Monthly Archives: April 2011

Sevcom closes CD shop.

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Advert: the Live To Air is happening.

It’s been a ride. Since 1998 sevcom has sold CDs online. We were one of the first – a raggedy thing run on slave labour and Stephen M Jones’ idealism. If ever Stephen or myself were to look at the numbers it would have been shut down years ago. But we did it anyway.

13 years later I’m beaten. Done in. Worn out.

We started when blank CDs reached 11 AUD dollars each. A sale of 12 USD meant we made around 2 dollars after postage. That margin grew and I was able to buy a few more burners and try out some fun stuff like transparent film and metal cases. It paid a bit better than a gig but thank God for my day job. Sometimes I pretended I wasn’t subsidising it. Those damn metal cases…

While CDs got cheaper the postage, paper and ink have steadily increased. In recent years a blank disc was around 50c, but the postage on each disc ended up about $5-6. That was OK while the exchange rate was about 60c US for 1 AUD but as the US started to slip into oblivion people bought less and expected to pay a lot less for it. Europe too has little time for music while staving off economic collapse. The final straw was Homeland Security charging 9 dollars to inspect packages. (USA: Plenty of money for weapons, no money for wages.)

And I don’t have the time any more to make these things. The time it takes to make a batch of discs is not viable as my treadmill of bills and debts get faster.

The number of online stores is cancerous and they are locked in a price war that we cannot beat. So we join. BandCamp is alright; it’s not independence, but that was lost a long time ago. Just join the rest. Move along citizen.

I like CDs. Uncompressed sound and a pretty cover. But we are becoming too poor to own real things. I say again – the 20th century was about creating cheap mass produced goods for all. The theme of the 21st century will be the divide between the physical rich and the virtual poor – bespoke items for the wealthy (vinyl in boxes!) MP3s and ePub books for you. A window for them and a screen saver for you. We fought it, but the law won.

If you want any physical items from me, you had best do it soon. I am not making any more and have a small inventory.

I’d like to thank all the people that put up with my lousy service, slow delivery, bent metal boxes, CAT HAIRS!!!1!! and packages that went missing. We were never Amazon.

Oh and ‘Jesus’ – the guy that ordered everything and then reversed the credit card as soon as they arrived, fuck you. A big fuck off also to all the MP3 blogs that uploaded my stuff. You talk like revolutionaries, but you are actually the traitors.

Twisted history

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ADVERTISEMENT : Apparently we may perform on radio station FBI on the 28th April around 9pm or so AEST. This is not confirmed. If so, they have a live stream on their web site. While I have your attention, can I just clarify that we will NOT PLAY AGAIN AFTER THE DATES ANNOUNCED. Anyone asks me about this I will be cross.

It was good to catch up with an old friend the other night, now with wife and 4 year old son. The man (nameless for reasons you’ll soon understand) is living in the USA deeply embedded in the infrastructure of finance, networks and databases that know more about you than you probably know yourself.

But we were talking about cowboy days, late 80s; the BBS scene, hackers and crackers and the other side. We’d met on Twisted Pair, the BBS that spawned Twister, Twister 2, and all the daughters up to the ill fated Twister 5, the collapse of which led to this one way blog. I don’t think it’ll hurt to tell that Twisted Pair had a secret area, in which select people had their fun. Back then it was all Amiga, and I was a lamer HEX hacker, somebody who searched through the hexadecimal of software looking for combinations of numbers that did some thing useful.

The most useful hack I did was the very first version of Lightwave 3D running in PAL. It was part of the video toaster which was NTSC only and so I guess NewTek thought it pointless making it work in European countries. But they coded it so all I did was find the sections that addressed the display memory, redid the maths, and fired it up until all the bits worked. Like I said, nothing fancy, but much appreciated at the time. If you were around you might have seen a ‘booped’ version. Yes, like:

Actually just now I remember I did the same thing for the first Photon Paint but Deluxe Paint was beyond me. Bloody EA had hard wired it all.

We talked about where people had gone and their conversion to honesty. Most of them I only knew by their screen names. Watching his son playing games on a phone we were worried about what our generation had done – our children are looking through a screen at everything, although I think they will rebel and as teenagers go about smashing computers and shaking real hands. Good for them.

I had to tell him what happened to Twister; a mailing list which was rather good, but eventually a phpBBS which sucked rather badly. I told him there was even a splinter called ‘Exiles’ and he thought that was hilarious. BBS community was dead by then, and the forces that broke it are still getting worse; anonymity, envy, celebrity, “friend” counts and the sale of privacy. It probably has to hit bottom before it bounces back.

