Michael's Texas Embrace

I am replacing my hack philisophical post with X-Treme Nerdiness. Yo.

On friday I drove to Houston and picked up a new synthesizer. Behold: (the colon is referring to the picture, so imagine the picture just suddenly appeared on the page before you, in a flash of blinding light.)

Buddha is sitting on the wood side paneling to illustrate that the Roland Juno 60 towers over all, even the enlightened lord.

It has pretty much everything a good synthesizer needs. Wood on the side is key. Another important question to ask when buying a synthesizer is, "does this machine have enough buttons, switches, and knobs that I could pretend I was a space captain or a scientist while I play it?" The Juno indeed has plenty of buttons, and can replicate the bewildering sound of science (which is usually fast beeps and whooshing static.)

As you can see, Gobo is excited about being able to play six (6) notes at once, because this synth is polyphonic! Sure, modern keyboards may let you play more than six notes at once, but who needs to do that? Jazz players? Classical pianists? Who plays any of that crap on a sweet synth? Losers. The 8-bit Nintendo couldn't play that many notes. And that was the peak of music.

So aside from buttons and wood, and being able to excite Fraggles, how does it sound? Way sweet 2 tha maxx. And since it has lots of buttons and sliders and switches, you can easily construct your own special sounds that annoy other people. And unlike the Moog, you can save your sounds (called "patches") and recall them at the press of a button! You can even save those patches if you run out of room, by plugging your keyboard into a cassette player and dumping the information on to a standard cassette. It sounds sort of like a modem on the tape. That was probably space-age stuff in 1982 (the year this synth was made.)

So I made a bunch of patches and then recorded them as a series of demos, because surely everyone wants to hear it. (As a note, there are no effects applied to any of the sounds. The synth makes all that noise itself.)

Juno Organ and Arp. Here's a pretty good hammond organ sound, some wicked 80s synth stings, and the far-out variable on-board arpeggiator. Whoa! Listen to those beeps!

Juno beep. I was trying to make it sound like a video game. So I played a little beepy pattern over and over and fiddled with the controls, so the sound sort of morphs as it goes along. Then I added some white noise (it has a white noise generator!), some spooky sort-of glockenspiel (with modulation), and a really sick-sounding lead. And some bubbly bass. It's sloppy, but I did all these really fast. Second takes are for sissies.

Juno Test #2. (Why is test #2 third in the list?) Cool synth bass sound, with a spooky sad part where the filter rises instead of falls. Weird lead sound. I programmed a synthy bass drum here, and then a crappy-sounding rim shot. But the fact that I can make up my own crappy-sounding drums is cool. And the sound is so robust, it doesn't ever really sound crappy.

Yep. This synthesizer makes me wonder why we bothered to move past the dazzling technology of 1982. New keyboards just don't do it like this. Unless you buy a really expensive one. But why do that when you can buy one of these for a fraction of the cost and get wood paneling? Sheesh.

It sometimes occurs to me as strange that I will never get to know what it's like to know me. Like when someone makes a comment about my behavior or personality, and it seems completely counter to what I think of myself--which happens a lot. This tells me that I have absolutely no idea what I'm like.

Like this evening, I was eating dinner and Maggie was like, "What the hell are you doing? Are you examining each bite of food before you take it?" And I was like, "No. Why would I do that? That would be weird." But then I lifted the next bite up on my spoon and paused--I couldn't help it--to look at the food for just a second. It turns out that I apparently examine each bite of food before I take it. I mean, what if there are bugs or pieces of glass or money in there? I all ready knew that I smelled things more than most people. My family had pointed that out. But now I'm a sniffer and a food-starer. I never knew.

Maggie also pointed out last week that if I wasn't smiling I had what she refered to as "a sort of intense" look on my face. This confused me. I imagine myself to be sort of blank-looking. Or maybe vaguely affable. Bored, unattentive, or slightly dumb, maybe. But certainly not anything in the same ballpark as intense. I can't even figure out what that might mean. I also have really only recently (like, in the last year or so) come to terms with the fact that I'm apparently pretty "dry." But once so many people refer to you as deadpan you have to accept it. I used to be pretty sure I was the opposite of that. So I often wonder who this curious person is that is me. I mean, I don't really seem to know him very well, which strikes me as infinitely strange. It would be neat if you could get everyone you know to write an honest account of yourself so you could read it, but would you jive with the results? I don't know.

I had two days off in a row. Naturally instead of doing homework and catching up on reading, I recorded music and drank pop. I also ate some pretzels and had some chips and salsa. The salsa was very spicy and good.

Forest, Boat

I took a hiatus from working on songs about food in favor of doing an instrumental thing. It's actually an old jazzy thing I made up on the piano back at 116 Leonard (for awhile I tried being a one-man jazz piano trio, but I'm not really a piano player, and I don't really know much about jazz. I'm learning jazz chords, though.) Anyway, I always liked the melodies, so I decided to redo it with synthesizers and toys. I'm kind of a mediocre musician, really. I have mastered nothing, but here I figured if I layered enough mediocre things no one would notice. I guess sort of "go for atmosphere instead of technique."

I'm pretty pleased! I like all the basslines. I think I'm getting a sort of bass style, after a year of owning a bass. The bass is a bit video gamey, I think. (I doubled up acoustic bass and synth bass a lot for that sound.) And the moog really shrieks on this one, thanks to modulation and finally getting over my fear of the pitch-bend wheel (careful...). And I figure that's about as good as those toys can sound. I also ripped off Kanye and Four Tet and put in some really high, sped of vocals. Except I'm lousy and sampling, so I just sang really high to a slowed down track and then sped up the vocals. That's kind of ghetto lame, but whatever.

Ummmm, I couldn't think of a good title, maybe someone has a suggestion. The first part sort of reminds me of a forest or maybe ghosts or something, but the second part reminds me of a boat, maybe. Or dancing. Shrieking and dancing. I don't know. Naming instrumentals is hard.

Last night I dreamt I awoke with long hair. But not too long. It was more like a bob, and a girly one at that. It had a lot of volume and a nice straight cut off about chin level. It was pretty bouncy. In the dream I got contacts because my glasses just didn't go with my hair anymore.

The dream inspired me to draw a picture. But I kept the glasses because eyes are tough to draw. And I decided with hair like that I should be holding a Zeus-style lightning bolt and a guitar, for bob-rock.