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Edited on Wed Jul-07-04 10:05 AM by RandomKoolzip
I went up for July 4 weekend to Chavez's house where me and him and a friend of ours were going to make some electronic/sampler-driven/beat-driven hip hop influenced music. I went there full of hope and ideas for the project. I came armed with more than a dozen CD's of cool bits of dialogue/music to sample.
Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. On the first day, Chavez's Mac, which he had updated to OS X, wouldn't run the sampling/editing software we need for the project; his versions of Cubase, Reason, etc. all ran on OS 9. So that was the first brick wall.
While he was trying to fix the problem, I broke out my little Casio SK-1 keyboard, the very first primitive sampling keyboard, which I still use for my own avant-garde music indulgences, and it didn't work either. We tried various different approaches to fixing it, none of which worked.
Then our friend Paul took his guitar out of its case to play us some songs he'd written, and the input jack had fallen into the body of the guitar, rendering it useless until fixed by a professional.
Then Chavez's computer stared freezing up constantly. At around midnight the first day, after much sitting on the couch and watching him mess around with his Mac, we decided to get a fresh start on the next day. Chavez said we should go to his workplace and get a floppy drive, and run a floppy version of Cubase from there. After much finagling and waiting, that didn't work either.
Then we decided to try and download a different version of Cubase from a Japanese website, the old version, which took hours. That didn't work either.
By that point, Chavez had made it so that we COULD run Reason, Recycle and iTunes in 9, but Cubase was out of the question; it required an authorization code which we didn't have. In the hopes that we could eventually use Cubase, Chavez and me sampled a bunch of my CD's in Reason for future use.
So after much waiting and hoping on the couch, we decide to get ANOTHER fresh start the next day.
Chavez had also deleted most of the things on his hard drive in an attempt to make all of this work, by the way. So for him, this was a heartbreaking defest, a real crushing blow.
The next morning, Paul and I decided to go to Branford and pick up his brother's copies of Soundtrack and GarageBand, which we hoped to use in lieu of Cubase. We drove down there and were unfortunately roped in by his brother to help tie his boat to a line on shore, which killed a couple of hours.
When we got back to Middletown, Soundtrack wouldn't run on the computer, and Garageband was too primitive in a number of ways to use.
So we watched some movies and went to sleep, hoping that maybe THE NEXT DAY we might get some work done.
The next day, after being so frustrated at every turn, we broke out a keyboard and some pedals and percussion, hoping to at least record SOMETHING. We got a nice little jam going, and recorded it on a primitive four track. But in the next attempt to record the live jam and layer it over a sample in Reason yielded nothing, due to the fact that the microphone was picking up mostly static. And THEN, in trying to retrieve the things we'd sampled earlier, we discovered that the computer was erasing them.
I think it was at that point when we finally gave up. Later that night, as we were watching a movie, Chavez's headphone jack on his Mac broke. So he was left with no source of entertainment whatsoever....for about an hour. He got it fixed around one in the morning.
It really seemed as though the gods of music were seriously preventing us from making anything happen. There were signs saying "GIVE UP!!!!!" all along the way which we should have heeded. It was very frustrating.
However, we all managed to have a lot of fun away from the computer, and all of us had a good time nonetheless. And I saw "F9/11" on the Fouth of July, too. So that was great.
How was YOUR weekend?
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