Net Album and Studio Recordings in the Works

I know live performances have been nearly non-existant this past year. Unfortunatly due to grad school and my location in the ho-hum convervative suburbs of Chicago I have not had the fortune or time to really invest in booking shows. I might get a small something in the next month or so, if I can find the time to rip a demo.

I am currently (finally after a year) in the process of recording tracks for a Dynamic Interplay net-album. I will also do a couple of studio live recordings to give people a taste of some of the new music as well as use for some demos.

You can expect the time frame on these of course to range from next week to next year for their release.

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Personality Test

I love taking personality tests. Usually I know what the results are going to be. I am a super neat introvert with a creative mind. I can't remeber what my letters are for the Meyers & Briggs test, but it is something like that. Here is another test.

Advanced Global Personality Test Results
Extraversion |||||||||| 36%
Stability |||||||||||||||||| 76%
Orderliness |||||||||||||||||| 80%
Accommodation |||||||||||| 50%
Interdependence |||| 16%
Intellectual |||||||||||||||||||| 83%
Mystical |||||||||||||||||||| 83%
Artistic |||||||||||||||||||| 90%
Religious |||| 16%
Hedonism || 10%
Materialism |||||| 23%
Narcissism |||||||||||||||||| 76%
Adventurousness |||||||||||||||||| 76%
Work ethic |||||||||||| 50%
Self absorbed |||||||||||||||| 70%
Conflict seeking |||||||||||||||| 63%
Need to dominate |||||||||||| 43%
Romantic || 10%
Avoidant |||||||||||||| 56%
Anti-authority |||||||||||| 43%
Wealth |||||| 30%
Dependency |||| 16%
Change averse |||||||||||| 50%
Cautiousness |||||||||||| 50%
Individuality |||||||||||||||| 63%
Sexuality |||||||||||||||||||| 83%
Peter pan complex |||||||||||||||| 70%
Physical security |||||||||||||||||||| 83%
Physical Fitness |||||||||||| 50%
Histrionic |||||| 30%
Paranoia |||||| 23%
Vanity |||||||||||||||| 63%
Hypersensitivity |||| 16%
Female cliche |||||| 23%
Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com


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Band Rehearsal Starts Again

Rehearsal for the community orchestra started up again. Despite my techno awesomeness the geek in me plays the clarinet. I am pretty damn good too. I have been playing the clarinet since I was about nine and always signed up to play in the school or university band at school. Unfortunately this year I was unable to do so because NIU cut one of the bands from their lineup and the other fell right when I had a class.

For the summers I play in my local community band, which is great fun. It is quite hectic too though. We have to perform about nine concerts in a twelve week period and there are literally thirty or more songs we play across this span. That is a lot of music to learn. Last night was my first rehearsal for the summer and our first concert is already on June 13th.

Thankfully my skills did not fade too much over the year, but my chops sure did. My mouth was dead tired after only thirty minutes of playing. The calluses on my lower lip and right thumb have also worn away and I quickly developed a cut on my lip and a raw thumb too. It is sort of funny in band how you can tell who plays what almost by their calluses. The brass players are always walking around slathering chapstick on their lips. The percussion with their gloves and hand blisters and us clarinets with are rock hard thumbs and creased lower lips. I suppose the flutes have it easiest.

Anyways band is one of those love hate things throughout the summer for me. It is beautiful outside and after a day at work the last thing you want to do is go to rehearsal for two hours, but once you get there is usually makes your day.

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One Week With the Macbook

Technically I was supposed to type this last night, but I was too tired from band rehearsal to bother. So one week has pasted since I have had my Macbook, and I gotta say it still pretty much rocks. I have had a program freeze up on me once, so shame on you Apple.

As is probably natural with any electronic a few bugs seep out here and there. I noticed that sometimes when I return from sleep mode some of the GUI or graphics of my windows don't quite display right. I will get an extra black bar around my iChat window for example. It is odd, but most likely just a software "driver" that will hopefully be updated in the future. Overall I am really loving it and I am also loving my new .Mac account. Sure it is pricey, but I am willing to pay for that to have everything centralized and easy these days.

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Garageband: First Impressions

Well I sat down last night to try out Apple's Garageband as a recording platform. Now I did not directly record into it because I prefer recording to minidisk as a medium, but I bounced my MD audio in. First off, Garageband has a great interface and can get you up and running right away. Unfortunately my likes of the program stopped there.

Perhaps the one thing that annoyed me the most was the export feature. You cannot export a song directly to wave, mp3 or any other format. You have to export the track to iTunes and then to mp3. Very round-a-bout and annoying. It seems as well that true to its name Garageband is geared for guitar players. There are a gazillion preset effects chains designed for vocalists and guitar players. Cool and all, but not really good for straight up recording.

The effects section was also a turn off. While overall there are some really nice effects that come with Garageband the few that I readily use either were not available or were short handed. Take the compressor for example. I am used to adjusting my thresholds, gains and ratios. In Garageband however, the compressor is a single slider that has a value of 0-100.

Beyond that there seems to be no DC offset or normalization plugins available. You would think for a recording software designed for life instruments it would feature some plugins such as DC offset and normalization.

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Macbook Day 3

Well it is day three of my new Apple adventure and I think I am finally settling into this thing. I have actually become most accustomed to the keys now and can type once again without staring them down. That is not to say however that my spelling skills have improved in any way.

While browsing through the Applications folder I came across a couple of programs that seem very interesting and that I am excited to try out. The first is called "Sherlock", and appears to be a general search tool allowing me to search just about anything from maps, to recipe's, to movie times to directions. The next is "Omnioutliner" which from my best guess seems to be an organizational tool and sort of note taking software. I am very curious with this piece because it may be extremely useful for my upcoming Capstone graduate thesis I need to begin working on.

In regards to everything else I am very impressed with my Macbook thus far and I very glad I purchased it.

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The Jealous Type?

So my mother seems to be eyeing my new Macbook. She is hovering around me incessantly asking me how I like it. Now she hates notebooks, but I think she was extremely surprised at how nice the Macbook is (especially next to her Dell). She asked me where to shop for Apples online (Apple.com) and I found her looking at some iMacs. I seem to have started a trend here in my family. My brother ordered his and my girlfriend is hoping to get one within the next couple of weeks.


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