trash night

Post 20 of 90.

Am I approaching the end of the beginning? Or maybe the end of the middle of the beginning? Or am I perhaps on the cusp of the beginning of the end of the beginning?

Ear training on Absolute Pitch Blaster in the B&N cafe after work. I'm still amazed at how middle C "lights up" now when I hear it during the exercises. I must be getting better, because I've been sailing through exercises that had me tied in knots for several months the first time I did them. Something has shifted and the sound of the note is a bit less abstract to me than it was before. Further work awaits.

Nearby in the cafe, a man fails miserably in his efforts to flirt with an exotic-looking, dark-haired woman. He laughs nervously and leans forward in his seat across the corner of the table toward her. She is leaning back away from him into her chair, with arms crossed, and remains that way for the 20 minute duration of the conversation that I witness (it was already in progress when I walked in).

Then the drive home through flurries of snow, listening to 94.9 ("The Sound"). Not bad. Not great, either, but still better than hearing the Lynyrd Skynyrd catalog in perpetual rotation (I even like some of their licks now and then). Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell" comes on, and I find myself amazed at all the layers of instrumentation I had never noticed or heard before. And I notice that Billy is (was?) a pretty damn compelling singer, too. I can tell where certain vocals were punched in. I notice the gating and compression of the drums. It all sounds very slick and expensive. Well done.

Is this the same recording I've been hearing since I was a pre-teen?

I've noticed this with several recordings that I listened to way back then, forgot about, and then rediscovered. Every time, I notice all this amazing stuff about the sounds, the notes, and the performances.

Was I deaf before? What was I hearing?

The Interval Loader relative pitch companion program to Absolute Pitch Blaster uses little icons to represent the intervals, the idea being that naming the interval--"Perfect Fifth" or whatever--is actually a sound of its own that knocks the interval sound out of your head or weakens your perception of it. It seems to work in practice.

The icon for the Augmented 4th/Perfect Fifth/"Tritone" is a little drawing of a Halloween pumpkin.

One day while listening to a song by The Cure called "The Top," I suddenly thought, "Why does this sound like Halloween music?"

I checked, and the opening bass riff is all tritones. I've been hearing this song for years and never realized this.

Back home again, I roll the trash bin out to the curb.

Then I make a phone call to JC to talk about compressors, ProTools, and computer recording. He warns me about "latency" in computer recording, which I hadn't been alerted to before. I look it up and find it can sometimes be a real problem, but that certain parameters are acceptable, maybe equivalent to the delay of sitting three feet from a set of speakers or across the room from someone else in your band. It's just weird when you hear yourself as if you're across the room.

I order the ProTools system I had my eye on. The Strike drum plugin is just too much to pass up. It's the prime reason I'm interested, and naturally it's only available in ProTools. The ability to export files and collaborate long-distance over the Internet is an important factor, too.

Let's hope it lives up to the hype.

The Voice: "Ian, your such a pompous prat! Look at this crap. Who cares? Who do you think you are? You think you're better than everybody else, don't you? Has somebody been doing his vocabulary exercises? Putting on airs again. It's really all just a lot of self-dramatization, you know. Even now you have to let everybody know how 'self-aware' and 'ironic' you are by drawing attention to how you recognize the unreality of your persona and how 'Ian' really isn't you, that you just experience life through him, but at the same time you dismiss that whole line of thought, you don't really care, because you know it's all just a bunch of that flapdoodle perpetually blowing out of the East...and now you're ripping off Henry Miller, you thief!! You fraud!! And now you're laughing at it all, too! Who do you think you are?!! How dare you hijack my rant, you pissant?!!...Deep, man...Really deep...Why don't you get a job and a haircut, hippie boy..." Etc.