A Short List

Songs for Drella is a rock opera about Warhol.

Using the Hologram Microcosm. A thing I do not understand. 

A playlist of violin techniques with Anna Thorsvaldsdottir. 

Glumpleskork

Magic Blur is a plugin written by someone who took the same class that I took (and completely failed) in C++.

Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process. This is a pretty smart and proactive way to present and deal with critique. 

Dig Zeppelin Design Labs. Also Dead Astronaut FX makes some neato guitar pedal kits. 

Coronal Mass is a Neutron drone from The Drone Zone which is really awesome. No, I can't replicate it. 

Liz Lerman again. 

What is narratology?

Autoethnography in media studies.

More autoethnography.

Narrative theory. 

Moi

It me. (Andrew Bellware).

Harmonic Story

Double Harmonic scale. When I was 16 or so I thought I made up this scale. More than 40 years later I found out what it was. 

Saturday the 20th, there's going to be a Rocky Horror at White Eagle Hall. 

¨§¨

Drama has an intrinsic ideology. You have to punch down. It's always about individuals. There has to be dramatic tension or conflict. The only way we learn about characters is through conflict and by what they do. What a character does is who they are. 

A story is like the parody of old movie trailers: One man/girl/robot wants to do one thing and they make a decision to do some harder thing. Around then they meet a boy/talking dog/love interest which further complicates their earlier decision. Their goal becomes more complex before it all comes apart at the end. But then with those lessons they learned earlier, and probably with the girl/dog/minor god they met earlier they have a plan to overcome things.  Then we're in act three and you know how that goes. 

Capitalism Does Not Exist

"Capitalism" is a structure or framework used to describe the political economy. It was invented by socialists in the mid-19th Century as a kind of straw man of what they were opposed to. 

The primary inventor of "capitalism" was of course Karl Marx. And it was a pretty good theory about how the political economy operated. But then, of course, a bunch of people who were in favor of the status quo (whatever it was) took a look at the theory and said to themselves "Why yes, this 'capitalism' seems perfect. We are pro-capitalist." They did this without any irony.

A Marxist analysis of the political economy has a great deal of merit to it. It has famously been picked apart by a whole variety of thinkers, from Veblen to Bakunin, to feminist and critical-race theorists, and of course rather disingenuously by a lot of right-wing propaganda. 

One of the big problems with Marxism, and consequently with any description of "capitalism" is its reliance on this binary: capitalist/proletariat each work toward their own self interest. In what we might call "capitalist economics" this even has a name "homo economicus." And this person... doesn't exist. People do things which aren't in their economic self-interest all the time. The Freakonomics guys made a whole career out of it. 

Everyone is a Marxist. 

Capitalism was (for all intents and purposes) made up by Marx. "Capitalist" economists are all "Marxist." That's neither good nor bad. But it does call into question what is non-Marxist economics? Not a whole heck of a lot, as it turns out. But by and large, all modern economists use a model of the economy which, although modified, essentially utilizes a Marxian framework of the political economy.

Anarchism And You

One of the earliest critiques of Marxism came from Bakunin and the anarchists. Interestingly, Bakunin was a Russian intellectual (and, unfortunately, super anti-Semitic), while Marx was a German with a Hegelian philosophical background. 

The Treadle on the Wheel

I'm trying to make numerous ambient experiments. 

I'm using Samplitude's electric piano and a free LABS sound from Spitfire on the keyboard. The pedals (which you don't see) are playing a Mod Duo X. Also going into the Mod Duo X is a Behringer 110 controlled by a 960 sequencer. 

A Korg NuBass is the bass, a Volca Sample is the drum machine. 

Liszt - Faust Symphony S. 108 (Score)

I mean, it's pretty cool, right? My doctoral supervisor suggested I listen to it because of Drowned Girl. 

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The thing I feel that's pretty brilliant, and strictly a Richard Byrne sort of thing to do, is the comparison between Goethe's Faust and Marlowe's. I mean, it's a very intellectual turn but it's a very emotional one as well. 

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Yellow Cat is a film to watch.

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Schorr is an employment attorney in New Jersey.

Death, Berlin, and all the rest

 The secret life of pots. A potentiometer is harassing me right now. 

Appointment With Death is a film I'm supposed to watch. 

Herd Immunity is another film I'm supposed to watch.

Babylon Berlin is a TV series I'm supposed to watch.

Manyavar Mohey makes some amazing looking jackets. 

