VexVox

Well, I finally did it -- I moved from Austin.

It took two years to line up the pieces to make it happen, but it's done. I live in Seattle now, close enough to Hawai´i to make traveling less arduous but far enough to keep me away from the orbit of familial crazy.

I live in a bona fide gay neighborhood now. I can walk or take public transportation, which actually is preferable since city planning in Seattle seems to be an oxymoron. (Take one wrong turn, and you'll find yourself on the other side of town.)

Seafood and Asian cuisine options are abundant, but of course, that means surrendering Papalote and Azul Tequila. But hey -- I can find plate lunches here. They won't give Grace's Inn any sleepless nights, but if I crave something from the islands, I don't have to make it myself.

Cedar season had to kick me in the nuts before I left Austin -- compounded by the fact the allergies really masked a stress-induced cold -- but I like the fact I'm spending my January free from the death grip of allergies.

My apartment has a balcony with the Space Needle squarely in view. I keep the vertical blinds open as much as possible because I love the view. I can see the Sound, the mountains, the downtown skyline. Back in Austin, I kept my vertical blinds closed because all I had look at was a swimming pool.

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I'm posting this entry from a hotel room in Seattle after spending the day hunting for an apartment.

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I'm pretty sure I'm two entries short of completing Holidailies, but given the extraordinary circumstances of the past month, I think I did well.

Of course, most of these entries were filler -- when in doubt, post some audio!

I think the topic whiplash of this past month is revealing -- first I talk at length about the death of my dad, then the instant I start working on music, he doesn't come up again. (I guess I'm not going to write that entry about how he ends up in my dreams for Holidailies. Maybe later.)

The story I'll stick to is that I spent a month back home in a pretty sub-optimal emotional environment, and I was all too eager to jump back into life as I'd known it.

Mostly, it's because I treated myself to some toys that really unleashed the creativity, something that wasn't much of an option during the lean times of the Fucking Recession. (Great, my ass.) I needed that.

Who knows if I'll do Holidailies again? Maybe next year, I'll post to my neglected tech blog.

Just when I thought I was all proud of myself for making my demos sound less demo-y, I decide to hear what my tracks sound like on my iPod. That's when I discovered -- there's no third dimension.

Yes, I was a good beginning mixer and made sure my instruments were panned in different parts of the stereo spectrum -- vocals and bass in the middle, guitars on the edges, keyboards off to either side. The drum samples, thankfully, already had their own panning. But everything was just up in front. There was no sense of depth, of front to back.

Which, of course, needs to be faked.

The stereo spectrum only determines the sideways orientation of sound, it doesn't do anything about depth. There is no close-far dial on the mixer.

And that's where long tutorials on the nature of sound come in. In short, I had to add reverb on everything to approximate the sense of a room, and I had to adjust that reverb to make one instrument seem more forward and backward than another. It can get tedious.

I did, however, finally learn what convolution reverb was and immediately put to use a SONAR plug-in that did just what I needed.

Yay! Depth!

Not so fast.

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Holidailies ends this week, and for this final stretch I'm going to be lazy and just post audio files.

Because really -- that's pretty much the big thing happening in my life right now. The life of a mad genius doesn't make for interesting reading. (Unless you're more "mad" than "genius".)

This time, I'm not going to post music written by me. Instead, I'll rely on Beethoven for that.

Back in the summer, I dropped $200 on an orchestral sample library called Miroslav Philharmonik. It covered a lot of ground for that price point, which is to say, it didn't catch everything. I'm not sure whether I could use this library to reproduce contemporary works.

Not being completely satisfied, I dropped another $300 on the Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Gold. That was half off the usual price. I haven't managed to finish inputting the score of a major work with this library. Maybe that's what I should do when I get sick of remixing.

Here, then, is the third movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C-minor:

Listen

And the fourth, which is a lot more substantial:

Listen

The two movements segue, so I'm including them both.

And no, that's not a live orchestra.