New kit, new sound!!!!

I’ve been fortunate enough to receive new music production equipment from jolly old St. Nicholas,

a PreSonus Firebox

and a set of Sennheiser HD 650 headphones.

The improvement in sound quality when I’m producing is brilliant! I write music on an Apple Powerbook (donated) and a copy of Propellorhead’s Reason, which is a good program for the price but has become somewhat infamous in the music production community for a number of reasons one of them being that the audio engine (the way the program turns the digital information inputted into an analogue signal you can hear) is faulted, an assessment I’ve found myself agreeing with, until now. Since getting these new bits of kit I’ve found a greater clarity (useful for tuning sounds and getting them to sit together) and ‘air’ (space in which the song sits) seems to have expanded, allow for a more complex soundscape. A great improvement over the set-up I had before (laptop speakers, sony headphones or basic hi-fi speakers and the basic Apple audio processor).

When I’ve had a bit more time I’ll put up comparisons showing the improvements in the mix downs of my tracks (if there is any that is… maybe it’s just the excitement that’s lead me to hear a difference!).

 

I look forward to getting a copy of Logic running so I can get some recordings done through the Firebox (which allows multiple recordings to be done simultaneously) .

Hope you’ve had a great Christmas and that you’re new year brings happiness, joy, contentment and awakening to you.

Larry Burns talks hydrogen cars

more about “TedTalks Larry Burns Hydrogen cars“, posted with vodpod

The talk mentioned in an earlier post

A bit of cheer

At this time of year we find plenty of messages of ‘happy’ christmas tidings. But what if we find ourselves in situations where happiness isn’t an easy option? (just try going shopping at the moment, seems to do the trick for most people!).

Maybe all we need to do is to remain good humoured and cheerful as proposed by Ed Halliwell in the Guardian here.

So I guess all that’s left to do is to wish you a happ…. errr… Cheerful Christmas and New Year!!

Is hydrogen the fuel of the future?

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading into the environmental problems humanity is facing, due of course to our reliance on oil, and have come across a few things which have led me to the interim conclusion that hydrogen is looking like a good bet, as a bonus burning hydrogen creates water, which maybe cleaned and used as drinking water or for crops, solving another of humanities biggest problems.

What originally started me thinking this was an article on PhysOrg.com (a science news site) which describes the findings of a study on a polymer material which has the look of solving the problem of creating hydrogen without using lots of energy in the process. There are also programmes to genetically engineer algae so they produce hydrogen instead of sugar (well… they still produce some sugar or they would die in the process).

There has been a lot research hydrogen cars for years, there is a quick lecture on Ted Talks by Larry Burns on GM motors efforts at creating one. 

Saying all this, I still think that using hydrogen should still be supplemented with solar, wind, geo-thermal and wave power, that way keeping reliance on one source to a minimum, also keeping energy production within the grasp of communities that can’t afford to keep importing fuel. This may also have the knock effect of breaking the energy monopoly that some corporations and countries now have. In turn would make war over fuel sources pointless and there would be less dependance on nuclear power, so countries would have no reason to have nuclear material, making policing the nuclear proliferation treaties easier.

More about myself

I have been slack updating this blog as I’m not really sure what to put on it (and I keep forgetting it’s here!).

So I thought I’d let you know a bit about myself.

I’m English, living in Bath, I spend most of my time writing music, some of which you can find at Reverbnation, taking photos, which I will post (those I like anyway) and in the new year I will be starting a carpentry course. I practice Buddhist meditation, enjoy reading and discussing philosophy (both western and eastern), science and other fields of human understanding.

There’s other stuff.. but I’ll leave that for you to find out!

Peace, love and light

Al 

What a nice man…

…Fanu is.

I bought his back catalogue as MP3s and he gave me a good price.

Wonderful musician as well…

Check out his stuff at

http://www.fanumusic.com

Deep atmospheric drum’n'bass and breaks. Every track he produces is a winner.

On a tangent, I was in LA a while back and took some photos around the place, most shown below were taken at the Getty Museum which is well worth a visit, even if its just to see the architecture! The building and the grounds are (to throw cliches around like an estate agent) almost worthy of being called art in itself. The other photos are of the view from the roof of the apartment I was staying at and the remains of a buddha head that was in the apartment.

 

 

Wonderful place LA, friendly people everywhere and travelling down to venice beach is like a festival.

Peace

Welcome

This will be a series of random meanderings through music, photography, science, philosophy and spiritualism. I must admit to writing this blog out of curiosity more than anything so I may change the format randomly just to see what fits and how stuff works.

I hope if you’ve found your way here you’ve found something of interest and that you feel free to share your thoughts as well.

Peace

Al the curator