The Older I Get. . .

[cptgone]

LEDs are sexy, even virtual ones.

[Warmonger]

Mobile phones? Pfft. Been avoiding them for years, with complete success so far. I've nothing to say (as those who've read my posts here will agree) and don't want to be talked at when away from the Last Homely Laboratory/Studio West of the Sea.

I used to say the same thing. That was before I had a best friend (who also has Sprint PCS, so free calls to her) who lives 1500 miles away. It was also before I had 2 roommates without cars who often need rides to various places.

If you don't like using it to chatter about nothing in all manner of inappropriate places, that's fine. You don't have to use it that way. A cell phone just happens to be a convenient and cheap (assuming $.05 for a landline, I would have been over $100 last month without the cell phone) way to get in touch with people I need to get in touch with.

[cptgone]

Mobile phones? Pfft. Been avoiding them for years, with complete success so far. I've nothing to say (as those who've read my posts here will agree) and don't want to be talked at when away from the Last Homely Laboratory/Studio West of the Sea.

I used to say the same thing.

Yeah, me too. When I was told about the Vibrate Mode I just had to get one. You guys can call me any time, day or night

[Meffy]

You don't have to use it that way.

Well, I don't use it that way or any way at all, and have no plans to. If it works for you, good. For me it would be a complete waste of money. I use other methods to communicate, and they suffice.

[Warmonger]

Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to convince you to get one. I was just saying that I used to have a smug sense of superiority about not needing a cell phone, and your post reminded me of that.

[eduardo_b]

Alongside this, I removed my entire VST synth folder a couple of months ago .

I haven't thought of doing something this drastic, but I have considered radically reducing the number of plugs in the folder. I mean, when one finds one's self downloading a plug only to find it's already in the VST folder...well, that's not a good sign. And then there are all the plugs in the VST and VSTi text files where I keep them listed. I don't remember what many of them are like and even do. Too many just-in-case plugs me thinks.

These measures are helping me to focus more on the music, learn more about the stuff I already invested in, and spend less time fretting about whether there's abetter VST to be found around the corner .

All great reasons to limit the number of these things on the hard drive. I don't know that I have your discipline to remove most of the plug-ins I now have, some of which I paid dearly for. But I definitely think about it.

[Meffy]

Smug sense of superiority? Um, no. A sense of satisfaction that I don't have that bill to pay, yes. I'm foolish, certainly, but not nearly foolish enough to think superiority comes from either having or not having a particular gizmo. Anyway, on with the show. :-)

[Stupid American Pig]

I switched to mobile only, since my land phone bill easily exceeded what I pay for my mobile. Things have changed recently with land lines getting cheaper and voip, but its a wash really. Im always available, for better or worse. Im just hoping that my office will deem me important enough soon to buy me a phone. some day...

[Steven West]

The older I get... The closer I am to meeting Rod Stewart.

[androidlove]

The older I get... The closer I am to meeting Rod Stewart.

is that a euphemism for death?

[mystahr]

The older I get ... the more fun it becomes

[Radek]

The less impressed I am by 'technology'. Now this isn't an anti technology post at all, what I mean is that I'm not so impessed by flashy and complex looking interfaces such as those on modern soft synths and stuff.

I was thinking this as I was browsing some synths in the drop down menu on this site. They've all got these waveforms editors and spectrum analyizers and ocilloscopes and look extreamely complex and flashy.

But I'm getting to a stage where I feel all this stuff is getting in the way of making music. When I was young and 'wet behind the ears', I would have LOVED this stuff, so I guess I'm going thru a natural progression.

Ha! You are just realising the limits of our perception. How many timbres we can differentiate, how many colors we can really see, how many everythings we really can taste?

In the market progress (even if faked) is a must. Look how company like Roland could look when it would admit their newest products are nothing more a repacked 10 years old technology (if lucky). We had been having everything many times now and NOW it's just selling the same thing another time. Perhaps with more flash, perhaps with improvement here and there but at the core any today's synths are mostly variation of "S+S" concept. Even software vstis are the same. Substractive, fm/pm, additive, physical modeling (VL from Yamaha, oryginal Oasys from Korg, some synths form Creamware), all of it was before...

I remember reading articles in mags years ago by people older than me saying a simillar thing about synthersisers and computer sequencers back in the day. I meanwhile couldn't get enough of it, I was attending electronics and computer programming courses just so I could understand it all better!

Now the years have rolled on and I find myself looking back with fondness at early workstations and hardware sequencers. I think that maybe one day I may well buy a modern hardware sequencer, something like a souped up Yamaha QY700 (if they ever build one.)

My love affair with technology has by no means ended but I'd rather it stayed 'behind the scenes' and leave me to create music than dazzle me with parameters, numbers and virtual VU meters.

I'm still only using an old version of Orion despite having a fairly powerful PC. I love my VST's as mush as the next man but I tend to seek 'one trick ponies' rather than 'all singing all dancing' (my favorite sampler is Cyber Free in combination with Orion's own sampler for example.)

Maybe by the time I'm 50 (I'm 35 atm) I'll only be playing the spoons.. or comb and paper!

You are just getting wise. Youth is vastly overrated as it is a sum of ignorance and stupidity.

How I was stupid being excited by AWE32/Live technical specs when I didn't have any (and possibility to get) good soundfonts for them? How I was stupid when I bought Gigastudio and having the same problem with libraries. Now I know I should just get a "rompler" (and I have very good offer then) and then I could just be busy making music and not fiddling with technological marketing wonder, which at the end costed me more money, more time and more nerves?

These are just my thoughts right now, There's no real point to this post but if you feel the same, or not, feel free to add your opinions...

Problem is we have a limits. The musical scale has a limits, musical timbers have a limits, we just can hear a tiny spectrum of sounds. Yep, I still can hear ultrasounds but it's everything but musical. It's hurting my ears when I'm hearing very high pitched sound for example and when I'm exposed for infrasounds I'm getting to vomit... You see a musical tones are narrow phenomena. It would be like exposing someone to gamma/x-rays/microwaves and expecting him to have a better vision experience.

[vurt]

...the longer my shitlist gets.

[Lazarus Machine]

aaaah yes.

i remember discussing "technology" [or what passed for it back then!] with Comte de Saint Germain once [this was just after the guillotine had made its debut]. "60-90 HPM [Heads Per Minute]!" he exclaimed and proceeded to convince me that you can't stop progress.

So I've been trying to adjust and adapt to all the hi-tech stuff ever since...

[Kriminal]

...every hole is a goal...