Do the Twist

Today I’m in pain, and it’s because yesterday I was having so much fun playing music. No, playing the piano doesn’t hurt. Neither does playing the cello (though I’ve been having a little problem with one finger, thanks for asking). What’s painful is using my computer music workstation.

Doing this type of work involves four separate components — the QWERTY keyboard and mouse (which we’ll count as one component, since they sit side by side), the computer screen, a pair of large stereo speakers (again, one component), and a five-octave music keyboard. The difficulty is, it doesn’t seem to be possible to get all four of those components into an ergonomically healthy physical arrangement.

The computer screen and QWERTY/mouse are in a good arrangement, considered by themselves. The table is the right height, as is the screen. But the music keyboard is off to the right, at a right angle to the computer table. In order to work with a music program, I find myself sitting in a twisted way, with my left hand near the mouse (yes, I’m left-handed) and my right on the music keyboard. This twists my right shoulder back at a fairly sharp angle. And while I’m editing on-screen, which I do a lot, I’m hearing the left speaker channel, essentially in mono, with my right ear.

I can roll backward and turn so that I’m facing the music keyboard and have the speakers directly in front of me in a good listening position, but then I can’t see the computer screen without twisting my head to the left, and I can’t reach the mouse at all.

I’ve seen charming (and expensive) pieces of studio furniture that are intended to address this type of problem. I used to have one in my office at Keyboard, in fact. This design puts the QWERTY keyboard and mouse on a little pull-out tray under the music keyboard, and the computer screen behind the music keyboard, between the speakers.

Swell idea, but in my experience it never quite worked. The pull-out tray is so low your knees bump into it, while the music keyboard is perched so high that it’s not at a good playing height. Plus, if the tray is pulled out (which it needs to be in order for you to use the QWERTY keyboard or mouse), the music keyboard is too far away to reach comfortably. And if your eyes aren’t good (mine aren’t), the computer screen will be so far away that you’ll constantly be leaning forward to see it.

Playing music should be comfortable. You want to be concentrating on the music, not constantly rubbing your shoulder. This is another one of those darn conundrums. I have no answers, I’m just grumbling.

Pass It Along

Forty years ago, you could buy classical sheet music by driving into the nearest large city and browsing in the bins at a large specialty store. Byron Hoyt in San Francisco was a regular stop for musicians when they were in SF, and was often worth a special trip.

This type of store no longer exists. You can blame rock and roll if you like, or the changing economics of publishing. A lot of the sheet music is still in print. A small local store will be happy to order it for you (there being little in their display racks beyond Harry Potter songbooks), or you can buy it online. But … what will you be buying? The advantage of a big sheet music store is that you can browse. Oh, here’s a sonata by a composer I’ve never even heard of. Hmm, looks interesting, and it’s not too difficult for me. I think I’ll buy it.

That experience of sheet music is no longer available. Today, if you go to a website (such as cellos2go.com, a very nice site where I buy lots of sheet music for my students), you’ll see a scan of the cover and maybe a sentence or two about what’s inside. You certainly won’t be able to tell whether the music is at the right level of difficulty for you, nor whether it’s in a style that you’ll like.

But musicians adapt. This week a friend gave me almost a gigabyte of scanned sheet music in PDF format. I now have, for instance, some Boccherini sonatas for cello and piano. I’ve got a Dohnanyi sonata, a couple of Grieg sonatas, a terrifying-looking sonata by Janacek (in six flats), incidental music for cello and piano (probably arrangements) by Mozart and Schubert, plus the popular concertos, dozens of orchestral cello parts – all sorts of fascinating stuff.

The legal status of this material is a bit hazy. The music itself is public domain in most cases, though I’m not too sure about the Milhaud and the Vaughan Williams. The published pages, for the most part, are clearly not public domain, no more than a recording of the music would be. So what I have here are pirated copies.

