Josh Rosario

MPI100 Music Publishing for Internet (Web design?)
MTVF400 Music for Film and Television (Composition)
APRT350 Advance Post Recording Techniques (Post-production for film and TV)

I need $2500 to buy a Macbook Pro. I haven't decided to switch over completely just yet, but I am going as far as buying a Mac keyboard for my Windows PC just to get used to the remapping of the "Command" key. Everything in the audio world has gone nearly 100% Mac so it's going to get confusing for me to keep "transposing" my Control key to Command whenever I go to work in a real studio.

I think I'd really like to have one for this class I'm sitting in right now, composition is usually done in Logic which is only available on Mac.

I got a promotion at work which I'm excited about. Nice little raise, too. Nothing has changed, though. I basically do the same job as before. The other day, however, I was playing Manager when he was home sick and his Assistant was on holidays. I had to do my first orders (big ones) for wine and BDL beer. I also dealt with representatives and delegation of staff and I didn't get off the phone all day. Fun day, a little stressful but I think it's good to know how to handle myself in those situations.

Played a show with Gunwail at my boss' house party on Saturday night. Amber and I also opened up the show, which turned out really well if only mixed horribly. Drunk white people don't care about the mix, though. It was freezing out but I almost nailed the solo for Pearl Jam's "Alive" which we played near the end of the set. My gear kept breaking though, blew a fuse on my tube head, delay pedal stopped outputting delay completely, and then, and this blew my mind, the battery in my guitar died and my pickups stopped outputting anything worth hearing.

I saw Dethklok and Mastodon on Sunday with Sebastian. I forgot my earplugs but thank god it was a smaller Theatre venue that didn't need excessive SPL levels. I couldn't believe how amazing everything sounded, ESPECIALLY Dethklok. I was worried it was going to be kinda lame since they're kind of a gimmick band but they performed really well. It was really cool to see the visualizations like watching the TV show but having a real band playing right below the screen. It was also cool to hear Nathan Explosion (Brendan Small) say, "Thank you Vancouver, you guys wanna hear another fucking song?"

Back to class, learning about hit points in film music compositions.

Posting because Dave did it.

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Burnaby, Surrey, Langley, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Hope, Fraser Canyon, Cache Creek, 100 Mile House, Williams Lake, Quesnel, Prince George, Bear Lake, Bijoux Falls, Pine Pass, Chetwynd, Moberly Lake, Peace Canyon Dam, Hudson's Hope, Charlie Lake, Fort Saint John, North Pine, Fort Saint John, Taylor, Dawson Creek, Pouce Coupe, Swan Lake, Alberta Border, Hythe, Grande Prairie, Grande Cache, Hinton, Jasper Ntl. Park, Pocahontas Campground, Miette Hot Springs, Jasper, BC Border, Mount Robson Ntl. Park, Blue River, Barriere, Kamloops, Coquihalla, Merritt, Hope, Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Langley, Surrey, Burnaby.

I haven't posted in a month but I still read this thing every day.

My life has been very exciting the last little while.

I've opened up my own studio, Acoustic Entanglement Studios in my spare bedroom and I've been really excited working on it. I built a brand new monster computer to run my new upgraded version of Pro Tools and I put a bunch of money into acoustically treating the room so it sounds it's very best when I get clients in there. I'm planning to record local singer/songwriters and maybe a few bands if they want to play on an electronic drum kit. I've already been offered a mixing gig by an awesome composer for film and animated movies.

I just finished recording Missing Starla and now we're going to move into mixing. Hopefully I can get the edits done before I go on holidays and try to book Studio M for the mix sessions. I'm going to pre-mix the songs in my Pro Tools rig at home and then when we go to the studio, I can just output the tracks to the analogue console for mixdown and make some use of the tasty sounding outboard gear in there (ie. 1176, Avalon vt737, etc).

Side note, I never know where to put a period when ending a sentence with brackets, I've never been great with punctuation.

I'm also finishing up with Taylor Harp getting his drum tracks finalized. We rented an electronic kit and he hired a drummer to come to my studio and play so it took a little bit of editing to get the performances to sound realistic when using MIDI triggers and EZDrummer. But it's sounding pretty good, I can't wait to get his bassist in to record, that's when the tracks will really sound like their coming together.

I wanted to go to school early but there was no parking so I drove up to Brentwood Mall and got a coffee from Starbucks. I hate Starbucks but there's no good coffee in Burnaby, I miss Cafe Fantastico where Asti used to work. It was funny though, yesterday I was sitting here more or less doing the same thing and some guy asked me if he could take pictures of me. Haha, I'm a model now. He was a photography student so it was cool.

One of the teachers (Brett Wade) asked me again to help him out with one of his engineering classes so I've been assisting/engineering for him the last couple weeks. That's what I'm going to school for today. It's really nice working with him, he's an experienced engineer and musician, writer, arranger, etc. I'm learning a lot from him. It's great too because when I had him as a teacher a year ago, it was almost by accident. He normally teaches the advance music production courses that I haven't even taken yet but he taught the engineering course that term. So I wasn't even supposed to have him until late this year. I'm learning how to read charts by immersion (I can't normally read music) and follow along for vocal session overdubs and I'm getting better at it. We're doing vocals today, it's kind of intimidating working with professional musicians who expect you to get it right the first time. Especially since vocalists wear out very quickly.

Amber's been a good wife, she's very supportive of me. I know I've overbooked myself these last couple weeks but she's being patient with me and I love her for it. She allowed me to move the studio to the bigger bedroom sacrificing her space for me. If she didn't do that, I couldn't be opening this studio right now.

My laptop battery is about to die so I'll have to wrap this up. Everyone have a good day, I sure am going to.

Love,
Josh

I just deleted EVERYTHING irrelevant to me and my current life on Facebook. I was literally going to delete everything (Apps, groups, pages, etc.) but I decided that some of that stuff is stuff I'm interested in right now (bands I'm working with, the Digidesign page) should be left in because some of it is important to me. If later on I don't feel I need them on there, I'll delete them and probably replace them with items of greater relevance at the time.

The goal here is to treat Facebook as an ongoing resume of my life. It's a way to get a hold of me (mobile phone still functioning) and for me to get a hold of virtually everyone I may know. I was going to delete a lot of my friends since I don't even talk to them and I feel weird knowing things from their lives that they post but I decided that I won't know in the future who I want to get a hold of for any reason.

Most of the reason for this is when you type my name in google, the first thing that comes up is my Livejournal and from there it's pretty easy to find my Facebook because I don't believe in keeping things private when using the internet when that information is available anyways elsewhere. The point is I don't need anyone going to my page to see "who I am" and first things they see are the applications I play with or the groups I'm a member of.

I think the most useful part of Facebook is the ease of communication. I was going to delete my account altogether a couple years ago but I'm going to use it as the tool it was originally designed to be.

Thoughts?

The other day (the first nice day weather-wise) I dropped Amber off at work early and went to the mall to get my hair cut. Felt pretty good about that, even if a little short, and bought a Sound on Sound magazine from the bookstore. I wanted to read it outside but not outside the mall so I drove to Central Park and read it on a bench there. There was a good article on this funny little device called the Korg nanoKONTROL.


It looks like a toy but it's got 9 faders/knobs and two buttons for each plus a transport control (play, stop, rec) and I thought it would be hilarious to use it as my control surface for Pro Tools 8. So I went downtown to buy it (it was only 86 bucks) and brought it home to find I couldn't get the programming right. You have to map MIDI Control values to every button/knob/fader and they have to be values that "trick" Pro Tools into thinking you're using a more expensive control surface.
So anyways, I spent most of the night trying to get this shit to work and finally stumbled on some article on a forum where a guy spent 5+ hours of trial and error seeing what each code actually does. He found most of the right codes and the only thing that doesn't work properly is the pan knobs, which is fine. So I got excited that I didn't have to return the damn thing and started to mix a song I've been working on with it.

So today I had my first day of class in Studio P (P is for Post-Production) and it's fitted with a Digidesign Pro Control:


But with another 8 faders on the left side. We spent a bunch of time learning to set this thing up in Protools|HD 8 and I had to laugh because if I knew about all that the day before, I would have had mine working a lot sooner. Best part is, this is a $70k system and the other system I could have gotten that works is $1200 yet I only spent $86 on mine.

