if you made a pie-chart of my brain this week, it would look something like this:

10% fellini movies
10% drama in my friends' lives
10% what's up with my strange sleeping habits
10% the usual vices (whiskey, porn, etc.)
15% missing my wife who is at burning man
45% VST plugins

an unfortunately for you, gossip hungry reader, this entry is going to be about what's on my mind *most*, that is, the selection, routing, and tweaking of virtual effects to process digital waveforms.

life is good, life is good.

had a good session last night with halion 3 (a virtual sampler from steinberg), was fooling around with and stumbled across the whole built-in effects module which is *incredibly deep*. there are insert effects, send effects, and program effects, the quality of which is pretty damn good and the breadth and organization are even more impressive. it took me awhile to figure out how the use the insert effects and there does seem to be a limitation of one per sound for inserts, but you know when you start piling on inserts you can turn a sound to crap pretty quickly so maybe it's not a bad limitation (and quite possibly it's not even a limitation, just my lack of knowledge, i haven't really dug in yet). combined with the send and program effect possibilities you've got a great sound sculpting pallette, and of course you can route the halion output thru any other effects you have in cubase.

the other breakthru i had was finding a way to use the sr-202, my 2nd favorite softsynth drum machine (after battery), and my favorite free one (though arguably it's not free considering you have to buy a copy of Computer Music magazine to get the DVD, which set me back about $16). anyway i was really bummed because the sr-202 doesn't work with cubaseSX3. but it *does* work with ableton live, so i've been doing my first composition work in live. just beat loops at the moment but i like the feel of recording in live, it's really easy and natural feeling and i've come up with some sick loops. for now i'm just exporting them for later use in cubase but i could see getting more into composition with live.

i've been in sketch mode lately, just getting used to the new setup and not focussing that much on finishing anything. but i've never had a sketch go to waste, most of the time i'll go back and steal part of it for another project even if the sketch never reaches fruition.

i guess i should have saved 10% of the pie-chart, or more even, for what the fuck is up with the united states not being able to take care of its own people in the wake of hurricane katrina. that is deeply disturbing. talked to jeff devas yesterday and emailed with blake jarrell, both those guys are fine but they lost a great deal of property and both of them obviously have to relocate and basically start over with many aspects of their lives. at least the situation seems to be starting to improve. what will happen to new orleans?