I’m going to be closing this site down in the near future as I migrate to new hosting. Please bookmark the new blog.

I’ve been looking for a better way to record my guitar and bass-based music. FL studio is great for MIDI and VST instruments, but I don’t like how it records audio. Conversely, Audition is great for multitracking audio, but the system chokes if I try and feed it MIDI. I had dicked around in Abelton Lite yesterday after work to see if it was viable, but I didn’t like the interface and poor usage of monitor space. I was looking into running Pro Tools M-Powered on my Delta 1010LT, but M-Audio is still struggling with compatibility with a 64 bit system. Cubase 5 looked ideal in every way except for the pricetag. There had to be something that would fit my needs a bit better without breaking the bank.

Enter Reaper.

What surprised me most is the fact that the program fits in such a small package. The PDF documentation was about four times bigger than the five meg download for the installer. The program is sleek, uncluttered, and customizable.

Download it now and try it out, and if you like what you see, the licenses come as cheap as $60.00!

I’d like to share some rejected song titles for a piece I’m working on.

• Hesitant Word Oil
• Rawhide Lion Tots
• Loin Wad Theorist
• A Howled Introits
• Loathed Ion Wrist

I’ve fallen in love with the Internet Anagram Server from Wordsmith.org.

My beer fridge finally gave up the ghost. I had a bunch more stickers to put on it but when it ended up out on the porch, I figured something like this was bound to happen. I had a Death sticker with the Sound of Perseverance album cover that faded to white and then completely fell off a few weeks before the malfunction.

Bryn Schurman

Create Your Badge

I may or may not end up doing band sites for Caustic Reverie and Shufflebrain. I’m not sure if I like how bands are handled on FB.

I’ve just found a review of Mithradatium on the site Recent Music Heroes, but I’m a little rusty in my Estonian. The google translation misses a few phrases but overall it seems to be a favorable review.

Cheers!

All I can say on this right now is two words: Terror Lotion.

After a period of less-than blogworthyness in my life, I came down with a pretty bad case of the flu. I don’t know if it was the regular type or the one that’s been getting all the scary headlines in the press but I did spend thanksgiving alone because of it. Luckily for me, I was able to recover just in time for this year’s Herald Hunt in Miami Beach.

The Hunt was fun this year but I found it way easy. It was held in the same town and basically a smaller part of the same neighborhood as last time, but the great facilities of the Adrianne Arscht center more than made up for it. I got together with some EvilCON alumni to form a team that ended up being five people large.

Only one puzzle slipped us up, though it turns out that I had guessed how to solve it without ever seeing the whole problem. We were able to arrive at the endgame solution without all of the other clues this year but there were already a throng of people at the site, some of whom were walking away because there was already a winner. We pulled a phone number out of the four dates and called it, expecting there to be six or seven other steps to get to end but the message said that there was already a winner.

There was not a hell of a lot of booing at the wrap-up, as it seemed like the majority of teams had solved most if not all of the Hunt puzzles including the skimpy end-game. The weather was about as nice as it could be in this state, and aside from some difficulties getting food at the Democratic Republic of Beer*, it was smooth sailing most of the way. I have a feeling that four more people will be back for the Hunt next year.

*DRB had some decent sliders but don’t even think about ordering bruchetta unless you want toasted hamburger buns covered with slap-chopped tomato. This is the only place I’ve seen Unibroue beer in the state so far, so drop by and order a bottle of La Fin Du Monde or Trois Pistoles if you’re in the mood for something different.

Triangulation is a song that was written a few years back for a random-topic songwriting contest. It was produced in FL Studio, which unfortunately does not have a surround mixer.

I exported all of the mixer channels to their own tracks so that I could import them into Audition. Keeping everything at unity gain, this gave me the stereo mix which I could then mess around with in Audition’s surround panner/encoder module.

The channels are shown relative to a circle with the listener at the center. The white dot shows where the sound source is to be placed, and the blue-shaded area gives you an idea of the coverage area and what’s coming out of the speakers. Audition does not have any way to record mixer automation, so from here on it was a matter of using the mouse to give the individual tracks room in the 5.1 mix. I was able to draw in some automation curves with the pencil tool, so one is able to give these elements some motion. I had originally low-passed the master-track to give me something for the LFE channel, but it turns out that there is a slider to control how much signal goes to that channel.

Here’s the finished product. Higher fidelity version.

The Audition surround panner can do nearly everything I’d like, but is a pain to use in that you need to have all your tracks (including effects sends) printed and ready to mix. I have quite a few MIDI devices with joysticks and X/Y pads, but I don’t seem to be able to use them with this DAW.

Two tracks from Caustic Reverie were featured on the Temple of Despair radio show Unknown Pleasures last week. The program is available to stream or download from here.