Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

So… I saw this funky update on The NIN Hotline today about some Rock-afire Explosion “band” (which appears to be made up of Chuck-E-Cheese robot rejects) doing a performance of the Nine Inch Nails song 1,000,000.  I’ve never heard of this Rock-afire thing; is it a TV show?  Anyway, check out the little preview clip below, it gets pretty funny about half way through.

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.

One of my favorite online radio streams is the Chillout station found at www.di.fm.  I’ve not listened to the station for a few months because it seemed like I would hear songs I’ve heard many times before more often than songs I’d never heard at all.   I used to dedicate myself to making sure I had some form of music playing for me in the background while working on the computer because every now and then there’s a REALLY cool track that will come on.  As it happens, today was one of those days where I turned it on and within a couple minutes a very cool track was on that I’d never heard before.

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!

First and foremost, the video below IS NOT from any of the 405 GB of High-Definition 1080p video that was released by somebody via three torrents recently (see a couple posts back about that).  Those videos are still in the process of being downloaded by all those who are willing to wait a couple of months for them to come down the wire.  What has been much easier to download is video that has been shot by the fans themselves.  The very last show on the Lights In The Sky tour was held in Vegas and an announcement was made to the fans in advanced that there would be a “very relaxed” camera policy (not like that wasn’t already the case).  The intent was to get as many people into the venue with as many different cameras as possible.  The result… well here’s an example of what the result may very well be.  ALL of the video and audio were captured by fans and not via official outlets (soundboard audio, $4000 HD video cameras, etc.).  This video is 100% amateur, and has been been organized together and edited to produce a very satisfying piece of entertainment.

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!

Holy crap!  If I didn’t already know that my favorite band is also the coolest on the planet, now I can be certain.

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

This is a slightly touched-up version of the song I released a couple days ago, with an additional song cross-faded into it.   Download it now.  My supervisor listened to it and said, “I feel like it’s the end of a blood bath and the credits are rolling.”  My girlfriend said it reminded her of vampires (whatever that means).

Enjoy!

I recently decided to reconnect my Yamaha DJX keyboard to my computer and make some fresh attempts at writing music… for the first time in about 6 years.  At least, with this particular keyboard. I have a couple of other piano songs I recorded with a terrible 10 dollar microphone a few years back, but never had much luck at getting anything recorded with sophisticated computer software.  I decided it was time to work at an old hobby I dropped so long ago and see what can be done with more dedication and experimentation.

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.

The time is 9 a.m. and I am sitting here rocking out to some Nine Inch Nails.  Not just any Nine Inch Nails.  This is an album that I probably invested over $400 dollars in because when it came out I said to myself, “I have to invest in a surround sound amplifier, now!  I just have to.  There’s no two ways about it.  It is my destiny.”  When NIN released their 5.1 dolby digital remix of The Downward Spiral, I started researching audio amplifiers and had one goal:  To find one that could do at least 5.1 surround and be able to fit in my desk.  And I found exactly what I was looking for:  The Panasonic SA-XR50.

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:

Last night I passed through a lot of places that I’ve not been to for quite some time.  First on the list was seeing Bob Dylan at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City with my girlfriend.  It started with a quarter mile walk on a full bladder from the parking lot of Walgreens because it was the closest place we could find to park (who KNOWS where the “Salvation Army” is actually located).  Did everybody drive themselves or bring an extra freaking vehicle with them?  Anybody carpool?   I thought gas was expensive.

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.