Blog Posts
July 22, 2010 - Cyberpunks
Well, the community compilation CD that my friend here at work was putting on is finally released! The official title of it is Emergent Collective One, and is comprised of 11 tracks. Partition 36 is featured on it with my brand new track, Cyberpunks. You can listen to it on the official CD, or download it separately below in a few extra formats (mp3, Ogg Vorbis, or FLAC. The version below is slightly different in that it has a greater dynamic range (the way I intended it to sound), so if you’re on the fence about which one to grab, download it off of this page. I highly recommend checking out the other tracks, however. There’s a lot of great talent on the CD!
Can’t hear the embedded audio? Get a better browser, such as Google Chrome or Firefox. As far as Cyberpunks goes, when I first started the track, I didn’t have any intention on writing about cyberpunk ideas at all. It actually started out as a sort of spiritual successor to I Love Penguins, where it would have again talked about the virtues and benefits of Linux. Another idea I tossed around early on was making it more generally about Free/Libre Software, focusing on the GNU General Public License. But I couldn’t come up with the right words, and I was also concerned that doing something like this could potentially alienate listeners who don’t know about the free software movement. After I had a few of the core beats and themes of the song done, I had the idea of instead focusing on the idea of “cyberpunk”. The term is most often used to describe a subgenre of science fiction, which focuses on post-industrial dystopias where technology permeates everything. The Bubblegum Crisis, Ghost In The Shell, RoboCop, and Blade Runner are classic examples from anime and film that fall into this subgenre, while William Gibson’s Neuromancer is a classic example from literature. I had heard a remark made quite a few years ago that pointed out something interesting. People who enjoy this genre tend to wonder what life would be like in a cyberpunk world, sometimes to the point that they even wish one existed. But what people don’t understand is that the current world is already beginning to resemble a cyberpunk world. One just need to look at the Internet and hacker culture for examples. The remark always struck me as interesting. I would say that it’s not 100% true since our world doesn’t look exactly like what we see in cyberpunk media, but there are some early signs of us entering one. This was the root of my inspiration for the song. I searched online for some sort of cyberpunk-related text, eventually settling on something called The Cyberpunk Manifesto, originally written by Christian As. Kirtchev. It fit perfectly with the feel of the song, as well as my ideas for it, so I recorded myself reading section of it. Things just sort of fell in place from there. On the technical side of things, Cyberpunks uses a few new tricks and ideas that I’ve had floating around my head. The opening background noise was generated in Reaktor using a built-in synth called Space Drone. I took one of the presets and modified it a bit to create a pulsing background pad that, I believe, is totally random and never repeats (I can’t confirm this yet, as I haven’t dug into the guts of this synth). From there it builds into the opening “pingy” sound, which was actually the starting point for the entire song. The bass is actually the same patch that I used in I Love Penguins, and is generated using Arturia’s Jupiter-8V software. Meanwhile, the saw sound at the end was done using my PolyEvolver Keyboard. Aside from a little bit of reverb and some very sight EQing to keep the mix clean, it’s very close to the original sound. The drums need special mentioning. These were highly inspired by the track Hi-Scores by Boards of Canada. To achieve the effect of a swirling, bouncy set of noisy high hats, I took various samples and passed them through a few effects plugins (at least one was a distortion unit). From there I used a delay unit to make the sound bounce back and forth before finally entering an EQ with an LFO on it. The EQ actually has a small peak that moves back and forth through most of the sound spectrum to give it just a little bit of movement. It’s probably easiest to hear this subtle effect right after the “speech section” as the drums come back in. There are two separate vocal tracks in the song. One is obviously the “speech” in the middle, which I passed through a few effects, an EQ, and a reverb to achieve a sound that resembles something coming out of a radio. The other vocal line is, of course, the vocoded vocals that repeat the line, “We are cyberpunks”. The vocoding was done in Reaktor. I was going to use the VirSyn’s Matrix vocoder, but I was having some issues with it crashing Sonar at the time. So there you have it. The song will also be appearing on my upcoming album Inside The Beat, which is now about 2/3rds of the way done. I’m shooting for a late November or early December release, but don’t hold me to that ;^)
June 09, 2010 - It's free, too! (as in beer)
For my next album, I think I’m going to switch up the license I use a bit. Up until now I’ve used the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which meant that anyone could distribute the music, make derivative works, and sell it, provided anything derived from it used the same or similar license. This, in effect, made it work a bit like a program that uses the GPL license, which was perfect for me since I’m a big supporter of the GPL and free culture in general. But after giving it more consideration, I think I’m going to switch to licensing all future works under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license instead. It’s the same as before, except there’s an additional clause in there that prohibits any commercial sale of the music. I want my stuff to be free as in beer too, not just free as in freedom. This will start with Inside The Beat once it’s released.
