I’ve picked up two newish releases this week.

It’s kind of funny, I started to type albums.. because I’m that old, and then rethought it. But what do you call an artist’s release when you just download their new stuff on I-Tunes?

Not Album, not CD. Wierd.

I’m sure someone has figured it out.

Anyhow. The new release by Green Day, “21st Century Breakdown” (new) and Theory of a Deadman, “Scars and Souvenirs” (less new) are pretty decent.

Green Day sounds a bit less punky then they did back in the, “Dookie” days. But everyone progresses. The Musicmanship that they show off on the new release is outstanding. The songs are good with a touch of the usual political ranting that they expressed so much on the last release, without being overtly heavy handed about it. All in all, a pretty good purchase.

I had bought the first 2 singles from Theory of a Deadman, “I Hate my Life” and “Bad Girlfriend” previously when they first started getting some airplay. It popped up as a Finish my Album offer on I Tunes (which is probably why I keep thinking of releases in that term) and since I enjoyed the first two songs, and had 11 bucks left on my account, I went ahead and picked up the rest of the songs.  Well worth it. I can see Theory of a Deadman being catagorized as a Nicklebackish band. But IMO, they’re a bit less douchy. (FYI – that was added in there just to see if my wife reads this. She’s a HUGE Nickleback fan. I’m a little less so, but we still buy all their releases and go see them when they tour near us.)

Anyhow. I’m pretty happy with my two purchases, so I figured I’d spend one of my very rare updates here typing about it.

Let me know what you think if you’d bought either, or both, of these.

I’m not a very prolific poster, but I figured there’s no way that I could not post on a day as important as the 31st of May.

My wife is starting up her own podcast, “1st Time Caller.” I guess, I’ll be mixing the bits together in Sonar to help produce it for her. We’re still in contract negotiations, at the moment, but if we can come to an agreement, I’m sure you’ll hear more about it here.

I’ve started recording a bit more lately. I took a while off to get use to my new guitar. PRS guitars have a bit of a wider neck than Ibenez, but I’m so fat fingered, it’s probably a good thing. I’ll be doing most of the music for the afore mentioned podcast to start, but my project, FOD, will probably see some more postings shortly, too.

Well, our 31st of May festivities won’t plan themselves, so I’d better go. Enjoy the holiday yourselves.

-dr

Yesterday I picked up a sweet new black PRS SE Singlecut. I did come pretty close to buying the SE Tremonti, but in the end, I liked the fatter tone from the one I bought.

I also picked up a phantom power supply for the AT2020 my wife bought for me as a gift. I wanted to pick up the Toneport studio UX2, but just didn’t want to drop the cash on it this week. It’s going to happen eventually. I just really want those tones. And the dual effects chain sounds awsome for my scenario.

So my home studio is back to 1 boy, 1 guitar, 1 mic, and 1 DAW. Now I really don’t have an excuse to not being working on some project or another.

I was kind of noodling around with a song in my head on the drive home last night. As often happens, I can hear how I want it to sound in my head. Now I just need to see if I can figure out how to get it recorded that way in my DAW.

I’ve really gotten into the whole home music studio thing. After I shut down the wife-aggro podcast last year, I found my self with some extra time and alot of undirected created energy.

So, I visited my local Guitar Center and picked up Cakewalk’s Sonar Home Studio 6 XL, a MIDI keyboard and started learning how to make them, and my guitar, play nicely. There’s a few examples of what I’ve been doing on the site here, if you’re interested, but I’ve still got a LONG way to go before I consider myself anything more then a complete newb.

Before long, my home studio comprised my DAW (Sonar), my Guitar, my keyboard, a Line 6 USB audio interface, and an excellent microphone that my wife picked up for my Christmas gift.

Not a bad little set up, to be honest. The Line 6 modeling software that comes with their interfaces was excellent for finding the tones that I wanted to play around with, and Sonar is absolutely excellent at getting my ideas recorded, arranged and saved.

And then my house was robbed.

Good Bye Guitar and Keyboard.

Unfortunately, as often happens when you’re an adult and have bills, taxes, and whatnot, it wasn’t possible for me to immediately go out and replace what I lost. I know what I want to replace them with. I’m going to upgrade the Ibenez guitar that I was using with a Paul Reed Smith Single-Cut SE And my, “not quite as good as I was hoping for” MIDI keyboard is going to be replaced with an much improved Edirol PCR-500. And while I’m at it, I’m going to replace my USB interface with the new POD Studio UX2 which, incidentally has phantom power so that I can actually use that spiff microphone I was given. So, the studio is getting an upgrade.

Eventually.

It’ll probably be the guitar and the interface, and then the keyboard.

So, if you’re checking out the FOD page for new music, please excuse the fact that it’s missing some guitar at the moment.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to hang out in bed and catch up on some TV that had been accumulating on our DVR.

