NewSc2

The day where girls have an excuse to dress slutty.

not that i’m complaining…

Download link: http://www.newsc2.com/audio/newsc2-chopin_op-9_2.mp3

left hand a bit too loud, some flourishes too mechanical-sounding, but a nice take. and damn you, wordpress. i’ve been trying to figure out how to embed a flash mp3 player for the past 2 hours.

Caught that new car commercial with the “This is Ground Control to Major Tom!” song. I love David Bowie.

Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles
I’m feeling very still…
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go…
Tell my wife I love her very much — she knows!

Ground control to Major Tom
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong…
Can you hear me Major Tom?

Trivia Update: Before I drifted off to sleep last night I finally remembered where else I’d heard those lines… They were in the intro of the Venture Bros. Season 1 “Ghosts of the Sargasso” episode (the one with the ghost pirate ship). Major Tom pilots an experimental spacecraft and it fails on him, and he says those words as he crashes.

I have 11 years of experience in an industry. And I’m only 24.

I work for a fine pen company, and I’ve been working for one since I was 13.

I guess I began as sort of a technical writer (you’d never guess after reading my last post).

The first company I worked for was Taiwanese, so they started me off by proofreading important e-mails and company literature, because my English was better than everybody else’s (I’m a native speaker). I eventually got assimilated into attending trade shows, running the business, and designing pens.

But all this time I haven’t really been into pens. I liked them, but fine writing wasn’t anywhere close to being a hobby. I rarely carried pens, and at work, I’d use a disposable rollerball.

Through it all, I’ve really wanted to truly appreciate fountain pens. Work becomes more enjoyable and easier to take on when you understand and learn to look for the fine details your customers are looking for too.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago we received some new prototype nibs from our supplier. Our old nibs had been having a small amount of ink flow issues, and it was such a relief to finally see something new.

I had to thoroughly test these new nibs before approval, so I took one of our newest fountain pens (a Momenta, pictured above), put the upgraded nib on, and kept it with me everywhere I went. I filled it with a bottle of Diamine Claret ink — a pink ink that dries almost raspberry.

A nice pen and a pretty ink deserves good paper, so I went out and purchased a pad of Rhodia paper. It’s not cheap — around $5 for a medium-sized pad, but it made a huge difference. Fountain pen ink is bright and water-based, so a smooth, thick, and dense paper (like the kind your checks come printed on) feels almost… sexual… underneath a nib. Once you write with good paper, you can’t go back to using regular notebooks — the ink feathers, and writing on both sides of a sheet renders it almost unreadable (bleed-through).

Needless to say — I’ve been kind of getting hooked, so I went out and bought some bottles of Waterman ink. Wow! Again, an amazing difference — some of the colors (especially Florida Blue) make my pen feel like a brand new one. The ink consistency is perfect. It dries fast, and it flows just right — not too watery, and not too thick.

And filling a pen with a new color makes me feel like a little kid again. I can’t help but smile like I’m in preschool, mixing colors and blowing on paint, or dipping a brush in water and “painting” on those pre-stained books. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch.

So I’ve been taking a lot more notes with all this new stationery. I always learned best by re-writing my notes and summarizing my textbooks before a final. Now I have a good excuse to go through all of the books and tutorials I’ve queued up — I’m just testing my nibs.

There’s just something about hand-writing a thought to really commit it to memory.

I’m finding my writing style evolving towards a weird form of diction. It’s becoming more… random streams of thought, and less organized.

I blame the Internet. I figured out where this all started from. I mean, I read a decent amount of books, and I read lots of professionally-written articles every day. But when I start rambling, in IMs or journal entries, my words and ideas start jumbling all over each other, and they come out like I’m on shrooms or something.

Anyway… texting, IMs, and l33tspeek have started to fundamentally and culturally change our my English grammar.

Like with texting — the whole point of a text is to pass along a message in, like, 2 lines or less (I feel sorry for people still texting on number pads). But even on smartphones, there’s no time or need for punctuation and proper grammar. Messages like “maybe silkys in 10?” make perfect sense — nobody has the time to read “Would you be willing to meet up at Silky’s in 10 minutes?”.

