Greg Mein

So this is all very interesting to me and it seems safe to assume that no one here has actually listened to a Joe Rogan podcast. Yesterday my favorite doctor (otherwise known as my wife) signed us up for a duo account on Spotify and I've just listened to his short video that addresses the current "controversy". I found him to be straightforward, sincere, honest and a bit overwhelmed by the drummed up hoopla. I look forward to listening to more. It would also be interesting to know if I'm the only one here that suspects Neil Young has never actually listened to a Joe Rogan podcast. To be perfectly clear, there are few things I find more frightening, evil and disgusting than attempts to censor others.

Now that Spotify is thrust into the spotlight it would be interesting to know more about it. Is there anyone here that has/had an account? Is it just something you download to your phone?

It might not be so bad if the royalties continue to roll in and you don't need to deal with the paparazzi.

I'd never listened to Joe Rogan but now I feel like I should, some will understand what I mean.

We had a good gig for NYE at our local place, Mad Mike's, however there was a downside to it. It's a challenge, being unknown in a new area; a sleepy little desert town filled with retirees. Here, things shut down early so I consider it to be a success that we had some folks with us until midnight (it's 9pm here when the ball drops out east). The downside was a random act of senseless vandalism that left me with two slashed tires on my truck ostensibly perpetrated by a patron who was asked to leave for trying to start fights. Yeah, that sucked, happy 2022! We just got home from a week in FL where we stayed with friends in a condo on the beach in New Smyrna Beach. We met a very nice couple who have a group called The Cyclones. Husband and wife, Jason Lee and Linda Marie, were hosting a jam at Peanuts just down the street from the condo. She was kind enough to allow me the use of her Tele, my wife had brought her flute and we jammed a few songs accompanied by the bass player and drummer, fun! A patron at the bar personally handed me a $10 tip later after we'd performed, very nice! Linda told me they would be performing as a duo at a Mexican restaurant up in Ormond Beach for Taco Tuesday and I got their card so I could nail the location down on their webpage. The four of us (wife and I along with our hosts) drove up to check it out while having some fantastic margaritas and tacos. A really fun trip! I wanted to take a break after the tire slashing incident but my wife is already pressuring me to get back at it in February, they want to have us on a monthly rotation. We may also have a different gig event lined up for March as well. It's certainly good to feel appreciated but I'm still longing to get the studio set up as well as a workbench in the garage and some other things and then just yesterday we bought a Can-Am side by side so we can participate in the amazing wealth of off-roading activity that is available in this area.

I had a pegboard up for cords when I had the large basement space, handy and convenient. Now cords will stay in totes in the closet organized to some extent. Glad you're getting your flow Dan, it sure is great when you can just start things up and roll. It's going to take a while for me yet. Even when I get things arranged in my room that's only half of it. Computers and configurations is a whole other realm. I've decided I want to get a new large monitor to mount on the wall (43" or larger) but I'm hoping there may be some after Christmas sales.

Back atcha Dan!

It's fascinating to me how such shallow and meaningless terms (in current times including; "anti-vax", anti-mask", "anti-science") are so effective at controlling the dialog and immediately putting independent thinkers on the defensive, ie; not adhering to the status quo makes you my opponent or even worse, enemy. Such totalitarian techniques have been used to great effect throughout history. The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind; repent and see Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior or we shall rip you apart at your limbs. It gives people a sense of moral and intellectual superiority, accompanied by a total lack of humility, based solely upon what they've been led to believe. One could also argue that it should be obvious to "modern people" why manipulating the population with fear and divisiveness is a go to for the ruling class. The lust they have for control, authority and power is already strong or extreme and any opportunity to gain more is impossible to resist. Perhaps no matter how educated or technically advanced a society becomes, certain fundamental elements of human nature will never change?

A very valid and useful technique indeed but with midi it's important to keep an eye on the velocity data. A lot of programs provide an option for some randomization to help reduce overall redundancy. Being open minded and experimental is where the fun is, great ideas!

As a rule, employers often drug test prospective employees before hiring them but I'm certain you'd find that any ongoing random drug testing is typically mandated by government agencies. The reason is twofold; if an employee is executing his assigned duties reliably and to specification there is no incentive for the company to interrupt his/her productivity and secondly it is expensive to maintain a random test protocol of their own accord with no tax write off benefit afforded by a mandate.

The guitar wall is great! I only had the space for one hanger. Since I share the space with my wife the only other wall available is covered with her diplomas and degrees (she conducts geriatric psychiatry appointments in there). I had a lot more space (huge basement) and a decent Alesis electronic drum kit the last time I thought I would be building my dream studio but a relationship breakup brought all that to an end. I sold the kit and there's certainly no room for that here. Our two other spare bedrooms are guest rooms and essentially off limits other than for some closet storage. I'll make do with Superior drummer and other software as I must. At the end of the day, it's a home hobby studio and my drum playing sucks anyway.

The wall of guitars looks great! The monitor mount I will be putting on the wall will probably only leave space for the single guitar hanger I put over the keyboards.