Nostalgia is anti-historical, it denies events to make a privileged viewpoint. That night we talked about chiggers the way others talk about vinyl, with just as much surety. Everyone thinks they are recalling something authentic when the exact opposite is true.

Right now, I can’t wait to get away from music. Much more interested in chiggers.

Let’s take the piss out of another Australian institution.

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Right now I shouldn’t be spending any money, especially on worthless shit. But from the mail I’ve been getting I feel that I must honour my promise to take a look at the Fairlight CMI application for the iPad. Your sense of right and wrong, your insane attachment to the 1980s, your need for 5 minutes or less of bile – the power of the cloud compels me. So be it.

Fun fact: Severed Heads did NOT have a Fairlight computer musical instrument at any stage, despite assurances by ‘knowledgeable fans’. We had a CASSETTE of demos made on the Fairlight, which we ran through guitar pedals to make a track called CMID (CMI demonstration tape). What we had for a short while was a Fairlight CVI.

Fun fact 2: Stephen Jones did NOT design the CVI. He designed a machine called the DVS, of which there was one and didn’t work too well. The only reason being he was too poor to buy the parts he needed and so it ran on avocado and moths.

Being one of the very first samplers the CMI was a like a dog that walked on hind legs, never mind how well it did it. It is older than an Amiga. It is older than a Mirage. It is older than an AKAI 612. All of these things sound better than what you get here. Compared to anything you have used this sounds horrible and you’re not going to actually use it for anything so get that out of your mind straight away.

  • The samples are lofi, hissy, aliased and shorter than a bad root. And not lofi in the way that the Mirage was, which was actually pretty cool. I mean like the original SoundBlaster. The real machine had a low pass filter, this doesn’t. Fairlight claim that a low pass would use up too much CPU.
  • Samples don’t loop by default; you can make them but that sounds like driving two cars at each other.
  • Quite a few of the sounds have a click at the front. Usually the delicate ones.
  • Anyone who used a real Fairlight dipped it in reverberation. No such luck here.

What you are buying is ‘the CMI experience’, which is like the Ghost Train at Luna Park. It’s a big in joke – seeing as that’s actually the best thing about it I’m not going to give away any of the jokes.

Obligatory Kate Bush image. Mind you it does remind you that Lady Gaga ain't anything fresh.

There is absolutely no reason to buy the full version of this app. You are not going to use Page R, it is not as good as PRO16 on the Commodore 64. Put away your wallet.

Apple fans will be pleased to know there is both a cat and fart sample. You’ll be right at home.

Still on the iPad, we should look at the curious case of Morphwiz and Bebot. One has a singing robot and the other has a wizard but they actually sound and look pretty damn similar. I was kind of mystified how this came about until I saw that the Wizard guy demo’ed Bebot a while ago – I guess he liked it.

Then Stewart shows me Thumb Jam, and on the blurb is Mr. Wizard again! “The only problem I have with this app is that I did not make it myself!” Seems like Mr. Wizard has solved that problem. But they’re all different in a way. Bebot is the simplest, Morphwiz is kind of like Bebot Professional. I haven’t tried Thumb Jam. but it’s a sample player not a synthesiser.

Thanks all commentators. Reading your words I feel the toylike nature of the pad is mostly a Good Thing, if Ableton Live was fully available it would mean there was one work flow where right now there are at least two. But Shannon I have to say that as a complete Keynote whore – it’s not nearly the same. It’s all presets and half assed.

Add sixty bucks for our copy protection!

Today I heard that Pro Tools 9 license keys are being snapped off publicly accessible computers, possibly because putting the license for expensive software on a fragile plastic key is like leaving a pie in a window with a sign saying EAT ME. There may be a way that you can put a key on a server, but I can’t help but think the dongle is never going to work for teaching labs. The Kamp is going to add Ableton Live, part of the attraction is the copy protection is not made of plastic. Discussion about upgrading Pro Tools LE to 9 is ‘frank’, I find myself defending it, but this could be Stockholm Syndrome. Others say that Ableton Live is just fine for multitrack. Then there’s Logic which has its own pompom girls, and the Reaper freakers. Does your head in. Everybody has a favourite and no one can slam dunk a solution.

I guess if somebody held a gun at my head we’d all be using Ableton Live, but I do think it costs much too much for the average punter. MAX for Live is also stupidly expensive given that you also need MAX. And all that to get an LFO.