In IMs — the enter button has replaced all forms of closing punctuation. There’s no need for capitalization, no need for commas or semicolons — just hit enter and type your next thought in. There are no periods in conversation, and nobody ever uses them in IMs. I’m serious — go ahead and look through your IM history. I bet you 99% of them have no periods.

Emoticons, and statements like “??” and “ehh…” communicate feelings better than real sentences ever could.

And with l33tspeek, this new culture of internet grammar is changing our typed words. On forums, in games, in chat rooms (well, never mind, nobody uses those anymore), new words and expressions are encouraged and rewarded. Lol branched out to rofl and lawl, noob into nub, and others like pwn(ed, age, j00), diaf, come up all the time.

These reasons don’t just exist — they’re being practiced and reinforced every time you type out “omg that set = :O”. It’s become almost more common to talk to people in writing instead of using your voice.

So damn it all. All of my writing issues, all of the dozens of edits and re-edits, are because I can’t get over the hours and days I’ve spent communicating the spoken word through my fingers.

And don’t even get me started on Facebook’s “Tony is ____________” status updates. Referring to myself in the 3rd person = FTL. Why can’t we just write whatever we want in that spot?

10-13-2008-electro-trancition-melodicbass

I just finished putting together this short 3-song set. Actually… it’s more like 2 songs pieced together with a trancey-transition in between (aka trancition — ooh I’m so clever). As usual, the track isn’t arranged, but just a medley of ideas I put down and stretched out. 

I really should arrange a full song one of these days…

Song notes–

10/13/08 Logic Electronic Preset Song

- Made a song using Logic’s preset “Electronic” template
- Template has good drum sounds, ehh-ish synth sounds (a bit too trance for my liking), and decent bass sounds.
- Tip: Hit “A” to bring up track automation

Bars 1-16 - Electro Part
- Tried to add more elements, but nothing sounded right.
- “Dark Pluck Bass” is the channel preset used for the bassy lead. I automated the cutoff filter open/close for some added movement. (Note: Should extend the automation across a minute or two, not just 10 seconds)
- Note: Add some arpeggiated octaves or something to add melodic texture to the background “Classic Acid Bass” 

Bars 17-32 - Transition
- Note: I don’t mind the evolving chords here, when used as a transition, but later on I’d prefer less dissonant chords (see next note).
- The chords sound a bit too detuned from the D-D-D-D bass line.

Bars 49-64 - Melodic Bass
- Note: Again, try to figure out how to change the chord or re-tune the gated chord notes. 
- I rather liked this bass line here.  The sound itself is too thin, needs more oomph and spice, but the syncopation and the melodic-ness is what I was looking for. It’s a bit complex to be repeated indefinitely, so a few notes should be added/changed every 8 or 16 bars.

I would’ve worked harder to make the song more complete, but I dozed off about 2 or 3 times throughout the process. God I’m tired. 99

Just finished MacProVideo.com’s Logic ES2 tutorial. The tutorial was only 150min. long, but it took me about a week to study and practice. 

The ES2 is a software synthesizer that comes bundled with Logic Studio (Apple’s music production software suite). At first glance, it’s a pretty complicated synthesizer, with many different sections, but after the tutorial everything feels really simple to me. Last week I had a lot of questions about music and audio synthesis. But after going through the tutorial, I feel like I can go up to any synthesizer and make some cool sounds.

MacProVideo’s tutorials have all been really, really good. I downloaded the Logic 7 tutorial off Demonoid a few years ago, and it was so good I decided to purchase it and all the other music tutorials they had at the time. But that was a few years ago, and I’ve forgotten many techniques. And not to mention Apple’s updated Logic (from 7 to 8/Studio). I’ve scheduled this next week to go over another one of Logic’s software synths — the drum synth Ultrabeat — and I’ll try to brush up some other Logic techniques.

I’m also thinking about purchasing their Photoshop tutorials. They give frequent discounts — there’s even a discount for opting to instantly download the tutorial (as opposed to getting a DVD in the mail). It’s so much easier learning by seeing and hearing examples instead of just reading things from a book. Speaking of which, I have about 8 music books that I’ve barely touched. Sigh…