Far more exciting was the Miyake taiko class we had arranged to attend on the last Friday we were there. Unfortunately it was an introductory lesson meant for absolute beginners so it was way below us in terms of skill level, but just being able to train under the eyes of one of the Tsumura brothers was a great opportuniy. The class was entirely in Japanese, far beyond my ability to comprehend but that didnt matter as the instruction was so good that I still managed to pick up what he was trying to convey and some pointers on style just from watching his demonstrations and gestures. In the end, we didn’t get much attention from the instructor or the two assisting students since they had a room full of beginners which needed their help far more, but I did get a few approving nods which was a great compliment.

The last day we were there, we went to the Narita Taiko Festival. Our flight out of Narita was at 8pm so it had seemed like the perfect plan for the day. Sadly it turned out to be a really shitty day weather wise, raining solidly all day, so the parade and outdoor stages were all canceled and a reduced program ran on 3 different indoor stages in some local halls. We saw a few good performances – Japanese taiko seems to be slightly different in style to what we play at Wadaiko Rindo, they use a lot more layering of simple but repetative rhythms and it feels a bit more tribal. There is also much more showman ship in the movements and general jumping around, so its really exciting to watch.

The highlight turned out to be when we managed to find out way to the Miyake Taiko performance at the festival – the last of the day before we had to head to the airport. I took a pretty shaky and blurry video with my phone, I really just wanted to watch the stage, so the phone just kind of got pointed in the general direction. I won’t post the video as I don’t think it would do the experience justice, but it was one of the most powerful and personally moving taiko experiences I’ve witnessed. Can’t wait to get back into the drumming tomorrow!

On top of that I’ve moved house the weekend before and I am working interstate 3 days a week at the moment. So long story short, I dont know when I will have time to post anything of substance, let alone get back to my production work… but hopefully it will be before next year…

Despite all its problems, it did offer us a few very important things – a big property all to ourselves with not many neighbours, which is important when you’re bringing a 3.8k PA system with you to blast tunes for the whole time you are there. My housemate also bought his laser (that he built himself no less) and a bunch of lights with him to, so it all looked and sounded pretty sweet on new years eve – sweet enough to attract a few people from the other side of the lake who paddled across on a boat to see what was going on.

One of the highlights of the new years eve tradition for us is that everyone gets to pick one up beat and one down beat song and we string them all together into 2 big long play lists which get played at night and the next morning. It’s always interesting to listen to other people’s picks and exciting to hear yours and talk about it with your friends. Good way to get exposed to music you don’t normally listen to.

I spent a bit of time over the few days we were there re-mastering a couple of my older tracks, trying to get everything mixed to the same level ready for release as some kind of album… when I finish a couple more tracks at least. Hopefully that will be this year, I feel like I am ready to put more energy into my music this year…. we’ll see how that pans out in time.

I also finally got around to reinstalling logic last night. I decided to go with version 9 in the end but I will be sticking with the 32 bit mode. I also picked up a brand new Allen and Heath Xone 22 mixer, to replace my years old cheap-piece-of-shit Behringer DJX700. The 700 was a good buy at the time I guess, $350 or so for a mixer which is basically a knock off Pioneer DJM600. I paid about the same for the Xone22, but I managed to get the last unit in the store at DJ City who are having a pretty massive sale right now. I thought about picking up a pair of DB Tech Opera 402s as well, but it was $1500 I couldn’t really justify. Hopefully the new toy will encourage me to practice more, at least when i move into my own place next year and have the space to leave my stuff set up.

Anyway since going back to a clean install of Snow leopard my macbook feels almost brand new. Well, not really, but it has that fresh install feeling that’s a lot like the New Car Smell. Everything is uncluttered and unbloated, and I just can’t wait to dirty it up with all my applications again. Actually it’s already somewhat sullied, I didnt waste much time in reconstructing my old user experience – Chrome, VLC, Transmission, Adium, etc etc. What is missing however are my ‘pro’ apps, more specifically all my music shit. I don’t really have an immediate need for it, but I want to have my tools around if by some miracle inspiration of some kind does strike me. I’m not entirely eager to give up that fresh install feeling just yet though, so I’m reluctant to just install everything I had before the wipe – a lot of it i never used.