May 19, 2010 - Community Compilation CD Project
A friend of mine here at work recently had the idea of putting together a Community Compilation CD made up of tracks composed by people who work within the tech industry. All of the tracks will be released digitally under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license. There’s even going to be a booklet included with it! Being in the tech world myself, I thought it was a great idea, and so I’m going to contribute a track to it. The problem is… what track do I submit to it? One idea is that I take a recent track I finished that won’t be appearing on “Inside The Beat” and submit that. Another idea - the one I’m leaning more toward - is doing a 4th remix of “I Love Penguins”. I’ve had some really cool ideas for how to expand on the original concept, like taking the voice samples and giving them even more impact. So we’ll see! If you’re a developer or someone who works within the tech world, you should check out the project. I think it’s going to turn out really well!
May 14, 2010 - More Album Plans
Last night I mentioned some plans for the upcoming album to a friend of mine. The plan is that the album will reflect the beats and music that constantly play in my head, hence the title “Inside The Beat”. There’s a huge range of them that I hear, so to reflect this the first couple of songs on the album will be more upbeat and synthpop-ish. As the tracks progress they’ll use darker sounds, as well as more mechanical rhythms. I think it’s going to end up working on more levels than I initially planned. He mentioned the idea that going from light to dark reflects life in general, as we move from an innocent childhood into adulthood. I also see it reflecting how my music is changing as time goes on. That said, here’s a new work-in-progress clip that may or may not turn into something. There’s absolutely no mastering or production work done on this. It’s straight from my head to the sequencer and synths.
April 12, 2010 - New Work-in-Progress - Stagnation
You may have already noticed this, but I haven’t posted any new songs lately. The reason for this is that I want to direct more attention to finished albums, and so it doesn’t make sense to post songs individually. After all, if you’ve already heard the song (or even downloaded it), why grab the album? This means that the New Music Podcast will probably not see any new full songs. It will, however, start seeing clips of new songs. Which brings me to the real reason I’m writing this post… This is a work-in-progress clip from an upcoming song called “Stagnation”, which will appear on Inside The Beat. The clip hasn’t been mixed or mastered yet, so no final EQing, multiband compression, or stuff like that. Also no work has been done to make sure things are balanced. But it should give you an idea of where Partition 36 is heading with this next album. Stagnation WIP:
March 16, 2010 - Album Update
Well, since news at www.partition36.com has been fairly quiet lately, I thought I’d give everyone a quick update on how the new album, Inside The Beat, is coming. Work on the album is continuing at a slow but steady pace, and it should be increasing soon. Three songs are definitely “done” and have been selected for inclusion in the album. Three others have also been finished, but they’ll likely not be included in the final album. Their style is just too different from what I’ve envisioned for this album, and I’m wanting this to be a much more solid release than anything I’ve done so far. So, I’ll instead release these three on a future EP or on singles instead. The ones that are making it on the album are much more beat-driven, a bit darker (such as the title song), and will all tie into computer-related issues. After all, without computers Partition 36 wouldn’t exist, right? I’ll probably not be posting any more completed full songs from the album until it’s entirely finished. I will, however, be posting short clips from songs as they get completed. So keep checking the homepage and the official Facebook Page (you are a fan there, right?)!
February 17, 2010 - Possible Future Live Show?
A live performance of my music is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but haven’t because I always ran into some issue that put it on hold. Some of the issues were technical in nature, such as finding the right software so I could play both hardware and software synths live while still processing their sound in real time. Others were more of a question of what the performance would consist of to keep things interesting since I would be the only one on stage. But in the past few weeks I’ve stumbled, almost accidentally, onto quite a few solutions. In short, I think the first live performance for Partition 36 might be in the semi-near future. What I’m looking at doing is performing a piece of each song live against a backing track, singing lyrics where appropriate and modifying parts of the song in real time. So a super simple example might be where I play the melody while the rest of the track plays off the computer. Meanwhile a sort of real-time video show will be going on behind me on a screen (not sure if I can do much control of this in real time yet or not, but I know for sure it reacts to the music). I think what I’ll end up doing first is a test performance of three to four songs in my basement among friends, that way I can see what works and what doesn’t (I guess I’m an engineer at heart). There’s still some hardware I need to purchase before I can do this though, and I’ll also need to prepare the songs for live use, but I hope to have this test performance done by the start of summer. In the meantime, you can become a fan on Facebook for updates.
