The first couple of hours we're pretty rough, but I eventually got it. Man did I fall hard though, and a lot. My rump and shoulder took the brunt of it and I have a splitting headache. Can't say yet whether I enjoy snowboarding yet since it is tough to compare four hours to my 10+ years of skiing. There seems to be a smaller margin of error though.
I rented skis for this trip, but I definitely have a desire to try snowboarding in the future. May even just buy one in the future.
Well Winter NAMM 2012 kicked off this past week and my initial thoughts at the beginning of the week were that it was going to be a bust. If trends mean anything (and apparently they do not) I was under the impression that NAMM was going to be stuck in the perpetual cycle of iterative software announcements. To my pleasant surprise however, we got to see a whole bunch of interesting hardware announcements.
Waldorf Pulse 2
This is one of three serious analog synths announced at this year's NAMM. Analog seems to be back and in a big way. The Waldorf Pulse was the one that excited me the most, mostly because of its form factor. I can see this little guy sitting very nicely next to a Blofield and a DS Evolver.
Arturia
Perhaps garnering the most attention at the show was the Arturia Minibrute. This was a surprise for everyone since Arturia has never produced a hardware synth, let alone an analog. I have seen many a talk over at LivePA.org with excitement about the fact that there is a control for every parameter here. The steiner-parker (no idea what this means) filer also is garnering a lot of talk.
Moog Minitaur
Personally I am not excited about this one, but it has the Moog name on it and is MSRP'd at ~$650. I suppose that is enough for a Moog.
Akai
Akai also seems to have come on very strong this year with a bunch of MPC stuff. The MPC Renaissance is a full on controller for the PC. The MPC Fly looks like a very interesting hardware interface bringing MPC pads to the iPad in a clamshell type case. They also have a nice grouping of Midi controllers that seem to be stepping up the level a notch.
Nektar Panorama Controller for Reason
The final piece of gear that surprised me was the Nektar hardware controller for Reason. We have seen over the past couple of years a lot of dedicated controllers for Ableton Live. It makes sense that Reason would eventually get one too since it has such a constant interface. I am personally not a Reason user, but this controller has a really solid look to it.
In all of the fantastic fanfare that occurred yesterday with the SOPA and PIPA blackouts, a fairly important decision from the Supreme Court slipped out with little or no attention and its potential impacts could be just as damaging to the art and music community as the SOPA and PIPA legislation.
In a 6-2 ruling yesterday the court ruled that works put into the public domain are not placed into a "territory that they cannot exit". This grants Congress the opportunity to re-grant copyright to works. What isn't made entirely clear though is how the copyright gets reapplied. Is it restricted to the original owner of the copyright, their estate, their family? Can the copyright be transferred by the will of Congress to another party? None of these questions are fully laid out in the decision and probably won't be fully fleshed out until a challenge comes in the future to iron out the wrinkles.
The fear here though also stems from the issue of creative license for the remixing and copying of work. One of the foundations of creative expression comes from the reuse, recycling and past works. There is also a potentially huge impact that this could put upon the classical musical world as well. With so much of the history of many of these works being hundreds of years olds in some cases, many orchestras or bands often times rely on access to these works for instruction and performance.
I am more and more finding the attack on the creative and arts field from corporate and personal interests depressing and actually frightening for our county. We are now set in a world where the dissemination of free information should be easier than ever. History has continually shown that the societies in which the arts and sciences flourish freely are the ones that are the most successful. Ancient Egypt, Greeks, Romans, Renaissance Italy, etc. We should be celebrating a epoch of cultural enlightenment, but we instead are finding ourselves caught in a world of fear, isolation, monetary greed and control.
For the past couple of months I have been constantly talking about cross country skiing. Of course our winter went from being forecasted as one of the snowiest in history to the third mildest in history. Chicago finally received some snow this past week and true to form I went out and purchased some cross country skis at REI. They had a pretty nice package deal setup for about $275. I surprised my wife and purchased her a pair as well.
Since it was a holiday weekend we had an opportunity to go out twice. The first time we went out to Morton Arboretum where they had a nice groomed trail. This was just two days after the snow too so the overall experience was excellent. Weather was very cold, around eighteen degrees. Megan had never gone skiing before so this experience was all new to her. Overall she did pretty well, but there were some pretty hilarious moments with her falling and attempting to get back up. The funniest of those moments actually came Friday night when she wanted to ski around the backyard to test out her new skis.
Our second outing was this morning at a local forest preserve prairie. This was not quite as much fun. The weather was warn, in the low 40's and the trails by this point have had numerous people, dogs and joggers on them. I think the trails would have been nicer had we hit them up a couple of days earlier, but that is just something I will have ti keep in mind for the future.
I will have to remember to bring my GPS in the future as well. It didn't even occur to me to track where we skied until the end of the day today.
Winter NAMM is coming up next week and normally I am pretty stoked to see what the world has to offer for musicians. The past couple years of NAMM's have been pretty boring though with not a lot on the horizon to get exicted for. Unfortunately, the trend seems to be following suit as the build up thus far seems to be pretty boring. Nothing really exciting is looming in the pipelines, at least not yet.
I have seen two pretty cool new DAW's though that have popped up lately that seem pretty interesting. The first i heard about the other day is a new DAW called Bitwig. It looks to be an Ableton Live clone in many respects, but has some interesting fatures and Linux support. Not sure what to make of it yet as it still seems a bit too Livey to me, but it is nice to see another player in the live performance market.
The next DAW (and I slightly hesitate to call this a DAW) isa product called AGL. IT is completely pre-Beta at this point, but the visual and audio demo below blew me away. At first it seems likea standard modular audio environment, no big deal right? As you see later in the video though the author has expanded the system to a three dimensional automation layout. It looks to not only be incredibly cool, but also incredibly powerful.
Let hope these lead to some better innovation from the "big boys" showing up at NAMM next week.
Taken at The Morton Arboretum