exchange high quality WAV files and even publish music for commercial release and get royalties out of it.

After sifting through the comments for another video by the same robot-building guru I found out that the song in this video is called “Parks On Fire” by Trifonic.

I’ve just purchased their deluxe digital copy of two of their CDs for 8 dollars.  You can stream/preview the whole thing with this little jukebox I’ve embedded here.  If you enjoy it, show your support for an independent musical group and buy their album!

Click to download “Flow” by David Steinlage (Extended sample)

“Flow” by David Steinlage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available via the author. www.davestechsupport.com/contact.html.

Unfortunately, I have come to learn that when you get a refurb, it’s possible the manufacturer has replaced the case on the outside with one that has a slightly different model number.  Long story short, I had found that this was actually an e200v1 (or perhaps an e250v1) and its firmware doesn’t support flash memory cards that are SDHC (e.g., anything over 2GB in size).  Even if I had upgraded to the latest version of the firmware available for this player, it still wouldn’t have fixed the problem.

Now for the good news:  While I was digging around for a fix, I came across an open-source software project called Rockbox.  Rockbox is a replacement firmware that will run on several types of MP3 players, and one of the features I was hoping to gain by installing it was support for SDHC cards.  What I got was a hell of a lot more than I expected.

For starts, this OS loads FAST.  Not only that but it came with a bunch of extra applications, visual themes, and GAMES!  Yeah baby!  I couldn’t believe it when I loaded up a variant of id Software’s DOOM on my cheap $30 MP3 player.  There’s no other way to say it but Rockbox is one really awesome piece of software and I’m really happy I found it!  THANK YOU ROCKBOX!

Anyway, the latest track is called Ridin’ The Ditch Witch (click on the link to download the MP3; 256 kbps CBR).  I would call it classic rock music with just a dash of psy-trance.  Check it out, enjoy and please leave compliments if you like it.

“Ridin’ The Ditch Witch” by David Steinlage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.davestechsupport.com/contact.html.

It all kicked off with a short drive from my friend John’s house in Lawrence to the Starlite Amphitheater in Kansas City, Missouri.  We arrived around 3:45 p.m. and joined a group of roughly 100-125 people who all participated in the donation drive for Eric De La Cruz and were anxiously awaiting for their opportunity to meet and greet with the band.  One girl I was standing next was so excited, she said, “I’m looking at the same sky Trent Reznor is looking at.”  I couldn’t help but laugh.

After passing through the gates and being handed my guest pass stickers (which only went to the top-tier donors) we were given a briefing on what to expect next.  We were then led down the hill and around to the back of the venue where we waited in line to walk into a pavilion area of sorts, shake hands with the band, have one item of ours signed by all the members of the band, have our picture taken and even give everybody a hug if we wanted.  From here, the group was split into two and the lower-tier donors were lead back out into the seating area of the venue while us top-tier donors were then lead to a dining hall for dinner.

I was personally expecting to see something like a series of tables pushed together with the band sitting down somewhere and everyone else surrounding them and having some lively table talk.  To our disappointment, we were sat in groups of 8 per table and more or less had to wait there for 50 minutes before Trent arrived to say thanks for the donations and open up for a few questions before going back to whatever it is he does before a show.  This was really the only minor annoyance about the entire experience.  Time constraints and what not are understandable, though the words “dinner with the band” was in the description, and I didn’t realize the word “with” was being used in the Mitch Hedberg-ish sense.  (Mitch Hedberg joked that whenever he goes to the bathroom to shave, he assumes someone else on the planet is also shaving, so he’ll say, “I’m gonna go shave, too.”)

We were then asked to go back out to the main seating area while Street Sweeper Social Club played the first act, and then return to the pavilion next so we could be escorted to the side of the stage and enjoy NIN.  It was surprisingly quiet compared to the loudness you’re pounded with in the seating area.  The staff throughout the entire experience were very kind and polite.  I really didn’t get any good pictures of the side stage area as most of my time was being spent video taping the show.  I’m not going to bother with re-encoding the video and posting it here because, well, I’m feeling kinda lazy, but also because I’m sure someone out there’s got better video than I do.  The view was somewhat obstructed, the camera is shaking from time to time, and the audio sounds a little muffled.

