MY NEW DRUGS

So I went out on Saturday and got some new music editing software and the hardware to bridge the instrument-computer gap. I spent most of the rest of the weekend playing with them.

I think music is a drug, really. Half of the time you lose yourself in it--it's a primal scream, or boundless joy, your favorite in-joke or just a nearly-subconscious ditty.

The other half of the time, you're a talentless hack who should have never been allowed access to a keyboard, and WHY GOD, WHY, WHY DID I EVER PICK UP THIS GODFORSAKEN THING?

So many geniuses are bipolar. Chicken or egg? I couldn't say.

I found this place that I've seen referred to as "Musicians' Alley" just south of the Tottenham Court Road tube station--it's about a block or so long, and every store is either a guitar shop or some other music-related store. (It's actually called Denmark Street.) Sheet music, keyboards, drums, amps--everything you could need or want.

It's a dangerous place.

I ended up at a Pro Audio shop, looking for a specific thing that I'd seen online. At first, the guys at the shop were vaguely rude to me--in the sort of "We know what we're doing and you don't and we don't want to waste our time with you" kind of way. So I walked out, looked around a bit, and then decided that I wasn't going to tolerate that. So I went back, and said, "Look, this is what I need, and I'm sure you have the pieces for this, so can you discuss this with me or not?" and they turned around and from then on were great. On the one hand, why give someone your business if they were dismissive? On the other hand, I wanted that bloody software and didn't care who I had to push around to get it.

I was afraid of getting equipment that I wouldn't be able to use back home in the US, but quickly figured out that anything I was going to get would have a power adaptor with it that would reduce voltage to 9 volts or something like that anyway, so I needn't worry. Just need to get a new set of adaptors when I get back to the States, which, let's face it, is the easiest part in all of this.

Of course, installing and setting things up never works completely smoothly. For example, I kept installing the driver for the USB/MIDI interface, and the computer kept whining about it anyway, so eventually I went to the company website to look for the driver there, and there was a notice saying, "This driver repairs the problems we had with Windows XP [my operating system]". I actually feel grateful that I didn't end up having other problems and then, finally, get directed to the new driver. But eventually I got everything arranged, and now know that in order to feed music into my computer I have to mess about with pretty much every control panel there is. By the end of this, I'll know more about digital music than I ever thought I wanted to.

I figure, though, I eventually became a photoshop/flash/illustrator expert (or close thereto), so if I just don't stress myself out about this too much or feel too much like I need to have a finished-sounding result right away, this will eventually come to me as well.

Anyway, I also discovered Father Ted, since a coworker lent me DVDs of the entire three seasons. Before watching this, I assumed that "feck" was just a different pronunciation of the other f-word. It turns out that in Ireland, it's a different word entirely, meaning exactly the same thing, but not considered nearly as offensive. Small children can even say it.

I would like to point out that this makes no sense at all.

Then again, nobody asked me.

I've been getting more and more spam from groups called things like "Christian Singles." Is it only me, or does an email with the subject heading, "SOME CHRISTIAN LIKES YOU" seem vaguely sinister?