Matthew Supert

It has been a while since I have posted one of these reading lists and I thought it is time to post an update as to what I have been reading. The biggest book on the docket for the past several months has been Three Kingdoms Romance (or Romance of the Three Kingdoms). This is an ancient chinese folklore tale that covers the time period during the fall of the Han dynasty and is considered to be one of the four great chinese classics. I have been laboring on its four volumes since September of 2011. Thank the heavens for the Kindle version as it made it much easier to read.  It broadly lays out the conflicts of this time period and intersperses it with a bit of magic and demons for good measure. Overall it was a pretty good book for being over eight hundred yeas old. If you think Game of Thrones has a lot of characters, this thing had literally hundreds. 

Since that book took up so much of my time I have actually not read a ton of other books. I listened to the audiobooks of both Heat Wave and Mockingjay. Heat Wave was simply not a very good book and Mockingjay was a fitting end to the Hunger Games Trilogy. It is a pity that I just cannot stand the main character in those books. 

I also got a start on the Books of Skyrim (Download Link). This is a collection of all of the books found in the Skyrim video game. Someone on the internet kindly put them all into an ePub file. I have to say that they are pretty good actually and hey, they are free. 

For the months ahead I have several real paper books to get through. I just started Born to Run this past week and I also have sitting on my shelf Manovationals, Arabian Nights, and the Complete Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (plus a dozen more books sitting on my Kindle). 

As I mentioned in my 2012 Goals post, one of my objectives this year is to donate at least $100 a month to a charity or cause that I find compelling. I decided to begin doing a monthly post on these donations to cast some light and awareness on them. If anyone else out there would like to donate to them as well I will provide links to their sites in my posts along with information about the cause. 

For my first donation of the year I chose to go with a seemingly unknown animal sanctuary call Batworld. As you might expect from the name they are an animal sanctuary for bats that for some reason cannot make it back to the wild. To be honest I cannot remember how I first came across this organization, but after reading up on them it seems that they have recently come upon some hard times due to some legal or defamation issues. They just felt like the right place for me so I made a donation. 

There are several ways you can donate, but perhaps the easiest and most heartwarming is their "adopt a bat" program". For $40 ($30 for a class I think) you can adopt a bat for one year to help pay for food and medical supplies for the sanctuary. I chose to go with Beene'. As a result they sent me a nice little informational packet in the mail and a wonderful picture of the bat that I plan to frame.

After I made my donation I had a pleasant email from the foundation as well that just sort of made me feel good. 

Dear Matthew,

It looks like you may have accidentally sponsored Beene' three times. Let me know if you meant to only sponsor her once and I'll refund the extra donation you were charged.

Amanda

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No I did actually want to sponsor that amount.  You can use the money towards other bats or whatever, but the $1XX is all yours.

Matt Supert.

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Dear Matthew, Thank you so much!!! This is so very generous of you. Our organization faces a continual uphill battle in securing the financial resources it takes to rescue these misunderstood animals. Your contribution will make a difference in the number of lives we will be able to save in the coming months. 
 
Again, thank you, on behalf of all the injured, orphaned and abused bats who will be helped due to your compassionate support.

Amanda

So I hope people find this organization interesting and if you are looking to adopt a bat with your kids, learn a little bit more about bats or perhaps do something for one of your classes definitely check out Batworld.org to learn more. 

Winter NAMM has been done for a couple of weeks now and everyone has sort of settled on their discussions at what impressed them at the show. Hardware seems to have made a nice appearance again, especially in the analog form. While discussing our highlights and disappointments at the show over at Serious-sounds.net an interesting question came up to me asking about my gear setup. Now for those not in the know I use grooveboxes for my entire setup. That setup with the built in sequencers has always just sort of clicked with me. Problem is no one is really making these magical little boxes anymore. 

My current setup consists of a Korg EA-1, Korg EMX-1, a Yamaha AN200 and the mother of all grooveboxes the EMU XL-7 Command Station. The history of grooveboxes is a short, but rather remarkable one. Perhaps starting originally in the Akai MPC 60 there are some notable boxes that appeared during most of the 1990s. The Roland MC series with the MC-303 and MC-505 were groundbreaking for their time. Then the Korg Electribes came along that brought a new affordable and groundbreaking accessibility to music production. Yamaha had a brief attempt at it themselves with the Loopfactory boxes, but really the EMU Command Stations (which were sort of a failure) ultimately were the best of the series. Unfortunately not a lot has come out since that time except for some pricy gear from Elektron, Radikal Technologies, Acidlab and perhaps Jomox. If you look at any of these companies they are all based in Europe.

If my current stuff ends up dying I suppose it leaves me relegated mostly to investing in some of this pricy gear. That certainly would not be a bad thing since these are wonderful pieces of kit with a great build quality. It does mean though that I have basically relegated myself to a largely boutique level of the production world. What setup to I actually end up getting though? 

The Elektron equipment I think is by far the  nicest and most mature. I have never really heard of issues with their software or gear. The Radikal Technologies Spectralis would probably also end up on that list of gear, but I have heard there were some OS issues in past versions. Only problem with all of this though is it would all have a price tag of about $7,000. 

So I traded in my skis this morning for a snowboard. I have never been snowboarding before. Wow, is it a different experience. On skis you are moving forward and leaning side to side. On a snowboard you are moving sideways an leaning front to back.

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.

Went skiing in Galena this weekend. Had a blast. It was Megan's first attempt at skiing. She did a good job in the morning, but had a crabby time this afternoon. She had to tell at me not to look at her while we skied. Ultimately my brother and I just went off our own direction and met everyone else later in the day.

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.