I wrote about the “Deluxe” edition of R.E.M.’s Murmur a couple years ago. The 25th Anniversary “Deluxe” edition of Fables Of The Reconstruction is out this week.
It’s remastered the same way as Murmur was. Maybe a bit worse. The RMS levels are all between -10 and -12 dB.
The bonus disc is very interesting – the “Athens Demos” of the songs on the album. I’ve not heard these demos before, despite my collection of REM bootlegs. They’re a fascinating glimpse into the band’s process, as the songs on “Chronic Town”, “Murmur”, and “Reckoning” were culled from the band’s years touring before they were signed. This material was honed, and the albums are polished perfection as a result. When it came time to start on the next record, they had to write new material. “The cupboard was bare,” as Peter Buck writes in the liner notes. The demos are the earliest recordings of R.E.M. songs that exist.
Unfortunately, the dynamic range compression is as bad on the demos as the album. In fact, looking at Driver 8, it appears an attempt was made to make the sound match between the versions, which isn’t really the point, in my opinion. But at least the material is available.
In case you haven’t been to the main site today, you may want to check out the new Projects section.
This is where I will be putting up information on the various projects (mostly electronic) that I’ve been working on and posting about. There’s only a little bit of info there now, but soon you will be able to get schematics, build instructions, code, etc.
Someone searched on “sequencer different time grids” to find this blog. While I’ve been obsessed with different scale types, I never thought much about the implications of different time scales in grid sequencers.
Currently, this blog comes up second in the Google search.
The first hit is a discussion of an interesting-looking sequencer for Atari computers. Looks like a very early grid sequencer. Oddly, it’s a 17×24 grid. One of the 17 is “off” instead of just allowing no selection.
It looks like it’s evolved a bit and gotten less intuitive. But might still be fun to play with.
The first ever Handmade Music L.A. was a great success. There was some great music, some cool handmade instruments, and even a concerto written for MakerBots!
There’s a video being edited, which I’ll link to. But here are a few pictures from the CRASHSpace Flickr:
Sweaty Caps and his and his Monome-powered acoustic set.
My noise toy performance.
Altitude Sickness with his groovy Tupperware Monomes.
Ian Hattwick’s Guitamaton.
Today the L.A. MakerBot group met at CRASH Space this afternoon. One of the guests was making a Rep Rap Darwin and was interested in knowing what was involved in printing the plastic parts on a MakerBot.
To demonstrate, I downloaded the RepRap 1.0.6 STL files from Thingiverse and randomly selected one (the bed clamp), sliced it up in the new ReplicatorG 0017 (which has STL import/preview and integrated Skeinforge) and printed it.
I fought with the new ReplicatorG for a couple hours, but got it sorted out and printed out the part. It was a bigger part than I’ve done before – about 50 mm x 40 mm x 6 mm – so I expected curling and incomplete fill areas. But it turned out near perfect. The sides are very straight and the top and bottom are nice and even and solid.
Behold a thing of beauty:
