a journal of the one man revolution

very belated

2009-01-13T13:12:00.000-08:00

It would seem that I've been away from this blog for a lot longer than I had originally planned.

A lot's happened mostly just being caught up in the married life, but also I got work on a website, it's an online support community for people with mental illness. I'm waiting on the very final version of my CD and planning the next one. I started and then neglected a blog for wedding and honeymoon photos and I got a patronage as a musician, I get money enough for my wife and I to live on and a work space provided that I am making and recording music. It's pretty exciting and a real morale boost to know that someone out there believes enough in my music that they'd pony up that kind of cash.

I went looking at a studio space yesterday in East Van and it looked good it was already sound proofed and seemed a reasonable rent. I'm still looking but nothing else has really come up in the past couple of days It would be nice to set up in a place with more direct light but anywhere else would need to be soundproofed and well lets just wait and see how things turn out.

Right now I've got to go and get some work done hopefully I'll have more to say soon... as in sooner than the last time I said anything like that.

Hey Guess What...

2008-08-31T21:22:00.001-07:00

I'm still here

2008-07-29T00:26:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd post here to re-affirm that I'm not going to let this blog lay fallow. I was going to write a different post but a public blog is not the right place for it. maybe I should start keeping a journal again?

I said it and now I did it!

2008-07-09T03:33:00.000-07:00

So you know how a couple of posts ago I said I might move to a new location with more specifically musical intentions...

well I just started that new blog here I plan on keeping this one up but I'm not certain if or how often I'll be updating it. I'll probably keep posting here occasionally since there's advantage to having a personal blog but only time will tell.

ok so go to http://wiresource.blogspot.com/ and tell everyone you know to go there too. Also if you have electronic musical instruments that you want reviewed send them to me and I'll review them.

Also, give me all your money.

Shut That Fucking Music Off!

2008-07-07T01:48:00.000-07:00

Honestly I'm surprised that it's taken so long for anyone to complain. I was having a great old time with the MS20 and Sr. Vikki knocked on my door and asked if I had heard a shout I told her I hadn't and she said that she had heard someone shout "shut that fucking music off!" from somewhere outside.

Again, I'm surprised that it's taken so long, sometimes when I'm programming I get tranced out and then it's dawn and I can't keep going any longer because my body's given out I can't tell you how often that's happened but I know it's not irregular or abnormal for me especially when I've had too much coffee or red bull. Anyway the shout happened at midnight so I'm going to just take the message to heart and be grateful that I had so many good months of late night analog jams.

Also I've just discovered another music blog which has been very interesting to read go here and tell everyone else you know to go here too.

Also I have been discovering the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and playing with Garageband. I heart Radiophonic music. Also Hugh LeCaine. And Don Buchla

Delia Derbyshire is really awsome

2008-07-07T01:47:00.000-07:00

steam punk modular synth??!?!

2008-07-02T20:58:00.001-07:00

I can feel a change in the air

2008-06-26T01:23:00.000-07:00

I've been giving this a lot of thought lately and I've decided to put an end to "The Journal of the One Man Revolution" at least in it's current incarnation. I haven't done anything with this blog that I had intended when I moved off of Live Journal. That's not to say I've done nothing I set out to. Since starting this blog I've gone on to do wonderful stuff at The Christian Radical Blog and my spiritual life is far from being at a stand still.

I guess that the thing is that I'm not much of a personal blogger. I don't use this as an actual journal and I rarely keep one on paper I have hangups about recording long pieces of my life in that way which I'll spare you. Also as you know I've gone from occasionally ranting about my life to constantly ranting about synth gear, electronic music and wanting more synth gear.

I'm nearing a personal goal of having the money to buy something modular for my rig and what I hope will begin a long but exciting process not only of accumulating new modules to create a truly portable and extremly versatile synth of my own but also to compliment the mini studio I've started in my room.

I've also become aware of how little time I've been devoting to other things in my life, specifically my guitar. When I began to learn subtractive synthesis and the MS20 I hoped to integrate the two disciplines but in the past few months synthesis has overtaken my guitar to the point where I need to devote a lot of time to get back what I've started to loose both in calluses and in practice.

