wake up, kiddos! it’s leap day! remember: today (well, the number at least) is artificial! we measure with man-made institutions of arbitrary days and hours that are estimations of actual time. Today we celebrate the inherent flaws in our estimations! for the past 3 “years” we’ve accumulated enough estimation error to just slap another day in our calendar year. How about that.
check out google for their “leap year” title graphic.
Spring break countdown: 7 days.
tonight, des and i finally got to see the student Jazz Combo and Ensemble. i’d been looking forward to hearing them since last semester. it was a lot of fun. i was ready to get up and cut a rug, but it was a performance, so i tried to keep my butt on the chair. didn’t stop my feet from tappin’ and my fingers from snappin’. an important thing to note: i know almost all of the players in the group. I go to class with some, live down the hall from others. I’ve even jammed with a few myself. Hearing the solos and the way they meshed musically was really a great experience that made me hungry to be in a Jazz Combo myself (if i only had formal guitar training…(i know, jon would say it’s just memorizing modes and scales (maybe during the summer))).
anywho, the first part of the concert was the Combo. Basic standard jazz combo: Drummer, upright bass, pianist, and some brass. They played a few good pieces, including “All Blues” by Miles. after that came the Ensemble: drums, bass, piano, and full brass complement. I’m talkin big-band style, crazy fun jazz tunes. And they had a flute in there too. When i first saw the flute alongside the sax and trumpets, i was wondering how effective it would actually be next to big, loud brass. But then the brass quieted down and the flutist did a sweet little solo in the middle of hoppin jazz drum brushes, i was taken. it reminded me of clarinet, which i am more used to as a jazz instrument, and it was so smooth and silky. LIVE MUSIC ROX. 4 life.
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by golly, my laughing muscles hurt.do you use a credit card?this actual scientific experiment is the funniest thing i’ve read online in a long time. maybe i was just ready for some hilarity.yeah, when you’re done with that, go see homestar. he’s funny too.
i’m boycotting winter.
You’re through, winter. It’s Over. The cold, rainy, bleak, dreary days have gone on too long.
I’m going to wear flip flops and shorts until you GIVE ME some good ol southern spring weather.
i, like jon, have been playing with my new toys all weekend, except for friday. but i won’t tell you about friday just yet, because it is a long story, and i must get to my neglected homework asap.
This weekend i tested out my 2 new condenser microphones.
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crunch crunch
munch
a whole bowl
a hundred rainbow fruit shapes
sweetening the milk
pinkening the milk
good sweet pink trix milk
all gone
another bowl?
it’s only 2:06
yes, i’ll have another
when i was little, i wanted to grow up and get my own place so that i could eat cereal at night and nobody would stop me.
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To begin-
What Garage Band is:
1. A sequencer: Yep, you guessed it, at it’s bare bones, garage band is a sequencer. It allows you to arrange recorded or pre-recorded music in any way you like with up to 64 tracks, in a non-destructive way. Okay. This basically eliminates the need for anyone to ever buy an ananlog sequencer (i.e. a four-track) unless you don’t have a laptop and you need the portability or unless you just really like that “analog” sound. Those reasons aside, the ability to arrange in a non-destructive way is obviously unparralled in analog recording and (until now) unparalled in digital recording for the price you pay for the application. Well for such a cheap app, how powerful can it be? Pretty powerful. I tried maxing out the track number, just for fun, and the app held up fine, only giving me a “disk too slow” message whenever i employed the most memory heavy digital effects and instruments at the maximum allowed track number. In other words, if you are trying to score a film with 64 tracks of orchestra, use another application. I have used other sequencing software on both pc and macintosh platforms, and I can say that garge band lives up to apple’s user friendly reputation. It far and away the most intuitive sequencer I have ever worked with. Even if you’ve never worked with audio production picking up the basics will be no problem for you (more on this later). So as sequencers’ go, this puppy is great, allows for volume and panning controls (more on those later), and is just all around easy to use.
2. An effects suite – Garage Band has a ton of built in effects, and also supports all of apple’s AU audio plug-ins. That means you have have at your disposal all your standard audio effects (reverb, echo, phasing, ect.) plus quite a few quality editing tools (parametric and graphic eqs’, limiters, compressors, ect). Again, these effects would easily run you into the thousands of dollars if you purchased them as analog units. Here they are practically free, and although a studio pro would probably claim that they are not very high quality, it is this user’s opinion that they are quite acoustically accurate and sound great. The effects can be used during and after recording, non-destructively, and a number of effects can be applied to each track. Really awesome.
3. A Drum Machine and Sample Collection – Garage Band, aptly titled, contains a number of samples and drum beats pre-recorded to use as loops. These sound great and cover a number of moods and genres. For non-musician’s, these loops are probably your selling point, as they allow you to compose without any musical experience. Of course you are not actually making the music (more on this later), but you are making tone, melody, and compositional decisions. There are, of course, many other loop based apps out there, but again, garage band’s unparalled ease of use is what really makes this app stand out. Apple also has a free application that lets you turn any of your recorded samples into loops, usable in garage band. I have yet to try this, but that is a big deal, as it allows you a great deal of expandability with your loop library. Also creating a loop allows you to transpose the key of your recorded sample, change the tempo and velocity, and the timing of the sample. All of these capabilities are hallmarks of higher end recording software.
