Disambiguation

in order to be more original and therefore funnier I have decided to make everyone who I presume reads my daily web comic update their book marks with no notice what-so-ever.

if you want to keep reading my daily attempts at humour (that's right humour is spelled with a U) you'll have to go to this domain and change your book marks.

grey sunny day redacted

I'm feeling in better spirits today and since my now deleted post I've thought better of myself for letting this upset me so much. Yes I want that synth, yes it'll take me more than a year if I have to buy it brand new and yes it can do everything I want it to (I should have said want rather than need in my previous post because the stuff I have already does everything I need it to do. My present situation is far from inadequate).

Anyway It's another amazing day and instead of sitting inside and bemoaning my financial situation I'm going to go out and enjoy myself. By yesterday evening the thing which depresed me the most wasn't my lack of funds, it was that I had wasted such a beautiful day indoors because I was making myself depressed.

I'm not going to do that today.

Yamaha REX 50 it's digital!

I had a pretty good pawnshop score today. I picked up a Yamaha REX 50 effects processor for $75.00 I plugged it into my polysynth (I have a weathered looking Portasound) and it's taken the cheezy discount synthesizer sounds of my keyboard and given them some much needed depth and bite. Also it looks like something New Order would have used and that thought makes me glow inside.

continuing to explore the Evolver and discovering some nice hidden things in some of the presets, you don't have to do too much to get them to sound more dynamic and it's hours of fun.

As for my Korg stuff it's still in the shop. I called Backline today to find out when it would be done and one of them is waiting on some parts. I'm not surprised VCO 2 and the KBD interface were always a bit buggy and I think there was a problem with the signal processor on it. I'm not expecting it will be very cheap if they had to order parts but I am very attached to my MS20 and Sequencer, I really think that as far as non-modular analog synthesizers go the MS20 is in a class all it's own and really represents the peak of Korg as a company. Compared to the MS2000 Analog Modeling synth and the Kaoscillator they are really more in the business of making expensive trinkets instead of really hard core and quality gear. Sure the original Kaos Pad is sweet but it's nothing to the MS line.

night of the vampire

too much coffee man

I've had too much coffee today, it only hit me now after finally getting some supper in me. I had my customary morning cup then about 7 I had a cup with a shot of espresso in it and now I just had a little more than a half cup with dinner and I'm feeling groovy.

I've had an awesome day!

Woke up had breakfast and updated the Christian Radical Blog and checked e-mails. Last night I found I had recieved some books in the mail from a comrade in the US and that was cool. I had a shower in Samaritan House's brand new shower stall and overhead fixture! it looks DIY because it is and it has the best settings, so much better than when it would hit my back and I'd have to do some minor yoga to wash my hair.

I have been on this diet for the past month and a bit and it's really beginning to show :)

Met one of the people I'll soon be working with at Tanglewood (I start in the first Saturday in June) and made arrangements for more studio time to put the last bit of work on the Desolation Sound album and then I went thrifting.

I don't know how many people know this about me but I love thrifting. I bet you're sitting there thinking "what are you talking talking about now Chris, what's thrifting?"

Thrifting is when you go to thrift stores randomly looking for treasure. I swear by it, Value Village and the Sally Ann, Hospital thrift stores and St. Vincent De Paul are like crack in store-form. I've been on a mission for a good punk rock vest and the first thing I need is a thrashed up jacket to make it out of. I was looking for black Denim but no luck. I think I might have something which will do but that's another story I want to tell you about the Salvation Army thrift store on 12th just East of Main st.

THIS PLACE IS LIKE THE SALLY ANN MOTHER SHIP! They have a furniture outlet where they are selling upright pianos for $300 and they're not too bad either.

but the good stuff is in their "As Is Bargain Nook" or as the uninitiated might call it "the basement". They have everything that's cool in a thrift store junk bin but it's like five or six thrift store junk bins in one! the air is cool and pungent and full of the sound of many hands rifling through piles of things.

