dubLaboratory

Prostitution Advocated by UGA Campus Newspaper as Way To Pay Tuition

dublab — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:33:31 +0000

UGA’s campus newspaper Red & Black recently ran a feature in its print edition titled “Student skips loans, finds a sugar daddy.” What I assume was originally the author’s attempt at hard-hitting investigative reporting somehow ends up suggesting that young, cash-strapped female UGA students consider getting themselves a sugar daddy in order to pay for tuition. It reads like a paid advertisement for the sugar-daddy web service – an old Billy Mays infomercial has more journalistic integrity.

If this sounds fucked up to you in any way, I encourage you to contact the good folks at the Red & Black with a letter to the editor. Or if not, you could drop the author a message (one Adina Solomon, LinkedIn profile here) letting her know what you think of her groundbreaking reporting.

King Crimson’s Lizard Remastered: Hear It Again For The First Time

dublab — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:55:31 +0000

Recently I was talking to a friend about the joys of listening to an album the whole way through, and I got to thinking about my favorites. So when I got home that day, I went through iTunes, dumped them all in a playlist, and then clicked Play to see if I couldn’t remember why I loved them all so much. During this process, I also ended up downloading some remastered editions just for shits and giggles. And of course, I loaded the whole list on my iPod so I could take it with me.

Now a little bit on my history with Lizard… once upon a time, when I was a wee young boy taking guitar lessons and carefully forging calluses on my fingers, my sage Berklee-trained instructor Waldo Ortiz somehow got the idea that my budding musical intellect would somehow be turned on by… King Crimson records, of all things. I’m not sure if this had anything to do with his perception of my musical tastes at the time or if it was just him trying to pass on his own love for the quirkyness that is Crimson. Of course, Casa de los Tapes (“The House of Tapes”) did not stock a single copy, so I special ordered my very own copy of Lizard, based only on the cover art in the catalog. A week and a half later, I forked over my allowance and ran home with a brand new CD to pop in my boombox. And to make a long story short, I was hooked. Lizard remains my favorite Crimson record to this day.

Fast forward to this morning, when I queued up my freshly downloaded remastered copy and played it in my car on the way to work.

I was blown away. The stereo separation in my car’s stock sound system was SO clear… until today I had never realized how much work and thought went into track panning on this album. During certain parts of Cirkus and Indoor Games, I felt like Robert Fripp was actually sitting in my passenger seat. With the drums panned hard left for parts of those songs, minute little details of his guitar lines that have escaped me for years suddenly revealed themselves, and I remembered just why I love this album so much.

So, long-time Crimson fans, find this remastered edition and give it a listen if you’d like to rediscover this underrated classic. And if you’ve never heard of em, now’s the time to start, and there’s no better introduction than this.

Old School Raunchiness from Lucille Bogan

dublab — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:20:53 +0000

Check this out… recorded in the 1930′s. Like the OP was saying, it makes gangsta rappas look like schoolboys.

Fascinating Rotary Speaker Technology Whitepaper From Strymon

dublab — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:12:29 +0000

If you know anything about the state of the art of guitar effects, you may have heard about Strymon in this past year. A reswizzled, rebranded son of Damage Control (who brought you the Timeline and Glass Nexus tube-equipped pedals), Strymon has spent most of 2010 releasing new an unbelieveable number of new and exciting digital modeling effects for guitarists: the Brigadier analog delay emulator, the El Capistan tape delay emulator, the Orbit Flanger, the Blue Sky Reverb… and each sounds better than the last.

For all those who thought the output would slow, Strymon has kicked off 2011 with some new offerings, including a rebranded and updated revision of the Timeline delay with MIDI control (which I MUST have), and the Lex rotary speaker emulator. At some point, I remember trying to draw out the physics of a rotating speaker cabinet on paper, but these guys have done a much better job by putting out a whole white paper on the matter – it’s definitely worth a read for musicians and geeks alike.

Check it out!

Bobby Talks About BitTorrent, and Back Again

dublab — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:42:45 +0000

So life has been pretty hectic and crazy recently. It doesn’t look like it’s about to change, however I have recently been thinking about the need to revive my little blog. I am still playing with the band, however I am also starting graduate-level studies, so hopefully my classes will bring some new perspectives to my writing.