Also Sumer is here and that means busking is possible and I want to do it.

This I suppose is tangential but it has a point and the point is that with the Christian Radical in both blog and zine form taking on average an hour and a half every day and a webcomic which needs updating every day and a hankering to make musical noise and write about it I'm changing the nature, name and look of this blog very soon. I've got a name and I've got some ideas for what I hope to do with it but you can be assured that it's going to be music oriented and casualy updated, essentially when I have things to write about and things to post.

I need a couple of days to figure out how to make the requisite changes here and whether or not to change the URL as well as the title and look of the blog. We'll see soon enough. For now I'm just writing to express my intentions, I'm not sure if anyone other than my mom and occasionally a hand full of my friends read this site to begin with but in case you are a regular reader and come here one day to discover that it's no longer the same place I hope you won't be disappointed, and I hope you stick around.

The nature of every revolution is change, like a fire which takes out all the dead wood in the forest and creates nurse logs for the seedlings to be born out of. In the all consuming spirit of this one man revolution I'll be burning this old blog out with the hope of birthing something new from its ashes.

And now for some robots playing rock music

keytars rule also modular indecision time 2008

2008-06-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

So I just found this on youtube and thought I'd share the love.

Speaking of love and the sharing of it I got me my MS20 and SQ10 back from the shop all restored and re-capped and tuned up and ready for action. created a bad-ass sounding patch with the sequencer and then I had to go to work. I am having a lot of fun with the newly restored External Signal Processor though I plugged tablebeast into it and circuit-bent my synth it sounded much nicer through the MS20 than through the Evolver. I also patched my portasound through it and have been experimenting with that too. I'm so happy to have my whole set-up back it makes me feel all awesome inside.

On a related note (no pun intended) I'm weighing my options as far as new modular equipment goes. Richard at Backline has an MOTM synthesizer that he wants to sell for 9 grand. I don't have that much but I do have three grand I've been saving for this very sort of thing. In a couple of weeks I will be able to afford a 22 space dotcom synthesizer (they make updated moog-style modular stuff) or I could go into debt and put it down on the MOTM. I suspect I'm getting ahead of myself and I'll only know how I feel about all this after playing the MOTM for myself and thinking further. I've known about this particular synth for sale for some months now and seeing as it's the owner of Backline's synthesizer I feel a lot more certain that I would get exactly what I paid for (a fully functioning modular synth with all modern modules in a 44space cabinet with another empty cabinet on to for later expansion and a whole shit load of patch cords). I don't suspect this would be a bad deal the question is more about wether I can pay it off in a reasonable time and whether I want to go into debt. a 22space dotcom isn't a bad start at all but next to this one it feels kind of like a compromise, there's also the added bonus of not having to pay shipping, duty, and freight costs and I could take it home that day instead of waiting 6 to 8 weeks for it to come up from Texas. Well, I'll be going to Backline on Saturday to try it out and find out how much Richard would want each month in payment I will suspect that he will want more than I could afford anyway but the thing is there and I would cream myself to have it so I've got nothing to loose for trying.

If ever there were a reason to boycott Ray Kurzweil's musical instruments

2008-06-13T02:01:00.000-07:00

this would be it

When I first heard about Ray Kurzweil it was in connection with his work in voice synthesis, he created a whole lot of really innovative software that emulated the human voice better than anything before. If it hadn't been for this man millions of illiterate people would be incapable of using computers, if it weren't for this man's work Stephen Hawking would have no voice. My family bought his reading software many years ago and I used it to sample computers reading stuff for my music concrete.

I later learned about his bizarre yet understandable wish to live long enough to live forever when his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology came out after readng a review I became somewhat further endeared because I have a fondness for mad scientists. But learning about his wholesale support for weapons technology and pre-emptive military doctrine have soured me about this guy.

It irks me that a man so ingenious as to do groundbreaking work in reading software for illiterate kids and also some of the meanest looking rack mounted synths on the market would be so gung ho about killing people. It's like finding out Santaclause exists but he's a serial rapist in his spare time.