After the show was over we were escorted back out through the seating area because Janes Addiction didn’t really want anybody backstage (certainly not side stage) while performing.  But my sister and I snuck back around and actually caught a glimpse of the lead singer and guitarist head through the double doors we had exited from to go out to the stage and perform.  And that was pretty much the extent of anything exciting that could possibly happen.  I watched Trent walk through a hustling team of roadies loading crates of gear and equipment on his way to his tour bus never to be seen again.  Not being a big fan of Janes Addiction, the four of us decided to leave the show early and beat the traffic to have a small after party of our own back at home.

That was more or less it.  Like I said, I had my expectations high and it’s something I’m sure everybody does who has never participated in something like this.  You have these fantasies of a “best case scenario” of actually getting to sit down and chat with the band for 5 minutes and stuff like that, but it’s simply not the reality of these kinds of things.  I mean, you have to think about these things from the perspective of the band members.  What would you rather do after a show:  Hang out in a decked out bus while surrounded by beautiful women, or doing your best to gum it up with speechless fans who are skilled at the art of making social encounters totally awkward?

In the end, I had fun… I don’t think I’d call it jaw-dropping-awesome kind of fun, but that’s just me personally.  The novelty of the event hasn’t sank in just yet, I guess.  I also got this vinyl record I bought years ago autographed by the band (including their art director, Rob Sheriden, who is a perpetually depressed looking fella):

Overall review:  GOOD TIMES!

Now most of you out there (or at least anyone who isn’t really into NIN) are probably saying, “Why would anyone spend that much money just to get backstage and gum it up with people they may never see or speak to again?”  Well… let me put it this way.  Imagine you could meet any single person in the whole world who you’ve wanted to meet for over a decade but couldn’t. Just think of your favorite actor/actress, or author, celebrity, musician, mad scientist perhaps… I don’t care who, just think of someone who you’ve always wanted to say, “Thank you.” to in person because that’s just how much of an influence they’ve had on you and you want them to know.  Then one day, you’re offered that one chance.  That’s kinda what this is like.  An opportunity to do something you’ll never forget for the rest of your life.

Besides, all the money is going towards a worthy cause.  I’ll get to honestly say that I met my favorite musician of all time (one of just a small handful of life long goals/dreams I have) and contribute towards saving a human life in the process.  And I’ll be proud about it for the rest of my life.  I imagine myself decades from now thinking back on the life I lived and appreciate such an experience more so than, say, the experience I’d probably get from spending that kind of money towards something completely material, like an expensive HDTV.  I couldn’t imagine myself retired years from now telling my grandkids about the day I bought a new HDTV and expect them to marvel at my totally boring story.

For me, the things that matter in life aren’t things (stuff) at all.  The things that matter in life are experiences, events, people, emotions, passion, romance,  ideas, adventures, thrills, challenges and also remembering that one of these days you’re gonna die.  Because if you do like most young people and tell yourself it’s too far away to bother thinking about it right now, you might start to procrastinate and regret not doing the things that would otherwise hold their value to you forever.

So, here’s to being ALIVE and happy to finally get to do something I’ve always wanted to do but never believed would ever occur.

Oh, one last thing.  THANKS DAD!  You’ve always been there if I needed a favor or help with about anything and that means the world to me.

This is for something important. Eric De La Cruz is dying and needs a heart transplant. He keeps getting turned down for a transplant list because he’s on Nevada Medicaid, and there are no transplant centers in Nevada. We want to get involved and hopefully so do you, so we’re extending a hand. His sister Veronica (former Anchor and Internet Correspondent for CNN) has started a campaign to save his life.

Eric’s situation shines a bright light on a broken health care system, and his particular set of problems are being addressed on the political front, aiming for reform in addition to the need for immediate financial help to keep him alive TODAY. I think we can help with the latter.

Here’s what we’re offering – three options:

If you have a ticket to a NIN/JA show: if you donate $1,000 to this cause, we’ll invite you to come hang out with us before the NIN/JA show of your choice. You and a guest can watch soundcheck, eat dinner backstage with us, take pics / get autographs and watch the show from the side of the stage if you’d like.

If you donate $300, you and a friend can join us for soundcheck and a handshaking / hug session before doors open at the NIN/JA show of your choice.

