TXT:: I honestly don't care for either one of the leading candidates, so whether you have fallen prey to the controversy of the swift boat veterans for the president, or the mike moore propaganda machine for senator kerry, it's your choice. My right to choose, however, has been taken away from me. Ever since the democratic party maneuvered to remove Ralph Nader from the ballot in California, I've been disenfranchised with this presidential election. I might go vote for the president just to spite the democratic party - or not vote at all (which is probably what the democrats expect). Acutally i'm going to write in Ralph Nader :-) For those who don't understand, it doesn't matter who you vote for in California since the electoral votes will more than surely go to senator Kerry... pretty cool eh? The results are certainly going to be interesting as the dirty politics start to unfold today.

AES:: This is another one of those reverse entry situations where I'm filling in the journal backwards through my experiences at the 117th Audio Engineering Society trade show. AES is a roaming tradeshow that goes to different cities each year, and there's a European as well as an American show. Next year it's in Madrid, Spain, and New York City. After recovering from triple duties at the show, i've finished up the photo edits, and I'll start filling in the entries this week.

TXT:: Thank goodness for Daylight Savings time. I managed to get 6 hours of sleep last night rather than only 5. I'm not sure what's happening, but I've been waking up early regardless of what time I go to bed. Still being the designated driver, I picked up Tage to get him over to SFO for his flight.

AES:: The candy bowl was emptied by the afternoon yesterday. Sugar junkies kept coming by the booth to nab the halloween candy. I found a place that was open early on my way back into the city, and stocked up with about 10lbs worth - the generic kind today. Today was a short day, and I spent the morning going around saying farewell to people.

I headed up to Sausalito to the Plant Studios. They were having an open house event for AES members, and I haven't been by in a long time. It was good to see my old friend, Arne Frager, who took me around to see the new stuff. I had not seen the 5.1 mix room that he's deemed the "Garden", which features an SSL surround console. The monitors are custom designed by Arne and and the old staff engineer, Manny LaCarruba. The mid and high speakers have dispersion reflectors that spread the mids and high frequencies evenly over a wide area. Arne played the Metallica S+M DVD that they mixed in the room. It's been a long time since i had a chance to walkthrough, and so I managed to see the Mastering room as well as the vintage Neve console installed in Studio B.

It was an absolutely gorgeous day, so I took the scenic drive back from the plant through the little town of Sausalito then down across the Golden Gate bridge. My mom was returning from a trip through France, so I had to make another trip to SFO to pick her up, before heading home.

I started walking the exhibits, and I started noticing another trend in audio gear, summing busses (aka merge boxes). I've been asking John to build a Revolution product like this so that I can run my computer interfaces through an analog mix path before digitzing it. It looks like other companies are on top of this with these 16x2 summing bus systems. Tube-Tech introduced one that has a set of inputs that merge through valve circuitry for gain make-up.

I was introduced to Bob Muller of Dangerous Music, another small company producing pro audio gear, who showed me their 16x2x2 summing bus called the Dangerous 2-Bus. It's part of a modular system of components that include a monitor section, meter bridge section. You can customize a workstation solution based on your needs without having a mix desk occupy all of your real estate.

The other trend i noticed was the push for 5.1 Audio. I saw a lot of multichannel microphone systems as well as monitors like the Blue Sky Media Desk systems. It's a clever marketing technique as they introduce a stereo system as "2.1", with an upgrade path to 5.1 or 6.1, etc. Everyone says 5.1 is the way of the future, but it's just not going to work on my workstation....

There are some other very nice pieces of gear that just grab your attention when you walk by, like the Weiss Engineering mastering eq's and converters. Mr. Weiss himself gave me the lowdown of their new DNA 1 denoiser/ambience processor designed for restoration of old recordings. The DNA 1 automatically identifies noise like tape hiss and removes it from incoming signals. The ambience processing is based on what they call "K-Stereo" technology to improve imaging and clarity on old recordings.

Definitey one of the buzz catcher's at the show was the Frontier Design Group's TranzPort. A wireless remote control surface for digital audio workstations. Already designed to work with Pro Tools, Cubase, and DP, the TranzPort is a radio remote control so you can start, stop, and punch in recordings. This is cool for someone like me since i sometimes track the rhodes sitting in the other room, and run back and forth to start and stop recording. With something like the TranzPort, i can start recording and set locators and watch the position marker on the LCD, listen back, or jump to another track and record a new take.

I made it back over to the W Hotel to catch part of the last evening of the Remix event. I managed to see Jame's last Reason demo before he had to fly home. The weather has been really nice in SF this week, and after the demo James, Tage, and I headed up to the terrace to hang out. They had this tent thing covering most of the open area specially set up for the Paul Oakenfold performance that night. They eventually kicked us off the terrace when Paul was coming in for soundcheck.

Tage and I ran into an old friend, Rodney Orpheus, (of Steinberg Fame, now working for DTS) who joined us for dinner at a nice "quiet" restaurant. Rodney always has great stories, and talked about the various 5.1/6.1 surround music projects he's been working on. He even mentioned the idea of a special limited DTS encoder for Reason. Rodney's bit of excitement was his participation in an AES panel discussion on surround sound for music. He was invited to speak for the electronic music world along with other engineers like Geoff Emerick and George Massenburg! How cool is that!?

This was Tage's first visit to San Francisco, and he had not had the chance to see any of the sites. So we hopped in my car and I gave him the 90 minute driving tour of the city. We went through Chinatown, North Beach, and up to Telegraph Hill. I wanted to stop, but the parking lot was full. We did the drive-by version of Fisherman's wharf and the Palace of Fine Arts and on over the Golden Gate Bridge to the vista point where we stopped. Being that Tage was a Swedish Naval Officer, I pointed out the various areas like the Oakland Shipyards, Treasure Island, Angel Island, Alcatraz, etc. We drove up to Twin Peaks to get a view of the city, but Tage had the opportunity experience the infamous San Francisco Fog, firsthand. It was rolling over the mountaintops, and we just watched the lights of the city disappear. Ok, so it's halloween weekend, and no tour of SF would be complete without a Tour through the Castro on Halloween. Rather than brave the crowd, we just drove down 18th Street to see the people in their fabulous costumes.

I was surprised to see the guys from Arturia at the AES show. They were showing a development version of their new virtual vintage recreation of the the ARP-2600. Not just any 2600, but the old blue face. It has all of the features of the original, but there's a very cool programmable modulator section that allows you to create unique modulation curves. Imagine if you could create your own LFO curves (like a matrix but with higher resolution), then tweak the curve with noise... That's what this does. Not only does it feature the synth, but it has the ARP sequencer as well.

I usually try to find something interesting at these shows that might indicate the future of the technology, and there was an emerging new trend in compressors. Next to the MAL booth was D.W. Fearn who was introducing his new VT-7 valve compressor that utilizes a unique pulse modulation circuit.

Along the same line, Korby Audio introduced their remake of the Pye compressor that uses a similar technology. Not only is it similar in electronics, but it sits in the same footprint as the classic. They had both sitting next to each other in their booth. Normally known for cool microphones, Korby had plenty of those as well. Another trend in microphones is to light the capsule with LEDs. Some systems have multicolor LEDs so that you can identify sources by their color.

The booth across the row from MAL, AEA went as far as to install LED arrays and incandecent lightbulbs in their microphones. AEA makes RCA and Coles replicas and ribbon microphones, but they also make these light fixtures out of the microphone housings.

I've always wanted a pair of DPA omni's to go along with my old B&K cardioids, but I really don't have a use for them. I had to drop by and check out the 4041 that sound really amazing. Amazing in the fact that they are really accurate to the point of being scarey. While standing in front of the mics, i could listen in on converstations behind me :-). The DPA rep told me about this guy who has a Yamaha Diskclavier grand with a pair of DPA mics fixed on it. You can send him a MIDI file, and he will send you back an audio file recorded on the grand. I'll have to dig up some more info on this!

I had to bail out of the AES show since I promised to go over to Robotspeak where Bob Moog was giving a presentation. The little space was packed since I arrived there quite late. The experience was quite mystical as the sub street level room was dark. The ambient lighting came from a row flashing leds on the various moogerfooger pedals, A red track light illuminating Bob's white hair and the glowing front panel of a 50th Anniversary edition Minimoog Voyager. There was a demonstration of the new MurF pedal, but most of the time was filled with Bob answering questions. One young woman in the audience fielded the question about Bob's experiences with John Cage, and he told a great story about a performance at Lincoln Center where he performed a Cage piece on an old Modular system. It was really cool since the presentation was hosted in the shop for an intimate group of admirers.

I had ordered a new computer and was there to pick it up and drive it home. While figuring out a way to load out, Steve was trying to hail a cab for Bob and his companion. One came down the street and some other guy grabbed it first. They were running late, so i offered them a ride back to their hotel. Talk about a surreal experience: Driving Bob Moog around San Francisco... We didn't talk about music much, but he said that he really admires what Alan and Steve are doing for the electronic music community. That was just plain cool :-)

Day two of AES was over, but i still had to drive 100 miles home to do some paperwork, make sure the animals were fed, then drive a hundred miles back to get ready for the next day. It's funny because i was so excited about the events from the afternoon, I almost forgot that i had my new MP-G5 in the boot.

Pictured are (L to R) John Hinson, Dave Marquette, and Tim Tattiva. John and Dave and I go way waaay waaaaaay back, and I still have one of the first (if not the first) V72 rack jobs they put together. I haven't seen Dave in about 8 years, and it was cool to catch up. I was happy to see that he's doing so well with his various pro audio ventures.

Besides the revolution gear, John does some freelance work as an analog designer, and helped Dave Marquette with some of the Mercury Recording Equipment gear. Dave has complete line of valve electronic gear based on some of the classic designs like his M72s and M76m mic pres.

Besides helping out with the Revolution REDD.47 stuff, I was also out pimping Power Tools for Reason 2.5 with the people from my Publisher, Backbeat Books, Music Player Network, and CMP international. Pictured (L to R) Amy Miller, Kate Henderson, and Kevin Becketti. Amy handled the layout for PT4R, and Kate worked on the back cover copy. Kevin is the head sales rep for backbeat. Kate and Kevin put together some cool little promotional postcards for my book that I was able to pass around during the show.

Mr. David Geren (Left) and Mr. Tom Reichenbach (Right) of Cinemag, a company that supplies John with custom components for his various projects including the REDD47, dropped by to check out the gear. Mr. Reichenbach is the son of Ed Reichenbach, the engineer who worked on many designs for Altec (back in the day)! There are some really cool old photos from Altec in the 40s on the Cinemag site.

We had a bit of a nice reunion moment in the afternoon, when an old friend dropped by the booth. Jeff Baust, who is on the faculty at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. His courses deal with Music Synthesis, so I got him a copy of Power Tools for Reason 2.5. Maybe he will incorporate it into the curriculum :-)

Tage had flown in from Stockholm, and James Bernard from Florida to present the Reason demonstrations at the Remix Hotel. As usual, James puts on an informative and entertaining presentation using the new Reason Drum Kits. Except he kept forgetting to mention that you get 17 different kits with RDK. Yep - 17 kits that provide a producer with different drum styles for almost every kind of.....ok <usedcarsalesflag 0> I made my cousins sit through the Reason demo so that they could finally see what the hype is all about :)

Also out in the Hall, Spectrasonics was demonstrating the new Stylus RMX. I also had the chance to meet up with Eric Persing, legendary sound designer behind the D-50, and other Roland synthesizers. Eric used some of the Reason files from this site for the design of the original Stylus, and the latest version, Stylus RMX looks very cool. Besides the 7 gig library of sounds that come with Stylus, you can also add your REX files created with Recycle.

These events are pretty cool since you get to meet like minded synthomusicheads. A fellow Reason user, DJ Messy, introduced himself and gave me a copy of his CD, Inner Sunset. It's actually quite nice. I also ran into an old aquaintance, Ian, who's a fellow ReBirth user (and still is apparently), who told me about the unveiling of Don Buchla's new modular systems at Recombinant Labs.

So after venturing through Remix Hotel, my cousins and I were joined by Tage and James for dinner. It was nice to finally sit down for more than 5 minutes. Afterwards we ventured over to Robotspeak where Warp Record's Artist, tweaker, sound designer, synth freak, and remixer Richard Devine was giving a presentation on his opensys eko. It was really interesting to hear about Richard's history and his love of tweaky gear and tweaky music. Apparently James and Richard go way back, so it was a nice little reunion for them.

Despite being exhausted from Jet Lag and lack of Sleep, Tage reluctantly said that he needed to go to the Digidesign 20th Anniversary party. Being the designated driver this evening, I ferried James and Tage over to the Fillmore. Being the start of halloween weekend, all of the freaks were out in costume. Digi packed the Fillmore with employees and guests to party and see The Roots perform. Nice party, but it just wasn't my crowd. Even though the music was cool, we left after 20 minutes of dealing with loud obnoxious (s)halloweeners.

Last stop of the night was the Cycling '74 party down at jhno's loft, south of market, which was winding down by the time we arrived. Marsha, who handles the PR for the props told us to come by, but by the time we got there, she was gone. It was really mellow with some chilled out IDM being performed on cycling products. The video performer had a cool rig setup with a little camera focused on a small light table. It seems that she was feeding the video through jitter and manipulating the real time images of various objects she placed on the light table. There was a great little nostalgic moment as she put those old Viewmaster stereo photo discs on the light table and spun them around. Steve and Alan from Robotspeak were also there and we had a chance to hang out outside of the store.

Day one of AEX/Remix hotel was finally over....

RFL:: I've been busy working on another project lately which has me editing samples. This has worked favorably since it got me in the Refill making mindset, and i've managed to get the ReBirth Modpack 1 refill posted. It's not quite as polished as i would like, but the thing has been sitting on my desktop for months, and I just wanted to get it off. The sample set contains the samples from the TB-909e, RB-SEMx, RSP-1200, and the Axiom_peace mods. I even went through the trouble of looping the various Axiom_peace samples. The patches for the looped samples came out really cool.

TXT:: Last Tuesday, i went up to SF to meet with Joselito Serling, who was having a birthday party at the StudioZ.tv space. Joselito is going to be teaching Reason classes at the NorCal DJ Music Production Academy. The instruction format is similar to Power Tools for Reason, so I've donated some copies that will be used for his classes. The party had a full lineup with quite a few people that i know from the scene.

This was the first time I've seen my friend Rich perform his solo act, Commute. Rich has one of the craziest rigs with a Rhodes, Moog Prodigy, Echoplex, TiBook (running Live 4), and a bunch of other effects, but it's definitely worth it. Rich is a really great piano player (see the live session refill where i sampled some of his playing), and his IDM stuff is absolutely brilliant.

Thomas and Nina were also visiting California last week, and we spent a lot time going out to dinners. Even though we were all a little jetlagged, it was great to spend some time visiting (even though I had just seen them in London and Stockholm). The Loveparade was in SF, last saturday, and I wanted to head up with them to check things out, but we ended up spending most of the day shopping for puppyphanalia. It was warm, and Nina wanted to stay in the heat.