Ok so that's hyperbole but I hope you see where I'm coming from.

anyway for the handfull of people interested enough in this blog to keep reading it since it became mostly about synthesizers the hypertext at the top may be of some interest. I kind of think it would be cool if some people in electronic music and production were to start a boycott of this man's tech but at the same time I am fully aware that it's wishful thinking on my part and it's not like I could have ever afforded anything of his first hand to begin with. Besides, I don't like the aesthetic of his keyboards and I don't really do rack mounted gear.

what I've been talking about

2008-06-11T02:12:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me that I never posted anything about what an FB01 is or how I got it. I picked this up from the same pawn shop I got the REX50 from and it sort of sat on my amplifier looking sad with nothing but a soon-to-be-out-of-my-life prophet 600 to trigger it. I liked the sounds but didn't really know what to do with it until someone at the synthesizers.com forum hinted at how to use the Evolver as a midi trigger. I gave it a try and after a couple of false starts and a look over the instruction manual I brought it to life.

The FB-01 is simply an inexpensive, 8 part multitimbral digital FM synth module. It's only a 4-operator synth which is less than, say a DX-7. This simply means its sounds are not quite as good. You will need an external MIDI system exclusive editor to edit the patches. This can be accomplished by a dedicated editor program like Unisyn, or by creating SysEx control messages within your sequencing program. The FB-01 has a lot of organ, piano, brass, bass, guitar, percussion, and lead sounds. Basically this is a good source of typical FM-sounds at a low price. It is used by Hardfloor and Moog Cookbook.

taken from vintage synth explorer

tablebeast: the source of uncertainty

2008-06-10T23:32:00.000-07:00

Been rocking the tablebeast today with the Evolver as backing

this thing shreds but in some very unpredictable ways. I've been trying to suss out the verious bends inside the patch bay. I figure that it can't be totally random inside, and I think I'm right. The dude who made this thing has in fact wired certain sections to different levels of the patch bay, for instance drum sounds are predominantly on the upper two or three rows of RCA jacks while keyboard function and malfunction are the middle and I think that sampling is the bottom but it's too early to be certain.

This thing ought to have been called the tablebeats because of the badass casio drum tracks it can lay down and believe me it loves to lay this shit down. I'll be patching on some piano riff and it will just automatically trigger the drum machine some how and you can get it to do all sorts of complicated patterns and fills just by moving the RCA cables around. I almost want to sell my drum machine.

(time lapse 3 1/2 hours later)

I've been at it some more. Tablebeast is best heard solo so far anyway. I put it through the Evolver and used the midi out to sequence some rhythm with my FB01 (it's wicked good at chiming sounds and clashing sounds also the strings aren't that bad).

Anyway running the tablebeast trough the Evolver's filter section didn't do too much for it except muddy the sounds and bends. I had a couple patches which sounded like evil laughter but in the end it was very difficult to tell what was Evolver noise and what was the tablebeast. In the end I plugged it back into it's own input and played around on it while the evolver interfaced with the FB01. I will probably post more about all this when I get my MS20 back I'll write up something about tablebeast and co. once I've been able to run them through the signal processor on that. I am hoping that I can get it to really effect the korg hardcore.

correction

2008-06-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

the Cabaret Voltaire stuff I mentioned was done in 1974 not 1978 sorry for the confusion.

I never thought I'd see the day when I thought Furby's were cool

2008-06-10T23:28:00.000-07:00

Each furby has 4 controls: mute, crash, loop and reset. The handle turns 8 cams which operate corresponding microswitches to create interesting rhythmic patterns. Part of the 'setting up' section at the beginning has been fast forwarded.

humble beginnings or noisy disturbance... maybe a little of both?

