An Old Classic: Or What I've Been Up To Recently

Greetings. I hope that everyone is finding themselves in good order. Just keeping you posted with regards to life out West. First I have some advice for Jared's last post:

1. I don't know too much about comps, I'm running PT LE8 through a newer generation iMac that runs great and handles RTAS DSPs pretty well. For LE, I'd recommend a decent amount of RAM and a sizable duo-core. A refurbished Mac would suit well.

2. I don't recommend anything lower than an MBox 2 Pro, primarily for the sake of the firewire interface that the 2 Pro has. Lag becomes a huge issue when recording anything externally, especially during record/playback. The USB interfaces make it feel like you can be playing up to an 1/8 note behind the record playback, which sucks and means that you have to do more takes and quantize.

3. As far as mixing consoles are concerned, I'd look at the Yamaha MG124CX. It's affordable and comes with a 12-channel and 4-bus channel capabilities and has a built-in compression system. That or I'd look at the smaller Behringer Eurorack series, it's what I use and it's perfectly fine for a bedroom Pro Tools setup.

4. As for affordable cardiod mics, I'd personally recommend, the Beta 57a. It's a go-to for almost any instrument setup (sans drums obviously, vocals and acoustic guitar). If you're looking for a good, rich and most importantly, affordable condenser mic I'd recommend the KSM27. It's pretty cheap and good all around. I would recommend, that whatever mic(s) you go with to run a HPF somewhere around 75-90Hz to cut the room noise that you get in home recordings.

But I digress. Seattle's insane. School's amazing. I love showing up for class everyday, even though I wake up a few days a week at 6am to catch the 7:15 bus. My history degree was in vain. I'm still settling in, but I've adjusted to the city exceptionally. Some photos of the things I've been up to:




Dinner: Fettucini with fresh clams. Did you know that "Buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo Buffalo." is a complete sentence in the English language? Damn right!


Cribbage night at the Hop Vine Pub, up on Capitol Hill.


Cribbage and beer, hooray! Did you know that Cribbage is the only game that you can legally bet on in pubs in Britain? Brain food yo!


Bought a soprano melodica, it's fucking awesome sounding.


The studio in my bedroom. Clustered with homework and music theory books.

Mt. Rainier from my balcony. My view's insane, you really have to see it to believe it. This mountain may blow up and kill me one day but at least I'd have a great view of my impending demise.

Anyways, not much else is new. I'm going to see This Is A Process tomorrow at Chop Suey (that one's for you Ben) and I'm waiting for Tony to get up here soon so we can make some music.

Two Words: Van Damme (Or I Finally Have Internet)

In lieu of going out last, some friends and I watched two (that's right, TWO) Jean-Claude Van Damme films. The first, a John Woo creation, entitled Hard Target is truly a large pile of dog shit. It takes place in New Orleans in the very, very early '90s and has a lot to do with hunting homeless veterans for sport. It ends up with Van Damme's character's uncle, played by Wilford Brimley ("I have diabetes, and horses!") shooting a bunch of people and moonshine with arrows that subsequently explode and trigger off a shitload of dynamite. Then Brimley makes shitty alcoholic jokes about moonshine in a terrible French accent which I believe was supposed to be a Cajun/Creole accent. The film surprisingly grossed a total of $32.5 mil at the box office in the US, which proves that people in the early '90s knew jack-shit about everything from music (Paula Abdul) and films (Jean-Claude Van Damme). Needless to say, it was fucking awesome. Check it.

The next award-winning Van Damme masterpiece was 1995's Sudden Death. This action/sports/family/fucked-up piece of cinema stars Van Damme as a fireman-come-headcase-come-security guard for the Pittsburgh Penguins. It is by far the most exciting event in sports ever conceived. Van Damme, a former minor-league goalie in Canada, is working the security for Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. He picks up his 7 year-old daughter and 11 year-old son from their mother's house and gives them two tickets to the game (plot bolsterer). The importance of security at this game is crucial. Why? Because the Vice-President is attending the game (further plot development). Obviously, terrorists infiltrate the arena and take the VP hostage. It's up to Van Damme to stop these scoundrels from taking frozen accounts and transferring them into their own. Certainly there are about thirty predictable plot twists throughout this debacle. All that I can say is that Van Damme kills about thirty or more people, saves a goal in overtime and crashes a helicopter. The game directly coincides with the transfer of funds because (spoiler) if they don't transfer an account per period they execute a hostage and if they don't get all of the money by the end of the game, they blow up the stadium (with what? C4 of course). Therefore, at one point the action goes down to the last second, as predicted. The children in this film are doomed to a life of therapy and behavioral issues. It's worth seeing for the incredibly horrible one-liners, exaggerated deaths (the last one is especially fucking good) and utter ridiculousness.

So to keep things interesting we drank to these classics. A drink for every great one-liner, that's pretty much all the dialogue. A drink for every round-house kick (that's all that Van Damme does, round-house kicks everything). A drink for anything exploding. You get the picture.

Pick these ones up, they're so damn good.

Other than that, not much else is new. Made some fresh scallops I picked up from the International District, they're pan-seared with bacon. Wish you guys could be here to share them, here's a pic of them: