Bobro

Whoa! A friend smoked me out the other day in a big way (shake and leafage makes my nose bleed but this was some Balkan Kine) and I may still be altered, but have you done some serious changes with the bass sound or am I tripping? Drums or drum mics recently changed too? Anyway I'm glad to hear you going off with your new toy, sounds great! -CB

http://promo.net/pg/ Project Gutenberg original site- there are many ftp sites with classics in several languages. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rapanui.html Easter Island site- this one is fairly and openly donewith lots of photos and links to tourist info, interesting views and counter-views, etc. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/ NASA Mars site. "The microbial community we found in Idaho is unlike any previously described on Earth," said Lovley. "This is as close as we have come to finding life on Earth under geological conditions most like those expected below the surface of Mars" Life in Idaho like life on Mars? Hardly a surprise. NASA rules! http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm Noam Chomsky archives. I've heard him quoted by the so-called "Extreme Left" and by the "Far Right", seems to me just a guy who thinks things over and reads up on the info a great deal and doesn't belong to any camp. And of course http://www.google.com/ is the king of all sites. I google for comparative religion studies, (everything from Scientology to the Rig Vedas) curry recipes, architecture, whatever. A lot of grad students all over the world put their papers up on every topic imaginable, I wind up reading a lot of those- it's great to find for instance a funky beta audio software, read the master's thesis by the author online, then a few years later read his articles in Keyboards and see he's doing well. -CB

You can try Pianissimum, it's here: http://space.tin.it/musica/almarzai/sfe.html and all over the net actually. Haven't tried the other piano at the site. Pianissimum is very woody, I think it has the most character of the piano soundfonts I've heard, and a far site better than a typical ROMpler piano IMO. It's been tweaked by various people, I'd send you my tweak but I can't find it, it's been a while since I used it. Some funkiness in loop-points, release times, etc., but all in all it has an old-fashioned character- I used it with crooning vox, it worked well. -CB

Thanks, John! My dad forbade whistling when I was kid, whistling being the sound of lost souls in hell and all http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/eek.gif so of course I practised my whistling chops quite a bit. The lost-souls whistling changes into wild tropical bird whistling at the end, so the little island off the coast is now one of the New World islands (like St. Vincent) runaway slaves escaped to and no longer one of the slave-market islands off the coast of Africa. There is almost 6 minutes of instrumental transition from Angel of the Odd to Little Island- 30+ minutes of the album finished, another 30 to go, using a lot of segues to tie it all together. I am very happy that you enjoy the piece, more to be posted but probably in bigger "in context" chunks. -CB

Thanks Steve- wish I had your highs! Guess it's always that way. http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/smile.gif Can't really remember exactly how I got the guitar tone, didn't pay much attention to the settings because I just wanted to lay down the improvised intro while the mood lasted. I checked out your friend's stuff, I see he's in the Soquel suburb of SC, where I lived about '90-'92, cool. There's a great guitar teacher in the area by the name of Guy Cantwell, and a great music store (Musician's Trading Post? I was drinking a lot those days). Anyway, I like this trippy stuff, it's perfect for this quite overcast Sunday morning, especially Come Down and Light of the Day from your collaboration site, and El Cochilla from the other site. Bernarda gives it the thumbs up for unique sounds, she's very down on presets and commercial samples, not from any technical viewpoint but from a musical ability to spot pre-fab or custom. I see on the B-Sonic site it's two takes to DCC, talk about custom. -CB

JamFree is sounding great! I listened to Soiled Alms as well as Unless You Know. Obvious then and now differences (from listening off and on for the last couple of months) is that the new stuff and new mixes sound good over my shitty multimedia speakers whereas before I would listen with the Sennheisers to catch things. Acid monitoring test for such organic music- cheap boombox at an outdoor barbeque. http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/smile.gif I've uploaded my first song tracked completely in my new recording software, Samplitude. Just a detuned Ovation-style guitar, a flower vase, a horseshoe, an Indian finger drum, vox and whistling, no synths or midi. The challenge was keeping the timbres in harmony with the other sounds on the album. The preceding piece is a DX-7 e-piano improv- a Rhodes eq'd dark would have made for a better transition, I'll have to write a segue. A Little Island Off The Coast Thanks for checking it out. -Cameron Bobro This message has been edited by Bobro on 09-01-2001 at 07:52 PM

Great main riff, catchy as hell. That timbre change at 3:25...are you mad, man? http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/biggrin.gif I really like the part about 5:28, there's the basis for a whole completely different tune in those couple of measures, to my ears. Bernarda likes this one, too.

Thanks Dave for your very perceptive comments. http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/smile.gif Sysexguy (Psysexunit would be pretty moderne, dontcha think?) Hamadryad is very good, I didn't catch the link earlier. http://www.hamadryadmusic.com Hm, I guess a lot of my perception of music comes from working with my hands, building furniture, guitars, cooking, and I percieve a lot of that passion in music that gets labelled "prog." People talk about technique and craftsmanship- I feel those terms are often misunderstood. It's about the ability and labor of love to be able to express yourself, the DIY ethic, appreciation and love of well-made and beautiful things and carving your soul into the world around you. More William Morris than Sartre, which means good food and homebrew at band parties. Anyway, Hamadryad rocks, especially in the three-dimensionalness of "The Second Round". I see that Vitaly Menshikov has done a great review of them- http://www.progressor.net/ well congratulations on the recording, all the best to you, -CB Edti- corrected link This message has been edited by Bobro on 06-18-2001 at 02:31 AM

Well this is the keyboard forum, so I thought I'd post a purely keyboard piece, a very short improv and fugue-type tune, actually several melodies from other tunes on the same album transposed, played retrograde, etc. and combined contrapuntally. A couple of the melodies are from the song "Jantar", so you can hear how the whole concept album is being tied together. The great thing is that you can take some melodies from a couple of different tunes, combine them, jam some new melodies over that, combine them, jam some new...and so on. The problem is that a handful of sing-along tunes is turning into 3 hours of music in a hurry. But it's fun. The tune is Daughter of the Left-Hand Czar PS. It's not really a DX-7, but the FMHeaven VST instrument, Frohmage freeware plugin filter and a Fender Squier Sidekick combo. -CB