Wired For Sound

Hope all my fellow canucks had a happy Victoria Day long weekend. Long may Queen Vicky continue to bless us with meaningless but greatly appreciated holidays! Hip hip, and all that.

Back to work tomorrow.

Most people go away on the "May Two-Four" long weekend, to mark the unofficial beginning of summer by opening up their cottages or some such activity. I barely left the house. But it was fun and productive all the same. Still work to do around the ol' new apartment, and I got some more things organized. It's getting there. Still nothing on the walls and no window blinds, but all in good time.

Friday night I went over to my friend Larry's place to partake of rum and Garageband. What a nifty little app. Within minutes, and using only a little mini midi keyboard not unlike this one, I laid down a moving Speilbergian soundtrack piece worthy of any closing credits. Just laid down some grand piano, then a couple of tracks of sentimental hollywood strings, and some slightly wah-tweaked classical guitar. Piece of cake! Okay, maybe it wasn't quite ready for prime time, but it sounded pretty cool. The audio modeling is very good.

And now that I've upgraded myself to Mac OS X Panther (thanks Larry!), I'm wondering if I can load it on my iMac. I have the requisite 600mhz CPU on my G3, but they recommend that the Garageband instruments need a G4 or better. Hmmm. I wonder if that's a hard and fast requirement, or could I make do with my G3?

Panther's pretty cool, and that's how I've spent a lot of the past day or so; just trying to familiarize myself with the new OS, tweaking settings on my apps, etc.

I also spent some time wanking on the gee-tar. Now that I have my little studio unit in the same room as my stereo, I realized that I could run the output from my studio into the mix mic input of my stereo, and that would not only allow me to play through the stereo, using its speakers as monitors, buy I could also turn on the radio or play a CD, and play along with either audio source... and my guitar comes through as if it was in the mix with the CD or the radio! This is brilliant!

So if I want to play along wth a song, I don't have to blast the stereo at high volume to be heard above the sound of my guitar amp (which has to be at a certain volume level, or it doesn't sound right). And I can run it all through my headphones (a nice pair of Audio Technica studio cans I picked up a few months ago) and jam away to my heart's content without bothering my neighbours. I mean, it's fine to just play the guitar on its own as a means of practicing, but I find I learn more and play better when I have a song to play along with.

And as if these technological advances weren't enough, I also did a load of laundry and washed the dishes!

Yup. Hear me roar.