Chip McDonald

(edited: potentially offensive to Andy Wallace content not intended) "TCL television speakers".

Craig, did you hear Bob Bradshaw giving you credit on the ToneTalk video podcast, for pedal switching systems...?

That's cherry picking. There is something odd going on with spell check in general. The first iteration of QuickKey was brilliant, it was almost error free for me - but then it started get crummy, I went back to Google's keyboard, and now it's... horrid, I've turned it off. That's not a.i., that's humans trying to tinker around with something to "make it better", maybe for job security. Same goes for Google Voice. Around late 2018 it was amazing (and considering they could use that back end for their spell check - why is it they can translate what you're saying more accurately than what you're typing? I don't buy that...), then it started getting weird. And now - again, it almost doesn't work. I had gotten completely used to not typing in anything, requesting songs by speaking out loud, hardly ever used the keypad; then it just went sideways. I can't imagine Google's engineers actually use their own product? Although I suspect it may work perfect on a Google Pixel.... Within 5 years it will be so integrated that for big productions like that, they won't let anything go from the "live" feed that isn't massaged by a.i. to look and sound perfect, even if the artist falls off the stage and is not longer even in the camera shot. It will be running serially so that there won't be any interruption, and you'll never know. "Auto-performance" in real time.

I'm surprised one of the CPAP companies haven't made a kit to modify a CPAP mask//systto have a N95-100 filter on it. It seems odd to me the CPAP companies have not tried to market a mask system for the medical industry. Friends working in hospitals are having to rely on generic masks, that are not perfectly air tight - CPAP silicone masks are way superior, and if you took just the seal/frame part of the mask and modded it to clamp filter paper over it, you'd have a much better mask.

There is something... strange going on with thymol. My wife ordered a couple of cans of the Second Generation spray back when Lysol disappeared (and still hasn't returned....? ) and what I read back in April runs counter to what one sees now about the efficacy of thymol on *viruses*. It seemed ineffective based on studies I read back then, but now there are new studies... which is... interesting. But more interesting to me is far-UV-C light, which apparently kills coronavirus but supposedly isn't destructive to human tissue. Which I don't know if I'm brave enough to trust that, either, but there are existing UV systems for disinfecting rooms hospitals use, and ultra-super sketchy handheld devices you can get from China, that you can see Median people demonstrate on YouTube without regard to their corneas or skin. If i drove an Uber I would plexiglas off my seat from the rest of the car, there is no way of actively sanitizing air in that close of a distance without resorting to Trump Medicine involving breathing Lysol or injecting it.

If we were an actual civilized society there would be repercussions for creating situations that potentially could harm people.

It would be insane. "Trade Show Cough" was a thing already! NAMM could do something clever and have a "virtual" trade show based around a video chat rooms arranged by a "floor map". You could see icons of people who are in said chat rooms, click on it as see whatever live demo is happening, see icons of other people. Different than what I've seen trade shows do recently, which is just "schedule a q&a". This would require exhibitors to have someone "on duty" during the "show hours", and it would be more free form, and in turn maybe more enticing for people who would otherwise give it a pass, if they just do the same "Join the Q&A for the new Zonkertech Fermion Humbucker at 2:30 p.m.". You go to trade shows with a loose time frame, not a "I've got a class to go to at 11:00" mentality. Or maybe not. People are increasingly throwing caution to the wind and being slutty with their personal lymphocyte environment, picking up a guitar handled by 100 random people I suppose doesn't bother the Median.

