So among the other things going on right now: My wife and I are buying a home. (We are closing within the next 2 weeks.) This is my first time purchasing a home, and yes it is kind of complicated. Lots to do, lots of paperwork, inspections, logistics, etc.

We’ve been looking for a little while. I always had two particular requirements (in addition to the standards like safe neighborhood, good schools, etc.). Namely, 1) I wanted a decent kitchen and deck because I really enjot cooking and grilling; and 2) I wanted a room that could be purpose dedicated to a studio/music room. To me that means something most likely in the basement where I can invest in some acoustic treatment, really decent monitors, a proper mixer, and some serious studio furniture.

Well, we found a great house, in a fantastic neighborhood, at the right price. Park nearby, great schools, easy commute. Requisite kitchen and deck.

Just no real studio space.

Well, the good far outweighs the bad, so I will continue to wait. Maybe in a few years, we’ll add a room on and THEN I will get my space!

In the meantime, I thought I would share some photos of quasi-realistic-to-one-day-have “dream studios” that I have collected over the years.

I’m attending to a little housekeeping here…

Spam and spambots are the bane of my blogging existence. Until a couple of months ago, I manually deleted spam comments. There were hundreds on some days; other days just a few. (They seemed to come in waves and most of them had an .RU url. Go figure.)

Anyway, I finally figured out an automated system for handling this. What I had not been able to do until now was install a system to prevent spambots from registering on the site as users. Well that changed this evening. There is now a ‘captcha-type’ system in place.

Unfortunately, I still have several hundred “subscribers” the vast majority of which are from spambots. To keep things clean, I am going to delete everyone from my users list (except for the handful of names I can recognize). I apologize in advance to anyone this may inconvenience, however it’s the only way I know of to clean that database up. Please take a moment to leave your info again.

Thank you.

Hi folks,

I’m experimenting with a new theme. I like this one quite a bit. I’m working on customizing it. There also seems to be a stylesheet problem for comments in Safari 4.0.2. If I can’t get that sorted out, I’ll need to move to another template.

In the meantime, enjoy and let me know what you think. If you run into a problem with the template, leave a comment with your operating system and browser version info. Thank you very much.

Cheers.

UPDATE: I got it sorted out! If anyone wants to know how, leave a comment and I’ll contact you.

From an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes. Not sure I agree with his analysis, but the graphic below is really interesting.

‘Course I note the source and am immediately suspect…

It is an informal tradition for me: Every 4th of July I listen to “Classic Rock” for the day. This past 4th I had a couple of insights I’d like to share…

• What I listen to today is radically different from what I listened to back then. Despite the differences in styles/genres/eras, there are clearly some themes/techniques/approaches that I appear to have always liked.
• I know much more about music and music production now compared to back then. That new found knowledge helps me to hear new things in some of the old stuff. This only increases my respect for what bands and engineers achieved 30+ years ago without plug-ins, DAWs or anything else I take for granted. (Conversely, it makes me look a bit more askance at my output given the power at my disposal.) Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd still holds up in a big way…

The rest of this post is long and sort of traces my own personal music “family tree”. It’s not exhaustive. There are explorations of some other genres like jazz and classical that I do not go discuss. Then again, those excursions have not been as extensive or sustained as the stuff I describe here.

Ambient “brain” music…

(Originally seen at Waveformless.)