Maniacally Conducting a Choir of Zombies.

May 06, 2004, 02:57 pm

There's so much that I should've written about, but I'll keep it concise.

My birthday was really nice. I hung out with my parents on Sunday and Monday, Jesse got my friends together and we watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch and ate pizza. It was the nicest birthday I've had since I was a little kid!

I bought more recording equipment, most importantly a Sennheisser 421 mic. I also got a headphone amp, so that when Joe comes over to do vocals, he can hang out in my closet (aka. the vocal booth) and I won't get as much noise from my computer in the recording.

I also got my USB MIDI interface working with Linux. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would. And I figured out how aconnect and FluidSynth work, so I've been playing with SoundFonts the past two days. Some are pretty impressive.

I have Mellotron Choir and Flute SoundFonts and they're okay for a limited range, but start to sound really bad in the upper and lower octaves. I really want to get the Gmedia M-Tron mellotron software synth. Playing parts with the Mellotron Choir is like conducting zombies. If you think about it, the Mellotron samples were recorded back in the sixties, so it's entirely possible that the people performing the vocals are now dead.

I like to turn it up, pound chords out on my MIDI controller, throw my head back and say, “Sing for me Zombies!!” I'm sure my neighbors like it.

I'm on the road to more spending: an external USB/Firewire harddrive. I have to transfer all the songs that we've been working on at my house to the studio Brian works at. Screw burning a buncha CD's. The songs are more than a gig each!