The Bass to my Diatribe

Okay hopefully you tuned into the little play on words in the title. Gonna be a little rantish but I need to spew this out somehow.
Most of you who know me know that I have very different tastes in music compared to the "here today, gone later today" 15 minutes of fame mainstream music. There, you can already gauge my opinion from that! While I am in no way some kind of heavy metal crusader hellbent on converting the ignorant, I can respect other peoples musical choices as well, it what makes everybody unique. That's the thing though, society is plagued by the media, "musicians" and artists are created, beat out, and molded into some icon of these big record companies to boost sales or appeal to a certain demographic.
That's a completely different argument though, i can go on for that for hours. In those lines though there is something that I just don't get, is how bad some people can be and have the gall to call themselves artists. Recently I've been finding myself barraged more and more with the whole hipster, hippie revival, indie rock stuff. Now i'm not gonna bash whoever listens to this, some of my best friends love this stuff. But the thing that I cannot stand is the very prominent arrogance that permeates several of these "artists." They prance around in some acid/ other drug induced delusion spewing utter crap, yet when called out on their style they all claim they're unique, and unlike anything that society conforms too, yada yada yada! Their ego is filled with as much crap as their "art."
Whether it's computer synthesized beats, or your boring ass 3 chord progressions, a degree of musical competency is a must. The utter tragedy that I cringe at all the time is how many absolutely slaughter any degree of respect demanded by the instruments they play. As mainly a bass and guitar player the music I play, as well as many other genres, requires a very intimate knowledge with your instrument. Theory, scales, chords, keys...all these fall into a desire to learn, to expand one's knowledge and escape a restricted dogma of "this is how it's played." What kills me everytime is I look some of this junk up and the bass player is there plucking away at root notes...with a frickin pick. Once again, there are many great pick bassists but honestly these images remind me of myself when I first picked up a guitar, constantly scanning the fretboard, counting which fret to use, and playing out of beat (this was probably in grade 5).If they do use finger-plucking style they use their thumb or their hand is positioned retardedly like they don't know they have a strap attached to the guitar/bass and they have to anchor it to their body. There is more than one string. I'll be damned if I see any of these artists play an arpegio, let alone be able to find where the frickin octave is (cf the greats: Cliff burton, Victor Wooten, Stu Hamm, Steve harris, John Myung, john Entwhistle, Les Claypool, Geddy Lee, Flea, Jaco Pastorius...these guys learned, they trained, they practiced, they didn't bash their hands against the thing and recorded whatever came out and call it music).
I had to do that, I apologize for the length, I do not apologize though for the content. Just another breath of madness!

Twitter This (reloaded)

Remember my anti-twitter rant a while back? Well I just stumbled onto this video from the Collegehumour guys, funny stuff. Once again emphasizing the point that 10-1 nobody freaking cares about what you're thinking or doing at that exact moment, just do it and get it over with!

Goodness a plenty

After days of trying to get it to work I finally did it. One of my friends just recently delivered unto me the 8gb download equivalent of pure gold, the complete adobe masterworks (aftereffects, premier, photoshop, encore, etc) shame that Daemontools was being a pain in the but, I spent today remapping the adobe registry on my comp. Total pain, nearly wanted to gouge my eyes out from all the thousands of damn .dll and other files, turns out there was a fragment from a previous adobe download that didn't properly uninstall, thus rendering my first attempts to banging my head into my desk. Aside from the nerdy comp talk, it finally worked.
I am now currently basking in the goodness that is aftereffects, I can feel the creativity flowing. So in essence this was merely an update saying that I am excited as hell to get cracking at several film projects this summer. Expect a new machinima, some music videos, promo stuff, the whol shabangabang!