• Groupable tracks! I missed this one so much! When you work with 20 to 30 tracks at a time while some of them should have the same effects or automation it can be really difficult to realize this without having the possibility to group them.
• New automated crossfading features. E.g. useful when given a short sample and needing a long one: The short sample must be overlapped and overfaded several times with itself in order to create the long version. This process will be way faster then before when using the new Live.
• Better MIDI-Editor which enhances the workflow of reediting MIDI recordings.
• Transients! I need them to create soft and subtle tempo variations.
• Much more wicked stuff! This is what i want! Especially the wickedness …

So long, cowboy. As you can see, I really like this software. Screenshots will be posted later in a seperate article.

So, I’ve told you this because I own a drum, and drumming at 1 a.m. at home isn’t possible if you have neighbours you are at least a bit considerate of. Way better then to establish oneself outside! E.g. in some nice, little park. Certainly, there are  people living near there, but the place is not as narrow and constricted as an apartment building where people are stuck together like ants in an anthill. Let alone the special atmosphere of a park at night …

Thus we took my laptop, the mic, the drums, a bottle of wine and went out for a little drum session. And our expectations were not deceived: It was really cool and very quiet out there, only the water rushing and chuckling besides us. After having had some sips of wine and configured the recording equipment, we started. It was a bit like being aboriginal people participating in some sort of strange ritual, and I think that’s why we’ve finally decided there must be some invisible monsters coming at us to eat our balls and stuff! Hidden monsters from the world of illusion!! OMG!! We ran like lightning, you can hear that at the end of the recording. Perhaps I’ll use this as the basis for a new track …

The real beasts almost got us when we finally packed all the equipment and walked home: The police, onoze! Obviously some narrow-minded resident of the park called them … this bourgeois spurner of the primitive rites! We’ve been lucky bastards that we decamped soon enough.

Drums in the park

Download audio file (drums.mp3)

First, I decided to reinstall my Windoze cause of certain bugs. And I did so, reinstalled drivers and stuff, downloaded tons of updates, same procedure as every year. Only this time my C:/ drive was to small. To fight this problem I’ve downloaded some ominious freeware partition resizing tool, resized the partition what actually took about 4 hours and finally ended up with a boot screen that looks like … u know. I guess I fucked up the MBR, perhaps not, I dunno. Anyway, I couldnt repair it and now I find me sitting here and writing stupid blog entries while Windoze is reinstalling. Arg!

And as if this wasn’t bad enough, I can’t continue producing the track I was working at before this whole crash thing happened. ARRRG!

Update, 20:13:

Everthing allright now. Pheeww!

The Metaphorical Garden

Hope you like it! Anyway, I will not put it onto the upcoming Grub Brother album because it’s just to different, using no samples at all, but only synths and midi files.

As I’ve been creating this blog, the first album is on his way to completion. It will most probably be called “Grub Brother” (Surprise, surprise!) and feature about 6 or 7 tracks. The first four of them can be considered as being done (they’ll be undergoing only minor improvements), the 5th is half ready, the 6th and 7th one only ideas. I hope that I’ll be able – thanks to term break – to complete them during the next month. Take a look at the cover: Calm, isn’t it? It’s a picture I’ve taken after a rainy day in autumn at my fathers when the sun got through and made all the field billowing under a curtain of mist. If you want to listen to the tracks or download them, just visit my last.fm profile! C&C are welcome. I’m also thinking about uploading them here, but I’m not sure if I’ll manage to train WordPress to behave in a more pleasant way. Stay tuned.