This was far too long to put up as a tweet, but it really bugs me.

I watch a lot of TV shows with my wife. Recently, we’re starting to get into Weeds, and I couldn’t help but notice that I tend to think about the wrong things while watching some of these shows.

When a new character is introduced to the plot, I can’t help but wonder if this person will die off soon (action flick), get dumped (comedy), die off soon (drama), or simply survive until the end of the day (24). Instead, normal people likely just sit back and enjoy the story.

I have a knack for recognizing people from movies or other TV shows. “Hey, that’s the guy who played the UPS guy in Legally Blonde,” I said, as the main character in Weeds encounters her son in a Porsche with his girlfriend’s dad. I’m probably very annoying to watch movies/TV with because of that, but you can rest assured that I never go to theaters, so you’re safe. ;)

Anyway, if the main character of a series enters a romantic relationship, I can often tell with great certainty whether the relationship will last for a while because of how recognizable the other character is.

If the actor is cameo material (highly famous from another TV show, or worse, movies), you probably won’t see the actor for more than a few episodes. I’m left asking myself what kind of elaborate story they’ve dreamt up to eliminate this character. It’s somewhat distracting.

If the actor is recognizable as someone who normally plays filler characters in movies (see above UPS example), or a lead role on a very short-lived TV series or mediocre film, they have much more staying power. The probability is high that this character will come back repeatedly. For instance, I thought it was obvious that Kumar (Kal Penn) was going to stick around on House.

When the character is a complete unknown to me, I tend to get back to being a normal person again and simply enjoy the story. :)

This probably explains why I enjoy shows like CSI and Law & Order a little bit more, because the tendency is to have new actors show up and disappear in every episode.

When I was 15, I sold my drum set to a nice guy who was slightly older (at most 17), and far more competent at the drums than I was. Listening to him play the set before he walked away with them was a little depressing, because he sounded like a real pro.

Part of the sale included him trading me for a MIDI keyboard in addition to his cash. You see, I had been experimenting with music composition in MOD / S3M / XM tracking applications, and I felt much more comfortable putting together entire songs rather than simply playing a single instrument.

During my experimentation with the tracking scene, I managed to get involved with a Toronto-based tracking group called VSL (Variety is the Spice of Life). None of my tracks (as far as I can remember) ever made it out in their releases, and I grew frustrated with the tracking process. It involved hours of painstaking searches for samples, and I spent more time on the tools than the creation aspect.

So, my transition to MIDI, in addition to a Sound Blaster AWE32 (which included wave table synthesis—an incredible inclusion for such a low-cost card at the time), was the real birth of my music production career. There was still some sample-digging involved, but I managed to learn a lot more about the musical aspect (teaching myself a small bit about scales, chords, etc.) and experimented with various combinations of drums, keyboards, guitars, string sections, etc.

My tendency was to create electronic / dance music, because that’s what I was really into at the time. Because of this, the General Midi set of 128 instruments just wasn’t up to the task. I started getting stuck again with digging for appropriate samples, and screwing with software to load my AWE32 up with custom sounds.

For my 16th birthday, I got a Roland XP-50 music workstation. It was big, heavy, expensive, and I loved it immensely. It had an on-board sequencer (which was great for experimenting), a dance music expansion card (with loads of great sounds), and on-board patch editing. You could create just about any custom sound with an excellent base of relevant samples.

At this point, the music really started to flow. I got a copy of Cubase shortly after, and was churning out fairly complete tracks on a biweekly basis. I had pushed a few other guys in the tracking group to also jump on the MIDI bandwagon (they were also using AWE32s at the time, and managed to do well with them), and we got together to make a demo CD. We sent that demo CD out to a few record companies in the area, just to see what the reaction would be.

A Toronto-area dance music label approached us and said they loved the demo. They thought the tracks were well-produced, and they’d love to have a chat with us. We spoke about our musical tastes, our influences, and how we each made the music ourselves.

Upon learning how basic our setups really were, they were very impressed with the end results. None of us could really sing, and our musical talent was centered mostly around instrumental house / trance / europop genres. If anything, we’d be best suited to simply providing help with remixes, or pitching song ideas that could be used by the label’s other groups. In the next installment, I’ll talk more about how our group grew apart, and how I continued to work with the label a little bit more.

This weekend I’ll be in Chicago at Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch’s C4[2] conference. If you’re also going to be there, feel free to stop me and say, “Hi!” (I look like this).

My attendance at C4[2] also means that I will not be answering support emails as quickly as I normally do for the next few days. To get non-sales-related help with TapeDeck or FuzzMeasure, please try posting your question to Get Satisfaction so that other customers might be able to help (or, even better, you find the answer to your question already answered there!).

