Buying something online is always somewhat of a weird experience for me. The only things I've ever given up my credit card information for, so far, have been online poker, buying this domain, this server space, and a few books from Amazon.com.
Late last night, I got around to purchasing the Tapco Link.USB external soundcard. It comes with Mackie Tracktion, the program itself is worth $149, and coincidentally, this soundcard was purchased for $149. The best part is that I got to use Paypal. The version of Tracktion is an LE version, but most of the plugins that are missing are free ones bundled in from elsewhere. A few of the mastering plugins will be missed, but other than that, it's a VERY sweet deal.
Nick Dash and myself have an upcoming project to utilize the Mackie preamps that come with the soundcard. A few of our close friends know our idea, but other than that, I'm keeping most of the details under wraps. I will, however, give a few hints away to excite the palate.
There's a lot of work to be done in this project, more-so than any project either of us have done in the past, but it also seems like it'll be lots of fun.
Don't you hate it when you think that you've done something, that you've tried multiple times on solution, and came to the conclusion that it didn't work? And then you hate it even more when you realize, by trying yet again what you perceive to be the same method, that you didn't even use that solution at all?
margin:0 auto;
Jeezus. I thought I'd tried that option at least 4 times, yet it wasn't the case. So now, thanks to the hammer and nail method of "hitting it until it's done", this website is properly displaying in both FireFox and Internet Explorer 6. Now I just have to get Opera, and maybe IE 5.x.
Short update tonight, kinda late. Just saying if you've been here the past few days and have seen some.... weird phenomenon, I've updated my site to download quicker than before, with the power of CSS coding. watch me as I abuse layout and markup like never before, adding spice to the mundane!
I'm still trying to fix the problem of the webpage not centering in FireFox, but that shouldn't take too long, hopefully.
So Nick Dash was over yesterday to work on some more tunes, and I convinced him to work on a hip hop track with me. Until I get my new soundcard, which will enable me some quality recordings, I'll be putting popular lyrics to songs that I can find on the net. So this one features Nelly Furtado and Timbaland!
I've also 'tagged' another song, it's one of my favorite beats that I've produced, so I could use the most [sarcasm] quality 50 cent lyrics to go over it [/sarcasm]. It sounds decent mixed together, surprisingly.
I also love PHP, and you need to know that.
So Nick came over tonight and we started working on a housey dance tune, which we haven't done in ages. I showed him a bit of my limited knowledge in synthesis, always learning something new in the process of teaching. I think I've got him liking Reason now, but I'm sure he still hates the virtual patch cables in the back.
So we made a few synth sounds, one was a semi crunchy bass noise, one was a nice high pitched rave lead, complete with appregiated volume, and the last sound we made (almost a preset) was a nice phasing chord.
Something that was also nice about the music was that I got my stereo speakers hooked up. Not quite monitors, but a lot better than these piece of shit laptop speakers. Dicking around on the keyboard was also a nice time, jamming out melodies and chords in real time is always a plus. It enables you to come up with stuff that you never would solely thinking and composing. I've been doing it for quite a while, but it's a new working method for Nick, he's pretty much solely used trackers his whole life. There's nothing wrong with that, trackers are superior sequencers in my mind, but it's always fun to work in a new way and explore new possibilities. NICK, get a 37 key MIDI controller, 25 is too little.
Something else I want is this
http://www.behringer.com/BCR2000/index.cfm?lang=ENG
as my midi controller has no knobs (I didn't know any better when I got it a few x-masses ago, I thought the mod wheel was enough). It'd help more on the performance side, something I want to get into a bit more.
Anyways, that's a mouthful for my audio-blog I suppose, I'll get into my ever changing ideas of what this site will be next time.