If you do NOT have a ticket to a NIN/JA show: if you donate $1,200 to this cause, we’ll invite you to come hang out with us before the NIN/JA show of your choice and provide 2 tickets (best available). You and a guest can watch soundcheck, eat dinner backstage with us, take pics / get autographs and watch the show from the side of the stage if you’d like.

100% of the money collected from this will go directly to Eric’s fund.

I hope you’ll consider helping out with this.

Sincerely, Trent Reznor

Go here for more info. If I’m lucky and can find the money, I’ll get to meet my all time favorite musician AND help save a life.

No, I don’t have a lot of money.  I would have bought tickets for this show via pre-sale a while back if had I’d know for certain I’d still be here in the states.  The catch about buying pre-sale is that you have to show ID, and the ID must match the name on the pre-sold ticket.  Now the concert is 8 days away and I’m certain I’ll still be around when it happens.  The difference being about $40 perhaps… so what.  For the occasion… well, who knows what I would have spent otherwise.  Like I said, it means a lot to me.

I remember being in 8th grade and not knowing about NIN at all until my best friend Bart showed up with an NIN T-shirt on and subtly keyed me in on the existence of such a band.  Before then I was trying my best to be cool by listening to Van Halen and Aerosmith (thanks for the misdirection, KQRC).  In fact, for a few months, I hadn’t heard a single NIN track until someone let me borrow Pretty Hate Machine for a few hours in between drivers education classes during the summer.  (Those were the days).

From their it spiraled out.  The Downward Spiral was the most intersting and inspired collection of music I had heard from anywhere (with the exception of Tool’s Ænima album).   At the time it seemed like Best Buy had the best supply of regular albums, and Circut City (no longer in business here) had the best supply of import singles.  I had purchased almost every CD put out there, with exception the rarest of imports from Japan which were redundant and overpriced.  There was already plenty of people out there who were ahead of me when it came to being collectors of memorabilia.  In all, I’ve probably purchased about 20 or 25 CDs from NIN, a few of which were duplicate (or triplicate) purchased, do to various lose of older copies I had once owned.  I am quite proud to say that none of the vinyl copies of albums I’ve purchased have needed to be replaced (last I checked, the vinyl copy of The Fragile I have was worth about $300… but I don’t regret opening my own copy).

So what did the tickets cost me?  $180 for a pair.  That’s not bad, considering it’s the second time I’ve paid that much for tickets to an NIN show (the first time was in Denver, and I actually got to meet Rob Sheriden after the show (though the friend I took with me who never paid me a cent got to meet Trent himself which really pissed me off); there’s even a video of me floating around the net of me screaming into the camera, “I love you, Trent!” after the show that NIN posted on their site, and I’m not ashamed to admit it).

Why did I like this music so much when I was younger and up till the present day?  Well… all I can say is that it’s just what I was naturally attracted to.  People who discount it as offensive or weird or strange probably haven’t actually taken the time to give it a glance and that’s their own problem or whatever.  Everybody should be able to enjoy what they want and like on their own terms, in their own space.  NIN, for me, kind of struck a chord because I was the kind of kid who was kind of lonely, but it wasn’t that bad.  I had friends, I wasn’t THAT  lonely, but I still felt like I didn’t fit in.  So, for some odd reason, I seemed to identify with the music Trent Reznor made.  It was abstract, abrasive, aggressive, intriguing, inspiring and sometimes an echo of what I felt back then.  I wouldn’t say that the music of NIN that was out back then is what I would identify with now, and neither would Trent.  He hates being asked questions like, “Why don’t you play “Down In It” on stage any more?”  because it’s something he’s moved away from, and I feel the same way when it comes to identifying with those songs.  My older brother on the other hand, who’s enjoyed NIN since the very beginning has said otherwise, and I would to if I were him.

I’m not sure what else to say about the music.  I don’t really think much should be said.  If you’re still reading this, you can preview his music via many ways (best of which is through www.nin.com itself), but otherwise, that’s about all I have to say.

Hopefully, since my girlfriend is stuck working that night, I’ll be able to steal her phone for the night and try out that new NIN iPhone app.

All of these hot babes are great looking but it is up to you to select your six favorite as they compete for a chance to be in an official Prymal Rhythm calendar.  Putting together the actual contest involved a good amount of PHP work by my programmer/site developer.  We had to come up with a way to help prevent ballot stuffing and figured the best way to do that is to require registration with a username/password and an confirmed email account.  This is where the next upgrade came in:  a new Members Area and a Forum for fans to chat with each other through.

This is a surprise bonus feature the fans have not been made aware of yet.

The last thing we did was basicly give the entire website a face lift by wrapping every page in the theme that was selected for the forum so the entire site matches and looks really cool.  There’s still a little work left to do but I would have to say we’re about 80% done now.  It’s been quite an exercise.

Знакомства

While we’re on the topic of Music Videos, take a look at these others (non-Nine Inch Nails) that I ran across today.  Both of them utilize stop-animation.  The first one is just cool, and the second one is not only cool but pretty damn hilarious as well.

Bubblicious from Rex The Dog on Vimeo.

I’ve been looking around on the web trying to find a high quality copy of this song and it’s very difficult.  What I did find was a copy of the song on Youtube.  You’d be surprised how often the most rare of songs end up on Youtube; it’s perfect for looking up those difficult to find trance and techno songs nobody listens to (according to eminem, and from the looks of the “view count”, he’s right).  So I just wanted to share the song I heard and liked so much.  Bare in mind that the audio quality is a little sub-par, and it’s recommended that you wear headphones or have some decent bass in your audio setup.  Enjoy!

The song below is called In This Twilight.  It was the last song played at every concert of the tour (so long as there was time for an encore, and there often was).  It is one of several very well made fan-mix videos, and you can find more listed here.

Here is one more of my favorites entitled 28 Ghost IV.  The name itself means nothing (it was simply track #28 out of 36 instrumentals released last year on an four-part album called Ghosts I-IV).  No lyrics.  Just beautiful music.  Enjoy!

I can’t wait to see the HD fan-mixes in a few months!

Nine Inch Nails released a surprise (belated) Christmas gift for their fans yesterday: 405 GB of unedited concert footage, filmed with 4 to 7 HD video cameras between three seperate shows.

Victoria
Portland
Sacramento

This is not your typical download to say the least.  It will probably take me weeks to download just one of those.

There is currently an open-source project being headed up at http://thisoneisonus.org/ which originally formed together to create a full length DVD using video that was filmed by fans at the concerts.  Now we have all of this HD video to toss into that mix.  So if you can’t wait to download all of the video above, you can be rest assured that there will eventually be a professionally edited mix of all the video into one much smaller download.

What a concert.  I think the last time I saw Nine Inch Nails live was in Denver, Colorado back in 2001.  No no, that’s too far back; I saw them again in KC a few years later.  As always they put on a spectacular show, this time around featuring the uber-cool “stealth screens” (which you can see in the above photo suspended over the band).  WIRED magazine did an article not so long ago about the ingenious use of these screens, which the band would interact with while on stage.  There’s a video included with the article (here’s a YouTube hosted copy of that same video, in case the one on Wired’s website doesn’t work) that explains all the cool tricks they could do with this new setup so check it out. You might be interested to learn that the computer responsible for generating the visuals on stage (aka, “the brain”) runs Linux.

The opening act was an little known “experimental rock” band called Boris (although I thought the big orange sign behind them on stage said “Bong”).

Their music was… pretty damn annoying.  If your favorite NIN CD of all time was Fixed (which itself was an experimental remix album based on Broken, an album Trent Reznor originally wrote because he was intentionally trying to destroy his career because he quickly grew to hate the legal/business sides of the music industry, and somehow ended up winning a Grammy for it) you might have been able to get into Boris.  For the most part Kristin and I were just praying for them to finish up and get the hell off the stage.  I know others in the arena got into them, and that’s perfectly fine.  I actually could have given one of their songs a thumb up if it hadn’t lasted for 15+ minutes, ending with their goofy drummer standing on top of his trap set with his arms in the air like a D-bag before walking off stage without the rest of the band.   And they kept playing the same drone for another 5 minutes after that.  Rather than ridicule them as being horrible… I decided that their performance was simply funny.  The drummer reminded me of Animal the Muppet.