Some of the published editions may be out of print, however. They might even be from publishers that no longer exist. In that case, there’s nobody to object if I pick up a free digital copy somewhere. And some of the files seem to be newly created sheet music, which anyone can crank out using Sibelius (the software) or Finale without incurring any legal difficulties, after which they can share their files legally.

The point I want to make, however, is this: If I’m pirating this sheet music (and I am), the publishers have only themselves to blame. They need to come up with a retail model that addresses musicians’ actual needs. I’d be happy to buy these three Boccherini sonatas, for instance; they’re going to be fun to learn. But I would absolutely never buy them unless I could flip through page after page of the sheet music first. Unless someone you trust recommends a piece (and maybe even then), you’d have to be an idiot to buy sheet music sight unseen.

Given the choice between very possibly wasting my money buying sheet music online and accepting free files from a friend … hey, hand me that eye patch and put a parrot on my shoulder. Arrrrr.

Somebody Hand Me a Machete

Yamaha’s tech support person told me I needed a new $75 Firewire board for my computer in order to get rid of the audio dropouts in their mLAN audio system. I ordered it and installed it. It didn’t fix the problem.

I sent an email to the Yamaha person yesterday asking what I should try next. He hasn’t yet replied. I cc’ed the Cubase product manager, and he did reply with a few suggestions, but none of them helped.

So this morning I figured, maybe there’s a driver conflict. I think I’ll uninstall the other third-party audio drivers in my system. Maybe the Yamaha driver will be happy when it has the playing field all to itself.

In order to end-run this issue when it first appeared, I hooked up a PreSonus FireStudio Mobile interface. So the PreSonus Universal Control is one of the drivers that I need to uninstall.

It won’t uninstall. The uninstaller program won’t run. I tried phoning PreSonus tech support and waited on hold for five minutes with no indication that there was even anybody in the office. Then I tried emailing them. I got a chirpy automated response that says, “Your email has been received and you should receive a reply from one of our Technical Support Representatives as soon as possible, usually within 24 hours. If you need immediate assistance, you can contact Tech Support by phone at 225-216-7887, between 9-5 CST, Monday-Friday.”

Note the usage of the word “immediate” in that sentence. It’s a lie. I phoned them again, just to check. This time I waited eight minutes with no answer and no automated system telling me how many people are in the queue ahead of me. And of course it’s not an 800 number, so I’m paying for the privilege. I also tried pressing 0 for an operator, and got the voice mail of Debby in Accounts Payable.

The temptation to abuse Debby by leaving her a rude message was nearly overwhelming, but I was able to resist. It’s not her fault they have her doing her own job and also a second person’s job as the phone operator.

(On the plus side, I did get a response from Brandon at PreSonus within three hours. His instructions on how to uninstall manually were very thorough. There’s still a problem, because RegEdit won’t let me delete one of the PreSonus keys. But Brandon is on the case.)

Remember when companies had people who answered the phone? That’s soooo 20th century. We don’t do that anymore – everybody is trying to stay competitive by cutting costs. “We replaced another salaried employee with a computer, Bob!” High fives all around. Of course, you’re staying competitive by getting rid of customer service, which is likely to be rather counterproductive.

Why aren’t our products selling better? Maybe it’s because we never answer the phone. Do you suppose?

I still haven’t received a response to the tech support message I left with Spectrasonics on Friday. (It is now the following Wednesday.) The people at Ableton are still looking into my problem with Live 8.1.1, which causes Live to run fully authorized 3rd-party plug-ins in demo mode. At least they answer my email by saying, “We’re still looking into it.” I guess that counts for something. Unless it doesn’t.

The Sonar support staff sent me a message saying I could load REX files into Sonar if I used the 32-bit version of their program instead of the highly touted 64-bit version. The message said nothing about the fact that Stylus RMX MIDI data can’t be dragged and dropped into the 64-bit version, so I don’t know whether installing the 32-bit version would fix that. The support person claimed that the problem was that REX files are not 64-bit compatible. In my response to him, I pointed out that the file consists entirely of 1’s and 0’s. There is no technical reason why they couldn’t write a little routine that would convert and load the file — they just haven’t had time to do it yet. What I didn’t say was, “Why are you trying to point the finger at the other guy? Why don’t you stand up like a man and take responsibility for the shortcomings of your company’s software?”

