Giving is Fun

Posted on 8th December 2010 in Something Daily

Yesterday evening at work as a tech was frantic. At about an hour into my shift, about five people asked me do help them out with various tech things within five minutes of each other and I was forced to run around trying to please everyone. More than one of the requests had to do with the impending final project due date for electronics lab. That’s the class for which I’m making the MIDI controller, and though I feel like I don’t exactly know what I’m doing, I’m still able to give help to some people due to my coding experience which, short as it is, constitutes a larger body of work than most of my Music Tech peers. So I helped out a couple of my friends on shift last night and got a cupcake out of the deal (red velvet from Crumbs!). That’s the second time something like this has happened. My friend Amy, who I also met through teching, gave me a Hershey’s bar after I stayed after hours to help her in the studio. So the job can have its perks, mainly in the form of food gifts from nice girls. I say girls because I don’t feel like I know of any guy who would do that for someone (I mean other than me of course).

The final bit of secret santa news has arrived, and honestly it’s my favorite of all. My giftee got the present I had shipped to him (a custom name placard for his desk with an Arrested Development joke on it) and registered his reception on the redditgifts website! It’s amazing to actually see the gift that I had ordered for him, and also to know that he’s happy with it. It’s really an awesome feeling.

Of course, we’re getting close to the completion of the final mix of our bluegrass “Get Low” cover. We plan to finish the mix tonight, so you can expect the final mix online some time tomorrow. If you didn’t hear it, here’s the rough mix on my soundcloud. We think it’s a pretty funny song in the bluegrass style.

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I Knew Having a Skateboard With Uglydolls on it Would Come in Handy Eventually

Posted on 6th December 2010 in Something Daily

Long title, huh? But it’s true. I crack myself up.

Last night I went out to a free show at the Upright Citizens’ Brigade theater. I’ve only been to one other sketch show (Second City in Chicago), but I figure that the UCB stage is more like a venue that Nirvana played before they were popular than a “theater”. The stage was raised about three inches off of the floor, and the low-ceilinged room was packed full of people from literally on the stage to the back wall. Speaking of on the stage, that’s where London and I sat. No chairs, just sitting on the floor with the improvisers right in our faces. Actually, that was one of the things that made it such an awesome experience. we arrived at the theater after the lines had already been formed, so there were no seats left. Instead of getting sent to the back of the room, they let us sit up front.

Anyway, the show was awesome and ridiculous. I’m pretty sure the guy who plays mc chris’ manager on “mc chris is dead” was in the show last night. His voice was pretty much identical…but I can’t find him anywhere on the internet! I don’t really know what to look for. Also, I’ve learned the benefits of actually going out once in a while, as London and I made some new friends who we met in the front row. Sketch improv is awesome, and Upright Citizens Brigade does a free show every Sunday. I’m definitely going back.

I’m listening to Electric Wizard at an unhealthy level and procrastinating on my Music Theory homework by writing this and browsing reddit. Electric Wizard are a great stoner metal band from England. I have one of their albums (Dopethrone) that’s made up mostly of disgustingly slow, crunchy guitar grooves that slowly build to something quite metal indeed.

I revised the “About Me” page today, and I’m contemplating the drawing of a new banner for the homepage. Not making one in Gimp, but actually drawing things. We’ll see how that goes, and if I have time for it in the next few weeks (which will be getting crazy due to finals stress compounded by my laziness). Somewhere during that time, I’m going to get some friends together, drink hot chocolate, and watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. Because that’s what we do when it gets cold and snowy outside.

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It Was a Good Day

Posted on 2nd December 2010 in Something Daily

Yesterday ended up being way better than I expected it to be! I started out early yesterday by assuming that the whole day was going to be crazy, frantic, and difficult. Due to a series of concurrent serendipities, it wasn’t any of those things. I mean I did have an 8 AM class, but even there, my teacher invited the class to dinner. I think I’m going to go, it sounds like fun. After that class, I hung around on the studio floor of Steinhardt for a while waiting Recording Tech. I ended up getting an email from the teacher saying that the class was canceled – sweet! The following class was also canceled, so I suddenly found myself with six hours of unexpected free time. So what did I do? of course, I went home and played a bunch of Mario, then wrote up my electronics homework so I wouldn’t have to do it at midnight. That alone was awesome – just getting that done early enough to not have to worry about it. I had another class that was kinda whatever at 5, but there were no lines at the Kimmel center for those little personal pizzas that are so delicious. They usually require a wait of about 20 minutes, but not last night for some reason.