January 13, 2010 - new Synths, Small Album Update
No, I haven’t bought any more :^) I think that whenever you buy a new synthesizer, there’s a period of time where it’s almost unusable. It’s not so much an inability produce sounds, but rather a general dumbfoundness relating to how it should be used. This is how it was with my Nord Rack 2X that I bought over the summer. Was it better for bass sounds, pads, or leads? What are the harmonics like on the oscillators? Do I use it in the background or foreground? I essentially had a very expensive red box sitting there and no idea what I was going to use it for. Sure, I had plans for how to use it before I bought it, but trying one out in a store and actually using it in your own studio are two very different things. A little over month ago I finally had the “ah ha!” moments I had been waiting for. The first was when I discovered exactly what the Modulation Envelope section does, while the second was finding out just how flexible its two oscillators are. Will it replace my Poly Evolver or Prophet V software as my main workhorse synth? No, probably not. But it is definitely turning into a centerpiece in my music and will show up quite a bit in the next album. Meanwhile, I found an excellent free software synthesizer the other night called Synth1, by Ichiro Toda. It claims to be modeled after the Nord Lead 2, which I can understand as far as its structure goes, but I think it ends up sounding different. For being freeware, it sounds out of this world… as long as you don’t use the built-in presets. This will probably also start showing up on some tracks in my next album. Speaking of which, progress on Inside The Beat is coming along great. I’ve finished three songs and have been working on a fourth, although I’m thinking one of these may not make it into the final album for quality reasons. If it does get cut, it will probably show up on the EP that will follow the album, or as a B-side on a single. Also, if you haven’t seen them yet, I’ve put up promotional images that were taken for Inside The Beat up on my website and on the Facebook Page. A little outside of my normal style of dress, but it was LOADS of fun shooting these and I really think it reflects the view I have for the album. A very special thanks to my friend Curt Richter for shooting these!
December 05, 2009 - Sequencers and LFOs
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written in this… gotta update it more often :^) Lately I’ve been playing around with my Poly Evolver quite a bit to try and get better at programming it. I bought the synth about a year ago, but I’m still just scratching the surface of all the things that you can do with it. So, aside from creating some drum sounds, I spent some tonight time messing around with the sequencer. It’s a 16-step analog-style step sequencer, which means that you have up to 16 steps per cycle in which it can control other things. Normally I approach sequencers as simply a device that one can use to control pitch over time. The most simple example would be to generate a simple arpeggio, while more complex examples can sound more like actual elements of a song. Both of these - which are just presets in my Poly Evolver - are programmed such that the sequencer controls the pitch of the oscillators. This means that, when the sequence played back, each step acts as if a new key is pressed at a certain pitch, thereby generating a melodic sound. In some ways it’s like the tape roll on an old player piano, except that it can only have up to sixteen holes. However, step sequencers can be used to control a lot more than just notes. The experiment I did tonight had the sequencer controlling the low pass filter instead of the oscillators. This meant that sound and pitch did not get generated when I played back the sequence. Instead, sound got generated the traditional way, with me holding down one or more keys. As I held them down, the sequencer acted as a retrigger, creating a straight rhythm. At the same time, I also had the sequencer modulating the lowpass filter’s cutoff frequency and (very slightly) the resonance, so you end up with this pulsing pattern that alternates between partially "open" sounding and partially "closed. To add a bit of flavor to the sound, I then finished off with some additional modulation from the LFOs. Now for those who don’t know what an LFO is, the term stands for "Low Frequency Oscillator". Just like the name implies, it generates wave forms at low frequencies. However, you never actually hear these waves directly. Instead they act as control signals that can be mapped to other areas of the synthesizer. A good example would be mapping an LFO that generates a sine wave to an oscillator’s pitch. As the LFO’s wave rises and falls, the pitch of the sound will "follow" this, creating a sort of pseudo police siren sound. Also, "low" is somewhat of a relative term. On the Poly Evolver, an LFO can be set so slow that it generates a single cycle only every 30 seconds, or as fast as 261 cycles per second (hertz), which is almost the equivalent of middle C on a piano. Anyways, for the test sound I made tonight, I had two LFOs controlling the volume of oscillators 3 and 4. The LFOs were set to a pretty slow square wave, which made one complete cycle about every six seconds. This basically gave the oscillators an On/Off effect. So, the final sound ended up being a pulsing sound, alternating between open and closed, with its timbre intermittently changing. You can hear the final result here, where I first play a single note/pitch, followed by a simple power chord. This isn’t the first time I’ve messed around with step sequencers to control a filter, but it is the first time I’ve actually figured out how to program an analog-style one. Since the destination possibilities for each step are huge, I should be able to create some pretty interesting sounds using it. What’s more is that it can also be used to control other synthesizers… or at least I think.
