Courtney
NEW SONG !!!
Jun 13, 2008
HEY Everybody !!
Check out my Heretic US bandpage- Pagan Soul has been rerecorded and remixed- I regret that I couldn't get my female vocalist to encore for this new mix, she moved away, but Jason sounds ok singing it all; remember, though, this is mostly for demo purposes until we can find a truly talented singer.
So, it's been so long since I took it down, it's going to sound like a totally new song.
Check it out, Yall !!
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Why I am Ashamed of the Entertainment Industry
Mar 11, 2008
Whatup Yall!
It seems that the backing vocals on Pagan Soul are proving far more difficult than I had anticipated- and are taking FAR longer than they did for the first, rough version- but you will be happy to know that the reason is that I am a FAR better musician now than I was then, and I am strongly motivated by a powerful desire to do this song RIGHT, cuz for those of you who have heard the first version of this song, you realize that although the words are very powerful and edgy, but if the vocals aren't done just right- - then the listener won't buy the rather contrite attitude of the lyrics and the song just won't work.
On a different note, I have been thinking of late about how the Internet revolution will hopefully change the music industry. No offense to my extremely talented friends and colleagues who HAVE succeeded in making it to the proverbial Big Time, there's no shame in that, BUT, I am hoping that in my lifetime, we will see a time when music is free to all, and the petty, ruthless corporate tyrants who are responsible for the current narrow-minded, creativity-stifling, lowest-common-denominator-pandering stranglehold on the modern music industry will be overthrown, and the day is rapdly slipping upon us when music will be FREE to all, and to simply LISTEN will cost today's fans NOTHING, and music will be freely exchanged between listeners, and the music industry will CEASE and desist throwing away millions of dollars on ineffective copy-protection schemes that do NOTHING but serve to further stifle creativity and original thought in an industry that's practically starving from a lack thereof already.
If a band is ANY GOOD, they will be able to sell tickets ot their live performances, and be able to accumulate wealth by WORKING the old-fashioned way, just like everyone else. I think it is truly a shame, and rather embarrassing to me personally, as an American, that we have homeless children and parents starving in the streets, public schools falling apart with half-century-old textbooks and every year releasing hundreds of thousands of graduates- many of whom graduated WITH HONORS-upon an unsuspecting workforce and colleges who can't find Asia on a map (or Earth on a globe!), As a result, the corproate and public infrastructures are rapidly decaying from unprecedented levels of such ineptitude and incompetent boobery that makes the Watergate affair of the 70s look like... well, like it was in the 70s, back when people still CARED whether elected officials of this country were actually able to run it, instead of just who they had slept with or voting on the basis of how ENTERTAINING they think a candidate will be once he's in office-- and all the while pop, rap, and so-called country stars, are living obscenely lavish lifestyles of such excess that it would make Marie Antoinette cringe with shame (and I won't even BOTHER to mention the billions upon billions of dollars heaped every year upon drove after drove of mindless jocks whose only claim to fame is not that they can create art, solve an equation, do scientific research, or do ANY of the things that makes our modern technological society of which we are so proud function in any way whatsoever, but that they can adroitly manipulate an inflated animal bladder or perhaps that they can run really fast.
Is this the kind of society we want to be? To time and time again spend literally billions of consumer dollars per year buying overpriced CDs, football tickets, and T-shirts , supporting the obscenely excessive lifestyles of people we wouldn't let our children even associate with, much less idolize, while over 47 million Americans live in fear that they are going to become sick and that their families will wind up homeless because they have no health insurance?
Shame on the music industry. Shame on the obsolete patriarchal hierarchy tha
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Whatup Yall !!
Feb 14, 2008
Hey,
Just want ya'll to know I'm workin' hard to get the new version of Pagan Soul out. I've run into a few snags- mainly, how to use the Roland V-Vocal (a software vocal editor that comes with my favorite sequencer, Sonar 6 Producer Edition) to create 3-part vocal harmonies; I'm not getting the sound I want, and my cousin Jason (the main person who sings for me, and plays rhythm and acoustic guitar on a few of the numbers posted here) doesn't have as much time as I would like to come in and sing new parts.
BUT... we'll get it eventually... I've sent out requests for aid on all hailing frequencies across the 'net... and of course, anyone reading this who is familiar with th software (Sonar or the Roland V-Vocal), and you think you can help, then, by all means, PLEASE contact me.
BTW, Mister Stanley, you most assuredly did NOT hit a bad note (very colorful and cute phrase, BTW, MS !! ), but it *does* seem like you aren't getting my messages and emails, or that I'm not getting yours, or both. i have changed my internet and spam settings, please try emaiing me again.
That's all for now, folks, more updates later !!
GG
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Roland VG-99
Oct 6, 2007
Hey ya'll,
After a loooonnnggg wait for me, I've been waiting on this thing since the dealers returned from the last NAMM show and put it up on their websites (I think it was in February- Roland US has had it up on their site since the first of the year), anyway, I've had my name in the bucket at Guitar Center Nashville since early March, and I struggled, but I was able to set aside the rather steep $$ they were asking for it. They promised that I would have it in my hot little hands by May and May came and then they promised June, then early July, therefore I didn't believe them when they promised Sept. 28, and I had to scramble to get the $$, quite a bit of which I had spent back in June when they missed the 2nd release date. Now I'm broke, especially after I had to pay top dollar for the MIDI foot pedal so I could use the manual Wah and other CC functions, which IMHO should have come with the thing, considering how steep the price was.
BUT... I'm sure many of you other guitarists want to know, was it worth the wait and the rather steep price tag?
Drum roll please: the answer is an unequivocal YYEESSSS!!!
Case in point: as I sit here and type this, the unit is ON and the distortion is cranked. The (mixing keyboard, roland KC-350) amp is at about 60% volume, but I'm not playing, and, guess what: I can't HEAR A BLOODY THING. NO amp noise, NO ground hum, no distortion howl that one tends to get with pedals, particularly multi-FX pedals, in general, and THE UNIT IS COMPLETELY SILENT WHEN YOU AREN'T PLAYING. I once owned the unit's earlier evolutionary ancestor, the VG-88, and there was no end to the howls, hums, and horrid noises that would be produced when you cranked up the distortion enough to allow the sort of effortless hammering and pulloffs that I do in many of my tunes. A mistaken touch of the wrong pedal on stage, and the audience would wince at the howls and hums and feedback that would be produced. It's important to note that it isn't the artificial silence of a noise gate (although the unit, of course, has multiple noise gates should you require them) so there's no unnatural-sounding cutoff when the gate kicks in: the unit is naturally silent like this.
THIS UNIT IS PERFECT!! The models, the sounds, I can't even begin to describe, but they are so real and so accuarate it's almost scary. Some folks think I spent a lot of money on this rig, and I tell them that people spend tens of thousands of dollars on speaker cabs and ampheads to get the kind of sounds that are programmed into this thing, and then, they are locked into one single rig. I can not only model any rig in the world, but also a few from several neighboring paralell universes- vintage rigs costing tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and do so accurately, confident that the sound I'm getting is real.
Never before has this been possible. Oh, there have been FX units and modeling units here and there that promise this and that, but IMHO, I have never ever heard one actually deliver the way this unit does.
And that's without even going into the possible synth sounds, the D-Beam (a controller that lets you activate a parameter with a wave of the hand or by moving the guitar neck over it) and the Ribbon controller.
You guys, both live artists and computer recording afficianados both, I can't recommend this unit highly enough. Sorry to sound like a poster girl for Roland, but I just can't be happier with this thing. You guys have got to try this thing out!!
GG
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