A clean bill of health for Robbie, plus some new stuff news...

Robbie's new healthy physique and outlook on life

I went to my Doctor this morning for my annual physical - I had delayed it from February since I was working on losing weight and didn't want to go in for that in such sad shape as I was in back then, just as I was getting ramped up on my new fitness routine. But today's appointment was the end goal and I needed to get the results so that I could claim victory or find out I'd need to continue taking blood pressure and cholesterol meds for the rest of my life...

July 2012 - I weighed in at 256 lbs / 116.5 kg, with blood pressure at 156/102 (very high - morbidly in fact). Body fat percentage was in the 33% range... the irony being I didn't look like I was morbidly obese, being tall and long boned, I just looked like your average American middle ager who enjoyed somewhat too much food and beer. But I wasn't feeling great at all...

Aug 2013 - 212 lbs / 96.4 kg (-44 lbs), blood pressure 123/78, resting pulse 71 bpm. Body fat percentage 14.5%. Definitely looking thinner now - waitress at my favorite mexican restaurant today mentioned I look skinny now (she was on maternity leave since end of March, so she can be forgiven). Feeling really good now, with a lot more muscle on my frame and not looking so puffy anymore.

Doctor has said I can go off the meds now - I've been off the meds for several months now, but he's given me the a-ok to stay off, so I am feeling really proud of myself at this time. I'm also looking better than I have since my early 30's - it's shaved off 10 years in perceived age, and my energy levels are way up. Funny, it has also helped with my being sharper thinking wise, and quicker as well.

New Stuff in the Studio

I've gone through some shopping for studio software the last while, plus I succumbed to my own pressure and took the Black Strat to the shop to install the roller nut and do a better job shielding the pickup cavity. Here's a list of the software I've picked up:

• Native Instruments Komplete 9 (the upgrade version)
• Evolve for Kontakt, along with the Mutations bundle
• Alchemy synth
• Waves Musicians 2 bundle
• Izotope Ozone 5 and Nectar effects bundles
• Seymour Duncan SH-18 Whole Lotta Humbucker pickup set
• 14" Zildjian hihats
• Sabian Neil Peart Paragon ride cymbal
• DW XHat attachment
• some more interesting drum rack stuff - curved pieces and clamps to better set up the kit

I was really hot to get the Izotope stuff - I've had Alloy now for several months and its amazing! I also had an "evaluation copy" of Ozone 5 and it was a package that makes a world of difference in your mix and master recording. And then, while evaluating Nectar, I found my vocal tracks to sound just phenomenal - even the ones that had serious issues and were pitchy. So picking these up was a no brainer - got 25% off in the end which was a bonus.

Similarly, Evolve and Alchemy I've been drooling over for a long long time - and they were both on sale! Great ambient stuff, some neat morphing loops and awesome cinematics that inspire a lot of creative thought. The really nice thing about both these, and the Komplete 9 package, is they can be installed and hosted on the Muse Receptor - so both studio and live possibilities are endless. Not to mention I can offload some of the VST workload onto the external box now.

I had considered Izotope's Iris package - but that will be a future purchase. Its a very very nice synth, but I feel that I really needed the ones I picked up, and after all my budget is limited. The more I look into the possibilities of the Muse, the more impressed I get....

Anyways - I had committed to getting out marginally early to hit the gym tonight. It's now 4:30 pm - FAIL. Have a great weekend folks!

updates - while I'm watching a webcast...

Here's some simple updates about where I'm at with hardware & software issues being encountered (posted chronologically so you can see the continuing issues and remedies as they were identified):

(from 6/24/13)
I completed the pickup wiring modifications on the Howard Roberts Fusion - getting some interesting albeit subtle differences when playing through the Mesa Boogie Nomad on more or less classic tube overdrive settings. I really love the sound of the JB in the bridge, much more pleased with the GFS Alnico classic in the neck although it can be a bit hot from that spot (~12k impedance) and is a bit tough to clean up when just rolling off the volume...

I took time on Saturday morning though to run through all the guitars through the Boogie and check out their tones (as a reminder for some, others to get familiar with what changed). Disappointed with both my Black Strat and my Svilpacaster - seems like we have a grounding issue with the Black Strat as I don't get any audio output anymore (I connected the common ground tab to the pot case and now no audio - maybe a reversed connection at the 1/4" output?). As for the Svilpacaster - having the older Fishman powerbridge piezo + Sustainiac seems to be causing issues for me, as I'm getting some oscillations occurring when the Sustainiac is switched on... I'm considering simply removing the Sustainiac at this point since its a nightmare to wire up for me... I'm also not happy with the JB that's in the bridge spot right now - very dark lower midrange and a bit muddy for my tastes. Might be simply affected by the wiring on the guitar, and the pickguard is a bit cheesy with the Anaconda skin pattern - I might just turn rewiring that thing into the next weekend soldering project in the near future.