November 01, 2009 - New Netbook
This morning I picked up a new netbook, a Toshiba Mini nb200. Spec wise it sports 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, an Intel GMA950 for graphics, and an Intel Atom N280 processor. This CPU is the same speed as an N270 (1.6GHz), but has a faster front-side bus at 667MHz. The screen is a bit bigger than the one on my 900A model Eee PC, though it still has the same resolution of 1024x600. Also, unlike my Eee PC, this one has a built-in web cam. The laptop itself is extremely slim, more so than my Eee PC even, and the battery is nice and fairly low-profile. The keyboard layout is pretty interesting, and somewhat reminiscent of my old Toshiba Satellite. There are dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys on the right hand side, next to the arrow keys, and even dedicated Home and End keys at the very top. The tilde key, which is important in Linux when you spend as much time at the command line as I do, is in between the space bar and alt key. Some may find this annoying, but I actually like it. Otherwise, the keyboard is extremely comfortable and I can type full speed on it. As for the mouse pad, it feels smooth, responsive, and I can slide my finger on the side for tracking. Multi-touch doesn’t work unfortunately, unlike my Eee PC, but this isn’t that big of a deal. Also, the buttons are actually quiet! This has always been one of my favorite things about Toshiba laptops, the mouse pad buttons don’t emit a loud click. So yeah, the system of course came with Windows on it (XP Home specifically), so the very first thing I needed to do when I got home was remove this and put Linux on it. Earlier this week I had installed release candidate for Ubuntu 9.10 onto my Alienware laptop from a USB drive. Now, the installer I originally loaded up had some issues with the GUI installer (probably because I followed instructions for a previous Ubuntu release), and so I was limited to the alternate installer instead. Not a problem, just a minor annoyance, so since I still had the drive set up for that I figured I’d give it a try. Unfortunately, the installer decided that it couldn’t find the install ISO. Not wanting to recreate the USB installer again, I decided to stick with Slackware instead. As usual I booted into the Slackware 13 installer using a USB stick, and then proceeded to install using an pre-mounted directory (through NFS this time) as the source. The install went great, but when I was most of the way through I realized that I had a bad symlink on my server and so I was actually installing Slackware 12.2. Oops. So, I fixed the symlink, rebooted the installer, and then redid everything. The install goes so quick anymore that it wasn’t really a problem. During the final config I was of course given the chance to name my laptop. Keeping with my current scheme, female characters from anime or kaiju films, I decided to name it Kusanagi :^) After rebooting, I did my usual setup:
So how does everything work? So far, I can confirm that the web cam, SD card slot, VGA port, and both the wired and wireless connections work out-of-the-box with Slackware 13. Unfortunately the sound chip in it isn’t 100% supported by Alsa, and at first I had absolutely no sound. After I tinkered a bit (and installed a newer alsa-driver package from source), I at least got the headphone jack working. I can’t say if capture is working yet or not as I haven’t tried, but at least everything else (minus the speakers) is working perfectly. As far as performance goes, it’s noticeably more responsive than my Eee PC. My guess is that it’s because it has a real hard drive in it rather than an earlier generation of SSD. I’m sure the faster FSB also helps, though ;^) Now for some nice, large images. Click the links to open them.
