Darin's Vox Blog

Starbase Lounge Music video draft...

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:38:46 -0800

A friend of mine sent me a link to this video which is for a song I wrote and completed just after 9/11. I had been working on it up until that point but after watching TV for almost 48 hours straight after 9/11 happened, I had to do something else and I finished up this song. Here's a video for it that is a lot more upbeat than the description of the timing of the completion of this song:

Youtube video link for the song Starbase Lounge Music from the album Eponyms originally released on Magnatune Records in 2003.

The synth horns in the background of this song were played live over the top of the arrangement. I found a patch in Reason I liked because it reminded me of the gorgeous horns in The Matrix movies that I really liked when I was working on this tune.

I hope the whole Starbase Lounge Music idea makes sense. The original concept was called Summer Madness II because there's an amazing song by Kool & the Gang called Summer Madness and it features a fat Arp synthesizer sound that rises to ear-piercing pitches by the beginning and again at the end of the song, after a couple of solos on the synth and guitar. Summer Madness is just such an amazingly brilliant piece of music that it defies description. If you haven't heard it, you must seek Summer Madness out and listen to it now.

The idea for the song title came from an artist I like called Visit Venus. They had a space jazz, down tempo album out in 1995 that I caught up with much later called Music For Space Tourism that I adored and I liked the concept of making music for the future or that was thinking about what music would be like in the future. So, the name Starbase Lounge Music came from the idea that this is what Summer Madness would sound like in Aldous Huxley's dystopian Brave New World future where people used artificial, synthetic substances to alter and enhance their lives and everyday experiences. As always, your mileage may vary.

On a side note: I've been trying to get my artwork, artist name and remastered music replaced and updated on websites and music services like Last.fm, iTunes and Magnatune.com for some time now and so far, no luck. The artist name on Magnatune.com was initially introduced as Belief Systems but this is actually the name of my record label that doesn't really put any records out anymore. The artist name for Darin Marshall is Mantic for all of the music released on Magnatune.com and soon on Nude Photo Music.

Apparently, it's fairly difficult to change the name and artwork of the music you've released after it's been propagated to various online services because it's been a long time since I talked with my distributor friend at Magnatune and the new music with the new artwork is still not updated on iTunes, on the Amazon MP3 store or any of the other places where my music has been aggregated. I hope this gets updated soon but until then, the old artwork and older versions remain on the web.

There's an entire new album of music called Epigrams made up of stuff that was released previously as well as some new songs that I cooked up and there's one additional song on each of the original two albums. All of the songs on the two albums that were originally available on Magnatune.com have been remastered and reissued with new artwork so, I can't wait for this stuff to get published.

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Improvements to the iPhone's Maps app...

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:55:16 -0800

I'm commuting to and from Apple five days a week now and there's all kinds of different traffic scenarios that occur in a typical week on the long trip to and from my home in Oakland. One of the things I frequently do with the Maps app is, check the map and it's estimated arrival time for my destination at 1 Infinite Loop before I leave from the house. I do this routine again in reverse as I'm going to the car, or getting into the car at Infinite Loop to leave work and return home to Oakland also. The flip directions button that I always forget about should prove itself to be incredibly useful in the future should I actually remember to take advantage of it.

While I use this app almost daily for my travels to and from work and couldn't live without it, there are a number of improvements that could make the Maps app a lot better than it is currently for my particular user scenario that I will call weekday work commuter user. Below, I've outlined some of those additions that would be nice to haves, as they say in the Product Specification documents I used to read as a Quality Assurance Engineer before testing a product or feature.

Nice to haves:

1. Add a resubmit button for the maps route distance and time calculation on the same page as the results.

Currently, I have to click the Edit button and then click the Route button again to have the distance and time calculation resubmit and display the updated distance and time information. A dedicated button to recalculate the time and distance data from your current location would be a very welcome addition to this app.

2. Add the ability to pull up frequently used maps from a favorites list. This is just a no-brainer feature. Frequently used maps would be a very useful feature. Implementation is also key to make this feature as useful as possible. Apple's got good people to figure that out though so, I'll leave it to them to design a good UI for saved maps storage and recall.

