To be continued...

I have created a site for my friends and me. It hosts my blog and lots of related stuff. My personal electronic music blog will continue on there (under News > Nebula's Glitchy Blog). Please check out juggernautmusic.com.

DIY STATUS.

I've been populating some circuit boards for a while. Planning a modular drum system.

CLX-VU: 90% complete.
9090: 70% complete.
Quad Bass++: 95% complete.
Mega Percussive Synthesizer: 95% complete.
SammichSID: 50% complete.
SammichFM: 0% complete.
Nebulatronix Circle Sequencer Prototype: 100% complete.

Still need to etch:
Custom MB-6582 / C64 power supply
Clangora

PRESONUS CENTRAL STATION.

I'm a lover of this thing - it's served me well for the past 5 years or so. But suddlenly the meters don't work.

I don't really rely on the meters for anything critical, but I can't get used to them not moving! They appear to be contantly "pegged" at maximum volume.

Calibrating has not helped.

I think I'm going to be in touch with Presonus tech support over this...

nebulatronix Circle Sequencer - "rotate" WORKING!

MIDIBOX 808 CIRCLE SEQUENCER.

NOT EXACTLY TIMELY, BUT ...

As an artist I'm always sad to see any vehicle for the promotion of underground music cease. I just found out Netmusique, which I have enjoyed for the past 10 years, is gone .....

from http://hsr.telldat.net/2010/10/11/rip-netmusique-august-6-1999-october-2-2010/

RIP Netmusique – August 6, 1999 – October 2, 2010
Monday, October 11th, 2010 @ 6:32 am | News

It is with great sadness that we received this email in our inbox, signaling yet again the demise of a great house and tech-house music station: Netmusique!

We’ve been supporting and promoting Netmusique since its inception in 1999 as one of the greatest places online to listen to quality, solid, tech-house music on the web. Now, it is no more, thanks in part to the newly enacted digital broadcasting laws that are making it prohibitive and costly for any and all the small independent online radio stations that have emerged and served us tremendously since the early days of digital streaming and promotion.

What makes these laws so deathly is that the bodies that are imposing them are asking “retroactive” payments for broadcasting going back to the creation of the radio station, more then 10 years ago! Why not work with those stations and create exemptions for them to align themselves with the new laws and start paying fees going forward? This is a subject that needs to be debated and supported strongly by the community.

Below is the letter that we received from Netmusique:

Hey Everyone,

It’s with a heavy heart that I send this message out, but after 11 years of amazing service and as a netradio pioneer, we’ve been forced off the air and to go silent. On Friday, we received an engagement letter from lawyers at SoundExchange whom are attempting to collect broadcast back royalties from when we first started. We do have a valid legal argument, as we broadcast in Canada and not the US, and we also have the support of the majority of the labels and artists that we play, but the fight would be costly and we don’t even have enough money to cover the costs of our servers as it is. This has always been a hobby for us and it would take too much time and money to try to fight this. In the end, we decided to throw in the towel and kill the station off quietly. We did this yesterday at 1:46pm.

Thanks for your understanding, friendship, and years of amazing of service and beautiful music. Please keep it flowing. We’ll make sure we’ll keep it flowing soon too.

It’s been an unbelievably fun run!

Lots of love,
Hali & Jeff.

iamamodularnerd

HOW TO MODIFY A KORG MONOTRON.

ZERO8 IN FOR SERVICE.

The touchscreen started acting up again. Dropped off Aug. 30/2010 at Long&McQuade.

DOMAIN REGISTERED!

The Godaddy.com back order was successful, but it was a nail-biter!

We had already registered juggernautmusic.ca, but I didn't want to go too public about it until we had secured the .com as well.

I'm thinking about a CMS - possibly Joomla ... we have no experience with this stuff.

SILENT WAY DC COUPLED CV AMPLIFIER SCHEMATIC.

a.k.a. the Expert Sleepers ES-1 - this thread is all about its design.

My plan is to make an 8-channel version of this. Os will consider selling PCBs, but I think it's simple enough that I might just use a big piece of perfboard

OK, ABLETON ...

Ableton Live, maybe you're not so bad. I mean, you're still a slut, and I still see you with other artists all the time, but ... your experience really shone through on Saturday night when we had that threesome with the Launchpad.

Thanks for looking after my needs.

TV dead.

For the record, my RCA projection TV that died this week is a P46100TN, manufactured in 1991. It no longer powers up.

in:fuse LINEUP.

Title link takes you to the details.

