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Post by Joseph on Jul 21, 2006 23:57:03 GMT -5
Variable, yes, a celesta basically looks like a piano except that it hits bars or tubes instead of strings. I found out that all celestas have keyboards, but the only glockenspiel that I've ever seen that uses a piano-style keyboard is the Schiedmayer model. Other glockenspiels use mallets, just like a xylophone or vibraphone.
Mika sounds too weird, even for you, Variable. You don't randomly glomp people in real life... only online.
Liz, I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I have a cousin who is also going to UMass to study Japanese! Except she's going to UMass @ Amhurst... I don't know what campus you go to. So maybe you might know her? Her name is Erica Ward.
By the way, when I was choosing the tempo of my new song, I decided it to be about the same tempo of the Hallelujah chorus -- 110 BPM. It will have a harp bass like Light Encounter.
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Post by Variable on Jul 22, 2006 17:27:05 GMT -5
LOL, no I don't glomp people, I just need a good teacher in the art of glomping. Also, you don't have to call me "Variable" call me Brad, my name, or Rush.
I totally glomped my closet today, I totally threw away all my old por- I mean, my old game magazines. I laughed when I found one that said "Will YOU Survive Y2K?" I'm guessing I have and threw it away.
Then I cleaned off my bookshelf and stored my old Shonen Jumps where my gaming mags used to be and put more books on the actual bookshelf.
I got a copy of the IRS Small Business Resource the other day. I'm toying with the idea of starting my own computer repair business. I don't know if it'll operate under the VRI name or not.
After Fuer Jiang, I started working on an IDM piece, and eventually I'll get back to Getting Drunk.
I'm also going to start fandubbing the Loveless series with a group of other Loveless fans (there are more of us than you know).
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Post by Mystical Sand on Jul 22, 2006 19:01:11 GMT -5
...Hey, Joseph? Your cousin's in my Japanese lecture. XDDDD!!!!
I had no idea what her first name was, since we all go by our last names in class, but I knew there was a "Waado-san" in my class... looked her up on facebook, and she is, indeed, one of my classmates at UMass Amherst. XD! That is sooooo funny and awesome. It's a small world after all...
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Post by Variable on Jul 22, 2006 19:10:03 GMT -5
More for the Small World: My brother lives in the same town as Joe.
Yo Joe, if I visit my brother, we gotta hook up.
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Post by Joseph on Jul 23, 2006 15:30:04 GMT -5
Cool! I can't believe I didn't think to ask you about it before, Liz. BTW, Erica is going to be visiting me in mid-August. What should I tell her about you to try to get her to remember you?
Speaking of CDJapan, have you looked at their magazine subscription offers? Some of them can have pretty art, and help you learn Japanese.
Talk about a small world -- Brad has just let me know that his brother lives just across the street from where my mom works. She works at a rocket production company called Orbital.
My new song "Celestial Roundelay" has a release date of Wednesday, August 2. I learn a little bit more with every song I do. Brad and I have gotten to a point where we seem to be releasing new songs on a regular basis. Right Brad? LOL.
Brad, do you want to see my 300-some page SweetWater catalog of professional music gear? The funny thing about SweetWater... my sales engineer, Joseph, told me that I need a keyboard peripheral for Make Music Allegro. Guess what! I don't! He was wrong. I don't need thousands of dollars of music production equipment -- Make Music does it all! Mind you, I haven't learned how to use loops yet, so I have to be the pianist, harpist, bassist, guitarist, etc etc, and I don't really know how to play all those instruments! When I was at church today, I watched the drummer very closely to see what he played like.
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Post by Variable on Jul 23, 2006 16:20:48 GMT -5
I don't know what it is with you. I don't announce when a song is coming out, it just does when it's done. Sometimes before.
Also, the Ward family seems to be in the thick of things. It used the be the Hall family that was everywhere. I mean, there are Halls in every country.
Sure, let me check out this SweetWater catalog. Your sales engineer is named Joseph too? You probably could use a MIDI keyboard to get the "full use" out of your program. If you're into drumming, you totally need to check out Future Man. He's Victor Wooten's brother. Both of them are in Bela Fleck and the Flecktones (Jeff Coffin is their saxophonist).