GREAT tip!! I really need that! Glad you're getting everything together As to standing - I don't really think it's possible to sing at your best while sitting down, it scrunches up your chest cavity too much. Yes thanks Craig, the wire duct really helps make the wiring handy and is easy to install and use. Sadly I've been at a stand still in there for a while, I knew the holidays would slow me down but I had no idea how annoyingly drawn out it was all going to be! For reasons I'll never understand we drove all the way back to IA for Thanksgiving which had us out for over a week and then we turned around on 12/10 to fly back there for Christmas. We got to the outskirts of Vegas before finding out our flight was rescheduled so came back home only to get up and ready again at 2am. If you haven't been to an airport lately it's like a scene from a horror movie. We spent several days in our old town partying like idiots with friends and then some Xmas stuff with family before heading to Chicago for more Xmas visiting. From there we went to Bloomington/Normal for yet more Xmas stuff. Then, because my wife's folks got sick and couldn't attend, we drove to Ames, IA to see her dad in the hospital (he has since recovered and returned home thankfully). We finally returned home on the 20th where my wife's brother and his wife had already been staying for a few days. Fortunately we got out of staying with them and others at some rental in Las Vegas for a few days but still must go down and attend the Absinthe show Friday for some unknown reason (he took us to that five years ago when we got married). Somewhere along the line my wife caught a cold and is currently trying to recover from that while meanwhile we still have the NYE gig we must do. I'm regretting buying tickets to see Bruce Kulick at Count's Vamp'd on the 30th, didn't realize at the time how socially burned out I was going to be by then. Now these are all great people and I love them all but it's just not my nature to be so overwhelmingly social for lengthy periods of time and it's sad how I've come to loathe Christmas time. I want it to be over so I can get back to things I want, and need, to do although I'll be interrupted again already in January when we must fly to Florida to stay with friends and then again in February when we fly to Jamaica to hang with yet another group of people. It should be fun to have such an active social/travel life but I'm not accustomed to that and it tends to get on my nerves.

Yes, thanks Kuru, it's great to be getting this back together on a hopefully permanent basis. I enjoy sharing my progress and appreciate the suggestions and advice that comes in here. Not only do I have a backlog of original ideas/reworks I want to do but I'll also need to be working on our live gig backing tracks. It's a testament to my wife's tenacity that we had a gig in our new town within two months, way faster than I would have expected, and has lead to being put on a monthly rotation as well as scoring the NYE gig at our local watering hole.

I've always thought that thunderbolt 3 ports exclusively was not one of their better ideas but I haven't had any trouble with these models and I hope the couple I have will hang in for a long time. I'm glad to see they've gone back to a better selection of ports on the M1 models.

I'm making some progress on this project. Something I'm really happy about and definitely recommend is the height adjustable desk. The ability to sit or stand at the same desk is already proving very valuable. The "Open Slot Wiring Raceway Duct" is also another valuable "infrastructure" addition. With the rack on the opposite side of the desk from the keyboards this keeps the cabling neatly tucked away rather than laying around the floor. I have a wheeled wire rack next to the desk where I put the desktop "administrative" PC, UPS, backup drives, etc.. Space is tight of course but the arrangement allows me to easily pull out and get to the back of my wheeled rack case. I've populated my rack case and put in some of the wiring. Tomorrow I hope to get the wall mount for my 43" monitor, I'm considering buying a new one with USB-C but not sure if I want to spend on that yet, HDMI has always worked fine and I'm looking at some upgrades for our live show.

A DBX 166 was the best compressor I'd had but like a lot of the hardware I used to have, it got sold for move downsizing. The Antares AVP-1 I've held onto has a compressor section but is no doubt software based. When I get going with recording again I'll do most processing with software and, in fact, even when I was on my last recording spree many years ago I typically used the DAW's built in stuff on tracks after the fact. I have a lot of work to do before I'm ready to record again and I have a lot of options with computers, software and the external units I held onto so it's hard to envision the approach I'll like best as I get my studio up and going again. I tend to think of compression in terms of the function and purpose of it rather than any type of sound it may impart. To me it's typically about leveling out vocal tracks but also comes in handy for acoustic guitar and maybe some other bits here and there.

I don't have a Helix unit but now I kinda want one, do they have a rack mount version?

At the risk of stating the obvious, ever since the internet became available for mass consumption people have been emboldened to write things they would never say in your presence. An unknown venue, 100 people in attendance and a band not known outside your area, yeah, I'd have to say you nailed it in your final paragraph.

I like the idea since Vegas is roughly an hour drive away, however, I'm never going to pay that much for a ticket unless they can resurrect and reunite the Beatles.

While I was still working I had my phone set so that it wouldn't ring unless the caller was on my contacts list and that was reflected in the voice mail message so that if it was legit they'd know to leave a message. As a doctor my wife couldn't do that and she often got scam callers. I turned that feature off after I retired but I honestly don't get many calls anyway, scam or otherwise. When it comes to internet stuff; Craigslist, messages, Facebook, email or whatever these folks are so incredibly obvious I no longer give it a second thought.

Wait...didn't Apple still make MacBook Pros in 2020? The M1 machines didn't come out until November of 2020, and they weren't MacBook Pros. When I go to About This Mac in the upper left hand corner it reads, "MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)" and I can certainly prove that I bought this from the Apple website in August of 2021.

People like to think of Apple as being cutting edge but that's not necessary the case. I bought a brand new MacBook Pro from the Apple website in August this year along with a "magic" mouse. The MBP is apparently a left over from 2019 and the mouse came with a USB charging cable.......a 2019 MBP doesn't have a USB port.

I can't understand what the motive behind this would be or why some old PDF files would even qualify as an issue?

Due to the theft of my computers in July insurance paid for my new one. Even though I knew the M1 was coming I couldn't wait for that. Apple has a long history of leaving users in the dust and I've learned to cope by just trying hard to avoid OS updates. I actually had a frustrating day recently when I went ahead and updated from 11.6 to 11.6.1, an update you wouldn't expect to cause much trouble. After the update the computer wouldn't recognize the power adapter. What I've learned is that the SMC chip on this one needed a reset, an annoying problem I've not had in the past. 12.0.1 is available to put on here but there's no way I'm going to try that. Apple has taught me that when you get things working the way you like just leave it alone. That sentiment goes double for the 2017 model I bought to replace our stolen gigging computer. It's highly unlikely to ever go beyond 10.14.6. I suppose if your'e just experimenting then there's no harm done and you almost expect to have problems.