The Friday and Saturday lineup for the ORP (i.e. OM Festival) in:fuse gathering this year is:

ARIA / quirk
ATP
Brontron
Cabin Boy Billy
Caspar Project
Crouching Tiger
dBoom
Dharma Lab
Disko & v0ins
Dj Azakite
Dj Soma
echobas3
FEED
Gavin Attwood
Gnomon
Gnosys
Hans Ohm
Hypercolour
Jibby Jabrone
Kadmon
Kneading Doe
Kristian Sunflower
Lakeside Mile
Lexifer
Machine Elf
Martin Fazekas
Marty Mcfly
Mental Floss
Nebula
NML VGTBL MNRL
Pat G
PlumDragoness
Praying Mantis
Purrpelle
Ray Vincent
Sidenote
Southwild
Spazzmonk aka DJ Gabor
Spiral Vision
spooloops
T-
Task
Thunder
V'1LL1N
Zumba

UPDATES.

Well the Foran's gig was a mixed bag. First, the negatives:

- I had to follow an aggressive dubstep set that largely cleared the bar.
- For some unknown reason, Logic suddenly stopped and gave me one of those "I couldn't keep up" dialog boxes like 4 times during the show.
- After one of the aforementioned 5-second silence intervals, I did not recover at the correct point and subsequently missed about 4 minutes of my set, including most of "Atmos".
- Missing most of "Atmos" meant the Thingamakit solo was also missed.
- My wife told me it sounded like nothing was new, even though I played 3 (maybe 4?) new grooves.
- The x0xb0x line was out of sync during "London B" so I had to mute it.
- No good pics, video, or recordings.
- The police dropped by and insisted that the sound be turned down, drastically, at 1:40 AM.

And the positives:
- Mixing on the new Zero8 was a breeze. The pseudo-kaoss pad was a joy, and the channel meters were really helpful.
- Alex Smoke was there ... or, given the problems I had, maybe that's a negative?
- The sound was surprisingly good.
- One of the parts of "Helium" was missing from my bounces, so I re-recorded it in the hotel before the set, and I think the new part sounds sweeter.

I'm retooling for Om. Big time. New software will most likely either be MainStage or (gasp) Ableton Live. I will endeavour to use more live hardware synths where possible as well.

Om Reunion Project's "in:fuse" gathering is in two weeks. Details to follow.

LIVE @ FORAN'S, DETROIT. May 31.

HELIUM.

Helium by nebula

DEMF.

I will be playing in Detroit on DEMF weekend. May 31, Foran's (just down the street from Hart Plaza), 11PM to 12:30 AM. This thanks to my friends at Debleeq.

Details to follow.

LOGIC 9, BABY.

On logicprohelp.com, a user writes:

Hi, I am currently using Logic 8. 3 lame questions:

1. Will there be anything in Logic 8 that I will miss NOT having in Logic 9?
   
2. Will I have to reinstall every single plug-in? Both instruments and effects or will it simply be updated from Logic 8?
   
3. I am also on OSX 10.5. Should I switch to OSX 10.6? Will it mean reinstalling EVERYTHING from scratch then?
   

After the user "Ski" remarked about some lost functionality in Logic 9's undo history functionality, I responded:

I haven't had the time and money to upgrade my Logic. I got back from a week-long trip a couple of days ago and found a really nice surprise in the home studio: my wife bought me the Logic Studio 9 upgrade while I was away!

I had an extra 250 gig HD sitting around, plus a copy of Snow Leopard I've been meaning to install for a while, so I slid the drive into my Mac Pro and did a fresh install of Snow Leopard and iLife 09. Then I ran Software Update a few times and got everything to be current. Finally I used my new Logic Studio upgrade package to do a fresh install of all components, including Logic Pro 9.0. It asks for your previous serial number or XS Key.

The next thing I did is take Logic Pro 9 and Mainstage 2 for a quick whirl.

Logic 9 definitely looks just a bit nicer. The subtle shading to show the active section of the consolidated arrange window in Logic 8 is still there, but Apple has added a tasteful border around the active area, which makes it much easier to tell where you are.

Another thing I immediately played with is the resizable plug-ins. I like to tweak percussion sounds in Ultrabeat, but I find the UI so small that it's frustrating. Now you can resize the plug-in window and scale the entire UI. Brilliant.

