Wednesday, April 19, 2000

Ever since I registered my copy of Sound Sculptor II, I've been playing around with recording my songs. In doing this, I have discovered two things.

First and foremost: I desperately need more memory for my computer! I never thought that I would see the day that my MAC G3 Power PC ran like a Macintosh Classic, but it has arrived and it is a horrible thing. The main problem is the songs themselves. My songs tend to reach past the six-minute mark. To record songs of this length at the sound quality I want requires a lot of RAM-based memory. My 64MB that happily sped along when faced with Word Processing, The Internet and Graphics applications cries and mopes along when faced with sound processing. Virtual memory doesn't alleviate the problem, because audio recording and mixing is a RAM-based process, whereas virtual memory tries to trick your computer into thinking it has more RAM by allocating a portion of the hard drive for RAM. The sounds know though, and they make you aware that only real RAM will do.

The second thing that I've discovered is that I'm never satisfied with the results of what I've recorded and mixed. When I said I've been playing around with recording my songs in the first paragraph, what I meant was, "I've been re-recording and mixing the same song over and over again." Basically, my hard drive has seen about 30 files with the same name meet the trash can. It'll probably see 30 more of the same. It's just that I always find something wrong with the file I'm working with. A minute mistake was made while I was playing the song (no one but me would notice really, but it bothers me the same). My vocals aren't up to par. The white noise is drowning the music (I doubt it really is, but I'm scrutinizing this thing to death). There's too much redlining in the meters. Ad infinitum.

"Why don't you just save the file and work on it later, rather than trashing it each time and starting over?" you may ask. See paragraph two of this entry. Ironically, I have enough memory to create and edit sound files, but once I have saved the file and quit the program, I don't have the memory to re-open the file.

Anybody care to make a donation to the "buy Seth's computer more RAM" fund?

Despite all these troubles and setbacks, I'm sure to have some sort of finished product eventually. I'm hoping that I'll be able to make some suitable files to burn to a CD. Perhaps I'll eventually be able to post some sounds on my web page. If I'm really daring, I could even send my sonic children off to be judged by a record label (independent, of course). All I really need is time, perseverance and more RAM. And a few extra gigabytes of hard drive space wouldn't hurt either.

In other musical news, I am still slated to play at Hurley's next week, except the date has been changed to Wednesday, the 26th. The show still starts at 7:00PM. Yes, I'm still playing my original concept-concert, Bitter. Here's a song list (not that I have any sound clips to offer at this point, or even an up to date lyrics page):

• Angel; Non-possessive
• Billie Jo
• Take Off Your Inhibitions
• Rebound Bitch
• Death
• Fractal Heart
• Limbo
• The Satellite
• If Only...
• Angel; Reprise

And yes, five of those ten songs are longer than six minutes. Two of them even pass the ten-minute mark. Apparently I have problems being concise.

I don't know why, but I have been getting phone calls from Discover Card all day. Usually I would simply find this annoying, but in this case my annoyance is punctuated with a bit of amusement.

Firstly, these guys must have the worst phone network known to man, because it took me saying, "huh?" three times until I found out who they were and what they wanted. This brings me to my next observation: whoever sold them my name to put on their mailing list messed up. They didn't want to speak to Seth Warren, but to simply, "Warren." On their third call today, this changed to "Warren Seth." Whatever help me if they find my online journal, I could get calls asking for "Project."

Anyway, they wanted me to sign up for a credit card through what they termed a "courtesy call." Seemed to me that if they really wanted to be courteous, they would have quit calling. Of course, had I wanted to be courteous, I wouldn't have hung up on them.

Next time they call, I'll spring forth with the funny voices. "Hoo eez dizz Zef Worrin? I kent zee eem ayneeware!"