----- Original Message -----Sent: 5/26/2006 3:22:15 PMSubject: RE: hooves on the rails (was: Computers and Global responsibility)>>OH NO! ONE'S ON THE TRACK! WON'T SOMEONE SAVE MILKY!?<<
did any one else grimace with guilty recognition? let me explain.... I am completely at one with mark when he describes the satisfaction to be had from reconfiguring his studio equipment or relearning the chops required by some old bit of kit that's been lying idle for a few years because of newer shinier toys.
I do this all the time- I even have a dv camera w/ wide-angle lens up in the corner of the room so's I can do time-&-motion studies when there are two or three of us at work..... can we all reach everything we want to? is the feng shui of the studio right & productive? are we making eye-contact often enough?
& sometimes, I'll dig out an old manual or even a magazine review for something I have, & find new inspiration therein.
BUT come the day, while we're actually *doing something* with/in the studio, somehow there's this guilty pleasure, almost like we're having too much fun & "this isn't real work". I know it *ought* to be payback time, for all the hours invested in getting the new merge box to pass sys-ex, or wrangling a digital synth so it sounds reasonable, or mapping a bunch of samples, losing the lot when the hard drive freezes up & starting again....
& hours later, when it's *playback time* (see what I did there?), the balance between our work & it's product seems a bit more even.
in exactly the same way, our double-O gauge enthusiast spends hours in the shed at the end of his garden, painstakingly painting the exact correct livery detailing onto the 2nd class carriage he's just bought to drag along behind his "flying scotsman" or "mallard" or whatever.... he'll then go to his rig (probably ducking under the roof-beams in his attic like the rest of us) & re-enact some bovine near-misses per mark's imagined scenario.... & he'll feel like a big kid *even though he worked damn hard to get there*.
too right he's going to make "whoo-whoo" noises, if the loco doesn't already do it for him. anyone would.
I would have an animal-air-ambulance helicopter with a cow-sling underneath, & really make the most of it. probably smear bovril on the front of the engine too.ahem.
which is my point exactly.back onto computers- I have yet to experience a platform or O/S (I have the very latest macbook pro with parallels workstation on it, so I can run os-x/intel & w2k at the same time on the same box!) that offers the same return-on-investment as, say, a sampler or a big old analogue synth.
I also have over two dozen basses, & it's not uncommon for me to change the strings & do a full set-up on one of them, taking several hours over this, only to play the thing for about twenty minutes & put it away again. but that's probably just because I have too many basses.
duncan.
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