Mixing

I feel that mixing music is one of the greatest innovations that has developed fairly recently. It's a splendiferous (yes it's actually a word) form of creativity and there are limitless possibilities and expressions. You can take one song that has some vibe and another that's totally different and combine them to make something that is totally unique. Now i have yet to be able to mix my own music but I will be getting the software and hardware to be able to do that and then the doors will open, because there are so many things you can do with music. Take the drum part of one song combine it with the vocals and bass/synth part from another song, take the vocals of a totally different song and put that in the backround, and make something crazy.
Mixing is my favorite form of UGC (user generated content), but as some may have learned, there is a war going on against UGC on Youtube® and other places that think it is copyright infringment. That's complete b.s. in my opinion because they're killing the creative juices that we've slowly been losing as a species. It's also not really copyright, as someone Larry Lessig from TED (Watch this!) adequately put, the land people own also consists of the space above it, yet airplane's can still fly over your house. This is the same thing with the copyright people cracking down on ser generated-content. Plus people aren't doing it for money, they're just doing it for fun. I could understand punishment if it was for profit, but since it isn't, Youtube® just looks like a Nazi.
The strange part is, mixing music is not illegal, yet people get money for doing it. I find it strange that the non profit people that create these imaginative videos are the ones that have to suffer. Hopefully we can eventually get Youtube® and other Nazi corporations to change their mind, haha.

Muse

Muse is probably my favorite band. I almost have their entire discography and there isn't one song by them I don't like and that's over 100 songs. As I said, all their songs are amazing, but none of them really sound the same, but they still feel right with the band. Some song are R&B influenced but they use really distorted guitar and give it their own edge. Muse is truly one of the best bands, and unlike most bands now a days, they are great live. I suggest, if you haven't heard them, go download or buy Black Holes and Revelations, Absolution, and Showbiz, plus they have tons of EP's and a couple live albums.
Now let's get to the heart of what Muse is. Muse is a British rock band formed by Matthew Bellamy (vocals,guitar, piano, keyboards, synth, and programming), Christopher Wolstenholme (bass, back-up vocals, synth, and double bass), and Dominic Howard (percussion, synth, and programming.) Matt uses an armada of pedals to get many, many, many sounds out of his guitar. His guitar also has an effect pad on it (for more information on his guitars check them out, they're really cool, http://www.mansonguitars.co.uk/Muse%20gallery/index.htm). Matt's voice is a combination of falsetto's and a pretty much constant vibrato. I've also been told "his voice makes me want to jizz in my pants", if you listen to them you'll understand. Chris is mostly the bass player, but he's not and average bass player. They use effects on it. Mostly distortion but sometimes they use other stuff, but it sounds reeeeally cool, listen to Hysteria and Time is Running Out if you would like to hear it. Dominic's a good, solid drummer, they do have some difficult drum parts though, like in Assassin (particularly the intro), which is a great kind of hardcore influenced song. They have a few of those Drop-D gems (Assassin, Dead Star, Stockholme Syndrome are some great examples).
They recently came out with a new album, The Resistance, I haven't yet had a chance to listen to it though so if you have, let me know about it. They have an almost countless number of albums and EPs. From first to most recent: Muse EP, Muscle Museum, UNO, Cave, Sunburn, Unintended, Plug In Baby, New Born, Origin of Symmetry, Bliss, Feeling Good/ Hyper Music, Dead Star/ In Your World, Hullabaloo, Stockholme Syndrome, Time Is Running Out, Absolution, Hysteria, Sing for Absolution, Butterflies and Hurricanes, Supermassive Blackhole, Blackholes and Revelations, Starlight, Knights of Cydonia, Invincible, Map of the Problematique, HAARP (Live from Wembley Stadium), The Uprising, The Resistance, and Undisclosed Desires. Most of those are singles but still, that's a very large armada of music and not one bad song, in my opinion.

