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	<title>EMUSIC-L &#187; essays</title>
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	<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l</link>
	<description>electronic music and other vaguely-related topics</description>
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		<title>Lying users and synth manuals</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/2008/02/15/lying-users-and-synth-manuals/</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/2008/02/15/lying-users-and-synth-manuals/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 16 Feb 2008 06:03:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[essays]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[software]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/2008/02/15/lying-users-and-synth-manuals/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In &#34;Every User Lies&#34; at the excellent&#160;Coding Horror&#160;blog, Jeff Atwood refers in passing to the&#160;concept of the &#34;active user&#34; &#8211; the person who immediately runs the software without looking at the manual at all.
In my trying out of various softsynths (most notably the WayOutWare&#160;TimewARP 2600&#160;and the GForce&#160;Oddity&#160;and&#160;impOSCar), I&#8217;ve found myself doing that &#8211; firing up [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In &quot;<a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001048.html">Every User Lies</a>&quot; at the excellent&nbsp;<a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/">Coding Horror</a>&nbsp;blog, Jeff Atwood refers in passing to the&nbsp;concept of the &quot;<a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/activeuserparadox.html">active user</a>&quot; &#8211; the person who immediately runs the software without looking at the manual at all.</p>
<p>In my trying out of various softsynths (most notably the WayOutWare&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wayoutware.com/products.html">TimewARP 2600</a>&nbsp;and the GForce&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gmediamusic.com/gforce/oddity/oddity.html">Oddity</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gforcesoftware.com/ins_imposcar.php">impOSCar</a>), I&#8217;ve found myself doing that &#8211; firing up Garageband, and opening the plugin in a track, then just fiddling with the presets. By this point I know quite well that doing this with an analog synth with a screenful of knobs and sliders is counterproductive, but I caught myself doing it anyway.</p>
<p>So I decided that if I was going to have any kind of a meaningful interaction with the plugins, I was going to have to work through the manuals and see what there was to learn, whether I decided to buy them or not &#8211; and to avoid wasting money on something that didn&#8217;t fit my headspace (and earspace).<span id="more-88"></span> My TimewARP 2600 demo expired last year(and reinstalling/other fiddling about doesn&#8217;t wake it up again &#8211; I suppose I could wipe my OS X install, but that&#8217;s frankly not an option&#8230;), so I&#8217;ve concentrated on the Oddity, since the impOSCar, though swoonily gorgeous soundwise takes too much processing power on my G4. (Click and breakups <span style="font-weight: bold" class="Apple-style-span">bad</span>.)</p>
<p>I was able to find the original&nbsp;Odyssey&nbsp;manuals at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.oldschool-sound.com/">oldschool-sound.com</a>, in addition to the GForce manual for the plugin itself, and I&#8217;ve started reading them through. Both are very good, and a very different experience from, say, the Ensoniq manuals &#8211; and most other contemporary manuals as well. These manuals assume that your goal is to build a framework of understanding before proceeding, so you won&#8217;t be lost in a maze of Too Many Options. I particularly like the advice from the original Odyssey manual which exhorts you to resist the temptation to simply crank all the sliders up. The author obviously had musicians like some I know in mind.</p>
<p>Frankly, in the case of these plugins, it&#8217;s really necessary to understand the signal routings and how everything is connected up if you want to be able to to do anything other than load presets. The original manual for the Odyssey is quite up to the standard of the 2600&#8217;s manual, with its outstanding step-by-step tutorial. (As an aside, any musician who wants to understand who subtractive synthesis really works should spend some time with this manual; as I&#8217;ve said before, even without a 2600 in front of you, it&#8217;s possible to get an amazing amount from this book.)&nbsp;It very carefully builds up from near the end of the signal path, gradually working backward and adding complexity as it goes. Quite a good read as well as being fun to follow along with.</p>
<p>I think that&#8217;s the key thing here: the machines are relatively speaking quite opaque, and unless you have some entertaining way in, you&#8217;re going to find it a bit dull.Then again, after all this, I&#8217;m still not finding the sonorities speaking to me yet &#8211; I think my current musical needs are actually better served by the Moog Modular V &#8230; which, again, needs more CPU than the G4 can give it.</p>
<p>Hmm. It&#8217;s entertaining anyway, and I&#8217;m finally getting to try out the instruments I missed in their first incarnation.</p>
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		<title>Different Skies: after</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/2007/10/21/different-skies-after/</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/2007/10/21/different-skies-after/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:48:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>joemcmahon</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[differentskies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[essays]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[events]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[concert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[different skies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gigs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[performance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/?p=73</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m currently at the airport, having just finished going through security and having to have my backpack scanned twice; too many confusing electronic bits, I guess. 
