Elektronkind

Today I met with my new sitar teacher, Alif Laila, for the first time. We spent the evening getting aquainted and going over tuning (Ravi Shankar style) and replacing a string on my sitar. It turns out that she’s a tea freak as well so we talked about our favorite drinks and how music is a true uniter. For the last half of the evening, we went over the basic scale of Sa Re Ga ma Pa Dha Ni Åša using da ra strokes. For now I’m using that to get the mechanics of string plucking and maneuvering my left hand over the frets down. It’s a trying effort but eventually the muscle memory will kick in and I’ll do it perfectly with my eyes closed.

Beer Taps Going The Way of the Gas Pump

That post on the DCist was brought to my attention today.

The markup on booze is the heroin of night club owners. I know that’s where their major operating capital comes from, but $6 for a domestic is just plain out of touch, considering I bought a case of 12 Blue Moon bottles for $28 in Virginia just last week, and Yuengling can be found in stores for about $1.00 – $1.50 a bottle.

If anyone’s really going to suffer from this, it’s going to be the tips bartenders get… though the price increase is no fault of their own.

I’ll be playing on the down tempo stage at the 2005 PowWow outdoor festival in Asheville, NC. My set time will be Sunday morning from 10am-12pm.

My new weekly radio show, Chill’em starts this Thursday. Clicky the linky to find out more.

Beginning on 3/14….

Come unwind from Monday’s monotonous routine
=========Electronic Vaudeville============
||Drum&Bass||TripHop||Downtempo||Atmosphere||
||Chillout||DeepHouse||Progressive||
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Serving You The Freshest Beats In An Urban Lounge Setting

9:30-10:30 – Kid Amiga
10:30-11:30 – Elektronkind
11:30-12:30 – Statler & Waldorf

Fully Stocked Coffee Bar!!
Extensive Sandwich/Salad/Dessert Menu!!

$4 Bottle Beer
$26 Wine Bottle
21+ To Drink (w/ valid gov’t issued ID)

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ A L L A G E S ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

$5 Cover after 10pm
Every Monday Night
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Jammin’ Java
227 Maple Ave E
Vienna, VA 22180
703-255-1566
http://www.jamminjava.com
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Over in the OSX Audio forums, Marc posted a very enlightening comparison of the built-in MacOS X audio plugin API, Audio Units with the old standby, Steinberg’s VST plugin API.

Very well worth the read for anyone who deals with audio on MacOS X!

Pictures

Sara and I went out to Starscape 2003 last night. We spent most of saturday burning copies of my mix CD to hand out (Sara whipped up the CD insert on her Mac since mine doesn’t like doing much of anything else when it’s writing CDs. One day I’ll get that 32x Plextor into a FireWire case. Anyway…) and then ordered some Chinese delivery for dinner before heading out. That chinese turned out to be our downfall for the evening.
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I need to make room in my studio so I’m selling a set of Pioneer CDJ-100Ss which come in their very own home, a Gründorf coffin (carpeted outside.) The coffin is designed to hold the two CDJs plus a Pioneer DJM-300 mixer, although any mixer of similar dimension will fit.

Both are in fine working order in a smoke-free studio, and I’m the original owner of 4 years. Asking $250 for the rig. This is a veritable steal!

Pictures are here.

Pick up in Arbutus, MD (right next to UMBC, outside of Baltimore), or Laurel where I work during the day. You *might* convince me to go further if sushi is involved :)

Update: These have been sold.

I updated the Visio of my new studio layout. It differs quite a bit from the previous one. The PC has been replaced by a Mac, there’s no more need for the Mackie mixer, and the DJ rig was upgraded. Check it out here.

I recently read an article on desktoplinux.com where the author extolled virtues of using Linux in a professional recording studio.

While it was an interesting read, I think the author was a bit over-enthusiastic by making it seem that Linux is at or close to being a contender for the Macs and Windows-based systems that populate the vast majority of studios out there. Cost and admin time savings seemed to be a main and understandable theme in his writings; But when he described what he used Linux for in his environment, it appears that he is only concerned with audio editing… which is only a component of what usually goes on in a studio. My own investigation into what’s available in the Linux world didn’t turn up much else. Read on if you want my full take on Linux capabilities in the modern studio…
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