Funny To Me

If you follow the work of Maynard James Keenan at all you might be interested in his latest release under the name Puscifer.

The first video is here on youtube.

It's . . . well, the funniest thing to me will be the reaction from both Tool and A Perfect Circle fans who aren't familiar with anything else MJK has done.

But if you've ever listened to Children of the Anachronistic Dynasty, then you'll be a little more prepared, at least for the single. Weird, drum-heavy, ambient . . . music, with vocals that are more about experimentation or ornamentation than anything else - if that sounds like something you want to try, give it a shot. While Maynard never gets quite as crazy with his voice as Mike Patton, both of them like to play with intonations, effects, breath patterns, hisses, pretty much anything they can do with their sound.

I used to listen to CAD while trying to fall asleep, and while I found the album to be shit when fully awake, in that reverie of near-sleep it was great for triggering lucid, strange dreams.

Maybe Puscifer will be the same.

Musical Interlude

I picked up an M-Audio JamLab from Musician's Friend. It arrived in the mail on Monday.

I played around with the thing most of the evening. Installation was quick and easy (once I realized that I had to have the unit plugged in before the second part of the software would install).

The experience made me giddy. The amp/effects modeling on GTPlayer is pretty damn good, probably better than I get on my ME-50 for most things. And I'm thinking I can slap an amp/mixer/ME-50 into the chain for pre-processing - can't see why that wouldn't work.

I'm still not sure yet why the sustain seems wonky. The clean signal doesn't have a problem, but the preset effects will clip the sound. This is more than likely something with the effects that I haven't discovered (that's the problem with using the presets). I tinkered with the Noise Gates and a few of the other pedals, but there must be an option I'm missing.

My major problem thus far has been my attempt to hook the Rewire into something, anything. Nothing works properly and support is just plain. The forums were majorly unhelpful. I tried Adobe Audition, ACID Pro, Reason and MAGIX and none of them worked. If I had GTPlayer open and tried to open Audition, I'd get an error concerning Rewire. Yet Audition wouldn't display the GTPlayer on its list of Rewire sources. No clue what's happening there.

Also, no guitar tuner. I found a few online but they aren't very good - one is ugly and laggy, the other unintuitive.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to put songs together. I'm thinking that I can play the Reason click track in the background (or even a backing sequence) and record with the GTPlayer's record interface (it's supposed to only take the input from the USB and nothing else). Then just drop stuff together with MAGIX.

Lots of tinkering to do. It's exciting to get back to the guitar. I've mostly just been dry playing my electric because in an apartment building it's not good form to blast an amp. Using my computer, everything's in the headphones. Which means even after my wife goes to bed I can jam.

Okay, this is starting to sound too much like copy for a lame ad in Guitar Player Magazine.

Rockapotamus!