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¡ay! ¡qué lástima!

So as the two readers of my blog probably already know, Jon, the esteemed bassist and co-founder of vice stevens (and not to mention one of my best friends since second grade) has chosen to pack up shop in riverdale and set sail for Austin,TX. I’m billing this show as more of a going away party for jon; plus it is my understanding that this not only is in the middle of nowhere on the Thursday night before labor day but it also may conflict with Barack’s acceptance speech at the DNC. Still, if you want to be at Jon and Vice Stevens’ last waltz (until jon puts together our reunion tour in a couple months), come up to the end of the 1 train and have some tasty pints with us.

And for those of you that asked- no, we haven’t even thought of looking for another bassist. w/o jon, there is no vice stevens. And, yes, I have meditated quite a bit on the subject of being in aspiring bands after being in a few over the past decade or so of my life (más o menos), so I’ll certainly be sharing some of those thoughts on this interwebs site in the future.

And here’s the invite to the event, as conceived by our also irreplacable drummer, bob.

Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition).

Doesn’t this guy just look like the kind of guy that would invent something crazy and completely game-changing?

This man is the creator of Melodyne, which has been one of the most creative and amazing pieces of music production software since it came out years ago.  I remember seeing a demo of it way back in… what was it, 2004?  I was at the Taxi convention (on behalf of Focusin) and the Melodyne demonstration simply blew me away.  Melodyne basically lets you treat audio signals like MIDI– that is, you can take a preexisting recording and it will separate musical and spoken events into, say, syllables, and you can manipulate them to  your heart’s content by changing their pitches, timings, and durations.

A number of other pieces of software let you do this (that’s why every piece of pop music on the radio has every single bit of imperfection sucked out of it- pitch and timing correction, baby- but that’s a story for another day).  However, while you could, say, cut up a guitar performance chord by chord, you couldn’t take each of those chords and look inside them and change their constituent notes.  And that’s exactly what Melodyne 2 and its ‘Direct Note Access’ (DNA) ability claims to do.

This is amazing stuff, kids.  Many, many very smart nerds have been trying to do this for a while (I met many of them while getting my Master’s) but as far as I know, none have come up with as successful an implementation as Melodyne’s.  Peter does say that you will probably have limited success in splitting a full recording back into its constituent  tracks (like if you wanted to pull out just the drums from your favorite Blink-182 recording… not that I’d want to do that) but… well, I know quite a few people that are salivating to see just how far this software can be pushed– I am one of them!

The picture of Peter links to a 14-minute video in which he describes what he’s been cooking up and how he’s done it (to some extent).  Enjoy.

in a similar vein to The Meatrix– there’s a series of videos featured on mtv.com about factory farming, ravaging the environment, and all that good environmentalist / sustainable table stuff.  If only the commenters realized that these were more than just sad videos about fictional animals getting mistreated:

omg

that is so mean i did not like that at all omg that goy is so mean and i luv animals i never wanna watch that again

anyhow… enjoy.  the video’s only viewable on mtv.com, d’oh:

http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1586120&vid=227205