I used to imagine that there was a place where all the lost dryer socks and favourite tapes from Junior High go when they inexplicably disappear. I would imaging a subterranean world with piles of tapes and mounds of videos and boxes upon boxes of old He-Man toys anyway if such a place were to exist outside my fantasy world it would be a lot like the basement of this thrift store. I've lived in Vancouver for more than a decade now and this is the first time I've ever been to that store. I got so many awesome tapes for sampling and listening and I joy Yvonne something and I'm totally amped on this place. So far the only thrift store that's rivalled it for me is the Delta Hospital Thrift Store in Ladner and that's only because I got two Sony three channel Analog Mixers and a Pong Table there for under thirty bucks.

Seriously, glitchy Pong with a console the size and shape of a kitchen table it can't be beat, except maybe by table sized Galaga but that's not the thing you often see at thrift stores and still I look for it.

Thrifting is also useful if you know about books and what has re-sale value because you can often buy great books in good condition for a song and then sell them to used bookstores for a small profit, if you're only kind of good at this then you may end up with some books left over and enough money to break even so it helps to go for the kinds of books you'd like to have around.

I have a documentary about thrifting someplace it's really a whole counterculture thing. Unfortunatly there are all these boutique-vintage type places now where they basically go to the thrift stores, buy all the coolest shit in the place and sell it at their own stores for way too much. Imagine all the old Iron Maiden T-shirts and musty smelling Sweater Vests and rodeo belt buckles except they cost nearly as much used as they did new. I'm not a big fan of the 25 dollar second hand t-shirt. And this is why I love thrifting.

oh fuck yah!

So I've been spending a lot of quality time with a Dave Smith Industries Evolver since my MS20 and SQ10 are in the shop having a checkup. and I've got to say that I've been programming some bad-ass music lately. The Evolver is the very first synthesizer I ever bought. I've owned an old Yamaha keyboard for years but I don't count it because I traded a book for it, this I actually bought. It's a tiny rectangular steel box with a row of knobs and another row of buttons and looks like this

it triggers itself with an 8/16 step sequencer and there's so much built into this thing that I really can't go into detail here but the Dave Smith Industries website will give you all the goods if you want to know about what this thing is capable of.

Some of the sequences I've made are so good that I can sit here and type this blog entry with it as background music and it sounds like it ought to be playing in a Goth Industrial club, seriously I could sample Interview With a Vampire and maybe some other dark stuff with this thing and it could be a full on industrial track.

This thing is so easy to play once you get used to the interface, it's all very intuitive: pick a row tweak knobs until you find something you like and repeat until you are ready to save it. The thing has four banks each with 128 spaces of memory so I could program 512 individual patches. The many of the factory presets are really something as well. It also has an internal signal processor so I could rout a guitar through it and there are 40 different ways I could get it to sound.

The thing is monophonic (can only play one note at a time) but Dave Smith has done some strange magic to it because it is waaaay more advanced than most classic monosynths. Part of it's appeal to me is that it doesn't require a keyboard, though it has full midi implementation
so I can (and have) plugged a midi controller into it before and used it like a regular synth but it's much more fun to program it with the built in sequencer. It also comes as a monosynth with it's own built in keyboard for an extra 500 dollars and there's a polyphonic version that has four voices (it can make up to four notes at once) but those are both too expensive and the added keyboard makes them impractical to me, I have enough keyboards in my life.

Two nights ago my friend James came over and we jammed out with electric mandolin the Evolver and my Yamaha being treated with a bunch of guitar pedals and it was the best jam I've had in about four years. I don't know if anybody who reads this blog is at all interested in synthesizers or making electronic music but if you are thinking about buying a musical instrument and have been thinking about analog synthesizers this one is far and away the one to buy. You can get a feel for it pretty easily, there's no special musical foreknowledge you need in order to make killer sounds and it costs a fraction of the cash that any other professional piece of gear does. (I bought mine on sale for $450.00 Canadian) And it comes with a power adapter that can fit plugs all over the world. (you could take it anywhere and it could fit in your carry on bag) . The thing is built like a tank and if you're anything like me, once you get used to the layout it's so much fun to play you'll want to spend hours with it.

Blacksploitation Vader and Van Damme pops a stiffy on Brazillian Television

heheheheheh