A short time ago, I realized that I haven’t posted nearly enough on this blog about myself, and people in the Mac software world might not know how I ended up where I am today. I’d like to think that I had a pretty interesting history that led to my career in software, and my memory about “life before programming” is getting fuzzier by the day.

So, this is the first post in a short series about my involvement with music while I was in elementary school, high school, and the early part of my university career. To say that this was “life before programming” is actually somewhat inaccurate, because I was experimenting with software development quite a bit during this time. However, I do recall that out of the many hours I spent by the computer during this phase of my life, the majority was in front of a different kind of keyboard…

Grade 7 was the first year that students were able to try out for the band. In my school, the band was seen as a fun activity that would get you away from schoolwork, and thus it was important for kids to try and get into this exclusive club.

I was intrigued by the idea of learning a new instrument (after a few unsuccessful brushes with pianos and guitars in the past), so I attended the introductory sessions where the band teacher would allow us to try instruments we were interested in. He taught us about mouthpieces (both for brass and woodwind instruments), and how to use them.

Our band had three sections—woodwind (alto sax, baritone sax, clarinet, flute), brass (trumpet, french horn, baritone), and percussion (5pc drum kit, bass drum, xylophone). First we heard a handful of folks try (many of which failed) to play clarinets and saxophones without squeaking, and then we got to brass.

I liked the look of the baritone, and it seemed to be the choice instrument for the bigger guys in my class (boys playing the flute? not in my school.) I was competent enough to be ‘in’ the brass section, partially due to my prior experience with reading sheet music, and partially because it wasn’t trivial to get sound out of the baritone. So, I was basically in the band at this point.

When the teacher asked who would be interested in playing the drums, we all looked around the class for volunteers. I knew my class, and I knew nobody was going to be competent on these things. I had many a fantasy as a kid of playing the drum kit, but I never had the opportunity to sit behind one before.

One girl in our class—tall, and clumsy as heck—put up her hand and got behind the kit. She basically pulled the equivalent of a toddler with spoons and a pot, smashing aimlessly around and making noise with a big dumb grin on her face. The teacher knew this wouldn’t fly, and I could see the sense of defeat in his face at the thought of a band without a drummer.

After seeing her bang away aimlessly, I figured that I might as well give it a shot—at the very least I could probably learn a few drum patterns over time, and all I had to do was keep time to make it into the band (not very high standards, I know). I sat down nervously at the kit, and took the drumsticks in my hands. I’ve watched a few people play the drums in the past, and had an idea of what kind of ‘position’ I needed to be in, and what bits I could hit to make certain sounds.

I tapped a few drums to get a feel for how they sounded. Snare, floor tom, kick, hi-hat, ride cymbal—this felt neat. I took a deep breath, got into position (right arm crossed over left with the stick hovering over the hi-hat, left hand playing the snare), and went for it.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-boom-tap-snare-tap-boom-boom-snare-tap. I was playing a very simple rock beat! I couldn’t believe what I was doing, and neither could my classmates. More importantly, the teacher was pleased with what I was playing. I played a few bars, hit the splash cymbal at the right times, and knew this was the right instrument for me.

There was a lot for me to learn about playing the drums. Drum rolls, practice drills, keeping steady time, etc. I worked as well as I could without a kit of my own, but not for long. I got a drum set that Christmas, and I was in love with them.

I enjoyed playing drums for the school band, and I got to attend the practice sessions for all band sections (so I had 3x the time away from class as the other band members!) During these sessions, I got to appreciate the different sections of a band, and how they interacted. I started to listen more critically to music, recognizing the different instruments and how they contribute to the overall song.

Unfortunately, I never got to play my drums nearly enough at home—it made a lot of noise, and I never thought the snare drum sounded right (it rang a lot, and never sounded like the kit at school). Being only 14 years old, dedication and self-discipline aren’t exactly in peak form, so my interest waned in the presence of these molehills.

It was around this time that I wanted to try making music of my own. I had a computer, and I was intrigued by the PC music tracking scene. In the next installment of this story, I’ll talk about how I transitioned to a ‘one-man band’ mentality and started experimenting with music composition software and audio hardware.

I pushed through a lot of outstanding bugs and issues last week—many of which I was working really hard to avoid for a long time. Some issues really seemed larger than they turned out to be, so I was very happy with the speed at which I was able to get these annoying issues dealt with.

I am almost ready to lock down 3.1 for release preparation, though I want to try a few more experiments with the distortion feature before I ship. It’s a real sore point for a lot of customers (graphs aren’t the easiest to read, color choices can make the three lines difficult to distinguish, etc), so I would like to ensure I get the UI sorted out soon.

Check out the latest build page for release notes, and a link to download 3.1b3.