stefkeB

Apart from software, there is a wealth of possibilities for guitar sounds. From real amplifiers and stomp boxes till software plugins and combined software/hardware products.

Right now, I'm borrowing a Korg ToneWorks AX3000G from my brother, which is mostly a hardware guitar effects and amplifiers simulator. One machine with a nice range of sounds. Maybe I don't need to buy two or more amplifiers and effects at all.

I am re-installing everything. My Powerbook's drive died, so I had to start from scratch (and the partial backup I could recover). I've switched from Tiger to Leopard, but still have iLife '06 for PPC on that machine.

On the iMac, I have the more recent iLife '08 which is nice (especially iPhoto, which we used to reorganize most of our family snapshots). Garagaband seems to be improved somewhat, but not dramatically. I have not had the chance to try others.

Last week, because it was my birthday, I bought a new iMac. It is meant to replace my old Desktop PC from 2000, which did not serve for music for quite some time. While I am happy with the Powerbook, it's still my laptop for work and it's disk died recently. While it is recovering and a new battery is ordered, I had to replace my home computer too. Because of music and graphics I chose the iMac, which is reasonably priced and comes with iLife (including the nice Garageband).

I had a rehearsal/brainstorm with the "Reverse Violin Company", yesterday evening. We listened to eachothers tunes, looked at lyrics and gave suggestions. We also wanted to record a new song, based on a lyric I wrote. It was hard to find a suitable "genre", so we decided to try with drum loops to get into a particular groove. After a few rock oriented drum samples, we settled with a more electronic beat and then the creative energy got bigger.

If you look for a Linux distribution oriented towards multimedia, you can try one of the 7 distributions as discussed on http://www.junauza.com/2008/08/7-best-linux-distributions-for.html There are several interesting options for Open Source music creation applications, which include Ardour, Audacity, PureData, Rosegarden, CSound. I tried many of them, but not as extensive as Cubase or Ableton Live.

Check out http://www.whateveriswrongwithyou.com to download the new song from Marillion for free and participate in a video-contest. You could win £5000 along the way.

Using an old copy of Cinema4D r7, I rendered the RW house. With some tweaked set up, it took about 30 minutes on the old Dual P3 1GHz.

While playing on your own has its advantages, such as full creative freedom, no pressure and no arguments, I would like to start a band. So if you live near Leuven and like some of the things I created, please send something to my hotmail adress, using "stefkeB" as username.

I don't understand Drupal anymore, but anyways. Music posting works again so I have uploaded many new songs again to this site. I also am recovering from a hard drive failure: the disk of the Powerbook died WHILE MAKING A BACKUP! So I end up without disk and with only 18GB from the 100GB drive backed up. I still have to restore the last backup from june from our local system, which I hope was made as late as possible. I will surely have lost some of my personal pictures, but by pure luck, some of my latest recordings did survive.

Somewhere between rock and pop. It starts quite (= "stil") and grows during the song. It becomes rougher when the drums kick in. The lyrics suggest but don't explain what really happens/happened.