Now I'm going to edit more drums since I now have a deadline to meet with this album production.

This one was more fun:

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My first time fails:

Connecting to server...
You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: hi
You: hello
You: wait...
You: is it really you?
You: it's been years!
Stranger: yes. i know!
You: I've missed
You: you
You: where did you go?
Stranger: i know, i feel the same.
You: why did you disappear?
You: everyone was so worried
Stranger: well, i wasn't willing to live anymore.
Stranger: so i pulled myself away.
Stranger: i'm sorry.
You: sorry might not be enough
You: not for the whole village
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Hey guys! I just discovered this awesome new thing on the internets where you make a little Profile thing that tells people who you are and things about you. Then you add your friends to it so you can see each others' profiles when their names randomly come up on the screen. After a while, you can figure out how to find every single person you've come into contact with in your life, most of whom don't actually remember who you are but are also trying to expand their friend list, and add them to your list. It's really cool, you guys, how you can upload 700 photos and create links to random people in the photo and also so people who don't know who you are can see your photos and track down other people who they don't know and stalk around their profiles. Even better, you can add as many little add on type things as you like since there's a million of them and, no matter how useless they are, it's always a great way to clutter up your profile pages. You know, things like "virtual pets" or little games that you can spend hours on getting you absolutely nowhere in real life, but that's okay since this whole thing turns into some sort of alternate reality hosted by the internets that makes you more popular than you ever thought you could be. It's really a good way to be cool, guys! We can totally stop writing letters or phoning each other or even emailing them because there's a sweet message system that collects all sorts of little notifications about everything that everyone does or says on there about you or your friends so you won't even have time to empty your junk mail folder in your email since you're spending so much time sorting through this stuff! You can even have it send all of these to your cell phones text message system. It's AWESOME. It even tells you when your friends' birthdays are so you can flood their inbox with messages, even if you never knew their birthdays in real life. They'll appreciate it. If you want to get together with your friends in real life, you can use the little calendar to organize events that most people will not attend, even though they've said they would on the internets. Or you can use the events organizer to create little petitions for things no one really cares about or just to see exactly how many people will join. I really love how the people who run it totally change the way it works and looks every few months, just to keep everyone on their toes. The more time you spend on it looking at the ads and reading about people you met in middle school and haven't talked to in ten years, the better. Who has real life stuff to do anyways? If you run a company and want to learn more about a person you might employ or are thinking of hiring, you can just Google their name and their profile will come up, showing you everything they do on their weekends and where they'll be tomorrow or even what they're thinking about right now. It's truly amazing, I can't believe the capacity for entertainment of this.

You should try it, you guys.

I haven't updated on my life in a while, let's start by saying Australian Red wines are king.

Super, super, super, super busy lately (thanks for asking). Just finished my last final of the term this morning, passed all my courses with a slightly lower GPA than usual, which is fine. No one is going to give a shit about my GPA when I graduate.

Sebastian and his brother Alex were over this weekend. Alex played some drums to some of the new stuff Sebby and I have been working on and it sounds like Transient. I found out that he had the same drum teacher as Murray, our former drummer, had so they somehow think similar. He's still in High School but I'm hoping when he graduates that he might move over here and we can all start playing and gigging again. If that happens, I'm sure Harry will at least visit more often to maybe write some new lyrics with the new inspiration.

Amber is sick and I feel bad I can't help her more. I also feel bad because I gave it to her, even though I tried not to. One day I felt my throat getting really sore so I ignored it like I always do. Eventually I got some anti-biotics but it didn't feel like old throat infections I'd had. I didn't have a fever or really anything but a sore throat. So when it cleared up, I instantly got really sick with a cold and fever. Best part was that it was the morning of my finals last week and I actually missed the first part of a practical final at 8:30am. Finished that and slept all day to go to my other practical at 10pm that night, which I apparently did awesome at minus several stupid mistakes. I'm still getting over it now, but Amber is sicker than I was. She has been vomiting and can't go to work tomorrow.