Future Man uses a homemade MIDI controller shaped like a guitar called a "Synth Axe Drumitar." It's the epitome of percussion. He once played an entire song with nothing but his Drumitar and a chair.
Vic Wooten plays the Bass Guitar and is the instrument I want to get. I was SO EXCITED when I met Vic and the gang back in January.
Loops aren't the "end all be all" of the music industry. They're good to use to start out (like I do) but after a while I hope to actually use real instruments.
Of course, loop based programs are great for piecing together different things. I used Acid when I did my Final Hour radio skit. It helped because I could piece different tracks on top of each other. Like, in one part, I had my lines, Ghaleon's lines, a fight song, and battle noises in one part. I forget which part had the most layers though.
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Post by Mystical Sand on Jul 23, 2006 21:20:02 GMT -5
Joseph, you can try saying, "The girl with the really long brown hair and big pink glasses who sat in the middle row and sucked at Japanese" and she might get it... or have her look me up on Facebook, and she might recognize me... need to change that stupid pic of me from prom; you can't see my hair. XD;
I'll have to look into that magazine bit; the only one I'm subscribed to at all at the moment is Shonen Jump, and I only read YGO out of it because I'm too busy working to keep up with everything else. x . x;;;
Not that this is relevant to anything, but if I'm really cranky/snarky in the next week or so, it's because I am in a shite mood due to finding out that the hole from the wisdom tooth they pulled on the bottom left of my mouth is infected and I am really mad and grossed out and on drugs and just all around none too thrilled by it. >___<
And my job is long and tedious. And the Ragnarok server keeps crashing. Not a good week in the life of Liz, and it's not even MONDAY YET! XD;
My family is everywhere because I have Smiths in my family and that's like one of the most common last names on the face of the planet. XD
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Post by Variable on Jul 23, 2006 22:37:35 GMT -5
Ragnarok... that's the name of my iMac... when I get one, lol.
In North Carolina, I went to the Family Plot. The graveyard was full of Bradley's, Halls, Tallents, and a pile of others I'm related to. I think we also have our own town.
What is your job, Liz?
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Post by Joseph on Jul 24, 2006 4:32:04 GMT -5
Liz, sorry to hear about your tooth pains. It can be a pain sometimes. You can check out free Sweetwater publications. It will tell you how to get a catalog, or as they call it, an "encyclopedia." That thing has more gear than anyone could ever use! (Honestly, I don't know how most of the equipment is used.) Lately, I've also been eyeing the Berklee Music bookstore for interesting titles (it's way cheaper than going to music school). Maybe a keyboard will enhance my music experience, but with Make Music it's truly optional. You really can do workstation-only composing. There's even a feature to make it play with "human" style playback. One of my favorite European trance groups is Sylver. They have intelligent, gritty lyrics, but the singer Silvy's voice is light and charming, which makes an interesting combination. She's trying to be herself, but appeals to those wanting some bold, poignant lyrics. I adore Sylver for pulling this off. I think I know how Silvy feels-- I'm more familiar with composing classical and dance, but when it comes to something that most people enjoy like rock and roll or blues, I'm hopeless. Not all my songs will be as light and fanciful as Celestial Roundelay.
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Post by Variable on Jul 24, 2006 13:20:45 GMT -5
I signed up for two of their books.
I watched the Venture Brothers on Adult Swim yesterday and there was a great Techno/Trance track on the beginning of it. Don't know what it was though.
I'd never seen the show before, but it was great. My dad had watched Futurama before, and said, "something weirder has to come on next...." then Venture came on. He didn't stick around for Pee Wee...
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Post by Mystical Sand on Jul 24, 2006 17:40:55 GMT -5
My job is actually really fecking awesome (if only because I make a ton more money than all my friends), I just like to complain. And I don't think there's really anything fun about getting up at six in the morning and working for nine hours on ANYTHING in particular, so...