Every time one of the band members yelled, “Whoooooooo!” into the microphone, I told Kristin to take a drink of her beer.  That helped keep her smiling because otherwise it was like watching someone wince at the sound of children scratching a chalkboard with lawn rakes.  I give them an A for effort.

After they were finished, and the rest of the fans arrived after the opening act, the show got off without a hitch and went on pretty flawlessly (so far as I could tell).  You can read other reviews by fans who also attended this show by visiting the tour journal at the ETS forums, found here.  There’s also a TON of videos from various shows on Youtube that you can look up and watch if you’ve got the time to spare.  I’ve even uploaded a few to my Facebook profile.

There is one song (The Greater Good) that is rather dark and creepy… a lot of whispered lyrics.  My girlfriend, being mostly unfamiliar with NIN, had trouble making out what he was saying.  The lyrics were, “Breath us in…. slowly…. slowly.”  She thought he was saying, “I breath my skin…. smelly…. smelly.”  HILARIOUS!  Every time she repeated what she thought the words were I about fell over from laughter.

One my favorite parts of the show was during the song Survivalism, which is off of the Year Zero album.  Year Zero was a concept album which Trent wrote shortly after the re-election of George Bush in 2004.  The premise behind the album was essentially what an album from about 15 years or so in the future might sound like if things in the government continued its streak of corruption.  It had a heavy George Orwell/1984-ish theme about it (warrentless wiretapping, facism/totalitarianism, excessive censorship of information,  etc.)  It was quite fun to see the backdrop for this song being “security cameras” aimed at the fans while the song played.  I especially liked the little touch in the lower right screen:

Overall I was very pleased with the show and would have felt it still worth the money if the opening act had not played.  One last little note mentioned by Trent during the show:  “For those of you who don’t know, you can download our latest album for free from our website.  And you can download every other album that’s not free from everybody else’s website.”

Download “The Slip” from www.nin.com for free

Enjoy!

I give you the product of about 45 minutes worth of work.  Very little time was needed to lay down the tracks, and a lot more time was spent playing around with knobs and browsing through the large bank of instruments I have at my disposal to find just the right sound.  I’m excited to write more.

So, please enjoy this free download of a very short piece of music I wrote.

This puppy is slim, loud and does 6.1 surround sound.  I’m sure there are others out there which can handle more channels than that, but it was more than what I was looking for and has held up for the last few years with no problems, even with the confined space it sits in.

And I wasn’t about to plug it into a handful of tiny 2 inch wide satellite speakers.  If you’re serious about music and the quality of the audio coming out of your PC, you don’t just spend 99 dollars on a set of tiny speakers plus one crappy sub-woofer.  I have a pair of headphones that are worth more than that.  I even spent more than that just for the center channel speaker.  Really, do yourself a favor and invest in quality audio.  It’s money well spent and your ears will thank you later (so long as you don’t deafen yourself).  Listening to surround sound music is a very satisfying; you almost have to smoke a cigarette afterwards.

In an unrelated note… During the last 5 years or so, I’ve made upgrades to my computer for only one of two reasons:  Either Nine Inch Nails released a new album that contained audio tracks my hardware couldn’t handle, or id Software released Doom III.  And it’s been a while since Doom III came out so you can imagine how old my PCs hardware is.  The case isn’t that old, but the guts inside are.  Still, it doesn’t feel old.  It doesn’t feel like a slow computer… probably because I stopped using Windows and did away with all of that hard drive fragmentation, spyware, antivirus nonsense.  It sounds like a joke but you really do have to put more money into a computer in order to stave off the stress that comes with having to deal with all that crap, and all you end up with is delaying the inevitable system meltdown.  But I digress.

My computer is my primary entertainment device, and even though it’s attached to a 35″ TV with an S-Video cable, I don’t think that counts as “watching TV”.  I hate watching TV.

Okay, this post is going no where, which means I probably woke up too early.  But before I end this, I can think of one other thing that rocks besides surround sound:

The concert went well, but it seemed like they went out of their way to give you the impression that the vocal audio was always bad, but in truth, Bob Dylan is not a great singer these days.  Sure, he’s got the energy and the notes, but it’s like his mouth is full of cotton balls.  I’m sorry if that offends you, but my girlfriend is the most die hard Bob Dylan fan on the damned planet and even she told me in advanced that I wouldn’t understand a thing he’s saying up there on stage.  It was like Eddie Murphy’s impersonation of James Brown.  Still, he had a damn sweet hat on.  And these 35 dollar T-shirts are pretty fucking cool.