Taylor is coming over tomorrow for a drum editing session. We sent his acoustic/vocal takes out to his buddy in Edmonton so the guy could track some drums to them. When he got them back, he wasn't overly impressed with the quality. Also, this guy sends me 7-8 takes for each of the 6 songs that we have to sit down and comp together tomorrow. Even better, it's all in MIDI so I just know we're going to run into troubles re-creating the original sounds. When it's done, though, we can track some bass and possibly re-track the vocals/guitar and have some pretty nice sounding tracks. Best of all, most of that I can do at home since I've treated my studio.

Next week I was asked to help an instructor with the SWEAT week (I don't know what it stands for, but it's the week where High School students come to the school and participate in projects relating to each of the programs the school offers.) He is going to record a song to show these kids how studio work generally goes and needs an assistant. He (the instructor) is also playing and singing a lot of the song, since he produces and arranges everything himself, so he told me I could engineer those sessions. I'm super stoked on this. Last time I helped him out, I was assisting for Rolf Henneman (Engineer: Heart, BTO) which was very cool.

Next weekend, I'm coming to Victoria to visit with some friends and family who I've missed a lot the last while. I know though that it's going to be a crazy weekend since I have a lot of plans with a lot of people but I'm not entirely sure on which days I'm doing those things. It should work out, though.

I'm going to bed and in the morning I'm cleaning my house to make it look a little more like a professional environment. Goodnight.

<a href="http://www.canwestshows.com/sexshow/>http://www.canwestshows.com/sexshow/</a>

I had a really good birthday/belated Christmas in Victoria this weekend. We didn't have time to visit anyone other than my Grandparents and my Parents, but I hope to have more time next time we got over there.

In short and because it's late and I need to be up early, my Dad gave me his car. '93 Mazda Precidia:

That's not the actual car, just one that looks like it. I traded my truck and a small amount of cash so I didn't rip him off completely, but it was still an amazing deal. It will definitely help with school this term, starting next week I'm starting some night recording sessions. This means I'll be able to go home and sleep right after. I can also try to get a job at a studio this summer or possibly sooner.

The rest of my family gave me cash towards my Avalon compressor:

and Amber got me another SM57 so I can do some real guitar recording. I was using a 57 and some Audio Technica small diaphragm condensor but I couldn't get it close enough to the speaker to get the sounds I was looking for, now I have that other 57 which will be invaluable.

Hooray, I have an engineer's wife. And it's nice my family supports what I do to the point of encouraging gear aquisition syndrome (GAS).

My financial crisis is projected to stabilize in around two months time. For now, let's just say my bank account reads -$10.73. Hilarious fun.

I have some interest in taking two terms off school starting in the Summer '09 (conveniently, during a loan period) and ending October '09. I need to try to find a job nearer the one in my industry. If I can find something that works for me, I may not actually need to return to school. But those are high hopes.

Let me explain: classically, if you wanted to work in a music/tv production studio, you would literally hang out. One day they would invite you inside to mop the floors, clean the bathroom, make fresh coffee etc. You wouldn't get paid. This job is called the Runner because you run around town and pick shit up like rental gear or food. This could last months and if you lasted and got lucky, and there were a bunch of promotions in the other jobs leaving an open assistant spot, you might get that job. You would start getting paid minimum wage, but you'd learn the most you've ever learned in your life working as an assistant to the engineer, or sometimes called a second engineer. You still might get the coffee and keep the band happy, but the engineer is teaching you how the shit works at the same time. Another day might come and there would be more promotions and the engineer might get a chance to be a producer. The only one he trusts in your chair would be you since he hand taught you all this stuff.

Now the problem is one day, people started to really record at home or in smaller project studios. Big studios are now only really being used for the big productions, where you have a record label giving you a few Hundy Thou and so the bigger studios started to kind of die out a little. The engineers tried to get more work by breaking off from the studio staff and going freelance. If a band was recording over there and wanted this engineer, he would go over there. Now the only people who really know the studio are the assistant engineers because they don't move from studio to studio every day. You are assisting the engineer but you're also like an interface to the board and equipment so he really needs you to know your shit in order to get the shit happening.