September 20, 2009 - Useful Windows Shortcuts
I don’t usually use Windows these days, but when I do, I generally find it a lot easier (and faster) to navigate with the keyboard instead of the mouse. So I thought I’d post a few keyboard shortcuts that can make peoples’ lives a bit easier. These aren’t the usual Ctrl+C (Copy) and Ctrl+V (Paste) shortcuts, but rather some slightly more obscure ones that you may not know about. Also, just to make sure people know… hitting just the Windows key will show the Start menu, while hitting the Menu key (which usually looks like this) acts like a right-click, Windows Key + L: If you have the normal login screen enabled in XP, this will lock your computers screen in the exact same way that hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del and then clicking “Lock Screen” will. If you have the Welcome screen, it’ll take you back to that. This works in Vista as well. Windows Key + D: Instantly minimizes all windows to show your desktop. Hitting it again immediately afterward will return all the windows to their previous state. In all honesty, I find this useless, not useful. Windows Key + Pause: Opens up the System window, which is the same one as when you go to Control Panel->System. Windows Key + Tab: It’s sort of like Alt+Tab, the window switcher key combination, but this one only switches the active item on the task bar without bringing the window to the foreground. Windows Key + E: Opens up Windows Explorer. Windows Key + B: Put the focus on the first item in the notification area (that place right next to your clock with the icons). You can then use the arrow keys to highlight different icons, the enter key as a left click, and the Menu key as a right click. Windows Key + F: Open up the search window, which I also find useless because I actually take time to organize my files… Windows Key + U: Open up the Utility Manager, where you can enable/disable things like the on-screen narrator and stuff. Windows Key + R: Open up the Run dialog (the same as going Start->Run). There are also ways to assign custom keyboard shortcuts to programs, so that typing them can instantly bring them up. For example, I have Ctrl+Alt+T bring up the Command Prompt, while Ctrl+Alt+E brings up Emacs. However, setting these things in XP seems a bit buggy at times, and I can’t always get them to work.
September 14, 2009 - Midsized Clients
Computers are sometimes divided up into two groups, “fat” clients and “thin” clients. Strictly speaking, a fat client is something like your average desktop or laptop computer, which has everything it needs to run and operate right there inside of it. Meanwhile, thin clients have practically nothing on them, and rely on other computers, usually servers, to provide just about everything except the most basic local hardware and processing power. If you think back to the old days of computing, where you would see text terminals hooked up to a mainframe, and all the computing was being done on that mainframe, those are essentially early thin clients. Today thin clients are mostly graphical, but the concept is the same. The desktop and programs are handled by the server, and the local machine just acts as a display unit. I think we’re starting to see, or at least have the potential to see, something in-between these two ideas. Compared to normal laptops, nearly all netbooks are very underpowered, and the subset of them that use solid-state drives instead of the normal hard drive even lack a lot of disk space. But I believe that if we change the way we interact with the file system slightly, we can change them into what I call “midsized clients”. The idea for a midsized client came to me after I noticed that much of the data I use with my Eee PC doesn’t reside on the local machine, but rather on the file server I have set up here at home. Now, there are a lot of ways to access a remote file system locally these days, such as Samba and NFS, but I personally like to use SSHFS. But what if the data wasn’t the only thing that resided on the server? What if some, but not all, of the programs also resided on there as well? Specifically some of the larger software packages, like OpenOffice. In fact, that’s how I use OpenOffice on my Eee PC. Naturally, this also seems a lot like accessing applications through a web browser. Google Docs is a good example here since we’re already talking about office programs. But, in my opinion at least, I don’t believe that accessing a web app through an underpowered, low-space machine qualifies it as a midsized client since it doesn’t really fit into the classical examples of thin vs fat clients. To be a true midsized client, the program should not have to use any sort of special interface like a browser to be started. Instead, the user should be able to start it through normal means, such as a menu or on the command line. Thinking like this opens up some interesting possibilities. Some locations may provide only certain programs. If I only need program X at work, I can leave it on a server at work, mount the server’s directory locally on my netbook, and then access it transparently. Data can then be stored in a folder on the same server that I use for work-related documents. If I really need to access it later, I can always VPN back into work. Meanwhile, my other small applications and my desktop remain local, so I can still use my netbook without a network connection if I need to. It’s that last point that I think is the main difference between the traditional fat/thin client split, and this midsized client idea. Of course, none of this is formally implemented yet, and this midsized client concept is working entirely off of very traditional, strict definitions of fat and thin clients. What’s more is that, as with many technologies today, there are some blurred lines of what actually makes something a thin, fat, or midsized client. In fact, this whole idea of a midsized client may not be new at all; I didn’t exactly Google any of this before I typed this up. In the end, though, I find it a pretty interesting idea, and I’d be excited to see where it can go. I think I’m going to continue playing with it here at home since it seems pretty easy to get things working. I had OpenOffice working within 10 minutes of grabbing a binary package, mostly because of the simplicity of Slackware’s packages. All that was needed was some slight hacking of install script to keep from doing things locally. I also have a fast enough connection here at home that accessing it off-site through SSH is mostly painless. Let’s see how far I can take this… |
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