A recording engineer in your computer – GB has a ton of presets for things that really can improve your recordings, and help you to understand how different effects work on different sound sources. For example, a male basic vocal setting, automatically adds just the right amount of echo, reverb, compression, and eq to give your recording that really refined sound. This is probably one of the biggest benefits of the app; it teaches you while you learn to recognize and use common produciton techniques.
read on->
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Today, the Sun came out in Georgia. It’s a beautiful day (1.4MB mp3).
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We live in a world that values the preservation of events; the “Information” age, we have dubbed it. Experience the wonders of such an age, see how we write and record every detail of our lives, because if it happened, somewhere, it’s important. Here, i have an example of this marvel of modern news reporting. Now, before you totally pass this off as just a silly oddball offbeat quip of news, read it again, look at the nouns that refer to those involved. This just strikes me as fascinating. This article dutifully records the events with MINIMAL reference to actual people.
Kinda reminds me of the dull blog. remember the dull blog? remember how matter-of-fact it is, how dry and just plain vanilla it is? yeah. we all know that this is just a web log, and it has the right to be like that.
Blogs are personal. News, like the above article, really truly wants to be personal and endearing. But it can’t, something is holding it back, someone is editing out just enough information to turn it into a totally neutral story about heartbreak and forgiveness. What is Neutral Heartbreak anyways?
I’m not saying that this is always necessarily bad. Kurt Vonnegut, for example, does a fantastic job satirizing societal quirks like these, combining realist detachment with a conscience. but he writes like that on purpose.
just thinking about it. sometimes when i read news or watch news anchors, i am actually looking for shreds of personality. i don’t find it often. what a crazy world.
i got lots of attention on my birthday! a lot more than i expected… cards, emails, comments, phone calls, how wonderful! when i went to visit GoogleNews like i usually do, i half expected to see the headline: “Happy Birthday David: The Inside Story”.
i guess having a website is good publicity.
Anyways, thanks to the exceedingly generous contributions of readers like you, my birthday present from Musician’s Friend will be arriving in the mail shortly.
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upon my 19th
(ahem)
so, nineteen, you place
me twixt youth and wisdom, but
you’re just a number.
It’s cold this saturday night. My Louisiana blood dosen’t do well with all this howling wind and driving rain; these are dank colorless days. But I suppose this what I should expect in Febuary, living as I do just near the thirty-second parallel. Makes me think of a small town I use to pass through when I would go to New Orleans by way of Morgan City called Paradis Louisiana. I think that little town is a lot like paradise, mostly because it’s not at all what you would expect.
I’m home this weekend, after being away for about a month. It’s funny, but there are some things I will always miss about coming home. Coming down our street, the only one I lived on for 18 years of my life, seeing the open fields and the pine trees in them, like sentinels gaurding my family. How well I know those fields and those trees. Every rabbit burrow, every blackberry vine; I know them. Next comes the oaks that ring our house, majestic in their evergreen glory. Across the street is the old barren lot, with the tree my father planted when I was born, the southern king, a Magnolia and across from it, his swampy prince, the cypress.
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just today, i discover myself in Georgia, wrapped in my sweater and overcoat, my eyes connected to the ground, trying to aviod puddles, cowering away from the cold, invasive rain. what has happened to the world, must it be so inhospitable to people? i look up, and see dull gray sky, feeling the slippery dank humidity seeping in. my senses recoil, how frightening and unappealing. then, for a split second, i remember Midland, on the other side of the universe, or so it seems. And i understand my reaction.
there was a time when i lived far away from here. my memories seem almost ethereal, now… events and ambient feelings that can only happen deep in texas. follow the sun, straight into the west. drift out of the old south, float over the fertile farming land, slog through the soggy bottom swamps and bayous. Cross rivers, towns, cities, metropolises, 4 state lines, forests, plains, rolling hills, ride up a giant rock plateau, until you can’t see anything for a hundred miles, and you are positive there is nothing left in the world but oil pump-jacks and mesquite. there the sun burns hot orange and red, staining the sands and bleaching the scraggled hardy weeds to a near wasteland. lo, discover now Midland, a refuge of humanity that seemingly had spawned from nothing.
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To the Readers of davidcomeaux.com: Please Clear your Cache
if you don’t know how to do this, you should learn how.
notice anything.. more aesthetic… about the top of the page? that’s right. a little cosmetic improvement. as well as the long-delayed inclusion of Jon’s name, co-author of the blog. the other pages of the site are also going to be under construction this week, so… um… try not to notice it.
so i am locked in. this is the first point in the semester when school gets heavy. i mean heavy. four test plus a paper which is weighted like an exam all due this week…that means every class i have is testing this week.
sometimes i imagine all the proffesors of my courses getting together and scheduling all of their test at the same time. i envision the fates over their cauldron, “Bubble bubble, toil and trouble….”
i am sure it’s like that, minus the shakespearean vocabulary.
i love college because most of the time, i feel like i’m not really going to school. but then the avalanche of tests comes and i wonder why i didn’t join the peace corps…
my guitar sits dusty in the corner wating to be played. emails sit unanswered or in their draft phases in my mailbox. sigh…
but the good new is, after this week, i have another three to four weeks of nothing before the tests come again.
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