Anyway, I just wanted to check in with you all and let you know that I’m going to be OUT for the rest of the weekend.  I’m heading up to the ABATE biker rally at Lake Perry.  Maybe I’ll see you out there.  I’ll be campin’ somewhere.  Hope nobody’s computer crashes or I’ll have to cut into all the fun I’m having. 

Coming Soon…

I was taking a break by visiting a favorite site of mine, www.ted.com and I came across a rather (in my opinion) profound video about classical music.  It is an entertaining 20 minutes out of your day that will perhaps leave you thinking about more than just music, but also living a generous and passionate life.

I just finished working for 13 days in a row, with the last of those days being the same as a concert I was lucky to attend.  Sigur Rós is a band from Iceland that plays a lot of mellow tunes.  I couldn’t believe how friendly the crowd at this show was. Very kind, very soft spoken.  I actually bumped into two people who I hadn’t seen since I graduated from high school in 2001 (though I expected one, thanks to that crazy Facebook news ticker). The show started with a fantastic opening act: One of the background trombone players (Helgi Jonsson) was given the opportunity to come out and play several songs on his guitar as well as one of the organs on stage.  If you didn’t know any better, you would have almost sworn that it was actually Thom Yorke of Radiohead in a wig.  The guys voice and playing was incredible.

The number of musicians on stage peeked near the end of the main ticket, with something close to 3 keyboard/xylophone players, 4 violinist, 5 brass, probably 3 guitarist (including the lead vocalist)…. I might be off a little on the numbers, but it was a spectacular show!  Part of me regrets leaving at the next to last song, but it was pouring rain, my girlfriend had very little sleep the previous night and she had another nearly sleepless night around the corner.  Time was of the essence.

Here is the song they started their set off with.  It is called “Svefn g englar”, which means “Sleepwalkers” in English.  Enjoy!

I was looking around and also discovered they have a movie out, called Heima.  Here’s one of the trailers for it.  The climax in the song near the end gave me chills.

I might as well take the opportunity to first and foremost thank my favorite musician for being nothing less than awesome by doing this.  “The Slip”, a 10 track album, was released on May 5th on nin.com for free.  This probably pisses Metallica off to no end (but I have to say it, and please excuse my french, but f*ck Lars Ulrich and his RIAA bandwagon). I could legally host the entire thing here for you to download if I wanted (since this was released via the CC license), but you can download the whole thing yourself in either 320 Kbps MP3, FLAC loss-less, Apple loss-less and even 24-bit/96 Khz WAVE format from www.nin.com, completely for free.

If you’re looking for a quick sample of what this CD is like, check out this favorite track of mine:

Nine Inch Nails – Head Down (MP3 format)

Forgive me, Linux community, for I have sinned! [dramatic pause... sound of thunder in the distance] But please, do not fret or pity me, my friend. For I have been saved. Behold! My new great Icon:

Ok, dogma jokes aside: If you have Ubuntu, or pretty much ANY distribution of Linux, INSTALL THIS APP! Would you like to have a few thousand Internet radio stations in HUNDREDS of different genres at your finger tips? Well that’s just ONE feature of many that make up Amarok. Here are some others that really stand out:

• Synchronizing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to the following digital music players: iPod, iriver iFP, Creative NOMAD, Creative ZEN, MTP, Rio Karma and USB devices with VFAT (generic MP3 players) support.
• Creating and editing play-lists, including smart and dynamic playlists. The dynamic play-lists can use such information as the “score” given to a song by an Amarok script, and the playcount which is stored with the song.
• Playing media files in various formats including but not limited to (depending on the setup) FLAC, Ogg, MP3, AAC, WAV, Windows Media Audio, Apple Lossless, WavPack, TTA and Musepack. Amarok does not play digital music files embedded with DRM.
• Last.fm support, including submitting played tracks (including those played on some digital music players) to Last.fm, retrieving similar artists, and playing Last.fm streams.
• Version 2 (in the works right now) will support iTunes Online Music Store, as well as support Windows and Mac OS.
• Thousands of free Internet radio stations, presorted in over 285+ musical (and spoken word) genres. WOW!