On a tangent your other thread, "Disaster Fatigue": People will get increasingly loose with their covid protocol as time passes. But not only that, ... I see over and over, (and this started months ago) People with Authority, school district leaders, political leaders, even hospital adminsitrators say the most ignorantly ridiculous things about "what the situation is going to be like in a few months". They've opened the schools up; as if the virus knows something is different now from April? Every week in Augusta they close another one; who is getting infected and having their life impacted by the "wisdom" of "well, we'll open the schools on (arbitary date). As if delaying one school a week from another is going to make some magical difference? I watched a Formula 1 race today in Russia. They're "slowly allowing more fans back to the races"? What has changed? What was the medical event that guided this decision? It wasn't a BUSINESS decision, was it? People talk about things "being back to normal by (November,December, end of the year, whenever) with no reasoning. I have guitar students routinely asking "when are you opening your office back up?" - as if a) I have some way of knowing that and b) something is different from when I closed it back in March??? So ironically Craig, your thread title, according to most people in my region, is wrong - THE CORONAVIRUS HAS GONE AWAY. I've learned so much about myself and our "civil"ization this year. I've had Inverted Dunning-Kruger all of my life, people are dumb all over as Frank says. It will take another explosive flareup that managed to affect enough of the population that everyone knows someone that's died from it, in order to have people's behavior change. Because we're just slightly smart monkeys; we won't do if we can't see. Disease is invisible, people die in hospitals instead of in the streets, myocarditis, renal insufficiency, neurological damage - invisible. The median i.q. are wrecking us. Dumb has been weaponized by the right. ... and the timing with the flu, which should be offset by a few months I would think, couldn't be better. People will get more and more lax every month, and by Christmas - college students home for the holidays, families getting together, cold weather making people congregate inside (or close)... January, February could be the peak that makes people finally start considering actually getting serious about stopping it until we get a vaccine. Testing everybody, quickly, and contact tracing. THE ONLY WAY OUT.

My mother has died, my dog died, I lost half of my business, where my wife works there is a continual list of people who have been infected, and get guitar lesson inquiries asking "are you teaching in person or only online?" and then getting quips about being a "lib" or worse for being "afraid of nothing". It seems like weeks have been flying by. The day is staring at a little 2009 Macbook screen doing guitar lessons, inevitably asking people "can you tilt your camera down?" as everyone seemingly manages to position their guitar necks *just* below the viewable area, tap dancing between FaceTime, Skype, Zoom. At first working from home was different, and if a guitar lesson canceled I could go to the kitchen and get more green tea, or go outside for a moment. But now it seems the little square screen (gah, I've got to upgrade... ahrgh) has the feeling of "life is in that little square screen for most of the day". *A lack of 3 dimensional, multi-axis interaction*. There is something about interaction being reduced to a flat, 2d plane, with rather poor and latency ridden audio that I think is altering my perception of time. I'm sleeping even less than normal, and I no longer seem to be able to tell what time it is during the day, when once I could do it almost to the minute upon waking up. I'm anxious to get to Vaccine Time, and it's like I've turned off the "living" part of my brain waiting for this to be over.

I know a guy whose wife posted a picture on Facebook of his sister, her husband partying in his kitchen while he's in the bedroom, sick with COVID. She wrote "hope vodka kills coronavirus!" as they're all smiling, toasting, in the picture while being in the same house - with the same air circulating. Surprise! A week later she's posting about how they're all doing, since they all caught it. The guy I know is hyper skinny. Was in bed for a week and it didn't seem to bother him more than a cold. His sister was out for about a month it seems, lost taste/smell, I don't know about her husband or his wife. It would *seem* they escaped unscathed; but chances are (30-40%) they will have some sort of life long complication that may not be obvious yet. ...but they were SOOOO kool posting about their "vodka preventative". Probably going to be a lot of stories like that in the South East. It seems like touring friends in Nashville are still isolating, but the local guys are doing gigs???? In Augusta it would seem there is a weird duality, some places pretend nothing is going on, other's closed. Sheriff closed a 250 capacity club down for having over capacity... but it may not have been a big deal if it wasn't over capacity? A couple local schools have closed back down, each school system has kids that have it, teachers that have it... meanwhile the F-150 crowd continues their anti-science anti-mask bragadoccio. I have learned so much about the general populace and median i.q. this year. I had a serious case of inverse Dunning-Kruger I'm rapidly recovering from.

