Pleasure for the Empire

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

The Rest Home for Building the Will to Victory

It's the 21st. This is the nonsense I've been doing since the 13th.

This is much more experimental nonsense. Mostly playing with textures and a little with dynamics. I'm still trying to "master while mixing" using emulations of Pultec EQ's and then being very lazy with slapping Ozone on there, tweaking the levels, maybe inserting SSL and/or Fairchild emulations on the mix buss. Many of the individual tracks have LA-2A emulations on them just for whatever that does. On many of these tracks I commit the sin of putting reverb on the master bus. I know, right? But you know, some days that just works.

Monday, November 13, 2023

Sapphire Rebellion

New album. Sapphire Rebellion. Mostly experimental, trying to see how much low-end I can get on a recording without it chattering and pumping. Not always successful.

I tried mixing and mastering on the same timeline. The mix master buss gets very busy that way, it's not a method I really recommend overall.

Some things, like Audit Announced in Advance, surprised me as I though the saxophone sound was pretty good. And I think it was just a sax which came with my DAW, Samplitude.

Chris Henson's Transphobia

This is really disappointing. Chris Henson's company The Crow Hill Company doesn't have a contact on their page, so I wrote a comment on their "What is the Crow Hill Company" YouTube video.

They haven't bothered to respond.

So I wrote to Spitfire Audio (using their help desk.)

I can't fathom not copypasting some boilerplate about how they respect all people regardless of race, creed, ethnic origin, LGBTQ+, etc.

So yeah, I'm not buying any more of their stuff. It's really disappointing and disgusting.

Friday, November 10, 2023

Spitfire Audio has a Transphobia Problem

I've written to both Spitfire Audio and to The Crow Hill Company about their positions on trans rights. Neither have bothered to respond.

I've always found Spitfire to make the most musical of the libraries out there. But I don't really need to be supporting TERFs. I encourage artists to not support Spitfire anymore.

Tuesday, November 07, 2023

My Things Two

Groove to my sister's new design site.

This is you.

I've been using Pexels for creative-commons videos.

Monday, November 06, 2023

Electric cello stuff

Because I should be doing something else, I am working on designing a fully-electric cello.

My idea is to make a headless instrument and to use magnetic pickups. The arc or radius of the bridge possibly makes putting a regular (say) bass pickup on it not do a great job of picking up the middle two strings. But maybe not?

Thing is, the strings have to all be metal. And good strings are almost comically expensive -- like $300 for a set. Of course, a bow can be tens of thousands of dollars because of... reasons.

Saturday, November 04, 2023

Three And One

The Telefunken ELA M 260 Tri-Mono Recording Set is relatively inexpensive for what it is. Apparently it's designed to be a Decca Tree set.

It's under $5000 for three channels of microphones. Decca trees are cool and those Neumann M49's and M50's are stupidly expensive nowadays. Right now I have a fantasy about putting three of those Warm Audio U-47's in the air as a Decca tree.
Huh. The M50 is also small-diaphragm. I was not aware of that. Anyway, my last Decca tree was with a pair of new Neumann omnis on the sides and an AEA ribbon in the center. That worked out pretty well, especially with some large diaphragm tube mics as spot microphones.

Broken Peach's Pink Elephants on Parade is essentially a perfect work.