Load-out took from after the concert and final jams (ten-ish) until about 3AM. We got to experience the weather we might have had: 60 mph winds and cold. Fortunately, [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;m currently at the airport, having just finished going through security and having to have my backpack scanned twice; too many confusing electronic bits, I guess. </p>
<p>Load-out took from after the concert and final jams (ten-ish) until about 3AM. We got to experience the weather we might have had: 60 mph winds and <em>cold</em>. Fortunately, that was the only cold night we had. We all got up as usual thsi morning; several folks had to go out early (Otso, DK, and Mike) because of bad weather predicted along their return route. Giles, Bill Fox, Darrel, Allen, and Doug went out around noon, and Jim Combs and I followed soon after. I was lucky that Jim was with me, as there was construction that required us to get off the freeway and drive through random parts of Phoenix. Jim had done it on Sunday when he went back down to pick up Otso and John 3. I dropped Jim off, dropped the rental car off (it was a Honda Civic hybrid &#8211; only half a tank of gas to get all the way to Arcosanti and back &#8211; cool!), and checked in.</p>
<p>Man, am I tired. Thank goodness Ivan was there to do sound for us, but that is some heavy equipment. Fortunately Rus ran into The Naked Guy during this process instead of me, as I would probably not have handled it with equal aplomb. (The Naked Guy showed up partway through the process; he apparently really needed to get to the visitor&#8217;s parking lot for some reason. Who knows.)</p>
<p>Sales at the merchandise table were brisk &#8211; the two folks who volunteered to help out took in more than $400. Wish I&#8217;d had my CD ready, but oh well. Maybe next time.</p>
<p>I need to analyze my setup and come up with something without a single point of failure if I want to play live. The FIREBOX was the bottleneck &#8211; if I&#8217;d just yanked the mixer cables and swapped them to the Firebox I could have stayed on line. &#8220;Everything and Nothing&#8221; would have just been different, rather than for all practical purposes nonexistent. I could have done fine with something I could switch to a straight audio-out feed from the headphone jack in an emergency &#8211; it worked well enough for the TV appearance, so it would certainly do for a backup. I didn&#8217;t use the Vortex much at all, so I could leave it home next time. If the audio was all routed direct to the mixer, and then to the direct box, I could turn up the direct laptop feed in case of an interface crash, or simply switch to whatever else I was using (real modules/etc.) if the computer bit it completely. Add one of the Edirol controllers for a backup if the keyboard goes but the computer&#8217;s up. and I should be ready for nearly anything. Though I will still keep the drum and whatever other acoustic instrument(s) I bring handy; they should work for anything short of the power going off. Miking, etc. is to be figured out later. And I&#8217;d really like to start playing trumpet again. Would be a nice addition to Brian&#8217;s sax.</p>
<p>Admittedly, it would have been nice if I had been able to figure this out earlier, but at least I&#8217;ve got a live setup sorted out for next time &#8230; and I definitely want there to be a next time.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>On Editing and &#8220;The Historical Record&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/2006/09/29/on-editing-and-the-historical-record/</link>
		<comments>http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/2006/09/29/on-editing-and-the-historical-record/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:03:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>joemcmahon</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[essays]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[policy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www-dev.ibiblio.org/emusic-l/wordpress/?p=42</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Today I got a request from a former listmember, who asked me to remove some posts of his from the archive, as he felt they were possibly going to reflect negatively on him should someone go searching for them.
I had to think about this for a minute. On one hand, there&#8217;s no point in making [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Today I got a request from a former listmember, who asked me to remove some posts of his from the archive, as he felt they were possibly going to reflect negatively on him should someone go searching for them.</p>
<p>I had to think about this for a minute. On one hand, there&#8217;s no point in making sure that something someone said in 1997 is available to keep embarassing them permanently (especially since there were indeed certain unfortunate implications in the posting). On the other hand, history never goes away on the Internet. archive,org&#8217;s got a copy; the search engine caches have a copy (for a while anyway); and of course, anyone who&#8217;s mirrored the older version of the file has a copy.</p>
<p>I decided, in this case, to redact the name and email address of the user in question, not because I think censorship is good, but because the gist of what he said is still there, and can still be found if you&#8217;re searching for that content, but it&#8217;s not specifically linked to a person.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve done an edit once before, when someone asked me to remove their mailing address from the archives in an attempt to cut down spam to their (still-active) address.</p>
<p>I think this is a good point to line out what I will and won&#8217;t do as far as edits: I will remove your name if your post implies that you might have engaged in something illegal, but not if you simply wish you hadn&#8217;t said what you said. This is going to be a judgement call on my part; I&#8217;ll do my best to keep everyone happy, in the ongoing spirit of how we did things on EMUSIC-L, but keeping the archive a legitimate archive is going to be my guiding principle.</p>
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