To be fair I made the bad guys a bit overpowered out of laziness.

I do far too much LSD, lemme tell ya.

In the fashion of my people, i am spending all of the money i am making so far.

This is concerning to me, but i think it should fade to my normal much-more-frugal mode soon.

Gonna get a couple toys first though.

Oh btw chris if you ever need cheap game peripherals to experiment on, I work in a used game shop with lots of working and broken stuff sitting around.

ORLY? I will keep that in mind. I am trying pretty hard though, not to buy anything videogame-related with my monies.

The only gaming shit i have gotten recently was some joysticks that i needed at least one of for playing flying games. My moms actually hooked me up with a couple of those because her local Goodwill randomly gets tech stuff in with some frequency. $2.99 for the wireless Logitech keyboard i am typing on at the moment and $2.99 for the exactly correct model of Microsoft Wingman stick that is old enough that it is optical and bulletproof(the newer ones are potentiometer-based and essentially disposable) , and new enough that i could modify it simply, to make it USB instead of its original Gameport connector.

That said, i am fighting the urge to blow too much money on a Logitech G27 setup at some point in the future. I actually already have two steering wheels, one actually decent, but i just really want a clutch/h-shifter setup. And this even though i haven't even played a driving sim in like a couple years at least. That is i suppose, really why i am trying to avoid spending money on vid game stuff. The nerd in me is just too strong to be trusted in such matters.

You have no idea how often I have to resist the urge to buy every old console ever. I bought a Genesis from a guy the other day for $5.

DEV!

Does your used game shop have any broken Thrustmaster Cougar setups laying around? PLEASE TELL ME I WILL BUY ONE IN A HEARTBEAT


Also, i bought a Bigsby B7 on the weekend. Having it installed on ye olde Yamaha as we speak. Weighs half as much, if not less, than the licensed bigsby on there right now. GOING TO BE SEXYYYY

Those TVL Yamahas really are hawt as fawk.

I'll post pics when the work is done so everybody can

I'll dig through the island of broken toys tomorrow night and report back.

Whilst going through some old things I found this:



Came along with the entirety of Deadwood, which I should give another run over this summer after I have exhausted everything I want to watch on Hulu. Thanks again, Fearless Leader.

Thinking I might treat myself to a Vox Amplug Bass. Should be spot on for messing around on and probably good for recording too.

Oh, yes I remember sending that. Still my favorite series of all time. No one is safe. Ever.

Ya know, doing a ton of acid is supposed to make you lose your ego or so the old hippie tale goes or whatever, but I am not sure if I have ever felt so proud or confident in my songwriting abilities. It is kind of bothersome how happy being on LSD feels, as I just want to do it all the time.

Sounds like it might be just about time to look into the cautionary tale that is Syd Barrett.

You are not the first person to mention this to me. My DM drummer/childhood father has been making similar comments.

Yo, the distortion on this US1800 is wayyy fucking trashier than the Alesis interface i have been using.

I think i am going to get along with it.

The Alesis pres kind of smoothed out and just sounded like dirty compression. This sounds like a fucking 60s fuzzbox.

An experiment for some day i don't have to work, will be to see how many channels my current core2duo 2.0ghz laptop will allow me to record via USB. I think my ram and cpu might bottleneck the thing. Won't know for sure until i get a fucklot of tracks going though. It does seem to stumble a bit more playing back 30+ tracks from other projects i have recorded, but that could very well be the fact that i haven't even looked at the latency setting yet.

New toy though. I am into it.

Barrett is about as bad of a rock'n'drugs story as there exists. I don't know if you have listened to much of his stuff(first Floyd record, his solo discs) but IMO, Rob Pollard doesn't exist if Barrett doesn't exist. He had that fucking crazy fucked up creative pop thing like no one else.

But then he went all toasted, and it was the music that he lost. The outtakes on some of his solo stuff are just fucking brutal. You can just HEAR that his brain is leaving him, and he gets this really scary sort of desperate wailing shout thing going on in his voice, and it is not pleasant at all, because you can just hear how badly he wants to keep that part of his brain intact and he just can't make it work anymore.

He lived to be a pretty old dude. That was like almost forty years of essentially existing in a vegetable state, inability to play music or write or even think straight enough to form a coherent sentence.

A bad type of bad scene.

Damn Chris. Sixteen ins. Aint that some shit! I appreciate how no time was wasted in molesting the preamps.

Does that harm them at all?

Hmm. Maybe? I dunno. The Alesis didn't seem to mind at all, because the preamps were basically 100% analog shit on the input, and then each was fed through a converter and into the digital fx board and firewire chip. So it wouldn't have hurt that any more than it would hurt a tape four track. Certainly that is specifically due to the way the thing did it though. The distortion it made was definitely not digital CRUKKKK distortion(which can really piss of a PC) but just a smoove opamp overdrive fuzz. The signal seemed to go through some sort of hard limiter before it got to the digital area.

Now, in the Tascam, i really don't know. It is a definite different flavor of scuzz, but so far, i haven't heard that hard CRUKKKK that would indicate to me that a digital component was being severely overloaded.

In troof, i have barely begun to fuck with it though.

My own general feeling on such matters is that

1. i got it for a decent price(it is refurbished, $210 shipped, looks new has all of the official shit with it and arrived in its proper box) and

2. worst case scenario, i might have to fix it some day.

I don't know, i have kind of always been that way with stuff. I never buy anything with the intent to resell it. If a truly interesting misuse opportunity comes up, i like to just be able to immediately say "fuck it yes, let us then do it wrong here". It is one of the few overconfident elements of my former self that i managed to retain.

I am not really afraid of blowing things up. Not audio things anyhow. Certain power tools still scare the shit out of me, as well they should. But noisy stuff, fuck it, if i break it, then i get to learn something new about fixing some noisy stuff. And now that i have been working some, i can actually kind of vaguely afford to live this way, which is a weird angle on it for me actually.