home ownership

My friend Corbin Dunn just bought a house up in the Santa Cruz mountains. Cool and interesting that my peer group is getting to the stage of life where home ownership is becoming a possibility/reality. Since I make only $20k a year as a graduate student, it seems like an impossibility! (but once I graduate, things can change) Corbin has bought a real fixer-upper, which means that he got a good price on the house in a neat mountainous area. (close to Santa Cruz, close to Silicon Valley) The views along the road on the way to his house are amazing. Well done, Corbin!

portland music, and thoughts on instrument building from Paul Alcott

I spent the day with my old friend Paul Alcott yesterday at his house in Portland OR. Paul is in 2 bands, the binary dolls and dat'r, both of which gig regularly in the Portland area.

http://www.myspace.com/datr
http://www.myspace.com/binarydolls

Paul has been building out some UI for the dat'r live show lately, including a joystick-based drum looper/effects module. It basically consists of some variable delays, feedback, and a sweep-able low-pass filter. It's amazing how many interesting sounds can come out of such a simple setup. It's very expressive, and one of the "secret sauce" elements is that he has a lot of good drum loops. Paul is using pure-data, GriPD and Live, and his thought that has stayed with me went something like:

"German programmers have spent 10 years making Live into a great, full-featured looper. I couldn't hope (or want) to reproduce that work, so I'm using pure-data only to tweak my sounds in ways that Live was not built to do."

This thought basically boils down to "use the right tools for the right job, and don't re-invent the wheel". Extermely sound advice, and not new, but it's a thought that I can bear being reminded of often, since I sometimes enjoy re-inventing the wheel more than learning about the tools on the market already.