I did ask him, “If I downgrade to the 32-bit version of Sonar, what features will I be sacrificing? Is there a tradeoff?” This is a significant question, because if the answer is, “None,” then I would have to follow up by asking, “Then why release a 64-bit version of Sonar at all, if it doesn’t confer any advantages?” He didn’t answer that message at all. I guess he was probably too busy answering the phone.

I’m about thiiis close to folding up my tent as a music product reviewer, hopping on my camel, and gliding away into the desert night. There are always problems, and they’re usually serious. After glaring at my computer screen for half an hour, the very last thing I’m fit to do is get in a creative mood and make some actual music. If I can just get the goddamn Yamaha mLAN interface squared away, maybe my mood will improve. Or maybe I’ll bare my teeth in a fiendish grin and say, “Okay, I now have a system that works. Goodbye.”

Are my experiences atypical, or is everybody who tries to use music technology dealing with this shit? I really don’t know, and it would take a well-designed survey to find out. You’ll never find out by asking the tech support staff what sorts of calls they’re getting. They’d lie to make their company look good — but also, they don’t know what sort of calls they’re getting, because they’re not answering the phone.

Tell Me a Story

Today I uploaded four more short stories to my humble website. For years I resisted doing this type of self-publishing, and for a very simple reason: Most of the fiction people put up on the Web is utter crap. It’s beyond awful. Who would want to be associated in the mind of the reader with such drivel?

But in the end I decided that modesty was foolish. I’m the exception that proves the rule. I’m certainly not Chekhov or Cheever, and never will be, but I do have a reasonable grasp of the art and craft of storytelling.

There are eight stories on the site now, of which four were previously published in well-known science fiction magazines. The other four are not previously published, but I’ll bet you won’t be able to tell which are which. They’re all pretty darn good. I have about eight more that I plan to upload before too long, and the percentage will stay about the same — half reprints from magazines, half previously unpublished.

For a while I was planning to do a print anthology, which would be made available through a print-on-demand publisher like lulu.com. I may still do that. But I have no marketing or promotional structure through which to sell books, so I’d probably sell no more than a few dozen copies. Besides, a print edition wouldn’t have the lovely color photos that I downloaded for free from Stock Xchg. I think they add something to the presentation.

If you enjoy the stories, I hope you’ll drop me an email and let me know. The probability that I’ll write a few more rises exponentially with each positive response that I receive.

Okay, Everybody out of the Pool

I’m trying to like Sonar 8.5. It’s got a lot of little tiny buttons, but I’m starting to think maybe I can deal with it. And then…

And then I discover that the 64-bit version won’t import REX files. Isn’t that charming? I’ve got a great big DVD full of REX files, and Sonar 8.5 (that’s not 1.0, it’s 8.5 — a large number) doesn’t want to know about them.

But wait, there’s more. That little gotcha gets me curious, so next I load Stylus RMX. The first time I double-click on a beat in the RMX browser, it plays. I decide I like the beat, so I grab its MIDI data in RMX’s drag and drop widget and drag the MIDI clip into a Sonar track. Whereupon, Sonar gives me an alert box that says, “Cannot find or open file.” On top of which, now RMX won’t even play its own beats out to the Sonar mixer. It’s dead. It’s a doorstop.

So that’s the state of the art, is it? I’ve got three major (emphasis: major) DAWs on the hard drive in my nice new Windows 7 computer. Ableton Live can only load 3rd-party plug-ins in their demo mode versions, Cubase spits up on its little yellow duckie bib when I ask it to receive audio from a multi-channel plug-in, and Sonar won’t work with the two most popular forms of beats. In case you missed the piece on NPR, beats are an important aspect of pop music.

