Living With a Nerd

Just a small little update, I’m working on another track for The Transient Unknown.  It’s easily the darkest music I’ve made…heh, I had to stop working on it because listening to the various textures over and over was starting to creep me out.  I know exactly what I want to happen with this track (which is rather uncommon for me), so completing it will just be a matter of getting my patches set and everything tweaked.  I may have to brighten it a little; it’s an awesome dark track, but I think it may be a little too dark to fit in with the rest of the album.

I also recently completed a short interlude track for The Transient Unknown, entitled Cosmic String.  It’s under two minutes long, but I did it as an exercise in layered textures.  There are 15 different synths/samplers in it, can you separate them all out?  I barely can, and I made the darn thing!

Nearly half of my previous blog entry has become completely irrelevant.  Rather than expand the music section on my own website, for now I’ve decided to just make everything available on last.fm.   Compared to making yet another webpage, I’ll get far more exposure, bandwidth won’t be strained on my own server (although that honestly wasn’t much of a problem), and it’s just cool to know that I have music on last.fm now, just like the big boys!  Or something…

In other related news (and continuing the theme of making my previous entry irrelevant), I created the first track for Lost on the Way to the Laundry last weekend.  I was working on Solar Winds (which is still pissing me off, because I can tell there is a great song hiding underneath what I have down so far, but I just can’t seem to find it.  I’ve been working on this track for what…4 months now?) when I took a moment to swivel around in my chair and look around the room.  Warm morning sunlight was beaming in through the window, scattered puffy clouds were floating by, Fizzgigg and Brittnie were softly snoring away in bed…it was just a really pleasant and peaceful morning.  Lotwotl was the result of that morning; I feel it represents exactly how that morning felt, and is quite possibly the closest I’ve come to taking the music in my head and making it into something I can share with others.  So how does this make my previous post irrelevant?  Well, as you can tell by listening to it, it doesn’t contain elements from either dubstep OR ambient.  I really like the sound of it though, and I’m going to strive to make the rest of Lost on the Way to the Laundry sound similar in style.  I’m having trouble finding other music to listen to for inspiration, though…it sounds like a Nightmares on Wax/Future Sound of London/some other group I can’t think of combo…any suggestions would be much appreciated.

In non-music news, The Crazies was pretty good…I was glad to see that it really felt like a proper remake, rather than just taking a concept and crapping all over it.  You can catch my full review of it here.  Hopefully, we will get a chance to go see the new Alice in Wonderland this weekend, so if all goes as planned, I’ll have a review of that ready on Monday or Tuesday.  I also recently took the plunge into gaming on my Dell Mini 9…I wrote up an article with some tips I discovered during this so-far short journey, while also going over some of the games I tried and how well they worked.  You can read it here.

I managed to catch Shutter Island over the weekend (full review here.)  While it certainly wasn’t Scorsese’s best, it was more than worth the price of admission.  I hope to catch a viewing of The Crazies this weekend, although up until a couple of hours ago I was completely unaware that it is a remake of a 1973 Romero film.  I’ve since moved it up to the top spot on my Netflix queue, so I’ll get a chance to see the original before I see the remake…a required tradition when it comes to remakes nowadays.  Look for a review next week.

In other news, previous plans to charge for my music have been completely scrapped, at least for now.  While I’m quite proud of the tracks I’ve put together, I don’t think they are of high enough quality to charge for them.  Since I’m doing this primarily to provide people with enjoyable experiences instead of a way to get rich, I have no problem giving it all away.  Who knows, if I get popular enough maybe one day I’ll release an album and actually charge for it.  For now, the music page remains unchanged, but sometime in the next few days I will update it to include previously unreleased tracks.  The other advantage of releasing the tracks for free is that it lifts any arbitrary release date I put on myself, thus reducing the stress associated with production.  Since I won’t be charging for it, I can make it exactly how I want without any worry regarding whether it has monetary worth.

I think I lost the Reason file for Circumstellar Disk, so unless I can locate it, the unfinished version currently on the music page will become the finished version.  I may use that as an excuse to put together a small drone project, which is something I’ve wanted to do since I discovered Stars of the Lid.  Drone ambient is relatively easy to make, yet is still very creatively satisfying for me.  Regardless, there are still at least two tracks to finish on The Transient Unknown (IC-443 and Solar Winds).  After that I plan on doing Lost on the Way to the Laundry, which (I’m hoping) will be a dubstep/ambient hybrid, although that could change radically when the time comes to actually do it.