Wow. See, this is how the WHO/CDC/worldd .gov is failing.... You win. I can't tell if you're trolling. It's obviously not a good thing, and news flash.... THAT'S MAINLY WHY COVID IS SO BAD. There is no "if" about it, you can be infected and infect others WITHOUT SYMPTOMS. Are you saying you don't realize you can be positive without symptoms? It does NOT mean the test didn't work! WTF?

A.I. is going to catch everyone off guard, and will suddenly be part of our lives in a way in which we can't imagine - like the internet is now. And it will distort social perceptions, human perspective. The median i.q. will gain an even further inflated sense of "talent", and the illusion of value added to something "creative" will be harder to discern from human creation. While visuals have the "Uncanny Valley" for CG realism, I think there will be, or already is, a "Creepy Trench" where a.i. creation masquerades as human. To me there is really nothing more existentially unnerving than listening to DADABOTS or the new music being created from the Google a.i. project. Ultra fascinating, but disturbing. Just as now we know there are plenty of pop/rock/country stars that literally can't really sing, soon there will be "artists" using mostly a.i. production that will gain accolades for doing nothing more than being the first on the scene to lay claim to pretending to make something while using a.i. tools almost exclusively. There will be a surge of hybrid music that will have that "creepy trench" a.i. produced vibe, associated with human faces - but isn't human. Man, I hate the 21st century.

quote=Anderton] Would it in fact be possible to create a DAW where you could be recording music in a satisfying way by screwing around with it for four hours? I don't think either one is possible, but that's just my opinion. Depends. 1) I know a person who is not a musician, has never played an instrument, can't play an instrument, BUT.... On Facebook he describes himself as a "musician" along with his day job. How can that be? He downloads apps on his phone where he presses a button to play a loop he chooses (from a list), and selects a drumbeat, imports it into Garage Band and "masters" it. He's "making music", so he's a "musician". The people who know him also think of him as a "musician", he "makes music", and - today you're not allowed to question that. He's a Musician. In the year 2020. 2) Within 5 years there will be apps, and plugins, that will use a.i. techniques that will convert any input into an output that matches anything else. You will have a guitar plugin that doesn't just auto-tune bad bending, but adds vibrato in the style of Hendrix, SRV, Gilmour, amp sound that perfectly mimics any recording, fixes harmony, timing. Same for bass. Vocal plugin that yields any vocalist's style, vibrator, timbre, phrasing. And what I'm waiting for, a drum plugin that yields a perfect performance from beat boxing anything into it in the style of Bonham, Copeland, Peart or whoever. All with perfect studio quality of your choice. A mastering plugin that will fix any bad production and make it sound like whatever production you choose to train it on. I claim all of the above could be made RIGHT NOW if certain people at certain colleges on the planet wanted to bother doing it. I also claim most reading this literally do not fathom that I am writing literally. People have no idea just how far advanced a.i. is right now, and how it's going to drastically change everything. There will initially be "bands" based on concoctions of presets of the basic plugins, but then later as Line6, Roland, or whoever implements it in an amp, you will have "bands" of Guitar Hero people banging away on instruments, but with a recognizable output: They will be "making music" and call themselves "musicians". People will regard them as "musicians". What happens to we the Actual Real Musicians at that point is the question. Because just as right now I'm telling people "the general populace" DOES NOT comprehend talent at all", when this era hits it will completely erase the value of being a real musician. My only hope is that the novelty of a "retro", analog musician will be quaint enough to have worth, or that being able to imbue some human quality will still be possible. When everyone can make something that "sounds like the Beatles", true creativity becomes hyper-marginalized. Plugin manufacturers will be wiped out, real audio engineers will be marginalized further, as the Median I.Q. Drone "makes music" that sounds like things once requiring TALENTED humans to make. 5 years, 6 -7 tops. / I keep trying to talk companies into making a midi drum editor that uses a GAN to humanize midi drum tracks.... eventually that will happen.