In the meantime I wanted to leave you with a link to a cool little article I found about BitTorrent. It’s a write-up from Bobby Owsinski’s Music 3.0 blog about another article on the state of BitTorrent and what it means to music today. I found it interesting because the author of the original article clearly does not thoroughly understand the technology that they wrote about, making for some interesting conclusions… I believe the main reason for this confusion is a failure to distinguish between BitTorrent the company or the software client, and BitTorrent, the protocol. Also it’s interesting that BitTorrent stats are invariably interpreted from a sort of pessimist perspective – if music downloads are up, people say it’s bad because the industry isn’t cashing in on them (which is actually NOT necessarily true and reflects confusion about what BitTorrent is and how it works), and if music downloads are down, it’s bad for the industry because “music isn’t worth pirating anymore.” Isn’t it also possible that lower music download numbers through BT could mean that the industry has figured more and better ways to monetize their content?

By the way, if you’re looking for a good BT client, look no further than uTorrent, preferred by geeks everywhere.

Thanks for reading. I’m glad to have you back.

Ironic Irony on CNN

dublab — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:10:47 +0000

I recently watched this news clip on the CNN website featuring dueling commentary from these two ladies (who i will refrain from describing) on Hugh Hefner’s statement that women are sex objects.

I don’t think either of them realizes they are proving his point much more thoroughly than any two-minute debate they could have…

Erik Aadahl on Doing Sound Design for “Transformers”

dublab — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:05:20 +0000

Here’s a great interview with sound designer Erik Aadahl on his sound design work for the Transformers movies. I would kill for this job…

It’s here.

Super Simple Tab Editor FTW

dublab — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:44:21 +0000

Even better than the last Guitar-Fu link I posted – here’s the Super Simple Tab Editor. You tell it what to play and it tabs it out… it’s even got an “experimental” ASCII tab output. I’m definitely looking forward to whenever that works.

Enjoy!

New Toys, May They Grow Up To Be Stompboxes

dublab — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:03:33 +0000

I recently “finished” my first attempt at wiring up my inaugural electronic creation, a true bypass loop box with an adjustable feedback control. I used a schematic I found on the Beavis Audio Research site (thanks Dano!), slightly modded to add one additional LED in series and using a DPDT for the feedback switch instead of SPDT (I had planned on wiring one of the LEDs to it so was going to use the second pole, but then I realized it’ll look a lot cooler if both eyes are red instead of just one).

I’m calling it the Red Eye because of the art on the box and my clever LED configuration. Of course since this was my first project, it doesn’t work. The red LED’s light up and it works in bypass but nothing else, so I guess I’ve got some troubleshooting ahead of me.

Once I finally get it working, my hope is to use it to run my Boss DD-6 through it semi-permanently. You see, the DD-6 is a great unit with a lot of possibilities and potential, but one fatal flaw – it’s tap tempo control is activated by holding down the footswitch for 2 seconds. While you hold down the switch the effect is already engaged (at the currently set rate). Once you’re in tap and you set your rate, then you have to hold down the switch for another 2 seconds, which disengages the tap but leaves the effect on, and once tap is disengaged you can stomp the switch again to turn the effect off. So tapping with the effect disengaged is impossible, which means if you don’t want a mess of ill-timed repeats while you set the effect you pretty much have to stop playing for 10-15 seconds.

Adding the Red Eye will let me leave the effect in tap mode semi-permanently (or at least for most of a gig) and turn the effect on and off independently, so I can then tap out the new tempos with the effect turned off. Then the additional switchable variable feedback loop would let me conjure up infinite repeats (and hopefully induce DD-6 self-oscillation) on command. That is if I can get it all working (hopefully that happens before the next 3052 gig)…

In other news, I’ve just received my Tube Screamer clone kit from JD Sleep’s General Guitar Gadgets site, and I’ll be trying to tackle that soon. Hopefully I won’t screw it up.

The Guitar Fu Super Simple Fretboard

dublab — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:30:40 +0000

THIS thing is one of the most awesome things I’ve seen for a long time, if you are a guitarist it should speak for itself.

Guitar Fu Fretboard Diagramming Tool