Once there is more content than just The Transient Unknown, I will likely switch from a single page to a seperate Wordpress website specifically for the music stuff.  It will still be located at livingwithanerd.com/music, but making it its own Wordpress site will allow me to keep everything more organized.  For now though, I’m going to stick with the single-page design.

No doubt you have heard about the insane snow we have had for the past week here in Maryland.  A storm last weekend dropped around 30″ on us, and a storm just three days ago dropped an additional 18″ on us.  Right now, our back yard looks like a snow swimming pool…the snow is only about 6 inches below the top of our fence(!).  Luckily, it should be above freezing for most of the next week, so hopefully a lot of it will melt.  It was awesome getting some time off from work though:-)

I’m about half way through Bioshock 2.  My opinion keeps shifting from “meh” to “more time in Rapture!  Huzzah!”  I’m still not quite sure what I think…on the one hand, it’s been cool to learn more about the Big Daddies and the various backroom deals that went on while Rapture was still a functioning city, but on the other hand the whole thing feels unnecessary and at times forced.  The new hacking mini-game is far and away the best change to the formula, but I’m not sure playing as a Big Daddy was the right move…it feels wrong that I’m a Big Daddy but can be killed by a splicer pummeling me with a wrench.  In the first Bioshock, if you just stood there whacking a Big Daddy in the skull you would be turned into hamburger.  I realize you are a “prototype” and not as well armored, but still…you’re in a freakin’ diving suit.  A wrench shouldn’t do anything to you.  I’ll reserve final judgement for when I finish the game, as I’ve heard the storyline kicks into overdrive in the final couple of hours, but for now I think I’m on the “why did they do this again?” side.

In other news, I just ordered a set of Audio-Technica ATH-AD700s.  I can’t wait to see how they sound with gaming, and the extra wide soundstage reported by many owners has me excited to see how they present The Transient Unknown.  From what I’ve read, they are a bit lacking in the bass department until they get burned in a bit, so I’m going to put together a playlist to run through them for a while.  I’m still going to actually use them during the burn-in period so I can hear them change, but I’m making sure to keep my expectations low at first.  I’ll likely go for a Nuforce uDAC in a month or two, but for now the control pod on my Logitech Z4 2.1s will have to do.

Special thanks to the members over at the Head-Fi forums and the [H]ard|Forum for helping me in my purchasing decision.  Keep an eye on livingwithanerd.com for an initial review on the AD700’s and a follow-up review once I have broken them in.  The main page has been neglected this week due to just general insanity going on around here…I hope to get things relatively back to normal next week, although I can’t promise that.  At the very least, the next entry in our Healthy Gamer series will make an appearance on Monday.

A few months ago, I put the album on hiatus.  Morale about the project was low, I couldn’t come up with anything that satisfied me creatively, and for a few weeks straight I was scrapping everything I put together.  Rather than continue to get more and more frustrated, I just set it all aside for a later date.  That later date is now.  Listening to old favourites of mine like Saafi Brothers and Redshift while finding some new artists and listening to a bunch of Hearts of Space episodes has reignited the spark back in me.  I don’t have any definite plans yet, I’m just going to get myself back in front of the MIDI controller and see what happens.  I’ve spent the past few days amassing a sizable collection of freeware ReFills for Reason, so I’m hoping to find some interesting stuff to either use or tweak from that.

My production skills haven’t really increased, but I have been trying to listen to ambient differently.  Rather than just relaxing and chilling out, I’ve been trying to pick apart the tracks; identify the individual sounds, work out what someone did to get them to sound the way they do, and even try to picture the producer putting the track together.  I hope to eventually release The Transient Unknown on magnatune, but it’s quite possible I’ll just make this a freebie and give it away.  Either way, the four tracks I have up on the website will ALWAYS be available at no cost.  I really enjoy those tracks, and I want other people to enjoy them too.  Since I’m not planning on making a living out of this and realistically don’t expect to make any money, giving some of the tracks away for free just feels like the right thing to do.

Taken at 3 PM with 7 hours of snow left. By the time it was over, both of those cars were completely encased in snow.