3. This may be a feature that should be reserved for a paid maps app but it would be nice to have an Alternate Routes button to show multiple routes and their respective time and distance so that the user could route around a bad traffic spot and get home with less stress and agony spent sitting in the car after a long day' work.

Those are just a few of the items that I think would make this app even more useful than it already is on the iPhone. I use it very frequently to find places and to get to and from work.

I can't wait to get an iPhone 3 GS when the prices come down for the refurbs for existing customers (currently $349 for a 16GB and $449 for the 32GB refurbished 3 GS for existing customers which is a lot less compelling than the new customer price of $149 and $249.

Having the magnetometer in the iPhone 3 GS would allow me to purchase some of the GPS traffic and routing software available in the iPhone App Store to see if any of the new GPS traffic aps have solved the traffic problems mentioned above any better than Maps currently does.

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Enable auto-loading of remote content (images) in Thunderbird 2.x or 3.x

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:22:26 -0800

This is a weird issue that has bugged me for a long time about Thunderbird. By default, Thunderbird tries to protect you by not loading the images that are sent in email messages. Many of these images are innocuous and don't really matter. The ones that do matter are typically 1x1 pixel tracking images that let a spammer or legitimate retailer know that you've opened their email message. This is a good thing that Thunderbird is doing but once you've filtered out all of the mail that you don't want to see, how do you go about loading the remote content images automatically?

It turns out that this is a much more difficult feature to enable than it should be, in my opinion.

On the Mac, go to the Thunderbird menu and choose Preferences. On the General tab, click the button in the lower left corner called Config Editor. Skip over the warranty message that warns you about mucking about with the internal Thunderbird settings when/if it appears and enter the following into the Config. Editor Window's search box:

mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image

Hit return to find this option and then double-click the "true" value in the right column and observe that it turns to false which is what you want. Close this window and return to email browsing and notice that the remote content is loading when a new message is selected after changing the setting.

On the PC, here' the path the change the setting:

Tools > Options > Advanced > Config Editor (button) ...

change the setting for: mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image to false by clicking on it or in the field. I don't have a PC handy so I can't try this to give you precise instructions but hopefully, you can figure it out.

As fasr as I know, there is no key equivalent for this but I did find some useful ones that make life easier for dealing with the few spam messages that do manage to squeak through:

J marks a message as Junk
Control (Mac: Command) + Option + M moves messages to the Junk folder that are selected

I hope this helps someone. It was difficult for me to find the correct setting for the auto load config entry.

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Email newsletters or one-offs with no date...

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:02:00 -0700

Rant mode on:

Please, for the love of all that is good and righteous in the world of opt-in newsletter email and all things technical and beautiful, please, all of you out there, please, please stop sending these emails to us with no date! What's the matter with you! I've got tons and tons of emails in my Inbox from back to 2004 and earlier. Every time you send me an email with no date, it goes to the top of the list of dateless emails.

Yes, this means you, Apple, Inc., OWC Larry, Tagged (Tagged, you are spam scumsuckers), Senator Barbara Boxer, Intuit for Tax Return acceptance emails and well, mostly, just Apple: ADC and iTunes Store emails both have no date. Whyyyyyyy! Please fix this! I don't want to have to go to the bottom of my email to find something important and then to have to scroll up to the last item that had no date on it that was sent to me. Gerf...

Okay, rant mode off...

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Today's hike for the gainfully unemployed...

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:56:32 -0800

JettyPhoto1Small

Today, I decided that I wanted to make the long hike out to the end of the jetty that runs along side Ferry Point where the U.S.S. Hornet is docked in Alameda, CA.

The first time I discovered the jetty, I made it almost half way before I decided to turn back due to concerns about being able to see after dark with no lights and treacherous, random rock piles that I was navigating on the way out there (see the video below).

For my second trip out, I was determined to get all the way to the end and I even found the secret entrance to the jetty parking lot that I had missed the last time I went.

We've had a brief break in the typical winter storms that have been hitting us in the Bay Area back to back lately and I thought today would be a good day to do this as the forecast calls for rain off and on into next week with a possibility of snow as low as 2000 feet.

So, I got out there and despite it being pretty late in the afternoon, I was able to press on through the Dance Dance Revolution step combinations necessary to avoid wrenching my ankles and feet in some precarious slots between the large, jagged and assorted rock types that are piled up to create this artificial breakwater jetty (again see the video below).

For the first part of the path, there's a bit of pavement that stretches along a really old fence and a make-shift beach where birds fly around in flocks like you'd see on a nature show. Shortly after that turn to the right, where the jetty path starts running parallel with the docked ships across the breakwater, it's only paved for another 200 feet or so. Once the pavement ends, it's all 4-Wheel drive off-roading for my feet and legs on volcanic, colorful, wonderfully distinctive craggy rocks that were piled up on each other to create this path to the middle of nowhere in the San Francisco Bay.

JettyMovieSmall-desktop

There are several cement markers along the piled rocks that make up the jetty. All of these marker spots look like some kind of wooden structure used to reside on top of them before they burned down. There's also a kind of circular metal hole in the middle and possibly some kind of light or lantern of some sort at some point in the past. These holes are now filled with salty seawater and bits and pieces of bird food fodder; chunks and shards of mussels and crab carcasses that have been discarded after the meat was removed and eaten by a seagull or some other seabird.

This crapshoot of obtuse and unusually shaped rocks continues for almost a mile and I started thinking I might fall into a slot and how would anyone find me if I twisted or broke my ankle and get a little worried. Just then, my neighbor calls me on my cell phone and I return to civilization briefly to tell my her that her sister will have to be added to my list of filtered MAC addresses before I can give her a password to our WPA2 network so that she can get free WiFi. Knowing that I can receive calls on my cell phone makes me feel better about the trek, although, with my luck, I'd fall, get my ankle stuck and the cell phone would shoot out of my jacket pocket and into the water simultaneously and I'd be stuck there with no phone and nary a pot to piss in.

Eventually, I reach the end of the line and realize that the jetty has an uncrossable gap in it that leads off in a North-Westerly direction and lots of birds are sitting on the rocks out there across this divide laughing at me because I can't come and play where they are hanging out. There's an official looking red and white striped box just a bit taller than me with a door on it situated right in the middle of the mile long rock-laden path that I've just come down.

Hike Detail Map 2

I turn to my left and I see another red and white striped box with a door on it just like the one that is where I'm currently standing at almost the very end of the jetty section that juts out into the bay towards San Mateo. The red and white striped box near me is obviously made of metal and inside the hinged but broken-locked door, there's what appears to be charred coal or the carbon remains of something that was burned inside of it. I presume the other one has similar crap in it and don't bother going out to the farthest point on the jetty for fear of losing my balance and falling into the water.

I'm a little winded now after the long, tedious journey. I'm feeling a bit uneasy about my solo trek, the late hour of the day and the chance that I could get stuck out here. A huge bay wave, similar to the one in the movie The Day After Tomorrow that swallows downtown Manhattan, although highly unlikely, could potentially come in behind me as I akwardly dance my way across the rocks back to the safety of the shore.

When I get home, I grab the always informative and now undersea-capable version of Google Earth and use the Ruler window to determine where I was and how far the journey out to the end of the jetty is in miles. Turns out it's only about 1.03 miles to the end where I went to. If I had a dingy, I could paddle across that gap and get to where all the bird crap is for a really rare photo opportunity but why would I want to risk life and limb just for a stupid photo that I could take from a ferry or a small boat in the bay some time in the future?

Distance of the hike photo

Anyway, my feet were sore and decided that as a reward I have sushi from the newly remodeled and recently re-opened Kai's sushi restaurant in Alameda.

Kai's isn't as hi-falutin' and yummy as Kamakura, also in Alameda, but the price of admission is cheap just like the price of my hike today. Next time I do this hike, I won't forget my camera so that I can take some pictures to add to this post of the red and white striped boxes.

The photos and video here are from the first trip out when I didn't get all the way to the end and it was much sunnier.

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The modern oven...

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:36:54 -0800

Oven Repair

I bought a new oven just prior to being laid off for the fourth time in my life. Previous times were from Opcode Systems, Topica, Tribe.net and now the fourth is Aggregate Knowledge amidst a wonderfully rosy economic outlook.

Having an oven to stick your head in if it gets really bad out there is at least some solace but just after installing the oven and using it once to make cinnamon rolls out of a can, a personal unhealthy favorite indulgence of mine, the oven stopped working. When I say, stopped working, as a Quality Assurance Engineer, this is not a succinct enough description. The oven wouldn't actually heat up when the bake button was pushed and the desired temperature was selected. That's a much more effective description of the issue.

I haven't had a range with a working oven since probably before I was laid off from Topica in 2001 and I've gotten along prefectly fine with just a toaster oven for things that needed baking. The stove top worked fine and the tenants I've had over the years seemed fine with the lack of baking facilities but when you fix something like this, you want it to work.

I looked in the manual that came with the new stove and we discovered some interesting things about the oven. This Kenmore oven has to have it's time setting set or it won't heat up but that wasn't the problem because we tried unplugging and replugging it in and resetting the time and nothing happened. I looked further into the manual and discovered that Sears, the department store where I purchased the oven from (at the low price of $399 + tax), offers day and night support people on the phone to help me.

What "Day and Night" actually means is, we have people who can answer the phone but can't seem to take down any of the details associated with your problem, can't actually make an appointment to have someone come out and won't let you talk to anyone else, including a supervisor. I have to say that it was this one particular person that was just difficult to talk to and eventually, he did transfer me to someone else who made an appointment for me and listened to my problem and even sounded like he gave a crap about me as a person and a customer of Sears.

The soonest that someone would be available to come out was Weds. Jan. 21st. The time range can be between 8 and 5PM or 1 and 5PM which is weird and makes mostly no sense at all. It should be 8AM to 1PM or 1PM to 5PM but I digress. The day finally arrived this morning and about 10:25 or so, I get a call from a strange number that probably means it's the repair guy and it is. We get his A&E (Applicances and Electronics I guess) truck through the gate and into the complex where he can get to it and he gets to work.

After some initial investigation and a faulty multi-meter give the repair guy some trouble (I ended up loaning him my Neumann multi-meter that I won on the Neumann microphone site some time ago that has been a great tool for me and

Broken Igniter

others on many occasions), Mr. Repair guy determines that the problem is the igniter. Modern ovens don't have pilot lights anymore which is probably a good thing for repair people everywhere.

Gone are the days when ignorant consumers can fill a kitchen full of natural gas in preparation for their repair people who come into a situation that is already fueled and ready to ignite and blow the repair person and the kitchen to smithereens. I'm sure many a range repair person has had a situation where someone did something stupid related to the stove's pilot light and they tell their kids about it as a cautionary tale before bedtime because they were lucky to survive and not have any horrible burns.

Anyhoo, Mr. Repairman shows me the igniter, a new-fangled device that heats up and ignites the gas which in turn causes the oven to heat up. Sure enough, the igniter is broken into two pieces and is the point of failure for the new Kenmore stove's oven.

The burners all work correctly on top of the stove but this one piece, a very important piece for the oven portion of the stove, has failed and all it took was one usage for eight minutes at 375 degrees farenheit for cinnamon rolls and poof, it's done.

The most important take away from today's events is, try your best not to get laid off but no matter what you do, it's unavoidable sometimes, buy an oven that's a little a bit more than the minimum and maybe your oven will work more than once the first time you try it out, and then again, maybe not and lastly, as the repair person so eloquently put it, "Things don't work like they used to". Time to bake some tollhouse cookies and drown them and my sorrows about being unemployed in some milk.

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MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:37:28 -0800

Mgmt3

It was not less than a month ago when my departing roommate Chuck played me a couple of songs and videos off of the toobs from a band called MGMT.

On my recent trip to San Diego and back, I've been hearing the song Kids all over the radio now. It's possible that people with some knowledge of new music releases hates this band by now and that Kids will become the new Hey Ya! but I really liked what I heard when my roommate played me a couple of their songs including Time To Pretend, which I initially confused with Kids and my favorite retro-funk wonk Electric Feel which reminds me of the days when I used to wear butterfly collars in Elementary school and listen to Yarborough and Peoples on something called a 12" vinyl record. MGMT's music is catchy and kitschy and reminds me a bit of the more primarily punk-oriented Crystal Castles album with all of its Commodore 64 chip tune sensitibilities.

As always, your mileage may vary. You may like Terrorcore, noise, speed metal or music that makes your teeth bleed but some may find this group's psychedelic pop freshman song collection Oracular Spectacular kind of alluring, even with lyrics like, "I'll move to Paris shoot some heroin and f**k with the stars" from Time To Pretend which apparently they performed on David Letterman in Jan. of 08; I wonder what they did with that line when they played on television? Did they cook with the stars?

Next flash in the can artists or real gems? It's hard to tell this early but I'm a songs person and I liked a couple of this band's songs right from the start and the others are starting to grow on me as I listen to the album through a second time. I think people will remember this album and artist years later as at least a small bump on the radar of musical evolution.

MGMT - Oracular Spectacular (Buy this if you like it)

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A long strange and wonderful trip...

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 01:55:40 -0800

I just got back from the solo eight-hour jaunt down the coast of California to see my dad's new place (see photo) and with the exception of the lack of cell service from his new digs, it was a great place to be for Christmas this year, far away from the communal, hippie-share lifestyle of the house I've called home in Oakland for the last twelve years.

Picture 3

I rented a car from Enterprise, as I've done many times in the past, and my friend Tony over at the car shop called them on my behalf to get me into a better car for the trip.

What I didn't realize abot Monday after 11 or so was how few cars would be left to rent but when I got to the office in Oakland, it was clear from the barren, tundra-esque empty parking slots that slim were going to be the pickins for this year's solo vehicular flight down to the northern part of San Diego County.

When I heard that I was going to get a Dodge Caliber, I said, "a Dodge what? I've never heard of that car before or seen what one looks like." At first glance, the car doesn't appear to be too much to look at either.

The vehicle looks like a squashed down version of one of those SUVs that the American car companies were so fond of before gas prices rose to over $4 and dropped back down again and the the economy opened up its trap door in the floor and gobbled up the remaining money and diginity from all of the struggling brick and mortar stores and essentially killed the car business for the foreseeable future.

The Dodge Caliber R/T though proved to be a real sport on the eight hour road trip. The Boston Acoustics sound system with a sub-woofer and nine speakers as a manufacturer feature made Los Angeles freeway traffic bearable on the trip down and back with the hand full of assorted CDs that I brought with me. This rental didn't have the EVIC module installed (Electronic Vehicle Information Center) which for a short week's rental, is probably for the best.

The reviews I've read of this car's handling and performance aren't that great but the stereo, the cruise control and the especially peppy 4-cylinder engine made this car a nice choice for the trip down. I guess I was right when I said "this Dodge Caliber is growing on me" at Enterprise RAC.

My dad and his wife and I all went out to the movies and to breakfast a couple of times in it and I just wanted to crank the stereo up to show them how good it sounded but I knew that no one else would care as much as I did about how great it sounded.

I just had an idea: When I give people copies of the three CDs of music that I've done over the years, I should rent this car and take them on a three hour drive so that they can hear all of the subtle nuances I heard when I was making it. It's too bad you can't request a specific car when you rent from Enterprise. If I could, I would choose this car just for the stereo alone.

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Thank you for sharing...

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:08:08 -0700

I am an avid Macintosh fan. If that's not already clear from reading my blog, I want to say it for the record. I'm geeked about the new Mac OS aptly titled Leopard coming next Friday the 26th of October and I'm also excited about the new Logic Studio 8 I've been playing around with lately, although I could use a new Mac so that I can play back my songs on it.

Where I work currently, we encourage people to use Macs for many reasons including the fact that you can actually have the Mac OS and Windows running side by side using Parallels software [Coherence mode is awesome!]. Another reason we recommend that new employees get Macs is because they have lots of extremely useful tools under the hood like BSD for starters and a terminal application appropriately called "Terminal" where Mac users can access the Unix kernel and configure their computers via a command line interface.

One of the questions that comes up often is "how can I share files with other Mac users or Mac computers on an internal network at home or at work?" At some offices, this might be more complicated because of Windows networking issues but with the three Macs I have here in the office or the two I use at home, this is so simple it's kind of hard to believe that I haven't been taking advantage of this feature for years.

To enable file sharing, go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences and click the Sharing Preference pane in the middle of the window under Internet & Network. If everything is set up correctly on your local network, click the Start button on the Sharing Preference page's Services tab and wait for it to finish the startup process.

Default options here are probably best but you can add additional services if desired in the services area.

To share files, make sure that the Firewall is Off under the Firewall tab. If you want to share your internet connection, click the Internet tab and click Start. I have never personally used the Share Connection option but I'm sure there's a good reason to have this feature and that someone somewhere is using it right now. Unfortunately, this feature is outside the scope of this blog post for now.

So, back to the important details. How is the shared Mac accessed from another machine you ask? First you need to know what the address of the shared computer is. By clicking the Sharing Preference pane with the Services tab selected, if Sharing is enabled [Personal File Sharing should definitely be checked as well] some text that says the following appears near the bottom of the Preference pane window when Sharing is the currently selected preference pane and when File Sharing is enabled:

"Other Macintosh users can access your computer at afp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ or browse for "username" by choosing Network from the Go menu in the Finder."

So, from any other computer that is not explicitly blocked from accessing other machines on the network, the address is what is specified in that sentence.

From another networked Macintosh computer, choose Connect To Server from the Finder's Go menu. Enter the address that appeared in the shared computer's Sharing Preference panel and click the + button to add the address to the list. Keep in mind that if you're network is running a DHCP server [dynamically allocated internal IP address server], this address will probably change often so it might be necessary to recheck it the next time you want to connect to the shared computer. If you try to connect to an address that worked previously, double-check that the address has not been changed since the last connection was made.

Once the address has been added to the list, click the item in the list of Favorite Servers and then click Connect. You will be prompted to enter a username and password for the remote machine.

This brings up a separate issue. It will likely be necessary to create accounts on the shared computer so that you can access all of the folders and drives associated with it. Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts Preference pane and enable Guest access, or create new accounts with specific access rules as necessary. Guest access will allow you to see the Public folder and the Share folder with restrictions on many folders.

In the Accounts window click the Lock to change settings for a given user account or to add Guest access to your computer. keep in mind that with default settings, only the Public folder that appears in your user's home directory should be accessible to other users unless you log in as you from the remote machine. Also noteworthy is the drop box folder where guests and other users that are not you can drop files and folders for you even though they can't see the contents of the folder.

Good luck and happy sharing on the Mac.

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Sibilance Draft 4 Ozone Master

nobody@vox.com(darinmarshall) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:36:26 -0700

I think this tune still needs some more work with regard to the levels of the individual parts but here's a little sample of what I've been working on lately. This is an MP3 converted from Reason after exporting it directly as a 24-Bit, 96K stereo AIFF file. I then custom tuned the Ozone 3 Mastering Plug-in with the tape saturation simulation effect to get a warmer sound in Peak before I bounced the file with the plug-ins to disk. After the bounce, I encoded the file with Peak to a 320K MP3 file at the highest and slowest encoding speed just prior to exporting the file from Peak.

I think some of the sounds could stand to be a bit louder in the mix but this is yet another sonic experiment. I think I might need to subdue some of the drum parts in the upper mid range of the frequency spectrum and accentuate some mids in the sound clouds that occur here and there during this under six minute song.

All of the drums sounds are Roland TR-808 samples taken from a collection that a friend of mine and I created at Naut Humon's recording studio in San Francisco many years ago for some synthesizer/sampler project. I think they sound pretty nice but I wish I could get my mixes a bit louder without introducing a lot of breathing or pumping like I hear on so many rock/pop style records. Oh well.

Here's the link to the file in case you missed it above:

http://www.belief-systems.com/music/SibilanceDraft4.mp3

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