I have had it up to here* with the construction next door. They seem to be removing the majority of the pub and replacing it with different pub, and the sound of power tools vibrating through the wall for the majority of the day is rather annoying. Sounds like angry whales crossed with a trip to the dentist.
And they’re apparently going to be doing it until Christmas!!!
Good thing I don’t work in a recording studio or anything.
Oh wait…
* – not an entirely successful turn of phrase without a visual referece, on reflection. Imagine me holding my hand up above my head and it works (marginally) better.
I’m trying to resist the urge to go out and by another Jasper Fforde novel. I’ve recently finished the penultimate (so far) in the Thursday Next series, and I’d love to keep going, but I’m mindful of the fact that once I’m done with it, that’s the last of the series for a good while. And that’ll make me sad.
Plus I probably shouldn’t be dropping $22.95 on a book when I still owe Corny some dollars, and while we’re looking to buy a house.
Which reminds me – we’re looking to buy a house 
Quite possibly the most stupid decision in the world given the current financial situation, but then again the other 50% of the analysts seem to think it’s a very good time to be buying. So what can you do? I figure jump on board and then see which way it takes you. Wisdom’s easy in hindsight, and all that.
I mean what’s the worst that could happen?
Published on
October 7, 2008 in
soapbox.
Christmas is coming…
Well actually it’s not due for nearly a quarter of a year just yet, but it hasn’t stopped the retail centres of Hobart from starting to put trees and decorations on the shelves. I made an anticipatory joke about it as we got back from our honeymoon, and was a little surprised to see that reality had overtaken my sarcasm.
But what Christmas in the city tends to remind me of is carols, and the cacophony of musical dissonance. I’m not talking about dissonance in the sense of any specific christmas ditties – Silent Night and Jingle Bells are hardly replete with tritones – but the surreal wash of conflicting tuneage that you get as you walk past shop after shop, each blasting its own choice of holiday cheer. I’ll never really know what ADHD feels like (actually some people might take issue with that) but I can imagine that it might be something like the feeling you get as your brain attempts to track 5 familiar but unrelated melodies, diverting any additional computational power it might need from other activites like, oh… intelligible speech, or not running into walls.
I had a similar moment this-morning on the bus. The drivers tend to play 7HOFM, which is the local middle-of-the-road commercial station. Nothing too objectionable music-wise, and the “zany morning show banter” is just shy enough of completely mindless that it keeps me from wanting to jump out the window onto the highway. I generally read a book anyway, and there’s nothing on the radio that’s so distracting as to cause any problems there.
Except occasionally – like today – you’ll get someone who decides that an appropriate volume for their iPod headphones is the one that allows everyone within a 4-seat radius to hear what they’ve decided to listen to. He was three seats away from me, and across the aisle, and the leakage from his headphones was actually drowning out the radio in the speaker directly above me.
At the risk of sounding like a bit of an old fart (actually, I think I may have crossed that threshold somewhere in the last couple of paragraphs), WHY do people have to listen so loud?! I mean, hey… I’ve been playing in live bands at pubs since I was 16, and I absolutely understand the appeal of volume and dynamics when it comes to the enjoyment of music. But there comes a point of diminishing returns, and I’d say if your earbuds are running hard enough they can actually function as heating elements to keep your head warm, you’ve possibly passed that point.
Ok, so Pro Tools 8 was announced at the AES show over the weekend, and they’ve been busy lads indeed. Lots of extra plugins, increased track counts, lots of MIDI love, notation editor, elastic pitch, and a very pretty revamped interface. Look at it up there, looking all smooth and metallic and… well, a lot like Logic 8, really
I’ll upgrade, if only to keep current with my knowledge of the platform, but I must admit that once the excitement wears off there appears to be a lot of catch up being played here.
I have this constant love/hate thing with Pro Tools. If I’m being honest, I’ll have to say that to some degree it’s just tall-poppy syndrome. It really rankles when people who don’t really know about the alternatives won’t look at you seriously unless you’re using Pro Tools. You’re not going to veto a writer because they use a certain brand of pencil, or a photographer who uses a Nikon rather than a Canon, or whatever. But people seem to have this raging love for Pro Tools to the detriment of some (arguably superior) competitors. Which is not to say it’s a bad product, which it absolutely isn’t. But it’s not the only product.
Is it because it has “Pro” in the title?
I don’t know.
And despite my little diatribe there, every time a new version comes along, I still feel compelled to take a look. Ah Digidesign, you seductive little minx.
Save for a bit of wood-working and an LCD monitor (which will have to wait a paycheque or two) the studio is complete once again.
Oh, and a rubber foot for my left side monitor.
I’ve set up the EMU and the Pro Tools box, as I’m determined to get back up to speed with Pro Tools. I only bought the thing back in ’07 because I thought I would need the platform under my belt for my current job, only to find they’d bought a SADiE in the meantime and there was no Pro Tools knowledge required at all! But I’ve been hearing some very good rumours about the imminent arrival of Pro Tools 8, and it’s encouraged me to give it another spin.
I have to stay at home all day tomorrow to await the delivery of our new fridge (thank you to all who gave us Harvey Norman vouchers at the wedding – defrosting is about to leave our lives, thank goodness) so I think I’ll take the opportunity to update all my RTAS plugins and record a couple of vocal demo tracks I’ve been meaning to get to.
An exciting life indeed…
Published on
October 2, 2008 in
Personal.
Ahhh, the indescribeable joys of house-hunting. What started as a whimsical “what if…” discussion a week or two ago has snowballed into a fully fledged procedure. Almost a plan if you can fathom it!
So we’ve been talking to financey folks, and to real-estatey folks, and generally getting frustrated in all the ways that one normally gets frustrated in this situation. Disagreements over details, money, over-zealous family members, balancing notions of “conventional wisdom” against doing what feels right… Actually it’s a lot like planning the wedding, now I think about it.
And that worked out pretty well