Please hurry the f*** up.

I own your Digi 002 rack along with Pro Tools LE version 7.something (Which I’ve upgraded once or twice in the past already. At a cost, of course). Please, hurry up with this upgrade. I know I rushed into installing Leopard when it really wasn’t a necessity. I know you like to take your time with your upgrades to ensure compatibility. But, come on! That’s your job. It’s been 5 months already since the operating system was released to the public. Finish up already!

These past two weeks have been nothing but creativity for me and my guitars (now hung on the walls of my living room). I’ve had to resort to my Korg D12 for my multitracking fix. It’s awful. Absolutely terrible to use. I’ve even decided to switch to Garageband for the time being. But alas, my 002 rack is my only audio interface and is unfortunately not compatible at all with this new operating system.

Please release an update soon. Thank you for your time.

I got two tickets for my Dad to finally see a Matt Good show last night. I think the final decision was for my Dad and my sister to go. Neither of them ended up going. Boo!

I had a dream like this:

If I was driving somewhere and felt a small pinch on, say, my hand. And I look down and its a tiny spider biting me. And his venom is poisoning me. And I died from the combination of venom and the inevitable car crash that would happen immediately after I died. I would really hope that the spider was from a swarm of spiders that would be the beginning of some crazy epidemic that the whole world would have to collaborate to fix (like a movie plot). Otherwise I would have died from a stupid tiny spider bite.

And she still has to work today because employees aren’t required to have sick days. To take the day off from work would use up a vacation day!

I have to go through my CDs (now in alphabetical and chronological order on a rack-thing in my foyer) to find out what albums I thought I had, but really don’t. Such as selections from the Tragically Hip catalog I’m still missing. Also, albums that I just still need to purchase. Below is, I think, my longest post. Enjoy:

Porcupine Tree | We Lost the Skyline

   This acoustic album was recorded at an in-store performance at Park Avenue CDs in Orlando, Florida. Steven Wilson, along with guitarist John Wesley, performed just over 30 minutes of material for around 200 fans. The set list contained a few rare gems such as “Normal” and “Drown With Me” (that’s nearly 1/4 of the album right there). Since these were performed acoustic, I was expecting something on the scale of disc two from In a Coma. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. There was no “acoustic re-working”, just repetitive strumming of the root chords with the occasional solo now and again. The empty space created by stripping away all drums, keyboard, bass guitar, and additional layers of vocals and guitars from an otherwise elaborate song was completely unattended.

Granted, the quality of the recording, as with all records touched by Steven Wilson, is phenomenal. My favorite bit is the banter (and failed start) at the beginning of “Normal”. My lease favorite bit is the end result of acoustifying “Even Less”. For a Porcupine Tree fan, this is a decent addition to their catalog to bring out once and a while for a “treat”. For someone not totally into progressive rock, have a listen to “Lazarus” or “Trains”. Both sound very pleasing.

Porcupine Tree | Arriving Somewhere…

   As usual my review is late. This DVD was released back in September of 2006, and I probably bought it early early 2007. Instead of watching it in a timely manner, I ripped the audio to MP3 (brilliant, I know). Fantastic show. Great set list. And, after finally sitting down to watch the video portion, terrific editing. I’m usually not a fan of watching live shows on DVD since they are usually boring, video-wise. This was visually compelling. The footage was edited by Lasse Hoile who edited the visual content that is displayed as a backdrop for other Porcupine Tree’s live shows as well as album art.

In addition, the surround sound content is such a big improvement from the MP3s I had listened to over and over again. I’d recommend “Hatesong” on a good set of surround sound speakers.

Since the image is slightly longer (and I’ve used the align=”right” tag) I’ll add a bit more text here: Occasionally a live concert will be released solely on DVD. This happens with stand-up comedy performances fairly frequently and was the case with “Arriving Somewhere…” at the time. For my own listening enjoyment, I like to rip the audio portion to MP3. I’ve used a program called DVD Audio Ripper in combination with something like DVD Backup (to remove copy protection). Honestly, I can’t see how doing so would be outside my legal rights from owning the DVD. It is the only methodology I know to take the content from one source (DVD) and move it to another (my iTunes). If, for some reason, this is illegal, I would like to know so that I may write another blog post complaining about it.

The Beatles | Love

   As promised, my review!

This album won a Grammy for Best Surround Sound. The “Best Surround Sound”. I had to repeat the phrase because I still can’t believe it won. As I detailed in an earlier post, this album was up against The Flaming Lips, Porcupine Tree, and two classical recordings. I’ll start with the classical recordings, both of which I have not heard specifically.Classical performances, mixed for surround sound, have a certain characteristic which is created by the engineer. The auditory “picture” could be painted so that the listener is in the middle of the ensemble with all the sections of the orchestra springing to life around them. Or, the expanded sound field could be used to recreate the effect of sitting in a concert hall. The reverberations can be more accurately portrayed coming from the rear speakers. Whatever the case may be, the difference is clear when switching between the stereo source and surround sound. Whether the additional speakers offer a subjective improvement or not, I personally would not consider the end result the “Best” in a surround sound category.

I am a firm believer that the genre of music will set the “improvement level” from a surround sound mix. Porcupine Tree and Flaming Lips are a perfect example of this. Where the engineer goes from there will determine a “good” mix from a “bad” one. Right off the bat, The Beatles would fall under the “low improvement” category. That style of music just isn’t conducive to an amazing surround sound mix. That said, I think that Love is great. I love, no pun intended, the re-combination thing they did, and they did a great job of remastering. Of course, the surround space was used, it just failed to astound me. One need only listen to the first track from each of these three albums and compare. Musical preference aside, The Beatles should not have won “Best Surround Sound”.