Two shows stood out enough to mention. The usually excellent Reaper and Kings (which I’m only just now catching up on).

I caught the last 3 episodes of Reaper which reminded me how funny this show is. The standout episode of the three, was “The Sweet Science.” In the episode, Sam must return the soul of a boxer who threw his last fight. I’m not going to spend too much time ruining the plot for those of you who haven’t had a chance to see it, but the I re-watched Sam’s second fight 3 times. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the series, I believe you can catch up on CWTV.com.

Kings is a new show this year. The premise in 1 sentence is that it’s a retelling of the biblical story of King David set in an alternate modern age. This sounds like the type of show that never would have gotten the green light from a major network. Yet, here it is.

The cast of Kings is excellent. Ian McShane (of Deadwood fame) plays an amazingly conflicted King Silas and stands out in the show. However, the rest of the cast does a great job and shouldn’t be dismissed as simply supporting castmembers. Once again, I’m not going to blow any plot points, but if you get a chance to see this show, I highly recommend it.

Lastly, the premier of Southland was this week. Strong start. I hope I’m able so see more of the show and see if it can keep going.

-dr

I’ve added two new pages to the site. WordPress treats pages sort of like individual content that just links off of a blog.

In this case, I’ve created a 21st Century Philosophy page where I hope to archive modern observations about our current culture. Please feel free to contribute.

I’ve also created a page for my pseudo band project, Foriegn Object Damage. That page will archive the trials and products of FOD. Feel free to criticize.

-dr

The Friday Night Shootout, which is currently being spent playing the excellent Left 4 Dead, is growing a bit stale, I fear. It’s not that the game stinks. But I think running the same two map sets over and over is getting old.
Valve has been promising a new “Survival Mode” for a while now. And there have been rumours that they’re planning to open up the two map sets available in campaign mode (but not versus mode) but nothing has shown up so far.

Last Friday there was talk about really needing a new squad based shooter to come along. I think the principle complaint being that there are 5 or 7 of us playing L4D, and the game only supports a squad of 4.

There’s not alot on the horizon, either.

Battlefield 1943 is pending. But it’s hard to find any info on it other then gameplay videos of a map from a previous Battlefield game. Don’t get me wrong, when they added the Iwa Jima map to Battlefield 1942, it was a blast to play. But rehashing the same map for a new game years later is either a brilliant transition move for the player base, or just lazy. As I haven’t been able to play yet, I really don’t know which it could be.

I really don’t know about any other multiplayer squad based shooters coming along anytime soon.

-dr

The Sci-Fi channel is changing it’s name to something that they hope is less geeky.

I’m a huge fan of a couple of the Sci-Fi originals such as Battlestar Galactica and Eureka. ((I suppose those links might be broken shortly??)) Obviously, Science Fiction content isn’t all that they show on the channel. They’re also well known for some of the crappier horror and fantasy programming of the last year.

I personally, don’t care what they call the channel. The shows that I love to watch I watch no matter where they reside on the TV menu. I do sort of think it’s funny that the change that they’re making, supposedly to distance themselves from just a Science Fiction fanbase, is being timed for the first episodes of Warhouse 13. A show about a secret government warehouse where the government stores secrets. Sort of a cross between The Librarian and Indiana Jones.

Just because it takes place in the now, doesn’t make it not science fiction.

What I do think is kind of cool is that NBC Universal, who owns the Sci-Fi channel, apparently purchased the Syfy namespace from a fansite that had been covering some of it’s shows. So at least one of us pasty-faced guys playing video games came out ahead in this deal.

-Troy

I’m having alot of fun with the new tools available to me with the new versions of phpBB and WordPress that I’m using now.

Over on the right there, I’ve added in a video player to post up the videos that I come across that deserve sharing. The current one from the Onion News Network is hilarious. Shortly, I’m going to add in a playlist enabled MP3 player for sharing other types of media. Mostly stuff from the wife-aggro house band, Foriegn Object Damage, but probably some other stuff as well.

I need to create a better way of getting to the forums, but for right now, I’ve put a link up above in the banner section of this page. You can register here to commont on these posts, and you can register there to participate in the forums, but sadly, the two accounts use different databases. So, while you can use the same name here, and there, you have to register twice. It’s worth it, though, I think.

I’m sure I’ll post a long rant about how hard it was to get the wife-aggro.com domain back in my name and back on the internet.

Needless to say, if you’re thinking of registering a website and creating your own little space on the internet, be wary of hosting deals where they’ll help you register your domain.

It took me the better part of 6 weeks to get the soil that is Speakeasy.net out of my shorts and back onto a new start. Old users of the domain will immediatly note that the forums didn’t make the transition. Let’s just look at it as a fresh beginning and put the past behind us, shall we?

-Troy