The big snowstorm this past weekend here in Maryland wasn’t the only major event…Brittnie got me a PS3!  I was planning on picking one up around the time that God of War III came out, but this works just fine for me.  Haven’t really decided where I’m going to start, but it will likely come down between Resistance 1 & 2 or Uncharted 1 & 2.  I’ve found that when used for streaming purposes, the PS3 is superior to the 360; easier to setup, built in wireless…oh, and being able to copy entire folders of videos from my computer onto the PS3 over the network plus more extensive codec support help to seal the deal.  It will be interesting to see how the exclusives compare to the 360 exclusives…although the 360 controller is still far more comfortable.  I’ve never been a big fan of the Dual Shock design, and even though the modified L2/R2 buttons are a good step in the right direction, it still has a long way to go.  This sounds lame, but the Dual Shock is part of the reason why I don’t have as much time /played on my PS2 as I do with my other gaming systems.

Speaking of other gaming systems, the addition of the PS3 brings our full list to the following: Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, SNES (two of them), Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Xbox, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS Lite (3 of them), PSP-1000 (aka the first-gen PSP), Game Boy, GBA (one original, one GBA SP), Game Gear, and a relatively up-to-date gaming PC.

I’ve put a couple of hours into Torchlight.  The resemblance to Diablo is nearly overwhelming.  I know that many of the Diablo team members worked on Torchlight (including the composer and sound designer for Diablo), and it shows.  If Titan Quest was Diablo 2.5, Torchlight is Diablo 2.7.  With no attempt to hide the similarities, Torchlight feels more like a trip down memory lane rather than a new single-player experience (but in a good way.)  The graphics are a bit jagged, but for an independently produced game, it looks damn nice.  Oh, and did I mention that it’s a hell of a lot of fun to play?

Brittnie left to go visit her sister for the holidays, so I decided to take a couple of days off from Living With a Nerd.  The next article (which will be a review of Torchlight) will post on Christmas Day.

Dubstep has gained massive popularity over the past few years.  The wub-wub basslines, driving beat, and endless variety seem to be the driving force behind this musical revolution.  Fair warning: for anyone that is even remotely able to produce Dubstep, this is going to be a very obvious post…so apologies in advance.

The basic wub-wub bassline is fairly easy to create for anyone that knows their way around a synth.  It takes less than a minute to get a standard, simple sound.  Getting it to sound unique, mind blowing, and hard hitting however…that is another matter entirely.  The different number of settings that must be tweaked is immense, and changing the value of a setting by only one or two units has a massive impact on the overall sound.  My reasons for enjoying dubstep go beyond it’s audible qualities… I have a deep appreciation for the expertise and skill required to create it.

To explain it in very simplistic terms, Dubstep is a product of multiple oscillators and LFO settings.  The rate of the oscillators and the LFO are the driving forces behind the familiar “wub wub” sound associated with Dubstep.  Matched oscillators, offset by a single octave and a few cents, combined with adjusting the rate of an LFO and a distortion effect unit are all it takes to obtain a basic Dubstep wubbity…but from there, things become far more complicated. 

I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to producing Dubstep, but I have a couple of very good tips for you:  Instead of creating a wubby bassline with one synth, use two synth patches (or two synths, if you are using software).  Have one set as a high-pass and one as a low-pass.  In your sequencer, copy the MIDI instructions from one track to the other (I suggest high-pass copied to low-pass).  This will enable you to tweak both parts of the wub independent of each other, while still allowing them to sound like a single “note”, not to mention “fattening” up the sound.  If you REALLY want your wub lines to sound huge, make a copy of every synth patch (or, again, synth if you are working just with software), assign it the same MIDI instructions, set one copy for the left channel and one for the right channel.  This will make your wubs sound massive, and cause your bass to be truly universe shattering.

I know it’s becoming the electronica flavor of the day, but if you have ever wondered what it would be like to combine UK Garage, Drum and Bass, and Grime, …check out some Dubstep.  Reso is a good place to start, in my opinion.

After putting nearly 20 hours into the track “Sun Spots” for The Transient Unknown, I made the huge decision to scrap just about the whole thing.  I have kept the Reason file, but it’s going to be filed away in the “not for the album” folder.  It’s a decent track, but it just didn’t fit into the overall feel of the album.  This led to getting frustrated with the project as a whole, and I haven’t worked on it in close to a month.  A few days ago, I went back and cherry picked a few of the synth patches used in Sun Spots, came up with some new ideas, and got back to work.

Sun Spots has since been renamed, reborn, and is currently about 20% complete under the title “Solar Winds”.

This is a track that is difficult to place in the album…the imagery I’m trying to to create in the listener’s mind is obvious based on the title, but accomplishing this while positioning it between a “slow” and an “active” track has proved difficult.  Luckily, inspiration abounds for such a track, and I’ve had no problem coming up with target sounds for various synth patches and loops.  I decided to make the overall soundscape huge and slow sounding, while incorporating some Dubstep-inspired patches to invoke the solar wind imagery.