Homework

This being my first post on the educational system id like to have it on the thing I like least about school; homework. It is my belief that homework was also forged with the Ring in the dark depths of Mordor and is pure evil. I'm mostly okay with school, but I think that school needs to stay in school. It's enough work as is! And then i have to go home and spend the rest of my night doing more school. The only time i get off of school is the weekend, but wait, I still have homework! It's totally redicilus (pronounced ruh-di-kill-us) , and then there's all the vacations, but we still have a report in almost every class due at the end of them. There's no escaping school, and I think teenagers need a break.
Homework is everywhere; elementary, middle school, high school, college. That's at least 16 years of it, then after a wonderful 16 years, most of us get a job, YAY, MORE WORK! Hurray for life and all of its monotonous splendor. Now some teachers (Mr. Martin, I thank you) feel like we should have a life over the weekend, totally fine with me. Now I only need them to feel that we should have a life in its entirety, but I think that's a looooooooong way off, unless I'm going to go live in Germany. From what I've heard, school in Germany consists of no required homework, and a few big tests. That is my ideal educational system. This system allows students to live their lives and still excel in school. I'm tired of the restriction in our educational system.
That's about all i got this week, just remember, we all have to work together to turn the homework book pages back one by one. Our lives our being constricted by school, I don't find that very equitable.
P.S. I think blog posts should be due Sunday because they are called weekly blog posts, not business weekly blog posts. And i know this is about weekend homework being bad but due Friday night is really difficult.

New Statement of Purpose

In my statement of purpose I said I would write about "the pressing issues in society", and I haven't really been living up to that, and I think it would be healthy for my writing if I did so. I also said that I would write about skating and education. Nothing about education has been a major topic in my blog except for little tid bits here and there. I've done a couple on skating but nothing has captured my attention as much as music. I still want to keep that a major subject but i need to expand my horizons in writing.
My second blog post was about the skating society, that was a fun topic. I got into some really deep stuff that I wanted to elaborate on in later posts, but I never really got around to it. I also got a little crazy/vulgar towards the end, but I just felt really frustrated by all the shit skaters get from figures of authority. Anyways, it would be goo to elaborate more into the important issues of the skating community. The next post was my intro to music, I really just outlined what music is to me. I'll admit, my writing was a little repetitive, but I needed 300 words, so it was the best I could do.
Next post was my first review. It was about the 5th generation Ipod Nano, and i reviewed the hell out of it.The only thing about it I regret not mentioning was the very short battery life, that's definitely my least favorite thing about it. I believe I portrayed how much of an awesome piece of equipment this thing is very well in that post. My next free write post was to give a band that very much needs some credit, its dues. I got a response from a person outside of school saying it was a good post and how much he liked the band. Obviously, my writing has improved. My next post... lets just skip that one.
In conclusion, my statement of purpose said that I would be more involved in the world and its politics, I haven't really done that so much, but I intend to. I said I'd write about skating and education, I talked about skating. I don't really plan much to talk about education in the future, maybe 1 or 2 posts. I'm definitely going to focus on music, I love it too much to ignore it.

The Best Band No One's Heard of

I'm here today to talk about The Faint. No, this isn't a drug, although it can seem like it. Nope, this is my favorite band that no one's heard of. If you're into punk, electronica, hard rock, or any of the above, you might love this band as much as I do. They combine all of these aspects and create a genre of music that's both unique and entrancing. They use distorted bass, an array of synth, heavy guitar, and vocals that perfectly fit their genre. I say their genre because it really is theirs, no one else sounds like them.
The Faint is a quintet, they have Todd Fink as lead vocals (he even plays a couple chords on guitar every once in a while), his brother Clark Baechle on drums, bassist/guitarist Joel Petersen, guitarist/bassist Dapose, and his brother Jacob Thiele on synth. The Faint have 5 actual albums out (excluding remixes and singles). They had defined their sound by the first one so the music was just improving every album.The first album is called Media, unfortunately I don't have any music from this album on hand so I can't really explain it myself, if you have bit torrent downloaded, you can find it here.
Their second album, Blank-Wave Arcade, was released in 1999, in this album they really started expanding the possibilities of music they could create while still sounding like the same band. They really stat using the synthesizer to its full capabilities, they use clean and distorted guitar while broadening the versatility of the bass. Throughout the rest of their albums they will use snappy pop-rock drum grooves. Their next album's called Danse Macabre, I don't really know what it means but it sounds cool. IN this album they focus more on bass and synth, and not so much on the guitar. Their senior album's name is Wet From Birth, this was their last album under the Saddle Creek label. In this album they bring back their heavy electro guitar. After Wet from Birth, the started their own label; blank.wav after their second album. their final album, so far, is called Fasciinatiion, brings together all aspects of The Faint and creates some beautiful, beautiful music.
From more information on The Faint http://www.thefaint.com/#

"Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria" Respose

To say that it is not our fault does not relieve us of responsibility, however. We may not have polluted the air, but we need to take responsibility […] for cleaning it up. Each of us needs to look at our own behavior. Am I perpetuating the negative messages in our culture, or am I seeking to challenge them? If I have not been exposed to positive images of oppressed groups, am I seeking them out, expanding my own knowledge base? Am I acknowledging my own prejudices, thereby minimizing the impact they might have on my interactions with others? Unless we engage in these and other acts of reflection and reeducation, we easily repeat the process with our children. We teach what we were taught. The unexamined prejudices of the parents are passed on to the children. It is not our fault, but it is our responsibility to interrupt this cycle.

I found this was the most important paragraph in the excerpt. I annotated this by underlining the parts of the paragraph that seemed most important to me and wrote some of my responses to them. I thought that this paragraph was the most important because it summed up the entire excerpt well and delivered and important message. It says that everyone has prejudice, but we have the responsibility of erasing it. It says that we need to learn how to keep our prejudice from being expressed and passed on to our children. Most importantly it says that this isn't our fault; but we still need to get rid of it.

5th Generation Ipod Nano

In my introduction to music I talked about its portability. I fairly recently bought a new portable music player, the Fifth Generation Ipod Nano. It's awesome! Sixteen gigabytes of space in such a tiny package, and it has so many great features. There's an FM radio, a camcorder, the ability to watch movies, it even has a pedometer (tracks the number of steps you take through the motion detector). To top it all off, it has a screen more than twice as big as the original Nano.
I thought the radio was a cool little feature. It has all the FM radio channels and you have the ability to add radio channels to your favorites. The only problem is you really cant take it on the go. The reception is constantly changing, other than that it's a good thing to have on the Ipod. Although, I prefer my own music to the redundancy of the radio.
Now the camcorder, that's real innovation. It isn't complicated, it has no zoom, no color effects, or anything like that, but the tiny video camera has close to the same quality as the Flip Video (http://www.theflip.com/), which is a great little camcorder by the way. Apparently you can even upload the videos from your Ipod straight to Youtube, but I still haven't figured that out. My other concerns with this is that there's no way to delete the videos from the Ipod if you aren't content with the video. And the other concern is that there is no way to take pictures on it, that makes no sense. Disregarding its faults, I would say that the camcorder is the defining feature of the 5th gen. Nano.
The ability to watch movies has been on the Ipod for a while, but i still find it an awesome component of the new Ipod. Seeing as it's nothing new, I'm not going to elaborate on it more. Now the pedometer, that's a fresh of breath air. This thing is so cool. The motion censor on it senses when you take a step and then records it as long as the Ipod is on. You can set up monthly goals on it, you can go back and look at every day that you had the pedometer on. I have no problems or concerns with this attribute.
To sum this up, the 5th generation Ipod Nano is a great investment. There is a ton of room for all your music and videos. The multitude of new features keeps it interesting for a long time, there's even a speaker in it. I don;t get how they can fit so much into such a small package, but they did and i must say it's worth it for $190.
p.s. Sorry Mr. S. I totally forgot to post it before midnight, be merciful.