But for the record: I work as an intern at an aerospace corporation. They manufacture helicopter/airplane/submarine/etc. parts; mostly bearings. I work in the office, filing part folders, employee training records, part specifications, and quality requirements. I scan and index shipping orders, send faxes, mail documents, deliver the departmental mail (I work in Quality Control), create .pdf files of part specifications, laminate things, make folders... Basically, I do all the backed-up paperwork that nobody else wants/has time to do. For nine hours (7:30am-5:00pm with a half hour for lunch).
I just finished a (supposedly) week-long project in which I updated 40 or so Quality Manuals (books full of manufacturing instructions) which my superiors effed up multiple times while I was away on "vacation" (see: having my teeth pulled) and it ended up taking two weeks instead of one because I had to fix all their stupid mistakes. Yes. I, the intern, somehow know more about the correct way of doing things than they, the full-time employees, do. Fascinating.
I also occasionally proofread stuff for my boss. My boss loves me and says she's going to put in a request for them to let her have me again next summer because she says she's going to kill everyone in the department while I'm back at college. She says I'm the only person that ever does anything right. o.O; I just follow instructions. And pay attention to what the hell I'm doing. And ask questions about EVERYTHING I don't know exactly how to do, because, hey, I like to do things properly the first time. - . -;
So yeah, that's my job.
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Post by Variable on Jul 24, 2006 21:31:06 GMT -5
Sounds like a good job. Way better than my first job packing stuff. Some of the people didn't like me because I had more education as a high school graduate than they did. And if they thought they could "one up" me, they liked it even more.
They never did, though some thought they had.
Next job was working for a professor. That was a great job.
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Post by Mystical Sand on Jul 25, 2006 16:55:01 GMT -5
This job is the only job I've ever had, and I hope I can keep it until I'm done with college. I only work during the summer, and I make enough money that I don't have to work up at college. If I had to work for minimum wage, I think I'd have to cry myself to sleep at night, because I'm so spoiled from the money I make at this job. And that's sad, because minimum wage in CT is $7.20, I believe, which is higher than most of the rest of the country, if not the highest in the country, so...
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Post by Variable on Jul 25, 2006 22:13:49 GMT -5
Wow, that is a lot. Last job I had was like, $6.50/hr.
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Post by Joseph on Jul 26, 2006 4:15:08 GMT -5
That's so cool, Liz. That sounds sort of similar to what my mom does. She's an admin assistant for Orbital and does reports, databases, and stuff. She's basically a coordinator. Her old boss was so upset when she quit from her old job as an admin assistant in city government, lol. There's too much flooding in Arizona. When we went up to Payson, it started poring heavily and we couldn't even get to our car because the parking lot was flooded. The only way we got away was I ventured out in the water that was several inches deep to pry Dad's car away from the watery clutches. And yesterday on the way home it was raining really hard and there was water a foot deep right here on the street that I live on! It was kinda scary. Fortunately, my car is built great and I managed to get through it. I would've taken a detour, but I just didn't know it was that bad when I was first entering it.
I took my first job after I had graduated from college. First I worked for Wells Fargo internal tech support -- basically just resetting passwords and unlocking accounts for those in the retail bank, mortgage, corporate and home equity departments. It's kinda hard to move up in that department. I worked there for 7 months and still just did passwords, though there was a great need for it. My second and current job is with University of Phoenix tech support. In this job, I help with student technical issues, like access to class, making sure posts are sent in, troubleshooting online assessment tests, downloading eBooks, etc. Just recently, there were a few people that were chosen in my department to do corporate support too... incidentally, I was one of those people that they chose (though I don't yet know why). Anyway, we accept all requests and technical issues for all the employees across the country, but the only issues we can really take care of ourselves are passwords and information matters... we have to escalate almost everything else (financial issues, software issues, new workstation setups, data integrity issues, etc etc).
I told Brad that it's just too much to handle-- student calls, staff calls, and staff Internet tickets. Thankfully, the supervisors have been giving us some time to get off the phone and focus on taking care of the Internet tickets, which are just a matter of routing to the right people, but are confusing and time-consuming nonetheless. I asked my supervisor if we could set aside one hour per day just to Internet tickets, and surprisingly, he said he'd look into it.
My dad has gone totally techie on me. He bought a portal DVD player and a digital camera both in the past month or two. He even uses a PDA for work. The guy's like Inspector Gadget or something.
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