One argument is that the win was “making up for lost time”, having never won a Grammy during their peak. Which is completely unfair. I’m done.

Nine Inch Nails | Ghosts I-IV

   Nine Inch Nails broke away from their record label, Interscope, in October of last year. This marks their first release without a corporate contract. The album is a 36-track instrumental compilation, presented as 4 nine-track EP’s. The first of four (Ghosts I) can be downloaded for free from the official website. $5 gets you all 36 tracks as a digital download. $10 will get the download, plus a 2xCD which will be shipped April 8th.

I think this new, DRM-free, and label-free distribution of music is great. Now all the general public needs is a service similar to Last.fm which will be the marketing backbone that record labels would have normally provided for a band. I only knew of this release by text message from my friend. I highly advise everyone to support this music business model whenever you can. Radiohead’s album, PAY for it! Pay something at least.

I guess that’s it for the review of this album. So far, it’s good. I’ve only heard it maybe one time all the way through. Check it out.

That’s a lot of text! Leave a comment if you actually read through the whole thing, haha.

I wish it could be sunset all the time. How cool would that be? Of course, sunset for me would mean total darkness for someone else on Earth. Maybe we just need more than one Sun. I suppose if you position them properly… no, that wouldn’t work. Maybe multiple Suns in combination with big shield-type things so each area only sees one Sun and is blocked by all the others, and the position of the visible Sun would be sunset. Ok, this is getting dumb.

As I mentioned in another post, I did something to my back about a month ago. I finally saw a doctor last week who (after my $20 copay) suggested physical therapy and prescribed a month’s supply of diclofenac sodium to take twice daily (which I picked up for another $10 copay). The medicine is an anti-inflamatory thing, I didn’t really ask about the drug too much. I did inquire about any precautions I should take when going to the gym, since I haven’t been in a while. We went over everything, what I can and probably shouldn’t do to help my back out. So, I went today!

Basically, I’m a little worried. I was very very surprised at how flexible I was, especially having not been to the gym in a while. My back didn’t hurt at all, as in absolutely nothing whatsoever. And for some reason I was able to just “do” more than usual. That’s scary, considering before I started taking these drugs I had to brace myself when picking stuff up from the ground, or “work through the pain” when tying my shoes.

Crazy. Anyway, I have a bunch of music stuff I want to write about. Namely: Porcupine Tree’s “We Lost the Skyline” and “Arrive Somewhere…” DVD, The Beatles “Love” in surround sound, Nine Inch Nails’ latest “Ghosts I-IV”, and my current A-Z iPod exploration (I’m in the C’s). But all that will be for another post.

Until then, I got Twitter. Ha.

I know I’m super late in the game for this, deal with it. While browsing Porcupine Tree’s website I noticed something interesting. No, not that Lightbulb Sun is going to be reissued as a CD/DVD-A combo after undergoing a full re-mix and re-mastering by Steven Wilson. At the bottom of their sidebar, there was a small advertisement for the album Fear of a Blank Planet with a caption that read “Grammy Nominated - Best Surround Sound Album”.

Well, since the Grammy’s are long done, I checked the winner (as well as other nominees):
- At War With The Mystics 5.1 | The Flaming Lips
- Fear Of A Blank Planet | Porcupine Tree
- Grechaninov: Passion Week | Charles Bruffy
- Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5; Fantasia On A Theme | Thomas Tallis
And the winner:
- Love | The Beatles

I really think that The Beatles won just because “it’s the Beatles”. Granted, I haven’t listened to the remixed/remastered compilation yet. Both the Porcupine Tree and Flaming Lips albums are fantastic in surround sound. And from what I’ve heard of other classical recordings, 5.1 is stunning. Off to Amoeba at some point to see what all the fuss is about.

My Driver License came in the mail today!

I do believe some “Congratulations” are in order.

I have a very full, 5th generation, 30 GB iPod. A lot of my music is on there, scaled down. Example: Dream Theater. I’ve got all of their studio albums (and I think the official live albums as well), but left out albums like Forbidden Dreams, or Making of Scenes From A Memory. I managed to fit 5,202 songs. If we estimate (since I can’t look up the numbers officially), at 3 minutes a song, we’re looking at over 10 days worth of solid music. A small fraction of my entire iTunes library.

This morning, I decided to take on an epic task. Main Menu - Music - Songs - Play. My entire collection of songs, in alphabetical order. Of course, I’m still in the A’s at the moment (and just hit “A Change of Seasons” - 23 minutes long).

Figured I would share. We’ll see if I can finish.

This is a silly post. And I’m doing 2 in a day, which I dislike doing for a number of reasons. Mainly, I have a hard enough time updating regularly that if I have additional content, it would be beneficial to save it for later and spread things out a bit. Oh well.

Here’s a riddle. Is Matthew Good actually enjoying his tour so far? These are quotes from his blog:

(Re: Los Angeles, CA - March 11th) — “Last night’s show in LA was fun.”
(Re: San Francisco, CA - March 9th) — “Last night’s show in San Francisco was a lot of fun.”
(Re: Portland, OR - March 8th) — “Last night was a lot of fun.”
(Re: Seattle, WA, March 7th) — “Last night was fun though.”

Main Entry: fun
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: entertaining
Synonyms: amusing, boisterous, convivial, diverting, enjoyable, entertaining, good, lively, merry, pleasant, witty
Source: Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1)
Copyright © 2008 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.