General updates
KeithHandy posted in Featured Posts on August 12th, 2008
Oooh, “general updates” — how’s that for a knock-em-dead title? And once you notice the bold, sparse minimalism of the complete absence of any illustrative picture, by gum, you won’t be able to resist reading through to the end, glued to this post like the guy clinging for dear life to a hard hat affixed to a steel girder by a single drop of Krazy Glue. And therefore I owe you, at the very least, the return favor of making it worth your while.
I don’t know what this blog is about. I’ve tried to not make it a vanity blog, but it kinda sorta is. I mean, besides it being mine, and being about me… and featuring random glamour shots of me in the upper right, if you keep re-loading the page over and over, which I’m sure you do all the time… there’s a way to run a personal blog that isn’t necessarily the high tech equivalent of wearing a t-shirt bearing “HOT STUFF” in a glittery girlyfont. For example, I could keep it focused on a particular project, and actually stick with it from beginning to middle to end. But my working patterns just don’t work that way. It’s more like, beginning to middle to switching to something else to coming back to it a few years later and realizing I did it wrong so beginning again a different way and then getting distracted again and then realizing the second attempt is missing some of the soul and magic of the first attempt so beginning a third project that somehow fuses elements of the first and second and then years later realizing I’ve made a mess and needing to clean it up and simplify it again…
As I’ve mentioned, I’m getting my feet wet on Tracktion 3. I haven’t yet had a chance to use it as much as I want, but so far it seems well worth the upgrade price, if only for some of its new features. (The looping features aren’t that interesting to me; I’m just not a looper.) I took one old old old old old song that I’m too embarrassed to name in public, and did something nice and tidy with its second half, which kind of puts a smile on my face and makes me go, okay, I can leave it at that and call it “definitive”. I used Tracktion’s improved stretching algorithm to bring a sluggish studio recording closer to the tempo it was typically played live. And telling you it was ever “played live” should indicate how incredibly old of a thing I’m talking about.
I’ve recently gone to some improv comedy shows, and it has got my mental wheels a-spinning. I think these are the kind of people I need to recruit for my film project. In fact, I’m pretty certain of it. Beyond that, though, it’s just inspiring to see people push themselves to be as creative as possible, on the spot, in front of an audience, with no pre-planning, no guarantees, no safety net. Just to expand my universe a little, I stayed after for one of their “open jams”, which is more like a series of games and exercises. It was fun, but it was slightly unnerving to be whisked back to 1987 and the realization that I was once again in the midst of theater people…
I want to put a better quality audio player on the site, to make it easier to hear a wider range of my stuff without leaking bandwidth to Chinese bots… and this is pretty important to me… not because I have anything against the Chinese, but because I want to have a lot more music available than I do… but at last check, there are some minor technical problems with my DivShare account, causing me to not be able to do what I want to do the way I want to do it. Hang tight.
