Losing My America

So, there’s this meme.  I had a very visceral reaction to it – it’s the one with the drill Sargent from “Full Metal Jacket” telling us in no uncertain terms that we’re losing our “beloved America” to “goat humpers.”  Honestly, that’s just offensive.  Because of our country’s history of racism and propensity to name-call, I know who and what this is talking about. 

Honestly, I find that I'm losing MY America to intolerance and hate. #ScarSpangledBanner #TrueAmericanHate (BTW, the most recent Testament/Exodus tour was freaking amazing...just saying) It's not some Muslim insurrection I fear because of the Muslims I know, most of them have better values and place more value on life and peace than their Christian counterparts in my life. If it's about “growing a pair and acting like Americans,” it's time to establish what that means and I, for one, don't recall this country being founded on the "values" of hate, bigotry and ignorance. Isolationism and freedom, yes. Being an asshole, no. Well, maybe...there's plenty of historical precedent, I suppose...

For me, it's not anyone from any other country, race, religion or so-called-creed that's undermining and destroying the fabric of our country, it's those that perpetuate that to be American, you need to be an asshole who instead of taking time to understand the cultural differences, choose instead to call names. My America is being destroyed by my government's insistence on sending my friends and family overseas to kill a fabricated and media-amplified enemy when the real problem is who holds the petroleum resources and something that could, really, be negotiated without threat of violence.  We're just not wired that way, apparently, because it's the more difficult way to do something. It's harder to accept someone for their differences than to dismiss them as different and "other." I've said it for years -- we need to stop listening to so-called "war experts" and invest serious time and energy recruiting "peace experts." I, for one, don't want this world blown all to hell for my kids because people have forgotten how or think they’re too good to use their words...

It says, “Wake up and smell the bacon.”  I do like waking up to the smell of bacon, although with my thyroid medicine I can't eat it until a bit of time AFTER my coffee. This is medicine prescribed through American health care, taken with Swedish coffee, in front of my American built (except for the Singaporean semiconductors, Taiwanese case, Thai hard drives...), sitting on top of a Japanese stereo receiver (studio setup...long story...). There's a point to this -- everything is from everywhere. We, as a planet, are together on our ride in this compressed and screwed up span of time, and we can choose to live our lives finding reasons to hate and kill each other, or we can choose to find our commonalities and work towards making this world a better place…and there are VERY few exceptions where discriminating against or killing someone makes a positive difference.

It's not the Muslim you need to worry about, it's the Extremist -- and that goes to ANY religion or belief. You also have to see through the media representations and perpetuated stereotypes. You have to care enough to take the time to learn why a certain people or person does something in order to understand that it's probably not a threat to the threads of your reality and, more likely than not, is just as odd to you as whatever you're doing is to them...

So, to wrap this up in a tidy bow, if you feel being an asshole is the most important American value, then you are the problem, not the person who is trying to make a better life for his or her family by coming to what used to be called “the land of opportunity,” but, now, seems more to be “the land of intolerant bigotry.”  Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

Producing an Album for the First Time: Part VI – Lesson Learned

A Time and Place

One of the more significant lessons I learned was about...well, honestly, patience. The situation was clear, however, I just didn't anticipate the disruption. The album had some tracks that were monsters, literally and figuratively, and when editing them on my original desktop setup, I ran into major problems with the CPU seizing and, sometimes, simply rebooting the entire system. It had enough and, honestly, so had I. Additionally, there was just not enough RAM overhead to handle some of what I needed to do, as well. Applying a filter would involve significant drive-grinding time as the virtual RAM disk swapped data back and forth for what seemed to be eternity. For reference, my desktop, at the time, was a 2.6GHz Duo-core with 12GB RAM. The problem? It was a Dell, so I couldn't just swap things out – I had to make sure they would play well with all the proprietary nonsense Dell saddles you with so that your next upgrade will have to be through them, or be done, yourself…

Now, this isn't to cast aspersions on Dell products, it is, however, pointing out that there are some proprietary things about Dell systems that will make upgrading a ...maddening… experience. First and foremost, the chassis connection headers are not going to match up to any motherboard you purchase and hope to put into your Dell case. Why would you want to replace your motherboard? Well, because you are limited to the type and power of the CPU you get, should you wish to replace it. In my case, I would only been able to upgrade processors to a quad-core and only up to 3GHz. Considering the deal I found for the Hex-Core 3.9GHz processor, I knew I was going to have to upgrade my motherboard, as well.

So, it came to be that I had the motherboard and the CPU, but I quickly discovered that there was no way I was going to be able to use it without a new chassis, since the panel headers were never going to line up and there were a couple of important ones – power on and reset. For reference, I didn't realize that systems wouldn't even boot without the reset being attached, at the least at the motherboard header level. The one that worked?  After a couple of attempts, I settled on probably the cheapest chassis out there that’s sold by reputable dealers.  The edges of the metal inside the case aren’t ground or beveled so are, in some cases, lethal…  However, the power supply location allowed the connections to still reach the motherboard, something the more expensive models missed being able to do by scant centimeters, but very real distances that couldn’t be overcome by wishy thinking.

The problem was that this process took a solid week and a couple days to get a system back up and running and able to do anything moderately useful.  The REAL problem?  This was smack in the middle of mixing Brendan’s album.

My justification was simply that I had run into a problem where there were three to four songs that I wasn’t able to listen to, in real time, when I was mixing, because the horsepower needed was more than the system currently had.  Here’s the thing – there are two approaches to take here and I obviously took one, which is to up the horsepower of the machine so it can handle all the plugins across the multitude of tracks in the mix.  The other approach, which I would recommend, is to simplify.  If you’re using that many plugins on that many tracks, it’s probably time to change your approach – but I was so new to this world that I didn’t know how to execute that fairly simple process.

For reference, something as simple as setting up a couple of FX busses and sending your tracks to the single FX source will go a long way towards reducing CPU overhead and also make it easier to keep a uniform FX application across all tracks on that particular FX bus.

So, really, the moral to this story is that if you have a song or four that have 15 to 20 tracks, each with effects, and when you hit the space bar to listen and it starts stuttering all over the place because your CPU is seizing and begging for mercy, the FIRST thing to do is look into simplifying the overall makeup of the song either through the use of FX busses or just reconsidering all of the effects, period.  If you’re still running into problems, it’s tempting to upgrade your hardware. Fair enough. My advice?  Don’t do it in the middle of a time-sensitive project.  Really.  It was bone stupid on my part and something I won’t be doing again, trust me.

So you know, though, current incarnations of the songs have 40+ tracks, limited effects bussing and relatively no CPU taxing.  It also helps that system is now a bit more juggernaut-esque, boasting a 3.9GHz six core processor with 20GB RAM. So, maybe the bigger lesson, for me, was how to craft a better mix without being reliant on CPU-heavy effects.  Yes, they sound better.