Is it just me? Maybe I need to join a Bible study class, so God won’t punish me this way. What’s next — boils? Flies?

RTFM? Gee, I’d love to…

One of the dubious benefits of being a music technology guru is that I have ridiculous numbers of high-end programs on my hard drive. After my fiasco earlier today trying to get Cubase to handle multi-output audio coming from VST plug-ins, I sulked for a couple of hours, drove down to the corner to buy two very fattening macadamia nut/white chocolate cookies, and then started thinking about other ways to get where I want to go musically.

I have Sonar 8.5 here. I’ve barely looked at it. Maybe it’s time to finally break down and learn Sonar.

First the good news: In preliminary tests, Sonar seems entirely happy to handle at least three simultaneous audio output streams coming from Spectrasonics Omnisphere. This puts it a giant leap ahead of Cubase, which chokes and spits up.

Now for the bad news: Sonar’s manual is all but impenetrable. The problem, and it’s deeply rooted, is this: The people who wrote the manual know what they’re talking about. As a result, they apparently feel no need to explain much of anything to the reader.

Right now I’m trying to learn how one would edit notes in the piano-roll window. The first page I consult in the online help has a nice big screenshot of the piano-roll window. It shows several panes, such as the Track List pane and the Drum Grid pane, that are not visible in the actual window I’m looking at in Sonar. Nothing on this page, however, instructs you how to open any of those panes. It’s just a diagram of, “Hey, here they are.”

The next page is called “Note Map Pane.” Sounds promising, right? Well, there’s nothing on that page. Or rather, there are two sentences, the second of which contains a clickable link to a different page that is also called “The Note Map Pane.” This might suggest that a bit more organizational thought would not have been amiss. Or something.

Does the second page called “The Note Map Pane” tell you how to open the Note Map pane? No, it does not. Among the other things it doesn’t do is explain to the novice why one might want to engage in a little note mapping. I happen to know that, because I’ve been using MIDI sequencers for precisely as long as there have been MIDI sequencers – but if I didn’t, I’d be baffled.

Okay, let’s try the page called “Adding and Editing Notes in the Piano Roll.” This page has, be it noted, no screenshots or diagrams of any kind. The first sentence, in its entirety, reads as follows: “You add notes in the Piano Roll view or Inline Piano Roll view by first choosing a note duration in the Piano Roll toolbar (or in the current track’s Note Duration menu if you’re using the Inline Piano Roll view), and then clicking in the view with the Draw tool at the pitch location and time location where you want the note to go.”

The thing is, the Sonar interface is totally studded with little tiny buttons. There are more than 60 of them in two rows along the top of the main window. These buttons are not labelled. So where would I find “the Piano Roll toolbar”? What does it look like? And what would I do in the Piano Roll toolbar in order to choose a note duration? Nothing on this page explains those little details. As with note mapping, I happen to know what an Inline Piano Roll view is. If I didn’t, this page wouldn’t help me. There’s not even a clickable cross-reference to the page where the Inline Piano Roll view is described.

This is what I mean by saying the authors of the manual know what they’re talking about. The meaning of that sentence is perfectly obvious, I’m sure, to them. But it’s not obvious to anyone who would actually need to use the manual.

I haven’t gotten very far in the manual yet, so I’m not sure whether what I’m seeing is due to the linear data presentation fallacy, but just for the record: Manual authors quite often pitch headlong into the linear data presentation fallacy. The linear data presentation fallacy is this: The author assumes that the reader of the manual will begin on page 1 and read straight through to the current page, not skipping over anything, and will surely remember exactly what was said fifty or a hundred pages back. Thus, there’s no need to explain it a second time, nor to provide cross-references. This is a failure of the manual writer to understand how the document will be used. Nobody reads a manual that way. (Well, perhaps a few timid middle-school students do, if they come from conservative homes.) The way you use a manual is, when you have a question, you find the page that relates to your question, and you read that page.

The consequence of this entirely unremarkable utilization strategy is that every page has to explain everything. This is, of course, inconvenient for the manual author, who is almost certainly very underpaid and working under an unreasonably tight deadline, and who may in addition not have access to the program as he’s doing the writing.

I speak from experience here. Native Instruments once contracted with me to write a manual. The contract specified that I would need a certain period of time with the software prior to my deadline — two or three weeks, I forget the exact number. On the date when I was supposed to receive the software, it was not yet ready. I said, “Well, in that case we’ll have to push my deadline back by the same number of days that the delivery is delayed.” The fellow at NI said, no, they couldn’t change my deadline. It would remain the same.

At that point I explained to him that NI were in violation of the contract, which I had negotiated in good faith. If they wanted me to do the work in less time, they were going to have to pay extra for a rush job. And of course they weren’t willing to do that. So I didn’t write the manual. When you’re a freelancer, you have to set your own boundaries, because nobody else is going to set them for you.

It would not surprise me to learn that the Sonar manual was produced under similar circumstances. My ire at this pale excuse for documentation is not directed at the manual’s overworked and unappreciated authors, whoever they may be. Nor is it directed at Sonar, Cakewalk, or their corporate masters at Roland. They’re not doing anything that most of the other companies in the music software industry aren’t also doing.

All I wanted to say, really, is – how discouraging. Here you’ve got a possible convert to Sonar-wonderfulness, an individual who already knows a whole lot about the technology and doesn’t need a lot of hand-holding with the basics … but your manual doesn’t provide the information that he needs in order to accomplish the most rudimentary tasks in the UI.

How will an actual novice, a newcomer to the technology, deal with this type of challenge? I don’t even want to think about it.

Underrun Run

Music technology sucks. In the story I’m about to tell, I want to make it clear that I’m not blaming any particular company or software development team. The problems I’m having today are symptomatic, rather, of the entire state of the industry, which seems to be shambling off into a blood-tinged and smoky sunset.

At the moment, I’m attempting to run Steinberg Cubase 5.1.1 in a Windows 7 computer using an M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB audio interface. What I’m finding is that this setup works fairly well — okay, there are little audio hiccups, but nothing I can’t live with — until I try activating more than one stereo output pair from a VST plug-in synthesizer. When I do that, Cubase’s audio output turns into a grinding mess.

Increasing the interface’s buffer size to 1,024 samples (which is far more than should be required with a fast processor) doesn’t help. It’s a software problem — something in how Cubase is attempting to address the buffer of the audio interface driver.

Needless to say, this is not something I can fix. (Footnote: A few days later, the problem has disappeared as magically as it appeared. Cubase is happy to run multi-output plug-ins now. This ought to be reassuring, but it’s not.)

My experience getting a response from Steinberg’s technical support has, of late, been abysmal. They don’t answer the phone, and they don’t answer emails either. But as I said, it’s not just Steinberg. While attempting to set up Cubase to do this project (an attempt that may be foredoomed, and God I’d be mad if I had paid good money for this software), I had occasion to phone the tech support line at Spectrasonics. A voicemail informed me that they were experiencing a high call volume; would I please leave a message, and they’d get back to me within three business days. (Footnote: I left the message on Friday. Today is Wednesday; they haven’t called.)

Three business days for tech support??? What the fuck is up with that? Here again, if I had paid hundreds of dollars for Spectrasonics software, instead of getting it for free, which happens because I write about this stuff for magazines, would I be pissed at having to wait three days? Yeah, I think that’s a fair assessment.

I can think of three reasons why tech support may be overloaded and not able to respond in a timely manner. First, their software may be selling like hotcakes, and they may not yet have added enough staff to handle the new workload. Given the state of the economy, that seems unlikely. Second, they may have laid off most (or all) of their tech support staff because sales are slooowww, and they don’t want to fire their software development staff because if they do that, they’ll never be able to reassemble it and develop any new products. That’s a far more likely scenario. Third, they may be getting a high volume of calls because their latest software releases are full of really nasty, hard-to-fix bugs.