And then we had an incredibly productive session for our Recording Tech project (a bluegrass cover of “Get Low” by Lil Jon and the East Side Boys). We finished all but a bit of touch-up tracking, leaving only the mix to complete. Last night we managed to track drums and fiddle, and to re-record the slightly ruined (my fault) acoustic guitar track. We just got a lot done last night, and it was a great feeling to finally be doing a session nice and smoothly. The past ones have had a lot of issues, but not last night for whatever reason.

If you weren’t aware, we had an issue with our music being lost from the tape earlier in the semester, so after a successful session such as last night, we’re predisposed to being paranoid and way too careful about losing our stuff. So short of making a multitrack copy on another tape, which we can’t really do, we bounced to Pro Tools. Rather, I woke up early and bounced to Pro Tools before class this morning. And, crazy as this is, it’s already on the internet. [soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="secret_url=false" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/7622869"] Get Low: rough mix by Raised by Robots (NSFW) It’s just a rough mix, everything dry apart from a bit of EQ on most tracks. We’re going to mix it next week. I’ll put up any subsequent bounces we do – at the very least the final product. Bear in mind, this is a cover, so we didn’t write these ridiculous/offensive lyrics. We just sing them because we think it’s funny.

To top off my good day yesterday, I discovered that the paper I anticipated having to write after the session (i.e. midnight) was not actually required. So I got to chill out (mario) instead of working. It was awesome – I love when you end up not having to do work you thought you had to do. It’s so rare!

So today has some big shoes to fill. We’ll see, I guess. Anyway, great job!

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The Importance of Being Tidy

Posted on 30th November 2010 in Something Daily

I’ve decided on my Secret Santa contribution. Rather, London came up with an idea and I decided on it. Since my giftee is a lawyer, London came up with the awesome idea of a custom name placard to sit on his desk with a funny phrase or quote or something underneath. My giftee is known to be familiar with Arrested Development, so I’m thinking about some different law-related quotes from Bob Loblaw or Tobias. So it would be the guy’s name (Matthew _______) in big type, and then smaller type underneath saying something clever. Some that I’m tossing around:

  • Analrapist
  • Why should you go to jail for a crime someone else noticed?”
  • No Habla Español

I can’t decide. It’ll come to me though. I’m leaning toward No Habla Espanol, because it seems like the safest and also most recognizable reference to Bob Loblaw out of the three.

It’s been two whole days since we all returned from Thanksgiving break, and already the kitchen is a horrible place. I knew upon cleaning it top-to-bottom the night before break that this would happen. I just found a half stick of butter that had been sitting on top of the microwave since last night, open and melting. Am I the only one to whom this makes no sense? Obviously not, but it can seem that way. This may seem a bit obsessive, but I really do think it’s important to have a tidy space in which to live. I think (and Eric agrees with me here) that your space acts like a mirror to your mind, and vice versa. That is, if your mind is fragmented, your space will be messy, and if you’re untidy, it can lead to anxiety and mental clutter. At least that’s how I see it. It’s not that I try to be incredibly organized and uncluttered in my spaces, it’s just that it feels completely wrong to me if I’m not. It’s not even an effort, it’s just the way I have to live. That said, I think there are definitely positive aspects to my compulsive need to clean.

Some miscellany:

  • I’m listening to the Octopus Project. If you like electronic music, check them out! Their album Hello Avalanche is what got me into electronic music.
  • This is a cool audio transcoding tool that was recommended to me. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks very useful.
  • Found this sweet T-shirt company on Anamanaguchi’s twitter.
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Thanksgiving Comes Early

Posted on 21st November 2010 in Something Daily

I woke up this morning and bought an mc chris ticket for Tuesday! I’m really excited for this show, even though I know it might be sort of lame. I just want to see mc chris in person – that’s really what it boils down to. I’m not going to listen to his new stuff yet, though. I want to be surprised. Actually right now I’m listening to Broken Bells, which is an awesome album, as it turns out. It’s the singer from the Shins and Danger Mouse together writing and playing awesome music that sounds a lot like the Shins but somehow way cooler. Check it out!