While I still have a ways to go, working on The Transient Unknown has given me HUGE respect for artists that produce nothing but Ambient Electronica.  Coming up with unique, interesting sounds and combining them with emotional and vivid soundscapes has proved to be far more difficult than I ever imagined.  I absolutely ADORE this type of music, and I’m very proud of what I’ve created so far…but after this album is finished, I think I’m going to leave the genre in the hands of those that actually know what they’re doing

I have been a longtime fan of Cannibal Corpse. I first heard of them (and death metal in general) from, where else, Ace Ventura. In that film, Cannibal Corpse can be seen performing Hammer Smashed Face with former vocalist Chris Barnes (for the record, I prefer George Fisher as a vocalist over Barnes). I went out and obtained every album they had made up to that point, and have tried to buy each one shortly after its release ever since.

Back in February of 2009, Cannibal Corpse released Evisceration Plague. I FINALLY got a chance to obtain it, and after giving it a thorough listening, this is possibly my favourite Cannibal Corpse album yet. The music is by far the most brutal they have put together, and some of the songs contain highly technical or strange time signatures. I’ve always admired Cannibal Corpse’s technical abilities, but they reach new heights with this one. The title track from Evisceration Plague is possibly their “heaviest” sounding song they have recorded, besting even Five Nails Through The Neck and The Wretched Spawn. I know I’m late to the party (again), but if you enjoy death metal, be sure to check out Evisceration Plague. It’s a brutal work of art.

In other news, I picked up Turok for the 360 over the weekend (originally released in early 2008), and am a little under halfway through it on Hard. The odd thing about Hard mode in this game is that it really isn’t all that difficult…you can still take a huge amount of damage, enemies don’t really take that many shots to kill (two, sometimes even just one in the head)…yet somehow, I keep dying. I never tried the game on “normal”, so I can’t attest to how much more difficult the game is on Hard…but there is no way it’s that big of a difference. If there is, Normal must be no challenge at all.

One issue I have is that the weapons don’t feel very “grounded” as they do in Bioshock or CoD4, leaving them feeling a bit disconnected from the player. This is surprising, as every weapon in the Turok series usually feels very much “in hand”, instead of just a textured image displayed on the screen. Still, they serve their purpose and are well designed from an art and sound perspective, a Turok series staple. The bow is made of even more awesome than it has been in the past, and the knife in this game is well-utilized for one-shot kills of dinos or humans. I wish the range on the one-shot kills was a LITTLE larger…as it is, you have to be literally right on top of your target. The worst part, however, is if your target moves, you slowly stab downward at the air, leaving you open to attack for a few precious seconds. Still, it’s a great melee weapon, and I find myself using it quite frequently.

Graphically, it’s fairly decent looking. It’s not going to win any awards, and sometimes the “walls” that enforce the extreme linearity spoil the atmosphere, but you occasionally come across huge vistas displaying the extensive vegetation of the planet. The sound design is excellent, with dinosaur shrieks and roars chilling your blood every time. Overall, it’s a fun game, worthy of carrying on the Turok tradition.

Oh, and don’t forget: tomorrow is 9/9/09, the ten year anniversary of the Dreamcast!

Musician’s block has placed itself firmly in my path once more.  I’m currently tapping on a boulder with an ice pick, but I will soon be picking up a sledgehammer when Sir Boulder isn’t paying attention. 

Production on IC 443 has been stopped, and the harder I’ve tried the less I have accomplished.  I decided to let it sit and stew for a little bit.  I intend to take another go at it this evening, and hopefully I will smash through the obstruction.  The soundscape was laid down without any issues, but now I have NO idea where to go.  I could just leave it as the album’s “super chill” track and move on, but there is too much potential here.  It’s as if someone placed a bowl of tasty food inside a cage, gave me a key to the cage, but I can’t find the lock anywhere.

Inspiration on where to go from here is more or less non-existent.  I feel like my only option is to start twisting knobs, moving faders, and pushing buttons until something jumps out at me, and then work with it from there.  It’s not quite what I had in mind when I started this track, but I think that is the path I will have to follow.  This may be a blessing in disguise, however…my original plans for IC 443 sounded much better in my head than they do coming out of a synth, and I think an experimental sound will fit in well, considering the track is supposed to be the aural equivalent of the Jellyfish Nebula (the common name for “IC 443″)

If progress is not apparent after this evening, IC 443 will be sent to deep freeze for storage, while a new specimen is placed under the microscope.