Based on my own recent experience, I’d say that’s a fairly likely scenario as well.

Right now, Cubase doesn’t want to host plug-ins with multiple outputs, Ableton Live persistently doesn’t want to admit that any of my third-party plug-ins are authorized, the M-Audio Axiom won’t run in Windows 7 at all, the Yamaha mLAN driver won’t work with a Firewire port that uses the extremely common VIA chipset … oh, and Apple Quicktime is not yet compatible with Windows 7, which means the control bar at the bottom of a Quicktime Player window in the browser shows up as solid black.

And of course the PCI Express card I ordered from Amazon, which may solve several of these problems, hasn’t arrived yet. My experience at the Livermore Post Office is that they sometimes hand packages to the wrong person — on one occasion the clerk handed me a package addressed to an entirely different P.O. box – so I’m hoping the card will show up Monday. (Footnote: The card did arrive. It didn’t solve the problem it was supposed to solve, however.)

When (if…) I get these problems ironed out and have a smoothly functioning system, I’m tempted to lock it down. Just tell all of the magazines I write for, “You want me to write a product review? Okay, send out an intern with a pre-built system, an intern who can stay here during the entire review process in case I need a hand with anything. And while you’re at it, you can pay me ten times as much so I can afford to rent a house with a big enough studio to house the pre-built system you’ll be providing.”

In other words, just stop writing product reviews at all. It’s hard enough to do any creative musical work when I’m just wrestling with my own internal emotional process. When I also have to contend with grinding noises, stuck notes, browsers that can’t find the files I’ve saved, and tech support personnel who, when answering questions at all, make blind stabs about what I ought to do, forcing me to jump through one hoop after another without resolving anything – it’s just too much. It’s just too damn much.

Chicken Man

This is a story about the power of positive reinforcement. I no longer remember who told me the story — possibly it was my friend Aishala, whose brother knew the participants. In any event, it has the ring of truth.

Two young men, freshmen or sophomores in college, were taking a psychology class in which the instructor emphasized the importance of positive reinforcement. (Possibly he was discussing Pavlov’s dogs.) The two young men lived in a dorm. Another young man in their dorm had an odd habit: Occasionally he would flap his elbows and say, “Awk-pawk-pawk — Chicken Man!”

The two psychology students decided to perform an experiment. It was a secret experiment, of course — they didn’t tell the subject that he was being experimented on. First they counted the number of times per day that their friend flapped his elbows and said, “Awk-pawk-pawk — Chicken Man!” Then, having established a base line, they started giving him positive reinforcement. Every time he did his little routine, they would smile at him, applaud, or even laugh appreciatively.

Sure enough, the frequency of the behavior increased dramatically. Within a couple of weeks, the poor fellow (who had no clue that he was the subject of an undergraduate experiment) was up on the roof of the dorm in the middle of the night, flapping his elbows energetically and crying, “Awk-pawk-pawk — Chicken Man!” at the top of his lungs.

The conspirators then reversed the experiment. Whenever their friend exhibited the behavior, they would stare at him silently, or turn away without reacting at all. Within days, the frequency of “Awk-pawk-pawk — Chicken Man!” had dropped to zero.

I got to thinking about Chicken Man recently because I’ve been searching for sources of positive reinforcement in my life. There are behaviors whose frequency I would like to increase. Specifically, I’d like to be composing and recording a lot more music in my home studio. But finding a way to get regular, reliable reinforcement for this activity turns out to be surprisingly difficult.

I live alone, and have for most of my adult life. So I don’t have a spouse to wander into the studio, smile and nod appreciatively, and wander out again. (Not that spouses are always reliable as sources of positive reinforcement, but that’s a different topic altogether.) I have to turn to outside sources — what we sometimes refer to as “the real world.”