While I’m on the subject of awesome things, how about Swingers? I just watched it for the first time in a while last weekend with Eric and London, and it’s just as fantastic as it ever was. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are in it, and they’re both pretty hilarious. Plus the movie has a really effective message about relationships. I was going to connect this to something in my life, but as it turns out, I already forgot the connection.

I had another session last night with London and Davis. Their song is really coming together nicely, I heard the bounce this morning. Last night I assisted the tracking of drums and bass – the session guys they managed to find were incredible. Especially the drummer (Jamie ___?) – he was like a machine. You could give him any pattern to play and he would just play it right back to you. Exactly what a session musician should be. It’s funny to think that I used to want to be a session pianist. Dream big, right? By the way, I’ll see if I can post/link to the final mix of this song that they/we are working on when it’s finished. It’s sounding really good at this point.

Josh just came over for a few minutes, and somewhere amid our talk about computers, he told me that I was “that guy”, indicating that he sees me as a person with a varied set of skills. At least, that’s how I took it. He mentioned computers and music, and how good he thinks I am at video games. I just wanted to say

Thanks again, Josh. You made my day.

I’m going to Thanksgiving dinner in Brooklyn tonight! Dave and his roommates are hosting, and it’ll be a rad rockin time! I haven’t been over there in a while, and Dave and his roommates are all great guys. Plus I haven’t seen Kenny in ages, that’ll be fun. And then school tomorrow…oh yeah. No worries.

So I’m going to go write some music and maybe draw a pretty picture. Here’s real, actual footage from when the periodic table had a dance party.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBCmt_pJTRA&fs=1&hl=en_US]

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Turns out Steam games come with a bunch of raw content

Posted on 20th November 2010 in Something Daily

Hello everyone, welcome back to another exciting edition of Three Stegosaurus Moon. We’ve got a great post planned for you today. It has it all. Even dinosaurs.

After a few days of me being mentally elsewhere due to this project that I won’t shut up about, I have returned. I woke up this morning without feeling the uncontrollable urge to start coding and solving problems. I slept in (until 8:45…late, huh?), had a nice long stretch, made myself some breakfast, and have so far had a very relaxing morning. I think I’m going to avoid skating today, in light of what happened last time I did. The scratch on my arm is healing, but it still looks pretty gross. I catch people staring at it sometimes…my eyes are up here, okay?. I believe I’m going to do almost nothing today, as I feel like I deserve it due to the big amount of concentrated effort over the last few days.

Let me just say one last thing about my esync/backup project. Writing a Perl script that recursively traverses directories and copies their contents is something that I didn’t think I could do four days ago. In a way, I still don’t believe that I can. Yet somehow I managed to do it – within the space of three days – and it works exactly the way I intended it to. I must be getting better at programming, or something. I just wanted to make it known that I, Emmett J. Butler, am proud of myself. For once.

As you may know, my roommate London had a recording session for his class last night on which he asked me to assist. The first thing I found out was that the Clive Davis studios are way nicer than the average Music Tech studio. Everything is just cleaner and bigger, and in better condition. But not to compare the two programs or anything. They’re completely different.

The session was to track a woodwind/brass section for London’s hip hop track, which involved seven musicians playing live. So we had lots of mics, gobos, and headphones for everybody. I’ve never engineered a session with that many people on it before, and it really drove home the point that to make one of them work, you have to know exactly what to say to the musicians to get the best performance. It’s like you’re putting on a disguise every time you hit the talkback button. The session was great, and I ended up assisting in a pretty big capacity.

I made the discovery last night that every game you download on Steam uses an unencrypted directory full of the media such as videos, audio and textures that it needs to function. I stumbled on this folder last night during a backup, and literally everything from the games is there in raw form. Every Team Fortress 2 map video, every zombie scream and gun sound effect from Left 4 Dead, the Portal song, everything. It’s just there, in .wav or .mp4, for the taking. I don’t know what I’ll do with this knowledge, if anything, but it’s crazy to see. You definitely don’t get that with a console game.

Check out what I found. I know somebody who’d eat The World’s Largest Gummi Worm (hint: it’s Andrew)

Dinosaurs.

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Programming is Tiring

Posted on 19th November 2010 in Something Daily

Ok, before you say anything…I know I missed a day yesterday. I try not to let that happen very often, but I got a little (read quite) carried away yesterday with coding. This has happened before: I get an idea for a program in my head and I can’t stop myself from working on it until it’s finished. It happened with the mouse game I made for CS 101, and with parts of the space dinosaur game I’m currently working on. Never, though, have I been this singularly obsessed with one goal in programming (or most other aspects of my life, come to think of it). This started a few days ago when I almost lost the code for that very space dinosaur game through negligence and was able to reclaim it from the abyss with the help of cloud storage. Despite having solved the issue, this for some reason made me want to completely rework my backup system. I wrote about this before, check it out.