2008-06-09T02:46:00.000-07:00

Got together with James tonight and had a Desolation Sound jam. It was really awsome and sort of reminded me of disk 1 of the Cabaret Voltaire Attic Tapes box set. The stuff from 1978 when they were basically just playing around running clarinets through an AKS Synthi and reading into a vocoder. James ran his electric mandolin through my Evolver while it triggered the FB01 and I played accompaniment on my Yamaha Portasound and REX50. Also I added a new piece to my burgeoning studio, I bought a circuit bent Cassio. It was bent by this dude who did one exactly like it for Trent Reznor. It looks like this: The thing's called a Tablebeast and it's basically a mini cassio sampling keyboard like the kind that the guys at homestarruner.com use to make their cartoon music, only this thing has a lot of ways to re-wire it using RCA cables. This thing is great, it can lay down some wicked cassio beats and wreak havoc with short samples from tape and the sound engine in this thing does much more convincing emulations than my Portasound. I never really thought much of these little cassio guys until I playe this one un-patched (it almost sounds like the things it's supposed to. Unlike the Yamaha which couldn't make a convincing piano sound to save the universe. I might try and do a simmilar set of bends to that one some day, for now I'm having fun ripping up noise with the tablebeast. I'm expecting to get my MS20 out of Backline soon and when I do I'm going to have a blast seeing all the different ways I can interface and program things.

I'm still saving for a modular system but I'm going to start with one that's about a quarter of the size of the one I'd like, partially because it's less overwhelming to learn how to patch 22 spaces of modules than 88, and also because I could afford a 22 space system in a couple of months (like maybe two at the most) while buying anything larger would mean waiting a lot longer. Also everyone I've talked to who knows about this sort of thing has told me that this is the way to do it, start small and expand based on budget and need. Besides a portable 22 is way more gig-able than a portable 88 and much more size friendly too. I'm really stoked on what James and I were doing and I'm looking forward to next thursday afternoon when we're going to do it some more. I'll post more about my tablebeast as I learn to do more with it.

Maybe one day I'll turn into one of those synthesizer geeks who make videos of themselves rocking their gear and post it to youtube...

It's Alive!!!

2008-06-07T22:38:00.000-07:00

Tonight I figured out how to trigger the FB01 with my Evolver! I know that might not seem very impressive to you but it's damn awesome to me. This means I can use it without digging around to find my midi keyboard and it also means that I can use the Evolver to trigger other things (like a modular system).

Bo Diddley December 30, 1928 - June 2, 2008 RIP

2008-06-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Times Online
June 3, 2008

“I don’t sound like nobody!” was Bo Diddley’s maxim in the 1950s, but over the decades dozens have tried to sound like him. Often imitated but not always acknowledged, the influence of the Bo Diddley beat — driving and relentless like the chant of a chain gang — is heard clearest and most famously on the Rolling Stones’ Not Fade Away. But that sound, which Bo Diddley called his “tradesman’s knock”, is just as discernible on U2’s Desire, or versions of the garage classic I Want Candy recorded by the Strangeloves and Bow Wow Wow two decades apart, or on George Michael’s Faith.

Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry aside, arguably none of the first generation of American rock’n’rollers had a greater impact on the subsequent course of popular music. Along with Berry, Diddley was also one of the first black performers to “cross over” and enjoy success in the predominantly white pop chart of the time. Among the classic singles to his name, all driven by the primitive but irresistible beat he likened to a freight train, were Diddy Wah Diddy, Who Do You Love?, Mona, You Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at its Cover, Road Runner and Say Man. The latter gave him his biggest American hit, but he also had a huge influence on the British beat boom of the 1960s. In addition to the Rolling Stones, those who covered his songs included the Kinks, the Animals, Manfred Mann and the Yardbirds, while the Pretty Things named themselves after one of his songs.

Bo Diddley, rock’n’roll singer, songwriter and guitarist, was born on December 30, 1928. He died on June 2, 2008, aged 79

read the whole article here

Jean Michel Basquiat

2008-06-03T15:40:00.001-07:00

best concert ever

2008-06-03T00:46:00.000-07:00

Oh shit I saw Joan of Arc tonight and it was one of the best live music events of my whole life. I've been waiting for these guys to come to Vancouver since they released The Gap back in 2002 I hope someone put stuff on youtube because that was amazing.

I think it made my week.

Disambiguation

2008-05-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-24T02:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-21T23:31:00.001-07:00

too much coffee man

2008-05-21T22:27:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-20T23:41:00.001-07:00

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.