Next problem is some guys one day thought that maybe a recording school might be nice for these kids to get a little of the technical knowledge that they aren't really getting as much anymore from the engineers and to prep them to work as assistants in studios. Sure, great idea. Some electronics, digital/analog theory, studio classes etc. but you still have to be good: technical efficiency, some knowledge of music itself (hey, it's what you're recording), and a real joy and passion for the art of it all.

The school I go to is great in a lot of respects. The instructors are truly amazing, they all are people who have real experience in the industry and are well respected by those around them. The equipment us pretty good for the most part, even if constant use by studios leaves it in a somewhat broken state a portion of the time. It's much better than going to Long and McQuade and having them give you some piece of shit M-Box and tell you you have a studio now. (RADAR > PROTOOLS) The school started as CDIS (Centre for Digital Imaging and Sound, I think) and was hugely a music production school. Then a gigantic privately owned institution for art buys it up and sets up the biggest school on the West Coast of the country for the various things they teach about: fashion, media, games, culinary arts, film, audio, etc.

There's also some things I disagree with when a really big company runs a school of this type. One would be the amount of profits they have in people who fail classes. Each time you take a course in this program, it's $1k. You fail it once, that's another $1k. You fail a bunch of classes, you go into "academic probation" where they tell you to do better. Fail some more, it's academic suspension or expulsion or some bullshit where they tell you to appeal the "decision" (decided by the fact that you actually received less than 60% in most of your classes) and get kicked out of the course until they say, "uhhhh yeah sure you can come back and spend more money here." Some of these students, they know damn well are not going to get the jobs they want in the industry. They tend to be a bit lazy or just don't give a shit. Maybe they aren't paying for it from their own pocket, not really my business but still a bit of a concern. Some of these students are actually in the way of people that actually give a fuck since that's one extra person in an already overcrowded classroom that isn't actually going to benefit from that teacher's time which is taken away from the other guys.

Anyways, my original point is that if I can work hard enough and endure enough pain trying to get a real job, I feel that by this summer I will have taken almost all the truly beneficial classes (save a few very important ones) and actually earned what my money paid for. This school is mostly about "getting you a job" but really all you'll get when you graduate is a certificate and maybe enough credentials to get a job interview. Although they may be totally useful or great to explore, I don't really think I need to pay money right now for courses such as Publishing for Internet or Composition for Film and TV. I've almost taken all the technical courses there and isn't that what the original schools primarily taught?

These are just some thoughts I've had over the last few days or maybe weeks. A certain instructor who I greatly respect told me that a car might be a great investment so I can start work sooner than later as a runner in a studio. He also has a reputation of knowing what the fuck he's talking about. I'm not trying to badmouth the school, it's so far been the greatest experience of my entire life. But I'd like to try to explore a possibility of something else and the sooner I do that, the better my chances of working on the side I really enjoy later down the road.

I feel better now. /rant

I'm feeling more normal again. The holidays are basically over, my stress levels are moving to a safer level and I'm back to school again.

Things are crazy busy now, the way I like them. I have three recording projects on the go right now and I'm setting up all sorts of sessions over the next couple months.

I just finished a three hour lecture on the exact means of transductance from sound waves in the air to the neural firings in the brain to correspond with them. Totally interesting though I'm regretting not taking any biology in high school. Or Greek. There's also a lot of ear training in the course too, I'll be able to tell you when something is delayed by five miliseconds by the end.

I'm also apparently taking the two hardest courses in the school at the same time. This one about the psycho-acoustic side of audio and another about digital studios. I'm kind of excited to sync a RADAR24 system to a ProTools|HD system, best of both worlds there.

Not really liking late classes with early mornings though.

Also, Diablo II is coming back, mother fucker.

Also also, I'm Rollin' Wit Saget and I'm an average everyday normal guy.

Happy New Year.

AC-8182 YXJ (Fort St John) to YVR (Vancouver)
1410 Mountain Time, land 1444 Pacific Time.

Half hour flight?! Oh, fucking time zones.

Haven't boarded yet, typical.

I miss it here already.

I love airplanes. And airports. I'm a robot.

No delays, Air Canada flight AC-8181 0750 depart (Vancouver Time) ~1030 (FSJ Time)