The 2011 Gibson Studio Gold Top with GFS mini-humbuckers sounds pretty crunchy! It, along with my G&L ASAT Legacy with the 4 position switch, are the most complete and studio ready guitars I own - very satisfying to play. The HRF will join that soon I believe, but I need to resolve the Black Strat and Svilpacaster issues quickly. Also, having a slight recurrence of the Firewire driver issue from a few weeks ago - sadly I might need to consider selling and going for USB 3.0 device if I can't remedy once and for all...

(from 6/26/13)

I have a support ticket with Focusrite now - hopefully we get the firewire interface issue resolved quickly!

I have to confess though that I haven't completed installing all the VSTs on my PC yet - that's a time consuming and tedious exercise, and it's been really busy to date with the youngest two kids, plus my exercise and weight loss program. Thankfully the severe diet portion has one more day left and I can go back to eating a more normal but reduced quantity (compared to before) daily meals and continue my exercising routine. 35 lbs lost - yes its excellent and I feel a lot better for it!!!

I will be starting to work on one of my older pieces maybe on the weekend, but for sure next week - I'm going to hack my way through drum tracks for "Undertow" after making some changes in lyrics, tempo and song structure to reflect a more experienced Rob in 2013...

(from 7/6/13 - mobile post)
Reinstalled VSTs on the studio PC - for some reason the Analog Lab install failed... I have to do some digging around now for the special key for all my Arturia software since the dongle seems to have forgotten the auth codes... Surprise of the day: Yamaha's VC virtual B3 is actually quite good, I'll be using it to get working beds for the songs...


(from 7/11/13)
Late night installing the remaining VSTs on my Ultrabook and testing they work - I've downloaded some newer shareware and freeware/donationware instruments for my testing purposes, and as I work with them over the next month or two while repurposing the older songs & writing new material, I'll post my reviews of them. Some of them seem really great - particularly a Boesendorfer grand piano VST that I got last night and if it stands up, I'll be buying the license and registering.

Nearly constant now, music is really flowing through the background noise in my head. The inspiration & creativity well has been filling up a lot the last few months and I'm getting close to being able to make a lot more sense of it. With my own writing, much of it is in my head before I touch an instrument, but there is significant influence from the instruments timbrally and tonically that brings the music to the surface. Lately the activity getting my systems set up for work and testing the technical side by doing some simple playing has fertilized the soil, causing the well to fill at an accelerating rate. To me, that's all good news as after each ever more complex project the well drains out more completely, and then takes that much more time to refill...

One of the riffs that I've been using to test the VSTs latencies, and the patches themselves is this 2 bar C-minor arpeggio in 16th notes @ ~132 bpm spanning one octave that is not only a nice benchmark for a good solo patch but also a nice warm up exercise for my right hand on the keyboard. Much like playing the 7/8 riff from Rush's Xanadu at double speed, its one of those riffs that sits in your head and you pull out to play for 2-3 minutes to limber up. This riff has been around a long long time - since I first bought a Roland JX-8P back in 1993 and built my first PC MIDI workstation in fact. I have some MIDI files with the riff being used as the basis for some instrumentals, but while at that time I left them as done, truth is I never felt the riff was really fully explored for what it could present musically. I had even pulled it out during the writing phase for "a fine line between..." and messed with it a bit, but never really liked what came of it... anyways, I kinda see it as one of a few themes to build the long dream based composition around - hopefully my "magnum opus" piece for my music efforts I know is yet to come in the future (my own Amarok? I can only dream it to be the case...). That specific riff also has some potential to be a spectacular guitar riff since it requires some serious gymnastics on the fretboard and cross-picking to pull off well. It would sound seriously spectacular on 6 string acoustic guitar...

(from 7/16/13)
so after straining eyes trying to figure out how to retune my Boesendorfer VST - I'm going to dig out the Estonia grand piano samples disk and go through the effort of migrating to Kontakt or SampleTank 2.5.4 - they aren't the greatest samples with a lot of hiss at the end of each of the sample files, but they give a more than reasonable working approximation of a grand piano for writing and demoing purposes...

Also surfing the VST3 sites and just grabbing freebie VST effects - I'm going to make the big purchase of both Ozone 5 and EZMix software soon, but finding some really nice low CPU bus effects will come in handy when going through the massive remix efforts.