Monthly Archives: December 2009

Deck The Halls

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DJ Tech Tools VCI-100SE Arcade... this and my two front teeth are all I want for Christmas.

DJ Tech Tools VCI-100SE Arcade... this and my two front teeth are all I want for Christmas.

If you’ve checked out df.com lately, you’ve already seen over the last 48 hours we decorated the site for the Holiday Season. Groucho the Cat has kindly offered to reprise his role as Groucho Clause once again. If you load df.com in Mozilla Firefox you’ll even get little snow flakes falling on your screen. It doesn’t work in Microsoft Internet Explorer for several really nerdy reasons that you’re not going to be interested in either way. So… if you like snow go with Firefox. If you don’t, load up IE. Problem solved.

Work on “digitalflood Pirate Radio Vol. 5 Ep. 4” has started and we’re on target 100% for a release this Saturday (12/19/09). I grazed through the set very quickly and it honestly sounds great. The final production version you’ll hear will be even better.

This afternoon J Diddy showed me a new DJ controller he saw on the G4 Channel’s “Attack of The Show”  the other day called the VCI-100SE Arcade. It’s made by a company called DJ Tech Tools and I have to say that I was completely blown away. The Arcade is a custom built remodeled variant of the original VCI-100SE USB DJ controller that includes arcade gaming style buttons in lieu of the traditional “brick style” trigger buttons found on most controllers. The design was engineered by electrical engineer, musician visionary, and WordPress web guru Ean Golden who is part of the “Controllerism” DJ mixing style. Controllerism is basically using mapped sample cue points in mp3 DJ mixing software (such as the Traktor Pro software used by Ean) to remix/rebuild an existing song or in some cases create an entirely brand new mashed up song. The style is notable for its quickly triggered samples that in turn require a highly sensitive USB controller. Hence the arcade style buttons that offer low latency, high durability, better tactile feedback, and less wear/tear on your hands than the aforementioned traditional controller. You can watch the video of Ean mixing live for a real quick introduction to his DJ style. He’s pretty darn nifty at DJing in my not so humble opinion.

MIDI Fighter DIY Kit - This week on "This Old Controller" Norm builds a sampler.

MIDI Fighter DIY Kit - This week on "This Old Controller" Norm builds a sampler.

This got me thinking about my “Cut Like Crack” style of mixing and how I can actually incorporate this into my mixing technique. I used some different software for my production (VirtualDJ, Acid Pro, and Sound Forge) and a different USB controller (M-Audio X-Session Pro), but the underlying concept is the same. In fact, many DJs are using M-Audio’s controllers with retrofitted custom arcade button configurations similar to how Ean rebuilt the VCI. I am thinking though that I can harness the same tricks through remapping my existing controller input knobs, wheels, and buttons to both a custom effects mapping setup and a custom cue mapping arrangement. The result should be very similar. I can then work backward to incorporate it into my existing methodology to hash out my own bastardized variant (Cut Like Crack In Control anyone?). I’m going to experiment during downtime between production, but if something develops you can be sure as heck to expect to see it turn up in a future Pirate Radio mix session. I’ll let you know how it goes either way.

I’m also eying the DIY MIDI Fighter kit. You need to add 24 arcade buttons and the whole thing prices out to about $200 in material with shipping. If I find something compelling in my aforementioned Controllerism experimentation this could be any easy option that allows me to not have to purchase the VCI. Ideally I’d like to keep using my M-Audio X-Session Pro (which I arguably absolutely love because of its underlying smoothness and ease of use) in conjunction with the MIDI Fighter to pull the whole Controllerism DJ setup off without having to foot the whole cost associated with $1k for a VCI. I’d actually end up better off because then I would have 24 sample/cue triggers plus my existing mixing controller’s setup and $800 in savings. Since the style is cue based I’m not losing anything in the end. Again, I’ll have to see how things play out; but I see the whole thing as a viable option.

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Back to the Grind

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Virtual DJ 5 Mix Session-- this isn't one of mine though. I mean God that's a crappy playlist!

Virtual DJ 5 Mix Session-- this isn't one of mine though. I mean God that's a crappy playlist!

All my audio production applications are back in order as are my art and web production applications. The short version is I’m 100% back in business and fully recovered from my computer’s main hard drive failure. With that, production will resume on digitalflood Pirate Radio starting tomorrow. Release for “Volume 5 Episode 4” will be this Saturday (12/19/09). I’m also going to try to crank out “Volume 5 Episode 5” by 12/21/09. That will put us back on schedule episode wise. Like most people who’ve run Microsoft Windows XP on the same computer for five plus years and then were forced to format– I’m enjoying my new found speed and system stability. I guess either way it was about time for me to reload Windows. I’ve been running on a patched together operating system for like two years and a bad hard drive for about four months. So all in all it could be worse.