When I first started producing I loved Reason, but now I’ve pretty much given up on it as production tool – it’s a nicely contained toolbox and great for getting started but its a walled garden approach to music creation that I found too limiting eventually. The synths are pretty great – Thor was ridiculously powerful and ReDrum is still my favorite soft drum machine, but not being able to use 3rd party plugins is basically a deal breaker, and using ReWire to get access to the Reason instruments in another DAW always seemed like a pain in the ass and an unnecessary drain on system resources.

Logic is my DAW of choice. I never liked Ableton Live (or Simpleton as i prefer to call it. Disabledon if I’m feeling less PC). Live users complain Logic is too complex, but I always found it pretty intuitive and as a DAW its flexibility and power is unmatched. By contrast, I hated the Live interface after about 3 minutes of use, the best it could come up with was essentially just good idea that was really poorly implemented. Still tho, I know people who swear by it, so maybe it’s just a matter of what you came to first.

The question on my mind now is what version of Logic to go back to. The gadget nerd in me obviously wants to run the latest and greatest version, currently 9.1.5, and since version 8 was released in 2007, it’s arguably well past time for an upgrade. On the other hand, my laptop is also a 2007 model so Logic 8 was pretty much written to run on my machine. It ran pretty much flawlessly for years and most of my work has been done using version 8. Upgrading to 9 was when I started having problems with stability and plugin compatibility, so after this whole re-installation mess, I am wondering if I should just accept that with the age of my laptop taken into question, I am better off sticking with old tech from the same era.

I’ve also considered that upgrading the software without upgrading the system underneath is really only half an upgrade. The usual separation of hardware and software in the computer world makes it easy for us to think of them as 2 distinct components, but a musician really needs to think of it more in terms of a digital hardware synthesizer, where the software and hardware are inexorably tied to one another. When I was first posting about the version dilemma I didn’t really want to downgrade to 8 after going to 9, but really after using 9 for a brief period I’ve come to the conclusion that there are not really any tangible benefits in moving to 9 but a there are a number of fairly compelling reasons not to. Essentially I would gain the ability to run in 64 bit mode at the expense of being able to use most of my old plugins and less stability in general. My laptop only had 4GB of RAM anyway so 64 bit doesn’t really offer any advantages over 32 bit. When it comes down to it, Logic 9 was designed for computers that are much newer than mine.

But perhaps the most telling factor to consider is that if there was much difference to the user experience and the features available between versions 8 and 9, I didn’t really notice – which either mean’s there really is nothing to be gained…. or I am just too much of a n00b to be capable of getting the full potential out of it

Or it used to be anyway. In recent years the online buzz from Mac owners is the quality has been slipping. Hardware problems have started to become almost common place, software bugs and gotchas have started to rear their ugly heads. Arguably, since Macs have become essentially just PCs in shiny Apple cases, they have started to develop all the same problems. If you compare the specs of the latest Macbook Pro to a Sony Vaio or a Dell XPS you wont find much to differentiate them except the branding and the chassis. I’d also argue that Apple’s new focus on the iPhone and IOS has taken the best developers and testers away from OSX and so now we are seeing the results in a product that has not been engineered to the same degree as it used to be.