Exploring Autoethnography as a Method and Methodology.

Autoethnography in Media Studies.

iPDTL for audio remotes.

The Proaim Telescopic Bazooka.

I've sold 265 "units" of Scampr for a gross revenue from Steam of $550.

The Zio is a sort of pedal/front-end/guitar preamp thing.

Wow, people really don't like the Netflix version of Persuasion. 

Analog Instability

 I'm not quite old enough to have actually dealt with real old-school analog synths. Analog has always had the cache of being cool, but by the time I'd touched anything* even remotely professional in the way of synthesizers, they were pretty darn stable, if not digitally controlled, analog oscillators. And now I'm playing with the Behringer 110 which sounds great but boy oh boy it drifts. Just like old-school synthesizers in times of yore. 

I'm using a 960 sequencer, which is WAY not stable. Boy, you flip the octave and it goes stupendously out of whack. I'm even using a quantizer and it'll sometimes bend an entire half-step out of tune -- straight-up playing the wrong note. 

So, I've always felt that the way to making an analog synth sound like something other than bleeps and bloops has been a decent delay. Some pretty echoes are always better. And, these days, a groovy shimmer reverb is a way added bonus. 

So I've been sending the output from the VCO/VCF/VCA that is the 110 into a Mod Duo X. Like this:

The topmost line is the analog input to the Mod Duo.

Basically, I'm throwing the signal first to a tuner (so I can have a clue about about where the tuning is), then to an auto-tune emulation (so I can get the actual audio to be somewhat actually in tune), then into a compressor, to a digital emulation of an amusing analog stereo delay, to a shimmer reverb, to a pretty chorus, a mastering compressor, and lastly a sub-bass processor. At the beginning and the end of the chain are a couple level meters and gain controls. 

The middle row is just a quick little synth patch I have which is running from the MIDI input to the Mod Duo X. I play it using my organ pedals. 

Using the CV input of the Mod Duo X I take the second output of the Barton CV quantizer and put it into a patch of the Mod Duo's internal CV synths. I can't figure out how to make those digital emulations seem in-tune though. That could be the Barton's natural variance. In any case, I auto-tune each of the two VCO's (technically those are DCO's, right?) inside the Mod Duo with their auto-tune emulation. 

It's good for experimenting. I wouldn't say I've done anything satisfying musically with it yet. Because I haven't. But it makes some fun sounds. 

*Other than an ARP 2600 that Rutgers University owned. I only had about an hour or so with it. I harassed the professor in charge of it a whole lot before he let me play with it. 

EP update

Exciting things on the Electric Princess front. We think we have the solutions to the Z+ gain stage, 

The electronics designer's modification to the Z+ gain stage. 

and to the 100Hz gain stage. 

 10K trim pot -> 1K

 C301 -> 0.47uf (470nf) C302 -> 1uf C304 - 0.1uf (100nf)

In addition: Put the trim pot on the opposite side of the board. Write "Electric Princess v.XXX" on the silkscreen Label each potentiometers' value on the silkscreen

Me. Not.

Not me.

Me.

Still working on the Electric Princess. We're going to have to go to another version of the board. 

This is a fun tool for visualizing projects.

 

Very Like A Whale

The Matthews Architect Overdrive is quite a piece of kit. It's their Klon/fuzz and it sounds great. I love the additional boost switch. In fact, that's where I got the idea for the second boost on my Electric Princess. 

July 3rd. America. Liberty State Park, NJ. 

Meydl²

The cat is quite cuddly lately. 

New York City. So nice, they named it.

Meydl can be very adorable.

Ernest Abuba

Ernest Abuba was a friend of mine. He played King Claudius in my Hamlet, he played the angel Abdiel in my film Apostasy. 

https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-broadway/article/Pan-Asian-Repertory-Theatre-Announces-Passing-of-Founding-Member-Ernest-Abuba-20220621

Ernest Abuba in Apostasy

Such a wonderful guy and such a talent. His students were awesome. Everyone he worked with was fabulous. We did a lot of theater too. I sound-designed some things of his. We seemed to do a lot of work about the Cambodian Holocaust. They were hard to take, but Ernest had a very Buddhist response to the horrors of that war.

Electric Princess Overdrive (Beta) First Look

 I have to give credit to Chance Shirley for the excellent graphic design on this pedal. 

https://youtu.be/xjPfiCGssg0

Here's a little video where I go through the functions.