Today - yes. And I'm not joking. I've been teaching guitar for over 30 years now. Year by year expectation of what can be achieved has been inflated while the time and effort to do it has been reduced. The "average beginner" now expects to be able to "play guitar" in a couple of weeks. Literally. Meanwhile what I used to get accomplished in the first 2 weeks now takes months, because people feel they don't need to actually touch the guitar at all to "learn how to play guitar". Perception of playing an instrument, production of music, and most importantly the idea of TALENT is so incredibly distorted these days it's super depressing. Throw in the Magic of YouTube and it's really become torture. I get a lot of people that say things like "I want to take a few lessons so I can play Such-and-Such song at my wedding", "I practiced for 30 minutes wednesday!", "I watched a video on this, but I still can't do it", on and on. The root of all of this is a distorted perception of what it takes to be an ACTUAL MUSICIAN. In the year 2020 I'm here to tell you "people equate playing an instrument to learning how to change the oil in their car". It's a *task* that YouTube can "teach" them to do in a few weeks, with no effort. 35 Years Ago, STUDENT: "You must have been playing since you were 6, 10 years or more!!!" (I was 16, I'd been playing for a year). 25 Years Ago, STUDENT: "You must have been playing for decades!!!" (a single decade at that point...) 15 Years Ago, STUDENT: "You must have been playing for decades!!!" (..uhg, well... yeah..) 5 Years Ago, STUDENT: "Maybe I'll be as good as you when I've been playing for 10 years!!!" (well... uhm...) 1 Year Ago, STUDENT: "Wow, you must have been doing this for years!!!" (..... well, it has been many... years) This year, STUDENTS: "Why can you play this but I can't? I've tried to do this at least 3 times already!!!" (.......... "that's why I'm the GUITAR TEACHER...???") I've literally heard that statement, and similar ones. They "tried" a few times and couldn't do it, so something is wrong. "This is too hard, this can't be right". "I practiced for nearly half an hour the other night, but still couldn't get it". I saw this coming long ago. We now live in a society where talent is a concept that doesn't exist, and "training" can substitute for anything in just a few weeks. Music has been devalued monetarily, and literally.

"No one is talking about it" - who is the "no one", mainstream media, Trump? What does positive tests with no symptoms have to do with anything? There is nothing to "believe", it's fact, there are plenty of abstracts of studies available that show this.

My mother died a few weeks ago from presumably complications of lung cancer. We're not sure, because - we had just put her on hospice a week earlier. Which meant my months of staying out of my parent's house, while my mother is dying, was thrown out the window as hospice personnel had to come into the house. My own viral provenance was unknown, so I still stayed out. I'd been "visiting" by standing at my parent's storm door at their backyard while talking on the phone to them, or via FaceTime. But the people that brought in the hospital bed, the nurses - what of them? My father had an N95, but my mother couldn't wear one of course. She suddenly got much worse the week after hospice; but COVID symptoms overlap lung cancer symptoms. And having her on a vent, alone in the hospital, would have been even more horrible. I had a phone conversation with the hospice social worker, who insisted she MUST see my mother face-to-face. I saw it as another unnecessary risk. In the conversation I eventually asked "what would you do it if was your mother and it meant another person would be around her that may be infected?" and the woman said "well *i* am not going to let FEAR rule MY life!!! God watches over me and protects me!" at which point I told her "do not come to my parent's house" and hung up. As I saw it I wasn't protecting just my mother, but my 86 year old father as well. It was not how I envisioned the last days of my mother's life would be. I had visited my parents every Friday since I moved out of the house, and I always thought it would go slow, I would extend my visits, etc.. I never expected that visiting itself would be curtailed (back in early March I stopped, realizing the danger). Had we lived in Canada, New Zealand, or some place rational where masks were not regarded as "pussy" or a "lib conspiracy against Trump" maybe I could have risked visiting, but as I sit here now I have no idea if I'm infected or not. My wife had to go back to work, and there is a long list of people where she works that has contracted it, a few have died; it feels inevitable she gets it, and I will in turn. But I tried to protect my parents. But did the hospice company do everything they could? Of course not.

