A rough ending to an other wise great extended weekend….. Well, let me give you the story as it currently stands.

I was in the market for a DSLR camera. DSLRs are the sorta cameras you get if you’re serious about photography… I had done some research and it looked like.. assuming I could find the right prices, I’d get a Canon EOS 40D…. which I understand is somewhat mid ranged.. not quite entry level.

It used to be, not all that long ago, that you couldn’t even get a DSLR for under $1000… which is why I don’t have one. Currently, if you are going through a reputable dealer.. you might find a Canon EOS 40D for under $1000, but that would without any lenses, and of course you need lenses… indeed you should probably spend more on lenses then on the camera… so…

My camera budget.. or how much I expected to pay was.. around $1,500… If I was under that I was cool.. and indeed the camera I bought was under that…

But we are getting ahead of our selves.. lets start with what made me susceptible to the con. I suppose the first thing is I haven’t been conned like this before… so what do I know? The second thing was.. I had been procrastinating dropping money on the camera, as I’ve been procrastinating spending money on a lot of things… And then, for one reason or another, I decided I needed to rush out and get the camera. There were a number of reasons really.. but my rushing.. well that was a big part of my getting conned.

So if you were to google “Canon EOS 40D” you’ll get a number of paid adds.. some of which will seem rather cheap..  

ok.. you might not even know about Google adds, so let me slow down here a bit. Google works on keywords.. the words you type into Google are keywords. If you want to market on Google, you can pay for keywords.. you bid on them really.. and depending on how much you bid.. well boom, they become the first things you see on a search.. I believe Google labels these as a paid link, or something like that?

Anyway, so you’ll find a really low price on the 40D.. and if you click through you end up on another site.. this other site is a.. what do you call them? A price search.. sites that you can use to search for products based on price… So the price that turns up in the Google add, you find on both the Google, and then Price Search pages.

Now there are legitimate price search sites out there.. but the one I landed on wasn’t one of them. Generally these sites offer user comments and ratings. And this site was no different. But.. if you then click into the details.. you begin to notice that you have 100 or more rankings.. all giving 5 stars? That’s not the way humans are.. indeed many of the reviews looks like they were generated via some sort of bot-ing like thing. Indeed, we were talking about a camera store and one review talked about how great it was buying a computer from them!

I then looked a little further into the search site and found it was a marketing site.. you pay X amount for leads… which they say are very valuable.. have a high click on ROI if you will.. and your performance in there search is based on how much you bid..  now.. being on the top of this search doesn’t really make that much of a difference.. as long as you’re above the fold.. and 90% of the folks going through there are probably going to buy on price… and there’s at most 2 pages of search results anyway.

Anyway, long story short.. if you find your self on a price search site.. dig around a little to see if it passes the sniff test.

So anyway.. I bought my camera on this site.. the one linked to from the price search site.. for the lowest prices.. and they up sold me.. which is to say they conned me into spending more then I originally planned on spending..  A listed price of under $900 became more then $1500.

Now let me stop here and tell you I don’t know how badly I was conned in all this.. and as I said before, I was prepared to spend that much money…  but, is what I got really worth $1500? Did I get any kind of a deal? I couldn’t tell you.. I think I might have despite it all being a bit of a con.

I got.. a Canon EOS 40D, 2 lenses.. which the sales guy informed me were “$1,400 lenses.” I also got lens filters.. a faster 2GB SD card, tripod, carrying case, lens maintenance kit, and um… a fast battery charger. I frankly don’t give a shit about how fast the SD card is.. from what I’ve heard it doesn’t really make that big of a difference.. I’d like a tripod but I’d rather buy it from a store where I can get a feel for it, rather then buying it online.. same goes for a carrying case.. I do want filters..  and I don’t much care about fast charging battery chargers.

So.. if it turns out that the Camera… lets say if you bought just the body.. that was $800.. then, as far as I’m concerned.. if the lenses and filters have a combined value of over $700 I’m happy.. sorta.

So.. as cons go, it could be a lot worse.. and I guess I’ve learned from all this.. but for now I’m just waiting on the camera’s arrival to see what I think of the over all situation.

A day latter: after the Camera came.

So it turns out my camera doesn’t even take SD  Cards! The sales guy spent a lot of time upselling me on that one! I still don’t know bad I was ripped off / conned / whatever.. I’ll have to get around to looking into this a bit more.. 

