Well, been a while since I updated this thing (yeah, really original). So much has happened. I was in a really dark place when I started this blog. It was a dark place on the light-end of a much darker place.
Love
Love will age you, love will kill you. Getting attached to the wrong people, even for right reasons, will rot the living hell out of your insides, even if you don't want to let it.
Lots of stuff has happened since last October. Enough about Love. Love will, certainly, ultimately be the death of me. So, enough about love.
MYSPACE
I'm pretty done with MySpace. Oh, it's really a great forum for dropping my creations on, or posting silly pictures, but I've really become quite the hermit. People are mostly very stupid, even if they are very nice, and I find that my attachments to them wear me out and use up my every resource. I was never like that til around ten years ago, so giving that it would kill me. Now, I find that because of my generous nature, I need to withdraw to my apartment in order to save anything at all of what is left of my life, and to get anything done for myself. It's not really a selfish phase; it's merely survival. I've really got nothing left in me after five years at failing at being in love. Oh, yeah; there's the aweful word again.
WHO IS GLENESIS?
I'm a trained audio engineer. Through my emotional struggles with myself, I've collected a lot of songwriting ideas. I figure that I have enough for five albums, right out of the gate, if I group them into relevant collections. The ideas go back into the middle-1980's. I'd stumbled onto a primitive, multi-track sample-sequencer, called Studio Session, around 1985, in the Mac Plus lab at Nassau Community College. First, I found the player for Studio Session files, and I really dug the lo-fi music that the thing put out of my Mac's speakers. So, I bought the software, and started composing in it's editor. The program used instrument files that were recorded with a serial input device called the MacRecorder. I saved up, and bought a couple of MacRecorders, and promptly started making piles of music with custom, 3-second-long audio clips, on 8 tracks of monophonic playback on a piece of virtual staff paper. I clicked in hundreds of thousands of notes, one click at a time. At a time when expensive synthesizers sounded like cheese (really good cheese), a time when using software MIDI sequencers was more like wrestling in thick, cold mud than it was like making music, I was putting together tracks almost the way I wanted to, way ahead of my time. I have thousands of custom samples at 8bits resolution, 11kHz sample rate. They are truly awesome.
Flash forward, 1991. My fiance, Alisa, left me for my best man. The first time my world was every completely shattered. I buried myself in a bedroom with my Mac SE, a 4-track cassette deck (a Tascam 644 MIDIstudio), a microphone, and a Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard. I wrote for months, and months, and months. Really, I wrote for the better part of 1991, fairly non-stop. In October, I was a passenger in a car accident, and was homebound for a few months due to a head-trauma (a blood-clot between the 2 membranes that surround my brain; very very very lucky). Trapped like a mad dog in a tiny cage, I dove into my setup, wrote a few hundred songs, and combined the best of them into a 27-minute piece, that I called "Just A Happy Go Lucky Guy". In making this thing work, I recorded 1,449 original samples. I still have the files, the computers, and all fo the gear that I used in the production. So...
Flash forward, Summer, 2005. Caitlin, love of my life, joy of my existence, my beautiful best, left me slowly and painfully after a viscious cycle of on-again/off-again romance (I am still worn out from the whole affair). When I wrote the rock opera back in 1991, I worked for a couple of years, then attended Five Towns College in Dix Hills, New York, to really learn what I was doing with this sound stuff. After I graduated, I got sucked into doing sound in bars for ten years, but I really wanted to be making my own music with nice studio gear, the whole time. I never lost touch with that. So, my life shattered completely for the third time, (yeah, there was a second time before that), I began to withdraw from live sound to save my hearing, and to get my nose to the grindstone making the songs I'd written. Over the 2 years with and without Caitlin, I'd found myself inspired by her and over her to write a whole lot of songs, songs I really like. Between 2003 and 2005, the emotional rollercoaster ride had churned up the creative juices the most they'd been stirred up in years. So, I ditched everyone, slowly, and I've been recording my own stuff again.
Anyway, flash forward, 2007: This summer's project is to reconstruct the original rock-opera with modern digital instruments. I'm recreating the piece, note-for-note, side-by-side with the original piece, in a file in Digital Performer. Once the piece is done, I am going to elaborate on it, in an expanded version, incorporating derivative ideas that I've produced over the years in-between, as well as incorporating ideas that I've had while I've been re-entering the notes of the piece and finding equivalent sounds in a 24-bit world.
This project is the culmination of 2 years of digging through floppy disks to find the original samples to get the original piece to play back, something that I haven't done since 1992. I drove around with an instrumental cassette that I'd made for vocal rehearsal for over a decade. I found that I had to dedicate a Mac G4 to running SoundEdit Pro and Super Studio Session (blessedly freeware now, it is still out there for download from Bogas Productions) under Mac OS 9.2.2, But it was worth the 2 years it took to get it playing.
The most painful part of the process was actually finding working copies of the Studio Session instrument files. Many of them were data-compressed to fit on floppy disk, and many were compressed with software that will only run under System 7!!! So, I found myself running Mini vMac, an open-source Mac Plus emulator, to decompress the files. It took most of the two years (more maybe?) to find the correct decompression software for the files. Once the instrument library was back online (for the first time in sixteen years!!!), the project really began to move along.
First, I wiped my G4/450 PowerMac, and installed a fresh copy of OS 9, and SoundEdit Pro, and Super Studio Session, and SoundApp 2.7.3 (the BEST sound-converter utility and player, EVER. Period.). Using Studio Session, I soloed each of the sixteen tracks in two files (one for the right and one for the left; I was very clever back in the day), and recorded sixteen, 27-minute-long, monophonic audio files. The mono files were in SoundCap format, which I could find NOTHING to play under OS 10. So, I used SoundApp to convert the files into something Performer could import as tracks, dumped the whole thing onto an external hard drive, and moved the tracks into my home-brew Intel Macintosh, where I've spent the last few months making Digital Performer play the stuff via MIDI on virtual instruments. Amazing. I am finally blowing my own mind again; it's been a long, long time. Hasn't it?