What I've learned is that the median i.q. are a lot dumber than I thought. Inverse Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

There is a difference between "doing safety right" and *being* safe. They have had 3 team members out with it, and last month a driver. The problem is that the testing isn't 100%, the isolation isn't 100%, and the practice of masks and distancing is very far from perfect. It only takes a casual bit of watching to see mechanics with the mask off their nose, and during the winning celebration you've got the teams pressed side to side yelling. It's not safe; if a test is wrong, or someone (like a driver and a team boss did a few weeks ago) decides on a thursday to go down the road to get a Coke, gets infected at the gas station, and then by Sunday they're infecting people. F1 tests every 5 days. The tests aren't perfect. The driver that was infected (who now may have invisible complications he won't necessarily know about) was quarantined for 14 days after his positive test; then tested negative before allowed back, but there are problems with the math of that relative to seroconversion. NBA is the same situation. The premise that "we're taking precautions" that are *imperfect* helps, but is not a guarantee. When the situation, like in F1, naturally requires a lot of people in the same area breathing air that has been in each other's lungs, it's only "safe" until it isn't, then you could have a really big problem. Additionally - *complications from COVID19 are not being publicized*. If something like 40% of the infected have life long organ complications, everyone quoting death stats are misdirecting the danger. The F1 driver above, the NBA guys that have had it and are now "symptom free" - we don't know what has happened to them completely. Renal failure 10 years from now, heart attack - of the thousands of people who have recovered we most likely will end up with another health care crisis eventually as cardiac, pulmonary, renal and mental problems start appearing that have been discounted today out of ignorance.

That seems like a lot of trouble. I just render to a Dropbox folder to listen in my car/go for a walk. Or maybe I'm missing something?

Lock down again, for real ala New Zealand. All essential mandated to wear masks, $1,500 fine. 12 foot distancing. Daily tv education on how fomites work, how aerobic transmission works, why masks are necessary. Sit tight until the curve actually flattens. Implement quarantine procedures for eliminating who is infected by Baynesian grouping/quarantining in the military. Put the "safe" military to work making rapid test kits and antibody tests. When the curve is flat, implement a national effort to test everyone, trace. Until it burns out. Literally do what New Zealand almost accomplished. Make it a national project. "that's not possible" - yes it is. It's just a matter of doing it. There is presently no other way. Waiting for a vaccine isn't a solution. At some point what I'm outlining will start being discussed... around January. I wish earlier. But by then people will be tired of it and hopefully it will be obvious this has to be done.

My mother has terminal lung cancer. Since March I have only seen her on Facetime and through a glass storm door at my parents' house. I have had to make the decision to put her on hospice. Which means a nurse/aid will come into their house to help my father. Which means rolling the dice not just with her, but my father. Now I want to see my mother, hug her, but ..... while I've tried to be safe, I had to go to a CVS a few days ago to get them something inside, where the woman behind the register was coughing. Prior to that I've had to go around a hospital in Atlanta because my wife had knee replacement surgery, then another hospital in town fearing she had a heart attack. Janitors not wearing masks, EMTs arriving with ambulances without masks. Nurses at the hospital with masks pulled down. My wife is going back to work on the 29th. Her job was considered "necessary" prior to the lock down, and the "safety" rules there are "no meetings of more than 10 people, wear a mask and distance" except what they do means confined areas, recirculated air. Someone has already died of COVID from her work (not medical), a number have become infected. People in Augusta Georgia literally act and behave like nothing is going on; people she works with has this attitude. So .... will she get it? Will I? in my area, Augusta Georgia, everyone behaves like nothing is going on. I can't go on Facebook: maybe 5 out of 1,000+ local "friends" are pro-mask, the rest are on about it being a hoaz, something to make Trump look bad, the numbers are fake, etc... The worst of it being the anti-mask sentiment is unreal. The "it makes it worse", "it's a conspiracy", "it makes your suffocate", "it's what the liberals want!" rhetoric is unbelievable, for those not in this area *I live here* and I can't believe the immense stupidity. I shut my office down back in March, have been trying to continue giving lessons online. But more and more students ask "when are you opening your office back up?", and most people inquiring about lessons ends with "are you giving lessons in person or only online?" ????????? Am I asymptomatic? I can't go in my parents' house; I don't know how long my mother has, but then I don't want my father to get infected. If I lived somewhere where PEOPLE ACTED RESPONSIBLY things would maybe be different; I have to figure out at what point I go to her, and weigh that against my father possibly getting sick. Or even shortening my mother's life. Meanwhile in NY where people are finally kind of taking it seriously, the curve has gone down. Canada. But in my home town people are going to beach in groups, walking around Kroger without masks, calling people "liberal!" in public for wearing a mask. Back in March, April I was called all sorts of things while wearing a mask at an Aldi's and Lowes. On Facebook, people I've known from HS besmirching me, "hahah, you're afraid of a cold!", "you're a commie!".... it's surreal, one day out of the blue the "Bill Gates is trying to kill everyone" thing came out of nowhere, and then suddenly even my "left wing" friends started railing against masks, "it's part of the conspiracy, Plandemic!". It's like I'm living in an alternate reality in North Augusta S.C./Georgia. Everyone around me has gone insane while the world burns, science doesn't exist, Trump is literally anointed by God. Then I look at what's happening in the world: NBA is training their audience to think things are under control, Formula 1 is doing the same: and it's all just for money. In August kids go back to school. By October kids will be getting sick. Will kids dying be enough to sway the vote? For people to take this seriously as other countries have?

Teach people that when they see people in Asian countries wearing a mask, it's not to protect THEM but to help prevent the spread to OTHERS. Why the Surgeon General, CDC and WHO was advising against it until yesterday is...baffling, but as a person that received multiple comments for wearing a mask at the grocery store the last time I was there a few weeks ago, I've got to say... WEAR A MASK in public. The amount of people that clearly don't understand based on what I see on Facebook and Twitter is astounding. It would have made such a big difference if the government had simply said "wear a mask, or fashion one out of a shirt/hankerchief/whatever if you go out around people" back in February.

I thought doing Yet Another Beatles Tribute Band would be a good excuse to learn their catalog. It sorta was, and I did. I can't remember any of it now, years later. But the educational aspect was fantastic. The one-little-slight-detail that makes one of their songs genius was a great thing to delve into and find out. Now would be a good time for people to try to put together a Tribute Band. People can do their homework at home, get together for rehearsal and go presumably when this hopefully is over. In said Beatles band I was in, we were doing each album one at a time. We would do a set of miscellaneous Beatles/ancillary Beatles material, and then a set that would be the album. PROBLEM #1 Once you've chewed through over half of their catalog, doing due dilligence becomes a massive chore. Particularly if you're the guy in the band that insists on memorizing everything, no music or even scribble notes. When it comes time to learn the NEXT album, you also find yourself having to brush up on an ever-increasingly enormous catalog of material. Thereby making it harder and harder of a chore to stay on top of. PROBLEM #2 Because of the complexity of integrating 10 musicians and assorted orchestra musicians, it then becomes Less Obvious about the practicality of logistics when it comes to Certain People insisting on last minute set changes on the opening set. "Yeah, scratch that out, we're doing This Other Song We Did 2 years ago in place of This Song You Practiced and Memorized for Tonight". PROBLEM #3 Because of routine habit, band members are called one at a time out per song. "Curiously" someone seemed to always get called out 1 song early... on a song I didn't play on. I used to be good with playing something straight off the top of my head from memory of hearing a song until I found myself doing this *suspiciously often* in front of thousands of people. So much so I can't do it as well now. So, I would say "Don't do the above" but do a Beatles Tribute band for the educational value of learning the arrangements and detail.

It's... interesting that you can apply something different times to the same track and it will decide different things need to be "fixed".

We are in a post-mainstream media propaganda era. The presumption that such manufactured events/presentations matter today is no longer true. Nobody cares except insular people inside the industry. They were never 1:1 with reality and now that they no longer can be presented as reality it's with a combination of nostalgia and vague repulsion I say "good riddance". Some things of the past are like old school hood ornaments with translucent plastic masquerading as "jewels".