The Mom Test

I come from a music/audio background. When I was in college, we were taught the Car Test, being budding recordists. The Car Test, for those who are not familiar, is when you take the mix you did on a pair of speakers that are designed for critical listening and play it on the shittiest set of speakers you can find. (This might be the iPod Headphones Test or the Laptop Speakers Test, but I learned it as the Car Test.)

This is Everything I Hate About Music

LOOK WHAT THE GTR CAN DO!!!!!!

No seriously, this is horrible, horrible, shit. Horrible. The people defending this as “noise” are fucking idiots. I’ve had the pleasure of working with some great avant-garde artists in my career as a producer, and every person that makes Noise music and is worth his salt would say the same.

I’m also a classically trained guitarist. The people saying “no but they’re really good technically” are fucking idiots as well. You could teach a monkey to play guitar like that. Can you type? You can play like that, too. Let’s hear one of those guys play Barrios’ “Julia Florida”. I bet it would sound like someone having a colonoscopy.

Storm Envy

It’s always interesting to see what a catalyst product will do to an industry.

Ruby Rags

There’s a place that makes shirts for Ruby/Rails geeks called RubyRags. The above picture is a rough sketch of my idea for a Ruby t-shirt. Maybe I am adding this to the list of jokes I need a whiteboard and a laser pointer to explain?

Lessons I Learned In The Trenches, No. 1

I consider myself very fortunate to be making a decent living doing several different things with music. This morning, I was reflecting on some very simple things I’ve learned over the last 5 or so years of being a real “professional”. I wish it didn’t take so long to learn these things, but I suppose such is the nature of being in a profession where you never stop learning. Here are a few things to start the ball rolling.

If you happen to stumble upon this, I hope it helps.

Something to Put on the Fridge

The track on this video is one I produced/wrote a few years ago with The Bird Cage Theater, called “Depression”. I’m still not sure of the name of the guy who shot/directed/produced this video for us, but it’s brilliant and it just did really well at a film festival down in Costa Rica.

¡Felicitaciones y buen trabajo a todos!

Open Source Ghetto In Need of Police

I’ve been writing Java code for a while now. I’m good with it, can manipulate it to do my bidding, create something from nothing rather than depend completely on its massive collection of libraries, etc..

Recently I started using Rails, and I like it, for the most part.

But I’ve written a program with a bunch of Javascript, and I need to somehow get data associated with the Java variables into a Rails database. Like an asshole, I thought “oh, I bet the Rails Wiki has some good info on this”.

Pro Tools 8

First, a disclaimer:

I am, and have always been, a Pro Tools guy. I am completely aware of all the shortcomings, but I do not hesitate to say that I swear by it. For me, it is an extension of my brain and allows me to keep the size of my “Thought -> Action” buffer as close to zero as it can be.

From what I have read about version 8, it seems like Digidesign finally gets it. The last couple of version updates have been trailing behind other DAWs, but 8 seems to be ponying up and delivering more. There’s more stuff that makes me say “Thank God” than makes me say “Oh. Neat. I might use that someday”.

“Cool Trick” or “Old News”

This might be totally old news for most of you, but I think this is a good hack.

We all know we can download YouTube movies with the activity monitor in Safari, right? Well, we can, but the resultant file is an FLV and yet it can’t be viewed using any conventional playback program, including Flash Player.

Here’s where I always find myself having to download some video compressor that has all its menus in Cyrillic and an icon that actually is a Trojan Horse.

But I think I inadvertently found a very elegant and trustworthy solution to this last night. Again, I’m sorry if this is like listening to your grandfather talk about how useful HAM radio used to be, but I think this is useful, so I’m just putting it out there to help.