Then I checked out the Pedalboard. I am not a guitarist, but I am something of a noisician, so running beats and other stuff through pedals is nothing new to me. You can not only chain a bunch of pedals, but you can change the signal flow and toggle or blend between effects in real time with the "mixer" pedal. This is a very inspiring way to mangle sound. I found myself wishing I could resize the window to show more actual pedals however, and suddenly I felt like I was using Ableton Live's frustrating side-scrolling signal path with no way to display the entire chain. I have a 30" monitor (2560x1600), but the pedalboard will only occupy about half of the screen. Sounds like something that could be addressed.

As for MainStage: If you play live with a MacBook as I do, you must check out MainStage 2. While Version 1 seemed more like a proof-of-concept to me, Version 2 is sweet. The "Playback" plugin opens up a world of possibilities. I had been suffering the limitations of using Logic to perform my live techno sets, and I was considering getting Ableton Live. I think instead I will re-tool my live set to use MainStage.

The Undo history issue Ski mentions sounds more like a bug to me than a feature change. I admit I am brand new at this, so I could be totally wrong, but I can't imagine Apple needing to take away a feature like that.

I haven't yet gotten into the power of Flex Time, which I suspect will completely negate any perceived need I may have had to buy Ableton Live.

The remaining two new features I most look forward to in composition are (1) the ability to set the volume of audio regions without needing to use automation, and (2) the myriad of new track management functions, such as bouncing in place and importing tracks from other projects.

So ... I'm not qualified to answer your question #1 yet. So let's move on.

2. If you install Logic 8 without installing a new OS, you will not need to re-install any plug-ins. Provided they are still compatible with Logic 9 (I don't know of any issues but no doubt there are some), they will continue to work.

3. So ... my wife upgraded her MacBook to 10.6 last year. The results were a bit disappointing - little if any performance gain, and a few new UI tweaks she'll never notice or use. I'll admit my results are somewhat preliminary, having installed it on my first-gen Mac Pro only a couple of days ago, but the performance increase when launching apps in amazing. Apps that took 3-4 seconds to launch (like Safari) now take 1 second. I suspect some of their multi-core optimizations are really working well for me on my Mac Pro.

You do not need 10.6 to run Logic 9, unless you want to run it as a 64-bit app. Presently there are very few practical reasons to do that, as it limits compatibility in some areas and its performance suffers. But if your computer has 4+ cores, you may benefit from Snow Leopard in other ways.

I'll admit I'm all over the place at the moment, and I'm typing this long message mainly because I'm waiting for 600 megs of software updates to download (Logic Studio apps are all updating to the latest as I write) ... but hopefully there's a little insight here for you.

REGISTERED!

Our little label has registered a domain name. Web presence hopefully in a month or two.

NEBULA TWEAKS AT BREAKANDENTER.

I keep forgetting to blog this video. It's three excerpts from my gig last month at the breakandenter two-year anniversary party.

Falko and Martin Fazekas also played great sets that night.

DAVROS - UPDATE.

Davros was unfortunately not released on Dec. 31 as planned - with the exception of a final decision on how to handle the BBC sample the track is complete, but I'm still shopping it out.

Maybe I'll just release it under Creative Commons licence and spread it out via Bit Torrent sites and YouTube, etc. It would make for quite the noble debut, I think ...

And trust me - the track slams.

HAWK-800.

I hope all Poly/EX-800 owners (including the Poly-800II) are at least aware of this. It is a Europa-style upgrade for Korg's diminutive 1980's synth blockbuster.

I've been meaning to pick up a kit for quite a while, but I have so many half-finished electronic projects on the go that I just can't justify starting another one right now. It's a shame, because my EX-800 is just crying to be used again.

My aim is to get on this before the end of the year.

DAVROS.

My latest track, entitled "Davros", contains a sample of a Dalek saying "Exterminate! Exterminate!" I shamelessly downloaded it from a random website, converted it from 8-bit, edited it to make its rhythm match my song, and inserted into just the right spot.

I plan to release this song on Dec. 31. I don't know what the ramifications of legal action from BBC (for plundering from a 1964 episode of Dr. Who) would be.

OPTIONS

1. Leave the sample as it stands.
2. Replace the sample with my own voice - but saying the same thing. Would this still pose a problem? Can the BBC have claim to "Exterminate! Exterminate!" as Paris Hilton does to "That's hot"?
3. Replace the sample with something more interesting. I played this song for a few people, and nobody under the age of 35 seems to have a clue what a Dalek is.

I'm leaning towards # 2.

DAMN YOU, NEARLY ENTIRE TWO-CALENDAR-YEAR PERIOD.

It's possible to have way too much fun here. Why am I not updating this site?

I added a fan box from my Facebook page. I think I need to talk about my music more.