I’m very unsure if the Lenses are what I’d buy if I was buying.. if I was looking into it enough.. I’ve more or less spent what I was going to spend, so I’ll have to live with these lenses.. my impression is they are very nice lenses.. just not what I would really want. At this point I’m just thankful to have the camera and the lenses!

One of my first complaints about Digital Performer 5, after spending a little bit of time with it, was the lack of a good reverb. DP’s reverbs seemed.. seemed very out of date, and my feeling was that I really needed to look to effects bundles…  and of course most of the bundles I was looking at were quite expensive. Expensive because I really need to be looking for tools that will cover a whole lot of bases.. In order to really be able to take my sound work to the next level.

Of course when you first start working with new tools, your perception of what they are capable of is very different from when your seasoned on them.. So it seemed to make sense to wait till I had spent some serious time with DP, and my other new tools, before I get to serious about looking to expand my studio..

Further, not all of my studio is even installed! Some stuff is installed but not working.. So just what this sound studio is really capable of.. it’s still a bit of a mystery….

Digital Performer 6 

Well… DP 6 isn’t out yet.. I had thought, before I had seen the feature list, that I’d probably skip this upgrade… and maybe upgrade Cubase so it would work on this system.. that that would probably be the better choice.. that is upgrade to Cubase the next time Cubase comes out with something new. Well.. the feature list of DP has me thinking otherwise. And there are two basic things that really have my attention.

#1 Convolution reverb with parameters you can automate as it plays. Convolution reverb is… well I’m not comfortable with terms like “best” as music production is like.. it’s like you’re talking about different colors you can paint with, or something like that.. and you can’t really say “oh, this is the greatest color ever,” as the value of the color has more to do with the context of the project then the color onto its self…  accept that.. well, there are qualitative differences between tools.. and Convolution is the latest greatest in the reverb world.. all be it the latest greatest as of a few years ago!

Convolution basically “samples space,” the space you would put a sound into. The results of this is.. well you can really have the best reverbs in the world.. you could put your mixes in the best acoustic spaces ever…  In my search for effects bundles.. strangely, not a lot of them had convolution reverbs, which is something I’ve REALLY wanted. Of course I should maybe add that I’ve been rethinking what bundles I should take seriously.. but we’ll get to that latter.

In any event, for me, the convolution reverb is enough to have me thinking seriously about the DP upgrade.

#2 Pre rendering of virtual instruments. I maybe not be using the right terms here.. I don’t really know how DP is implementing this.. but I’ll give you my sense of how it might be…  

You load a software instrument into you a channel.. and you give it something to play. Software instruments can use up a hell of a lot of processing power…. So how powerful your computer is limits how much you can have going on at anyone time.

Different software instruments consume different amounts of power.. and you’ll often find your self in a position where your choice of instruments has much to do with how much power they will consume, not on how good they sound.

The deal with DP is, when your computer isn’t busy doing lots of stuff that requires a lot of processing power, DP will actually render those instruments.. So that the result is.. when you hit the play button, if stuff is rendered, the only processor load you have is the load to stream channels from disk.. which..  is not much power at all.

Now, the part I’m not sure about is… It could be that it also renders whatever insert effects you might put on that instrument.. wether or not it does this as well.. is sorta mute for me.. since I’m largely working with instruments inside of Kore.. which means I can put the insert effects in Kore, and DP will render them…. although there could be issues with plug in formats at that point.

Ok, so lets bring this back home to what this means for me:

Not much actually. See this computer that I’m running on is a monster, and I have no need of more power.. at least not so far. So far, everything I’ve thrown at it…. doesn’t challenge it at all. This is a sort of mind blower to me… but, when I get my studio working right, this could change.

Reaktor is one of the most processor demanding programs in my library.. and its a tool via which you can make your own instruments and effects. It’s  very cool.. there’s online libraries of user generated devices.. some of which are some of the coolest things I’ve ever heard..

So you hear me bitching and moaning about.. not having a particular effects in my library.. So the truth is that I could just get Reaktor working.. and use Reaktor to fill in those gaps.. The trouble is.. that there’s a huge difference between a Reaktor version of an instrument or effect, and a version of that instrument and effect that was actually optimized…  the power consumption can be brutal… 

I don’t know how well this computer will handle Reaktor, and we are talking about lots and lots of instances of Reaktor.. but if the instruments in my library are rendered to disk as I go a long.. in such a way where I don’t feel like I’m managing it at all.. It’s a little bit as if this computer suddenly got twice as fast… which means I have less need to look to those other software libraries. (Not that we aren’t looking to them still.)

Ok, other stuff.

To give an example of how much convolution reverb costs.. and in particular Altiverb, which has my eye, take a look at this review of Altiverb 6 from Keyboard magazine. 

From the same company we have a product known as Speakerphone. Do check out this video on Speakerphone, it really shows you around.

Speakerphone uses said convolution technology, and emulates various types of speakers… It includes cell phones, guitar amp speakers, and just about everything else you can imagine.. It’s the bomb!  

It’s actually pretty incredible.. It’s more then just amazing speaker emulations of all kinds.. you do have some convolution reverb patches, you’ve got a whole lot of effects of different sorts.. huge ambient sound sample library.. 

Speakerphone has obvious applications for sound design.. say for film work and whatnot.

Next day sometime:

So Speakerphone costs a little more then $500.  For me, $500 is a lot of money… The kind of money that you really have to evaluate priorities when you think about.. So why should I be drawn to Speakerphone? This brings us into the deeper topic of what my sound work is about.

Somewhere along the line my music went ambient… but even from the start, my electronic music was at least in part about creating a kind of cinematic experience. In my work we move through space.. as the listener, and the instruments them selves move through space.

So you got this sound work that is fundamentally about space.. and in deeper ways then I’m describing here.. I don’t know.. I just see these kind of amazing possibilities here…

Bigger Picture 

There is the bigger picture of the studio… and the bases that need covering. As things stand, it’s really the mix engineer bases that probably need the most covering.

Earlier I talked about reevaluating my take on what I probably need.. mainly this comes down to “all effects ought to be native” aka “not run on some sort of DSP sorta thing.. which is to say they run directly on your computer… not on some special hardware card, or whatever. The reasons are two fold #1 I have all the power I need, at least for a little while (particularly with where DP 6 is going), and #2 effects that run on hardware cards are generally more expensive because of the extra work that goes into developing software to run on those cards.

Waves Native Power Pack 5 

I’m now looking at Native Power Pack from Waves. It sells for about $375, and at least where I’m at now, looks like a really good deal. Most of the bundles I’ve been thinking about are more like $1000… but there’s a part of me that would rather not buy a big bundle, but would rather get bits and pieces from different companies.. particularly as investing in software is investing in a relationship with a company, and the question is.. do you really want to be too locked into a relationship with any one company?

Waves has kind of a bad reputation.. for more or less forcing upgrades, and for there anti piracy schemes.. which I must say.. is the sorta thing I’m sick of dealing with.. Of course the trouble is that Waves makes some of the best stuff  going.. so…

So the Native Pack includes:

True Verb: From what I can gather True Verb is a very good reverb, probably significantly better then anything in my current effects library. It offers a good deal of flexibility “for all your reverb needs,” more or less… or kinda sorta? If you conceptualize it as one part of a larger pallet of reverbs.. I think it looks very good.

Super Tap 2: We are talking about an emulation of an analog tape delay. I LOVE analog tape delay effects….  Though I’ve never really had a good one.. and currently I don’t even have one.. this stuff is great for ambient music styles… So I’m loving this.

IR-L: Here we have a convolution reverb… From what I understand it’s very good.. perhaps a little limited in selections.. From what I understand Waves’s IR-1, of which  the IR-L is the light version, allows you to download more spaces / a broader selection.. from the Waves’s website.. which you can’t do with IR-1..  but it still looks good.

L1 Ultramaximizer:  My understanding is that the L1 is something of an old standard maximizer.. Though its now a little out of date..  So… still very cool.

C1 Compandor: The C1, is  a compressor… with gate, eq, filter.. It’s not real clear to me what it’s all about from what I’ve gotten a chance to look at.. as far as how its side chaining works.. and if its basically a multi band compressor at that point.. but it sounds like its very nice anyway.

Doubler: This is not the sort of thing I’d normally be all that interested in.. but I find myself interested in it anyway… you through a sound into it and it “doubles it.” For instance if you were doing vocals.. now you can have up to 4 “doubles” and for each one you can control things like pan, delay, feedback, pitch, modulation, and what not.. 

I actually think this is an effect I’ve been hearing on a number of recordings, for the last couple of years, that I’ve really wanted to put in my work.. so… 

Q10 Paragraphic EQ: I guess we are talking about a 10 band parametric EQ.. I don’t really get what the “Paragraphic” thing means.. but from what I understand this is a very good EQ.

S1 Stereo Imager: I could be a little off base on this.. but my impression is it uses certain phase techniques.. lets call it psychoacoustic mojo, to achieve what I would call “special effects” with respect to your stereo field.

