A few years ago the fine developers at fxpansion began discussing the development of their next software, Drum9. It was to be the successor of their very useful, and deceptively simple drum playback/synthesis software engine, DR-008. For various reasons, which I won’t rehash here (and, honestly, only know from reading a bunch of KvR threads a few years back), development was ” shelved.”

Sidestepping the quagmire of vaporwear, I still think Drum9 sounds the t*ts. From what I can recall, it was to be similar to DR-008, a user/developer-scriptible drum program. I imagine that it would have broken somewhat from the paradigm of “drum-pads” (no doubt a mindset hold-over from hardware samplers). Developers/advanced users could then “break open” the modules and build custom scripts that would do various things (step sequencers, synth units, MIDI players et cetera).

It sounds so very cool.

To be honest, however, between BFD, StylusRMX, microTonic, (all of which I hope to write about here) and the nearly mis-understood classic DR-008, plus whatever freebies I’ve got kicking around, I think I’ve got drum software just about covered. And, really, I’d bet only a fraction of its users, myself included, tap the full potential of DR-008. Still, it’s fun to think about how they might improve upon DR-008.

I just spent the better part of an hour reading a thread on KvR about EQs. Yeah, it was informative (that which I could follow), and it made me actually excited to use EQs. But really, wouldn’t my time be better spent, you know, EQing something?

I think we all know the answer to that one.

Found this link through a post on KvR: http://www.fawmers.com/, which is a year-round meeting place for participants in this: FAWM. No need to reiterate what is already written there, but if you’re not inclined to chase the link, FAWM is the acronym for February Album Writing Month. (14 songs in 28 days.)

I haven’t really read through them too seriously but I get the general gist of things: a few years ago, in a last ditch effort to salvage any use from my BA in writing, and perhaps the last of my ambition as a writer, I signed up to participate in National Novel Writing Month - they’ve staked out November (which struck me as an ambitious month to undertake such an undertaking, what with holidays and all). Even though I was unemployed at the time, I still didn’t have it in me. Oh, I spun my wheels for a few days, but in the end I let it fall where so many of my projects end up. (I wonder what that place is like? Crowded I imagine.) Perhaps it was this that led me to finally gracefully if belatedly accept I wasn’t really cut out for the writing life.

Could I pull this off? Hmmm. In the reality based world, it would entirely depend on what my life was like in February, you know work and projects and all. But let’s suppose I had discretionary time and finances weren’t a worry (dare to dream), I might attempt it. Two years ago I made my first and apparently only New Year’s Resolution: I was going to write a song a week for the entire year. It didn’t matter whether they were good or bad, or if I ended up using them in any way, just that it would be the structure and lyrics for an entire song. Honestly, I made it through about 2 or 3 months or fairly consistent writing; it tapered off quickly. But it was always more about doing the work than… you know, that old saw of kicking creativity in the keister.

Someone remind me when Feb rolls around. Let’s see how my life is then.

I swear, I can’t stare at css and php code any more. I know I’ve done out some of what I was hoping to do, but most of that is just to get the site resembling like something I’d want to look, forget about cool or useful mods. And I’ve managed to break a few things that at this point I haven’t got the attention span to track down.

Anyway, I’ve got it so it doesn’t look like, as the kids say, ass. So now I can start getting to work on, you know, actual content.

Last night I stayed up to 3 a.m. undertaking the configuration of this (really spiffy) blog software. (Debt owed to asymptomatic.net for doing the heavy lifting; apparently his blog software comparision chart is causing quite a stir among people who care about such things. It saved me a heap of googling, I’ll tell you what.) Over the next couple of weeks I’ll learn & hack the code, integrate some mods, and work on the design; I have big plans for this code. And since this needs to be an ongoing learning experience, expect to see some elemental shifting around here over the next couple of weeks.

On the plus side, it’s not likely that there will be too many people to notice.