Done reading? Good. To make a long story short, I wrote a perl script that searches a given directory and copies all of its files and subdirectories to a given source. The idea was/is that I’ll use this in place of rsync for future backups. Let’s say, though, that esync is still in the beta stage. After testing the functions thoroughly (but as I soon learned, not completely), I tried them for the first time on my actual filesystem, full of music and code and games – all of my files, basically. Upon doing this (about an hour ago), my iTunes library quickly vanished from my computer and onto an external drive, not copied, but moved. The same thing happened to a bunch of Application Support files in my Library, causing things to spontaneously quit and restart, lose their settings, et cetera.

Thankfully, no data were actually lost, just moved around a bit. But it was crappy. I’m tweaking a bit more, and hopefully I’ll have something functional by the end of the night. And if that’s the case, I can stop obsessing over this project! Sometimes it’s hard to avoid the thinking addiction that accompanies learning programming. And unfortunately, I don’t have too much else to write about, as this code has been filling the majority of my free time since Thursday. I am going to a Recorded Music session tonight to assist, though. My roommate London is recording a track for a class, and he asked me to help out. Leaving soon, we’ll see how it goes.

EDIT: This is my Friday night. The dinner of champions: Mega Man X, Yuengling, Perl, and fried rice. But not necessarily in that order.

Here’s a link that I had to use today during my exploits, you might find it useful. How to show hidden files in Finder

As always, thanks for reading!

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A Busy Day with Perl

Posted on 17th November 2010 in Something Daily

Wednesdays are bananas. Really just Wednesday evenings, actually, but it all sort of blends together when you stay in motion between 5 and 11 PM. I stuck myself with a bunch of homework tonight by becoming obsessed with this perl script I’m writing. Due to yesterday’s episode involving lost (or almost lost) code, I decided to seriously revamp the script I use to automatically back up my data. It was previously a BASH script that used rsync to update the home folder on two drives, as well as a few other folders in other locations for ease of use and redundancy. One of the big flaws, though, was the lack of multiple backups. In my old system, only one image of the drive was stored at any one time, making it difficult to reclaim lost files (as I discovered). Another problem with it was that BASH does not have easy support for runtime switches, which I want to use to customize the action of the script. As an added challenge for myself, I’m not using rsync anymore, but rather writing a recursive function that traverses a directory tree and copies the contents myself. It’s a bit of work, but quite educational. And to top this off, I learned that I actually sort of love Perl – the built-in support for regular expressions and the $_ variable are helping me see what an easy language it is compared to some.

But the point of all this is, I didn’t get much else done today until crunch time. I spent the day when I could have been blogging or doing homework instead working on an algorithm. Which is great, but it means I have more work right now. It also explains why I’m updating moments before midnight. I just wrote a lab in 30 minutes, and another 1-page paper is soon to follow.

We had another session tonight for our “Get Low” cover, and this time, the material that we had recorded the previous week was actually still there! It was a miracle! After tonight, we have guitar, bass, lead and backing vocals tracked. I engineered for the most part, and I sang a high backup part (with my incredible vocal range….right?). This project is starting to become a lot of fun, though. It wasn’t so much when we had to start from scratch every week, but it is now.

Apart from all this, the reddit secret santa is approaching, and I can’t wait to be paired with someone. Also, I’m seeing mc chris for the first time on Tuesday at the Knitting Factory. It’s going to be a completely rad show, you know it’s true. In case you don’t know mc chris, here’s a starter. It’s called “Robotussin“.