Of course FL Studio is only $99. But then it’s not professional.

These professionals would never use FL Studio because.

 

Somewhat less than Amazing and Magical.

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According to newspapers people all over the world are queuing up for iPads. Some reporters say that it could be weeks before you can have your hand rubbing oil all over a screen. Lies.

On Friday I waddled into the Mac store on UNSW campus, plunked down money and waddled out with toy. If one other person in the whole shop buying some headphones is a queue then I guess the demand is insatiable. Note I said TOY. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by claiming some academic or artistic hoo hah. Yes, it’s going to used in classes and live shows but c’mon people – you can employ a rice shaker for kindy – it doesn’t make it a research investment.

If you’ve been using an iPhone you’ll find that most of the software you already own is wasted on the pad – it sits limply in the middle, or can be blurred up to fit, neither particularly magical. There’s considerably less so called HD titles – obviously the phone is far more popular. Not a great evil but something that will force you back to the shop to find replacements.

My first stop was GarageBand as Stewart is using it and we need to share some notes for upcoming gigs. OSX GarageBand is already a cut down version of a real tool, and the Pad version is the emasculated remnant of that. You can open up a sampled piano and plink away at it. The samples become obviously strained at the edges of each sample zone and it’s kind of 1988 AKAI, but good enough. Record your tinkles as best you can on a plane of glass and find that you can’t go back and clean up the effort. So you decide to add some drums. There’s a cute drum kit on screen – the kick is loud, the snare is soft, how can we adjust the difference? Within minutes of trying out GarageBand I was at a dead end – things I needed to do were just not available. It’s a toy, a great toy, and reasonably priced. But it’s going to end up in the cupboard.

Let’s go professional! One of the things that iPad has that seems ultra-cool is Reactable. Originally $20K and yours for only $10 (or $13 in Australia even though our dollar is worth more. Apple Australia – home of petty penny pinching). OK so you drag blocks on the screen and rotate them to make little webs of interconnected noise. This takes a bit of trial and error. Right, I’ve added a couple of oscillators, let’s get another… what? Two oscillators, one filter – no, it can’t be, but it is – the most elaborate 2 Osc through one filter synthesiser on the market. What is the DAMN POINT of all that modularity when the configuration simply come down to playing some loops and 2 oscillators through a filter? Why in God’s name do you even NEED to have this metaphor when all you can do is a small set of variations on a patch that could be put together in SynthEdit? It even sounds like SynthEdit. No, SynthEdit sounds better. When reading reviews of Reactable you get three facts over and over – it’s expensive – it looks cool – and Bjerk used it on a live show. FUCK Reactable.

Avoid that and get Jasuto Pro instead. Jasuto is much more complex, much more difficult and rewarding, and if it comes across as borrowing Reactable’s mode of operation, it goes on to actually USE it with grown up modular components and screen geography. You can get PC and Mac versions of it as well, so you can run your patches on real machines.

And that’s a fundamental problem. Take the iMS20. It’s a MS20 emulation – but on a computer you could have more than one running, each polyphonic. Here KORG have done the best possible cut down – you get one monophonic MS20 and a 6 part ‘drum machine’. The drums are all custom samples of the MS20, and all channels are driven by hyped up versions of the analogue SQ10 sequencer. So think about it – there’s 7 possible MS20′s running off 7 SQ10′s and while six of them can’t be modulated or evolving you can still make up quite an orchestra. As somebody who once owned 3 real MS20′s and a SQ10 I was able to get some good shit happening pretty quickly and this is not a bad replica of the good old days of cable madness.

KORG!

Never had an Electribe but the same goes for this 90′s KORG drum machine. It’s for fiddling little loopy bits of analogue sounding drums while drug whacked and while you are never going to use it for symphonic rock it’s pretty good value. Mind you so is Soundrop for much the same reason.

I’m tempted to get Fairlight CMI, for the same reason that people paid to go see Charlie Sheen live. It’s going to be a huge disappointment, you know it will, but somehow that makes it all the more intriguing. Will I be like Kate Bush? Actually I’d rather have a CVI. Fairlight? Actually where are the VJ tools on this thing? It’s so obviously the point of a lightweight video player with touch controls.

Maybe I should have waited for the EEE Tablet, which will run full applications – Pro Tools, Live etc. But I guess there’s the possibility of a musical style here, maybe some more minimal composition, some of the kicking against the pricks that happened back when musical instruments were very limited. I made music on much less than this, perhaps better music. Let’s hope so, before the credit card bill comes in…