I feel sorry for you Windows and Mac users. You have been forsaken….for now. You’ll have to wait a little bit longer for your musical savior to enlighten you, when version 2 is released. Unfortunately, it’s only in its first alpha phase, so it will be several months before a final release (or even a stable beta) can be expected. But keep your eyes peeled. This is a wonderful application!

To install Amarok in Ubuntu

Click Applications>Add/Remove. Then search for “Amarok”, check off the box next to the search result “Amarok”, and then click the Apply button. You’re done! Install takes just a few minutes (depending on your Internet connection and download capabilities).

The program is pretty easy to get used to. Unfortunately, I’m not in much of a position to give an full review of the program. Being as I myself just “rediscovered my music” with this app, I don’t have much more to say about it other than the MASSIVE collection of radio stations already included with its play-list collection is absolutely jaw dropping. There must have been over 40 stations listed in the Oldies genre alone! Now that’s insane. Even for the Internet.

Ok. Nuff said. Download, Install, Enjoy!

To install Amarok in Other Linux Distros, you can check out one of the links below.

Kubuntu	openSUSE	Fedora
Gentoo	Arch	Ark Linux
Debian	Mandriva Linux	PCLinuxOS
	Other (FreeBSD, Yoper, etc.)

If you like Nine Inch Nails, click this link before reading any further (so you can listen to the album right now while you read a little about it from me).

I’ve been on a pretty good streak writing blogs about Ubuntu Linux lately, but now Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails went and released a new album by surprise. And I say surprise because not even one track of it was being pirated on the Internet before its official release date. Hey, I don’t know about you but I’m impressed by that. In most cases, new CD’s are pirated weeks in advanced by some Joe Shmoe delivery guy with a box cutter and audio ripping software, the files ending up in bittorrent swarms and spoiling the album later on. Perhaps not necessarily spoiling album sales per say, but spoiling it nonetheless.

Nine Inch Nails recently left Interscope Records; Trent Reznor choosing to avoid the red tape of signing any more contracts with another label went solo. Since that time, www.nin.com has added a new remix section to the website, where you can download multi-track versions of NIN songs and remix them to your hearts content, and then upload your mixes to share with the world online. This brand new 36 Instrumental release, entitled Ghosts I-IV, is being distributed under the Creative Commons License, or what some might call “Copyleft.” In short, you are free to copy and distribute the music, remix the music and publish, but only for non-commercial purposes. Because sharing is caring.

I could go on about all the cool little things Reznor had done to piss off his ex-record label (like dropping USB keys containing unreleased tracks into bathrooms at venues where Nine Inch Nails performed live; see: viral marketing). But I’d rather like to say more about the uniqueness in the way Trent chose to distribute and sell this latest album. For comparison, I’d like to criticize Radiohead’s In Rainbows.

In Rainbows was released on the Internet… or at least the first 10 tracks of it, as the physical CD release of it contained an additional 8 more and didn’t come out till a later date. In Rainbows was released for download, at a price of “Whatever you think it’s worth,” letting the fan choose their own price tag for the download. I remember downloading In Rainbows for nothing, and I’m glad I did. I like Radiohead (really!), but had I known in advanced that the Internet release wasn’t actually the whole thing, or that the download was in 160 Kbps MP3 format (mediocre quality), I’d probably wouldn’t have wasted my time waiting for their servers to come back online after the flood of downloads caused them to crash.

Trent Reznor, in the unique position of being a well known musician and also not being slave to a contract, decided to do his first truly solo release just a little differently. And I like the way it was done:

• Free: Download the first 9 tracks
• $5: Download all tracks in either Lossless FLAC, Apple Lossless or 320 Kbps MP3
• $10: Download all tracks as above, and get 2 CD digipack with booklet (shipping in April)
• Element of Surprise!

Now that’s a deal! And a rather clever business model.

There were some more expensive deluxe packages available, including a classy $300 package (above) with Trent Reznor’s handwritten signature (limited to 2500 units). So there’s something for everybody.  You might not like industrial rock music (or whatever they’re labeling the genre these days), but you shouldn’t have any problem appreciating this business model. It’s genius!