What did I just say? Well conventionally you have two speakers, and the sound sounds like it comes somewhere between those two speakers.. but now you can make it sound like its coming from the left of the left speaker.. Idk if the S1 does this.. but I think it might.. and there’s something for mixing on headphones.. or for headphones… that can be a thing.. and there are binaural things that could be a part of it.. so probably, maybe, some cool stuff. (How’s that for unreliable information?)

DeEsser: This is an effect I don’t really care so much about.. it reduces sibilance.. which is generally something you worry about when recording the human voice, which I don’t really do all that much of.. but you know.. I might in the future?

Renaissance Axx: Here we got a compressor especially designed for guitar. I think this is a base I probably have well covered with Guitar Rig.. but you know.. perhaps this could add something.

conclusions? 

The power pack seems like a lot of punch for not a lot of money… Where it’s a little limited, one could go with other brands and packages to overcome..  but for the money it’s probably good enough for me in the short term. Also.. it does have an upgrade to Waves’s Gold Bundle.. which is the $1K bundle I’ve had my eye on for a long time.. 

While writing this I read some interesting reviews from guys who “really get this stuff.” Here’s one from Ted Spencer, who using the Platinum bundle doing the score for one of my favorite movies.. American Splendor. Which, of course, was extra cool for having a little Joe Maneri in it… Another good one was from Frederick Bashour, using the Gold Bundle.

I should say that there are many things pulling me to the Gold bundle, but we’ll skip that subject for today.

Other Stuff: 

Ok, this entry is getting long, but lets see if we can’t do something quick.I’ve been talking about liquid mix for a while now.. It is a hardware based system that gives convolution EQs and Compressors. If you think about this in relationship to the above mentioned items.. I would imagine that Liquid Mix would probably eliminate any need for EQ or compression…  Or at least I anticipate Liquid Mix meeting all my needs in this area.. the only trouble being, really.. that Liquid Mix has limited instances, that go down as you start working with higher bit sizes and faster sample rates.. which is a bit of a downer… so maybe something to fill in the spaces has some value in here.Out side of all that’s mentioned here.. I’m thinking about orchestral sample libraries, synthesizers that actually emulate the sound of a human singing.. and inexpensive electronic drum set, and a cheap electric bass..So to just sorta conclude here.. It sounds sorta like I could be a fairly happy camper for about $2K worth of upgrades… Maybe 2.5K would be ideal. My feeling is..  Outside of maybe a DP upgrade and the Natives Power Bundle, I could easily wait a good year or so before I really felt a big need to upgrade any of this… And maybe by that time something like Nebula 3 might come to the Mac, making the cost of what I want to do a little less.Budget wise.. I’m still not in a position where.. I really know what’s up.. And the possible variations are enough that.. at best, this stuff could be covered.. and worst.. they maybe could be covered.  

 

I’m fucked. I don’t usually use such language on here.. but I’m in a rage, and.. well when you’re in a rage.. sometimes you are given to things that if you were “in your right mind” you might not do. So.. yeah, I’m fucked.

Ok, here’s the basic deal, it’s creeping up on 11 PM on the last day you can file your taxes. I was under the impression that you could file for free online.. this from a consumer reports magazine article.. if you made less then X amount in 2007. You know how much I made in 2007? Try Zero.

In Massachusetts there’s a state law that makes having health insurance mandatory, if you don’t have it, you get fined… or something. Or you do if you can afford health insurance. You would think someone who made zero couldn’t afford it, right? Well it turns out, by there law, I could! How? Well I’m entitled to free state insurance… if I had filed for it by the deadline.. which I didn’t because I didn’t know about it… didn’t even know about the deadline… how groovy is that? And because I qualify but didn’t get it.. I could afford it, thus I get fined.

Yeah… fun fun fun.

So I guess I could file tonight.. if I could figure the fucking BS out. I can’t… I maybe could if I wasn’t sooooo over tired.. I didn’t know that on a scale of 1 to 100.. the usability of the system is about negative 50…  Didn’t know this was going to be a problem….

So what the fuck?

So what’s the penalty for filing late anyway? I have no idea.. but in my current state of mind.. I’m seriously ready to go blow shit up, you know what I mean? In reality, shit probably isn’t as bad as I imagine it.. I mean fuck, I don’t even know what the penalties are… but it feels pretty fucking bad. I have no idea what the fuck I’m supposed to do… I’m just feeling screwed, and in need of venting.  So thanks for listening.