The long and short of it is that Macs break now when they never used to, and with this development a new problem arises – that Macs are a pain in the ass to fix. For all the problems of the PC world, almost any dork off the street could pull one apart and put it back together, and any geek worth his salt can repair a faulty system. When it comes to fixing a Mac tho, its not so simple. Even tho the hardware is now essentially the same, the guts of what is going on under the hood is still hidden from the users, usually giving you no more clues than a flashing folder symbol or the dreaded Sad Mac Face. Determining what the problem is requires essentially requires a trip to the Apple store – go ahead and take a look at any article on the Apple knowledge base for know issues, most of them end with ‘please contact your closest Apple store for assistance’. When the screen in my macbook pro died a few months back, I had to make an appointment to see a ‘Genius’ before I could get my machine looked at. The ‘Genius’ had some ipod looking gizmo which diagnosed the problem I suspected straight away, then they carted it out back and told me to come back in 2 weeks. 2 Weeks! That’s a long time to go without your computer, especially when you are used to being able to fix a hardware problem in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

If you read my posts from a few months back you will know I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion recently, and mostly regretted it. Last week I decided enough was enough – I wanted my laptop to sleep when I closed the lid and I wanted the bluetooth to work when it woke up again. So I decided I would go back to Snow Leopard. I wanted to do a fresh install anyway since I had been having a few glitches before I upgraded, but it turns out that was the only option anyway, OSX will not let you do an in-place downgrade. Unfortunately even a clean install was a pain in the ass, I spent probably 3 hours trying to get the install DVD to boot with no luck, using both the internal superdrive – which it seems is cactus, and an external USB drive. In the end I had to download a new dmg file using bittorrent then restore it to a usb stick and boot off the usb stick to get the OS to install. It was a lot of fucking around, and once I did get it up and running I discovered that Apple changed the mailbox format in Lion and I just restore my old mailbox in snow leopard, I need to export it in lion and then re-import it…. So now I’m trying to find a Lion VMware image just to get my mail back

Still… now that is over, hopefully I wont need to be doing any of that shit again for another 4 years….

In the more advanced classes however, this should be less of a problem, at least in theory. The truth of it is that at the upper end of the scale you have a much wider mixture of skill levels, from people who have just become good enough to advance from the intermediate classes, to people who have been playing for 10 years+. Practice doesn’t always make perfect though, as with anything there are those who naturally possess the skills and talents required to be truly good at it, and those that do not. With taiko, as you can imagine, a strong sense of rhythm and timing is vital, as well as the ability to memorise the order of a piece, or continuity as i like to frame it – being able to string it all together. On the physical side you need good coordination, the ability to keep a steady beat, good left-right separation, and fast hands. Of all these skills fast hands is the area where I struggle most, while rhythm, timing and memory are the areas I am strongest. I’m also a pretty fast learner.

So, I was pretty disappointed last week when, after training for 6 months at the direction of our sensei to learn the (difficult) lead part for our piece, that part was given to the older, more experienced player who had learnt it before. That might seem fair enough, and perhaps my problem is I am just not Japanese enough to accept that that’s the way things go, but age and experience don’t necessarily translate into the best person for the job. In this case, the older more experienced player is in his 60s at least, and despite his experience lacks the sense of rhythm, timing and continuity to lead the piece well. In the last practice he stumbled over every transition, and the one before that our sensei actually said to him “you can’t count” when he was soloing. On top of that, due to most of the class not being regular turning up to practice, the whole piece lacks cohesion and it needs a strong lead to hold it together. When we played it last week I could tell quite clearly the pieces suffered from a lack of one.

Perhaps I shouldn’t take it personally, but its hard not to when your hard work and natural strengths are over looked in a situation where those qualities are absolutely necessary, in favour of someone who lacks all of them, based purely on an antiquated ideal or cultural bias. It’s even harder when the part I did get given is basically the worst part in the piece, I come on for a about a minute in the middle then I go off again. It almost feels as if I am being punished for something. Perhaps I am that proud student from the old martial arts parable that must be humbled by his master. I guess if I am, then just like in the parable all it did was make me more angry.

Maybe I should try learn something from that.

So, Fractal Films have another Samsara clip up on Youtube, this time showcasing the lasers from the party, which were totally bad ass. As usual the video doesn’t really do it justice – but unlike the snapshot video this one has raw footage with the actual music from the party, including a few tracks from my psy set between about 2:45 – 3:45.