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“Avatar” meets “Cats” on ice

Posted on 15th November 2010 in Something Daily

Last night I saw Sufjan Stevens and his band at the Beacon Theater, and it was incredible. I’ve never seen another show with such high production values in terms of stage theatrics: an at least twelve-piece band with two drummers, all in crazy glow-in-the-dark space costumes; projected video on the backdrop, a screen that fell in front of the band on which more projections were…projected; dancers, Space Jesus, and lots of balloons and beach balls. The band was incredibly well-rehearsed, which made the show all the better when combined with the lights. Sufjan played mostly guitar and occasionally a small synth that he had next to him on stage as they did most of Age of Adz and All Delighted People. The big orchestral jams with the full band like “Vesuvius” and “Age of Adz” were interspersed with acoustic songs that usually had only Sufjan on guitar and a woodwind or two – “Heirloom” and “Enchanting Ghost”, for example. The high point of the show, though, was the 25-minute “Impossible Soul”, during which everyone got up from their seats and started dancing in the aisles, bouncing beach balls all over the place. Sufjan had several onstage costume changes/augmentations during the song, and at one point the backup singers came out front for a dance segment. Also there was a big diamond-shaped spaceship thing that lowered from the ceiling – combined with the trippy light show that was going on through all of this, it was something close to madness. This was immediately followed by the most beautiful rendition of “Chicago” that could possibly exist, with beach balls dropping from the ceiling. This and “seven Swans” were the only pre-ADP songs he played in the main set. I cried a little bit. The encores were almost exclusively from Illinois – mostly just Sufjan on guitar. Obviously, you had to be there. But this was an absolutely breathtaking show. If you ever find yourself with the chance to see Sufjan, do it. Seriously, I’ve thought about it and decided that this was the best show I’ve ever been to.

Here’s a video that Justin took from his awesome seat near the front of the second half of Impossible Soul, right at the beginning of the dance party. The whole show was this crazy-looking.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOYkuItejKQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

In other news, the power in our entire apartment went out last night after Justin plugged in his laptop charger and the splitter we had on the microwave and coffee maker burned up. So we got some candles and had an acoustic guitar singalong in the dark (after playing sardines, of course). We ended up getting out power back just before I went to bed, when the super came to help us out. Thanks super!

In honor of the amazing performance last night, here’s a primer on Royal Robertson, who Sufjan said was a big influence on his most recent album.

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Secret Santa and Sufjan

Posted on 14th November 2010 in Something Daily

I haven’t been paying very good attention to blogging for the past week or so. It’s been an incredibly hectic and stressful bunch of days recently, and blogging hasn’t been foremost in my thoughts, which is why posts often go up at or around midnight. It’s also why they’re sometimes devoid of much content. But as of right now, I’m trying to get back into it.

The past week has been full of projects for school, essentially. I had a big pileup of audio projects due in a really short span of time, some of which were remembered a lot later than they should have been, resulting in frenzied last-minute sessions and desperate text messages. Our bluegrass Lil Jon cover encountered a major setback this week when all of our previously recorded material mysteriously vanished from the tape. Additionally, we remembered the fact that the music for the student film for which we’re doing audio post was due about fifteen hours before the deadline, which of course resulted in a bunch of extra work for me. Normal homework levels persisted in other classes, as well as the final electronics project looming closer. I plan to build a MIDI controller for Logic with an Arduino, but haven’t really started with that yet.

Somehow in the midst of all this, I managed to make a rage comic, write a bit of new Gameboy music, successfully scan and enhance a pencil drawing I did, and configure my MacBook for a dual boot with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and Mac OS X. I just need to have projects, I guess. I feel wrong somehow if I don’t. I may draw something later today, or try and enhance another one of the old drawings I did a few weeks ago. But having time to recover from these (and some other unmentioned) stresses is the main plan for today. I’m going to play some New SMB Wii and do some drawing as I get ready for the Sufjan Stevens show tonight. As I type this, in fact, I’m giving my first full listen to Age of Adz in preparation for seeing it live tonight. I’m quite excited for this show, as I’ve never seen Sufjan before and I’ve loved his music since middle school. You can be sure that there’ll be a rundown of the show up here tomorrow.

Additionally, I managed to find time yesterday to sign up for Reddit’s Secret Santa gift exchange. So I made myself a profile and checked out the subreddit – as it turns out, Redditgifts admins use an algorithm that pairs you with someone based on geography and common interest, and then you go out and buy them a little gift and ship it to them. I haven’t really done anything like this before (that is, becoming so IRL involved in an online community), so I’m quite excited for this, both to see the reaction when my partner gets a rad gift, and to see what someone sends me! Check it out – Subreddit or Reddit Gifts. It’s going to be so much fun for me.

That’s a synopsis of most of my life at this point. We’ll see where I go from here. I’m going to go now and play some New SMB Wii, but here’s Link rising from the dead first. Have a great day, if you can!

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