In the real world, there’s way too much music and not nearly enough listeners. The competition for earlobes is unremitting. I’m not opposed to the idea of putting my music out there (on YouTube, MySpace, and various forums, or even in live venues) and competing for listeners, because I think my stuff is pretty decent. I don’t even insist on getting paid. But ramping up to engage in that type of activity is a huge job in itself. I would need to receive some positive reinforcement during the ramping-up phase — and I don’t have it.

Then, once you’re putting your music out there, it takes a long, long time and lots of sustained effort before you start to see positive returns. It doesn’t happen in a few weeks. I would need to be getting some regular positive reinforcement during the period of time (which might last months or years) during which I wait for positive reinforcement to arrive.

My tongue-in-cheek name for this condition is Affection Deficit Disorder. It’s real. It’s a problem. I have no solutions.

Stuck in Lodi

Today I’m thinking it would be very nice to have a group of local artists to hang out with — preferably people with whom I have a modest amount in common. Maybe even a group of musicians. I mean, it’s great to find out what a local painter or potter or jewelry maker is up to, but it’s not quite the same thing as talking to another musician, especially one who is knowledgeable about computer music resources.

Unfortunately, I live in Livermore. This is not a good place to be an artist of any kind, but it appears that musicians are in especially short supply. Since I’m more involved in computer-based home recording than anything else, I googled “home recording music livermore” and “home recording music pleasanton.” Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. I did find one MySpace page with a couple of songs written and recorded by a guy who lives here in town. The tune I listened to was … well, let’s just say this is not an individual with whom I feel much artistic kinship.

There are a few good musicians in Livermore. Some of them are even pop musicians. My friend Jim Hurley does some nice stuff, and Tom Darter has a digital recorder set up next to his piano. (The above comments are not about Jim or Tom.) But basically, I’m stuck in Lodi here. There’s nothin’ shakin’.

What would be maybe the most fun would be to find half a dozen people who are actively composing and recording with Propellerhead Reason. Play tracks for one another, give one another encouragement and mixing tips, all that. Not that Reason is the be-all and end-all, because it isn’t, but it’s a very solid, self-contained program, which makes it easy to talk about. If two people are both using Reason, their experiences and resources will be similar, which is not guaranteed to be the case with Cubase or Logic. But I’d be rather surprised to meet anyone in Livermore who uses Reason regularly. Or has even heard of it.

We don’t have a local music store with a keyboard department. One course in electronic music is listed in the catalog of the local community college — not that I need an introductory course — but it’s not being offered in the Spring semester. It’s sad, really.

There does seem to be a local rehearsal studio for rock bands. It’s called Burnin’ Burro. Possibly an infelicitous choice for a name, as it’s bound to suggest hemorrhoidal discomfort. Even so, if I were interested in rock bands, maybe I’d be inspired to find out who’s hanging out at the Burnin’ Burro; but I’m a little old for that scene.

Ah, to have been in Paris in the ’20s!

Slotted

So I ordered a new PCI card for my new computer in order to get it to work properly with the Yamaha mLAN driver. But — whoops, silly me! I looked at the back of the computer, saw metal tabs over card slots, and figured, hey, I know how to put in a PCI card.

If I had taken the trouble to look at the specs of the computer before ordering, I might (maybe) have noticed that it uses PCI Express. Confusing name, because PCI Express ain’t PCI. The two card types are fundamentally incompatible, although in theory, your software won’t know the difference. (That is, I want to emphasize, the theory.)

So I spent $35 on a PCI card that I can’t use, and wasted a week waiting for it. When it arrived, I had to hack the plastic packaging open with a box cutter. God forbid they should put these things in packages you can open with your fingers. Now the package is ripped to shreds, so there’s no point in trying to return it.

One might legitimately ask, shouldn’t the Yamaha tech have said, “Does your new computer use PCI or PCI Express?” But no, that would be passing the buck. It’s my fault.

Hewlett-Packard — reinventing the wheel, one spoke at a time.