I posted a link on the Jesusonic Forum to the Jesusonic DirectX plug-in, woot.

Also, our show next tuesday is on, and we will be going on at about 8:00pm.
Hooray.
Here is a playlist of our last rehearsal (which is a mixed bag but 
entertaining no less).

There's a new version of Pathsync up.  Thanks Francis and Alan! This new one 
lets you do a lot of nice things, see the whatsnew on the page.

OK so I still need to build the footboard for the new Jesusonic (which I will
do this week), but I just upgraded the board in this one to a via C3 1.2ghz 
board. The CrusFX still has a 1.6ghz P-M board in it. The difference in power
(and price!) between the P-Ms and the C3 is huge. But The 1.2ghz C3 is finally
powerful enough where in normal (and even excessive experimentation) I'm not
finding it running out of power. Yes, if I try, I can get it to run out 
(whereas with the P-M that is difficult sometimes even). So I think the first
run of Jesusonics will probably be 1.2ghz C3 powered.

If anybody is interested in purchasing one of the first run of Jesusonic 
hardware, let me know. It will probably cost around $1k, and will likely be
hand made and of very limited production. I'd like to gauge interest before
building the initial run.

I've still been using the 1.6ghz P-M based CrusFX for our practices, it's 
really quite fantastic, we tried using a Line6 POD XT Live for half of one
of the practices and while it was good too, it was also lacking in certain 
features (which makes me feel like making the Jesusonic is somewhat justified,
if not completely useful).

We had a fantastic rehearsal today, too, the mp3 is up. I can't wait for the
show (but I'm glad we have a little more time to get things solidifed ;)

So apparently we're going to play on May 3rd sometime after 8pm at Studio Z
here in San Francisco. Our practice yesterday produced this decent collection of
songs. It's merely 35 minutes, but played live would be stretched out closer
to 40 I'd imagine. And we have a cover we might do, too.

It works now! All that's really left is to build the detachable footboard!
Yay. Here is a picture of the internals (what a big mess of wires, I know!):

...and the front:

...and here is an MP3 I made quickly with it.

After a day at the beach, getting the tops of my feet sunburned, I came home and
registered brainal.org (think Brainal Sex), and then found myself building a very
strange website on it. <3 PHP.

Here is a lovely playlist of tracks.

Also, made an RSS feed for our full jams, not sure if that'll be
useful for people.

I'm protesting the use of the word "blog" by calling this a home page, which
is what it really is anyway. Not too different than the ones we used to have
back in the 90s, only a little more chronologically biased.

Here is another kinda entertaining song from that last (April 2nd) jam.
And another, and another.
Oh and here's one from yesterday with just me and Brennan.

After working on many of the parts seperately, I finally got to put the box 
together, and suddenly everything worked! (I have't done the audio subsytem
yet, waiting on parts, so this is just the UI and whatnot). Woohoo! My 
knobs were all backwards, but a quick firmware update later, that was fixed. 
And the range on the expression pedal needs calibration, but that'll be an 
easy software fix. And I think I want to put a hinge on the lid for easy 
access...

Got my temporary crown, joy. Somehow I've managed to get up early every day
this week (the week after DST change, at that!), and it's really driving me
into the ground. mmm need coffee..

wait what does that mean anyway? but at any rate, I (like Steve) will be getting
some bling in my mouth. functional bling no doubt, but bling no less. or so I'm
told. sigh. what I don't get is that in this age, they can't make a tooth crown
in less than 4 weeks? shouldn't they be able to do it in a week, if not a few
days? so instead I'll have to endure a nice plastic crappy temporary crown for
over a month? lame. I want instant gratification.


perhaps the best decision I've made recently was to ditch the cheap electronic
drum kit (which was in my office from back when I was testing Jesusonic with 
it) in my office, and replace it with another desk, which is devoted to 
electronics construction. it has made it so easy for me to build another AVR
board for the knobs on the new prototype (above). There's something just really
gratifying about making things easier to do (or at least not any harder than
they have to be). Oh, and here is a terrible mp3 (not quite scratching, yet, but 
maybe someday).

(oh and oops, yesterday's posting didnt go live until today, doh)

Saw "Sin City" today, was very impressed. yummy even.

I only have one complaint, it was that after getting this LCD mounted in the
new Jesusonic case, and booting the thing up, the LCD requires you to hit a 
button to turn it on. Which is annoying. So I either need to figure out a way
to hack the LCD to always be on, or do something really dumb like have the
microcontroller in the box just simulate a button press after a few seconds
of being on (which could have negative consequences, so I probably won't do
that). Or I could just mount a nice little button on the box to toggle the 
screen on and off, but having to turn the screen on every time you plug the
power in is lame. real lame.

Got an expression pedal working with Jesusonic, yummy (right now it's just
connected to my microcontroller dev board). Since that works, I started 
working on a wah effect. Using a resonant bandpass, seems to be working 
but haven't gotten it to sound decent yet. Here are a couple mp3s.

The first one also has the new advanced drum sequencer I made earlier today,
it lets you specify volume, panning, and additional timing information for
each event. Yay for more flexibility, and it's backwards compatible too.

(One final post-posting note, I realized that picture is giant line6 ad. 
oh well.)

It is quickly approaching 5 in the morning, and I just got home. After seeing
a midnight showing of Napoleon Dynamite, and a spirited rehearsal turned jam,
I decided to ride my bike the mile or so home. San Francisco SoMa and Mission
is awesome at 4 in the morning on a bicycle. Nobody around, quiet, concrete 
playground. yum.

Also, I got some Etymotic 6i headphones for free (SV100 or whatnot), and while
I'm not completely sold on their everyday use for me (a bit itchy at times),
they are fuckin perfect for band practicing. They block out so much sound,
and when you mix in the monitors, feel really natural. OK they are good for
planes too..

The highlight of the jam we had is this song of epic proportion (or should that be 
plural?). Listen to the whole thing (start to finish) if you want to get it. 

Really.

I couldn't agree more with Brennan on this subject (the second paragraph).

Also, the whole April fools joke thing is funny, and was funny back when it
would be one or two or three things being thrown in there, making you wonder,
whereas the tons and tons of them that end up on sites like slashdot make it
really just annoying. seriously.

Fun fun fun. Motherboard and CF reader mounted, keyboard/trackball mounted, LCD almost mounted
(retaining mechanism needs to be finished), microcontroller firmware for knobs, footswitches,
LED display, multiple-device-on-one-serial port support, etc, done. Need to install the audio
hardware (sound board, transformers, 1/4" TRS jacks) and build UI hardware (knobs, 
microcontroller board, etc). Need to build the detachable footboard (with its footswitches 
and microcontroller and LEDs). And then the second preprototype will be done, and if I dig it
I'll have to go see how I can build ones similar to it quickly and cheaply, *sigh*.

Also, the whole secular "SKULR" doesn't really translate well. any suggestions?