My cousin Garrett for Christmas last year is making us our own brew modeled after the gonzo imperial porter from flying dog ales. It’ll be about a month until we have it in house, but we are quite looking forward to it. Two of them will not be consumed (more on that at a later date), and I think there are a couple of people that are asking for one as well. If we could legally sell it, I know how it would be sold, however there is no way anyone is going to pry it from my hands.

Garrett is also being quite dilligent with the process of brewing it so we’ll have another set of photos for the gallery. Right now the gallery is the stock install for gallery 2, but the plan is to integrate it into the site. So please forgive the “stock display.”

For now you can see photos of the studio, recording sessions, Xipetotec’s car crash from earlier this year, and a gallery from a very old show we did in Johnson City, TN (I think that was back in 1996). I should be more dilligent in taking photos while we are in the studio, but it’s one of those things where it would be best if several cameras were mounted in various locations and they just automatically took photos. Of course that would require a digital camera of sorts, and I’m still fairly anti-digital in regards to photos. I prefer the “old school” 35mm.

But back to the brew at hand, which has already blown an airlock during fermentation. Quite a fitting event given we don’t seem to be able to be contained either.

Yes, the label has the logo.

February 28th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 5 comments

In what I can only describe as the most horiffic moment in the studio, Saturday night while installing the software for the new akai mpd16 and the drivers for the oxygen 8 (so that it would also function over usb), the hard drive errored. Essentially the mac equivalent of the file allocation table got corrupted. I never quite reached the point of panic, but I was pretty close by Sunday morning.

Thankfully some of the guys at twelvestone were able to help me out. For $99 It looks like on the surface I’m going to be able to get back at the very least the cubase files for all the current tracks in production. So for about four hours last night I sat with Data Rescue pulling material off the drive. It’s looking like I’m only going to have to search for one track on a backup elsewhere (maybe i’ll be lucky and a copy of it still exists on another partition). If I can’t find it, I’ll have to sit down with the audio file for “Simulated Stimulation” and begin resequencing it. To me it’s not a huge loss as I was already contemplating doing some drastic things to it anyways given it’s original conception is no longer a influence.

Now the drive (made by lacie which i’ve never had issues with) is at most three months old which begs the question of why did it happen. Was it my own fiddling with the OMS studio set up while Cubase was opened? I’ve done that before with no issues.

so now we are up to 3 rules in the studio:

1. No beer past this line. You spill on it, you buy it. More for others than us.
2. Turn off the heat upon exit.
3. Create a cd of all related files for the track worked on that evening before leaving.

Xipetotec was able to get all the effects processors to step through their programs by changing the setting on the 8024, but also discovered that the newest effects processor (the behringer virtualizer pro) has a piss poor midi implimentation. factory presets are in the first 100 slots, and there is no way to jump to the user stored presets. So it and two unused old effects processors (the alesis microverb 3 and lexicon a|ex) were pulled from the effects rack to be traded in for credit on a lexicon mpx-1.

February 27th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 2 comments