Introduction to Music

Music is great. It's really the only universal language and anyone can do it. Lets face it, everyone likes music. Almost everyone who can afford an mp3 player has one. Everywhere on the planet there is music, no matter how poor, no matter how stuck up, there can, and always will be music.
Music is an extraordinary activity. Every culture has their own language and no one knows every single language. But everyone knows what music is and anyone can make it. You can give a drum to a person that has been cut off from the rest of the world, he could figure out what to do with it. Music's pretty extraordinary.

Now its available everywhere you go, which is great for me because it's like having a soundtrack throughout my entire life. The Walkman was the first mobile music player and I think it was fairly revolutionary, I know some people that still have them, considering how old they are, it's impressive to me. A few years down the road something called the ipod was created by the good folks at Mac. This invention has no doubt changed my life, and they're constantly getting better. I just recently bought the generation Nano, which has a camcorder on it. It's amazing but I'll save that for another blog, anyways, the mobile mp3 player revolutionized the music industry because now music is available anywhere you go.

To sum up, music is a mystery. Anyone can play it (though not everyone should) and everyone likes it, or at least, they like good music. But that leads to questions like, what makes good music? Why does music stimulate the brain? How does classical music make babies smarter? I have absolutely no idea, but I have no problem talking about it, and i will be.

Canadian School bans Skateboards from School Property

Skateboarding is a very simple sport. You have a piece of wood with wheels attached to it, but its getting increasingly hard to do this. It's like the world's out to get us. They keep coming up with new ways to stop skaters from doing what they love. Thousands of skate stoppers are installed every day and with ever increasing numbers, there's just not very much to go around.
But skating can't, and won't, be silenced. As long as we have hammers, there will be a way to skate what was previously "stopped" spots. There are way too many of us to be silenced, we might not all get along but we all have a similar cause. But as i mentioned before there are forces uniting against our will to skate. For instance, here's an article about a school in Canada that has banned skateboards from school property.


Skateboard ban prompts student petition

A Calgary high school has banned skateboards from the property, upsetting hundreds of students who have signed a petition.

The principal from St. Francis High School wasn’t available for an interview, but Catholic school board spokeswoman Janet Sutherland said safety concerns were behind the decision.

"There is a district-wide policy that states that skateboards cannot be used on school property and some schools have gone a step further to make it their policy that skateboards cannot be brought to school," she said.

Liza-Jane Karieter, a Grade 12 student, said a skateboard cuts her commute by a third.

"It's fun just to go down hills and just go extremely fast, and if you fall off, then whatever, you fall off, you get back up and do it again."

Students who skateboard said the rule singles them out since it doesn't apply to bikes or inline skates.

"We're troublemakers or whatever you want to call them,” Karieter said. “I don't think it should be like that."

John Maitland, a Grade 12 student, said he isn’t allowed to even bring his skateboard into the school and put it in his locker.

"The rule is you're not allowed to take it in and put it under your arm because it's a weapon,” he said. "All I want is so that I can be able to pick it up and put it in my locker, so that I can go to school faster and leave school faster, even if they just made amendments to the rule."

The students have a petition with more than 800 names, but Sutherland says the policy is not up for review.

"They're in place for a reason so students may not like the policy, but it is there for their safety,” she said.

How fucked up is that? The word is out to make us look like bad guys. A lot of people on use them for transportation, what these people are doing is a form of discrimination, and it's just because we ride around on a piece of wood? Now you can see why some skaters are all like, "Stick it to the man!". It's because the man is trying to stick it to us, so I say, fuck the establishment.

Statement of Purpose

I intend to write about the pressing issues I see in our society, mainly skateboarding and education. I am also going to write about music, it's my life. I love music, it, and the need to go to college are really the only things keeping me in school. In fact, I’ll probably be writing about that in my blog.

Hopefully, this blog won’t just help with my perception of the world, but my writing as well. I’m going to be writing an exorbanent amount of material so all aspects of my writing should improve. This actually involves us in the real world, something I rarely see in school today.

My purpose is to expand my level of thinking and writing from the conception of a teenager and student. I feel this is a great opportunity to do so.

p.s. sorry Mr.S couldn't do it at lunch on Friday and i was at my dads all weekend.