While I was at it, I loaded a whole bunch of new effects into Virtual DJ. So you can expect some fresh new tricks to be rolled out over the next few Pirate Radio mix tape sessions. My latest trick is what I call the flanger solo. You’ll hear it in Episode 4 pretty pronounced, but those of you who listed to Episode 3 from this season will be able to kind of figure out where I’m going. If you have a good subwoofer you’ll also notice my new experiments in what is called sub-bass. My goal is to set off the air bag in your car. I’m almost there.

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Shoulder Surgery – 7 1/2 weeks in

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Scapular Strengthing w/weights (Courtesy: http://grantpierce.wordpress.com/)

Scapular Strengthing w/weights (Courtesy: http://grantpierce.wordpress.com/)

Last post I talked about how I was returning to a normal life. At 7 1/2 weeks away from Open Bankart Surgery on my right shoulder normality seems closer and closer. Shortly after my last blog post I had my follow up visit on 12/4 at physical therapy (PT) where I was able to reach an all time upward amount of 170 degrees. If you recall, 180 degrees is full rotation. It was very painful to go past 160 degrees, but I did it.

With that I continued my normal at home PT routine over the weekend and returned to work on 12/7. I was able to work both my PT in that day, as well as, my 3 at home (or work) PT sessions. Again, I was able to hit 170 degrees at PT and did so with less pain. We also continued external rotation (moving my arm away from my body) towards 30 degrees. Again, 180 degrees outward is your maximum, but for now this is the limit my orthopedic surgeon wants me working at.

I had to miss my 12/9 PT session because they closed their office for snow and to top it all off I came down with a cold that same day. This laid me up the whole week and stopped me from doing my at home PT work. When I returned to PT on 12/11 the effect was I reached upward to only 165 degrees, but was still able to go outward to 30 degrees. In short, my muscles though stronger overall from the rest are also tighter. We worked through a brutal upward stretching session that left my bicep feeling like chopped meat.

At that same PT visit the therapist added a scapular stretch, which is the motion you would do if you were standing straight up and pulled out a draw from a dresser while bending your elbows. Over the course of this coming week they will actually start me on scapular weight training to start building the strength back into my lower arms back up to normal, as well as, my shoulder blades and back.

The good news is that I’m noticing less and less daily pain. Sitting still there is normally little to no pain. Driving is minor discomfort when I get around 10 miles and I can finally sit through dinner while out to eat without having one of my arms pop out of the socket. This is all very good news. I also notice my upward reach in my protected zone (150 degrees or lower) is painless as well. I was able to get through four hours of mall shopping yesterday and over 50 hours of work this week. All with little to no discomfort. So there have been good gains overall. I plan now that my cold is letting up to get back to my at home PT starting today so I can catch up and restore any range of motion that I’ve lost over the last week or so.

As always, I let you know how it all goes by the end of this week.

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Baddabing

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Just a quick brief update on the status of my crashed PC– I’ve got it rebuilt with a new hard drive. Still have to get my music programs installed again, but that should only take another day. If all goes well, I should be working on finishing “digitalflood Pirate Radio Volume 5 Episode 4” by Monday night (12/14/09). I’ll let you know how that shapes up, but at least things are starting to look up again. As always, thanks for hanging in there!

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Blowing Stuff Up

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Atom Bomb Testing in 1951... yeah those are real troops.

Atom Bomb Testing in 1951... yeah those are real troops. Can you say crispy?

You may have noticed we had a major outage to digitalflood.com from around 7 pm EST 12/8/09 into the early morning of 12/9/09 sometime. This was the result of a major spam attack against digitalflood.com. To prevent future attacks of this type against our site, yesterday afternoon I finished migrating email services from the same platform that serves our web page into burlier clustered email server solution. By splitting apart these services and using the web server to only serve web pages (a novel idea indeed) we should no longer see these type of spam attacks “downing” the web site.

While I was at it yesterday (12/9), I also did a whole bunch of OS updates, as well as, some plug in updates to df.com. This is too keep things up to date and secure, as well as, insure top notch delivery of the web site. As a result of all this work, we’re back in business and everything is loading pretty good on the site considering the recent spike in web page viewership. I’m still noticing some anomalies I’m trying to iron out, but ultimately it’s looking like I’m quickly outgrowing my current server. This is admittedly quicker than expected. I cannot complain about df.com being so popular so soon after it’s return– clearly that is a blessing. Therefore my only real long term solution will be to move to a beefier web server and I plan on doing that sometime early in 2010 if all goes right. I may have to “speed up” that new web server deployment though if things continue getting hairy during high volume hours.

Now onto the real bad news, that same night of 12/8/09 of the spam attack my computer’s main hard drive completely failed (it’s a total coincidence– but what bad timing for irony to strike). While I won’t lose any of my music or web cast recordings (including the still in production digitalflood Pirate Radio Vol. 5 Episode 4) it certainly stops production of Pirate Radio for this week. Thus I’m regrettably (but without choice) going to have to move the release of Vol. 5 Ep. 4 into next week. If things change and I somehow get my hard drive replaced/rebuilt faster I’ll let you know right here on df.com, but for the time being– consider this an unexpected week long hiatus in Pirate Radio production.

I’m finding that when it rains– it truly pours. *boom*

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