The Former Yugoslavia @tfytfy - Tumblr Blog

“Dropped”. I prefer “released”, but anyway... I, ahem, dropped a new album the other day. It’s called You’re a waste of a song, and I think it turned out pretty good. It turned out to be a little more on the abstract side than I was planning on, but I suppose that’s what happens when you use Pure Data in the production of at least part of every track on the album.

It’s available for pay-what-you-will download on my Bandcamp page. I hope you like it.

#the former yugoslavia #you're a waste of a song

Change taking places...

Change taking places…

Apologies for the lack of updates for the one or two of you that are aware that TFY is a thing again… things have been a little stressful, anxiety-laden, and did I mention stressful for the last few weeks, but the upside of all of it is that I found another logistics position with a smaller company, and my first day is tomorrow. The pay and benefits are better, but sadly the hours are not –…

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One year on (give or take a few days)

The only thing I really miss is this…

It’s a GP2X WIZ, a handheld Linux computer that runs emulation software for folks like me who are into retrogaming. It’s been my friend on many flights over the years, short and long, and I took it with me on my ill-advised and ill-fated vacation last summer. I think I left it on the plane. By the time I realized it was missing, it was surely too late for…

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Good news! Well, better news at least...

Good news! Well, better news at least…

Instead of the thirty days I was fully expecting, we’ve been given six months to vacate. That was kind of a shock, but I wasn’t going to argue. We can actually do this right – we can maybe possibly save up for first/last + deposit instead of having to do emergency 401(k) cashouts and go into hock, possibly have time to do some research and find the best place we can rather than settling for a…

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I live under a rock most of the time How did I go this long without hearing METZ? They're pretty much my new favorite band. I, for one, welcome our new noise rock overlords.

Mouth for War (Double Drum Metaedit)

I’m not entirely sure what to do with this, so I’ll put it here for now. Yesterday morning I was pretty much blindsided by the news of Vinnie Paul’s passing. While I was never a Pantera fan, Vinnie was an undeniably good drummer, so I ended up down a YouTube rabbit hole playing videos of isolated drum tracks until I found one for “Mouth for War” that was ripped from the audio tracks in a Rock Band

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RIP Thornsetter (2005-2018)

It’s more or less official. The landlords are putting the house I’ve called home for 13 years on the market, which means Thornsetter (my home studio) will be dismantled and will likely languish in U-Haul boxes in a storage space until further notice.

What does this mean for TFY? For a music project that quite literally could not exist without a digital audio workstation, this is obviously not…

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Useless is certainly a word for it. Presenting the Pure Data equivalent to the useless machine. As one would surmise, as soon as the patch is opened, it bangs an internal quit message and shuts Pure Data down completely. Lol. I'm torn. Should I upload this to my Github Pd repo?

I think I leveled up.

http://www.formeryugoslavia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Recording-49.mp4

Forgive the crappy keyboarding (and accidentally touching the crappy pitch/mod ribbon controller thing on my Rock Band 3 keytar – hey, it was $4 at Goodwill, and it has MIDI out), but this last weekend I started working on a feeble but somehow decent-sounding Minimoog clone in Pure Data. It’s still in heavy development,…

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And balanced on the biggest wave, you race toward an early grave...

And balanced on the biggest wave, you race toward an early grave…

Well, I managed to stop nerding out over King Crimson long enough to almost finish my Raspberry Pi/Pure Data-powered effects processing box. It’s one adapter plug away from being 100% finished, but it’s 100% functional at this point. I wanted to demo it with guitar, but I lack the right equipment to record myself doing such things.…

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More Fun With the EBow

http://www.formeryugoslavia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/euclid.mp3

For lack of a better title, I’m calling this track “Euclid”. Pd is sending Euclidean MIDI to Ableton, while in another Pd window I’m playing clean input EBow guitar through my effects rack. Good ol’ Cool Edit Pro 2.0 recorded the wavetable live. This was really more of a proof of concept than anything else, but I will be…

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Stochastic Sunday – Random Euclidean Rhythms This turned out nice. 😆

Six Degrees of Robert Fripp

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve been on kind of a King Crimsonkick lately. I’m torturing myself by trying to learn how to play “Lark’s Tongues in Aspic (Part II)” on guitar (see previous post). I’m up to that first weird-assed lick which has tripped me up every single time so far. I figure if I can get through this, I can tackle anything. But I’ve also been listening to a lot of his solo and…

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Inspirations Come From Wherever I've been working in 5/4 a lot lately, and I'm pretty sure this is to blame for that...

A slight change of plans

After listening to about a half-hour’s worth of material that I had declared “finished” and giving it a good deal of thought, I decided to scrap the previously announced album project. This is definitely a case of cooler heads prevailing. I don’t know what I was shooting for with this, but whatever it was my aim was way off. I’d say that roughly half of it was worth salvaging and expanded upon. The rest of it is sitting in the Recycle Bin. There’s 36 GB in there. I should probably empty it.

So, basically, Reinstatement has been promoted from EP to album. I’m not going to put a hex on myself and give a projected release date. When it’s done, I’ll let you know. :)

But since I’ve still kinda got the EP bug, I was thinking that a couple of covers would be kinda fun. I started working on a cover of Ween’s “You Fucked Up” (with actual, real-live guitar played by me!) before things got crazy at the first of the year. I’ve been kicking around arrangement ideas for a few other possible covers. Since I got this excellent Pure Data patch from Pierre’s excellent GuitarExtended website running, I’m pretty sure there will be some Mellotron on there somewhere.

Anyway, as you were.

Fun fact: every sound used on the Discard album went through this thing first.

#tfy #the former yugoslavia

pure_data_stuff - This is where I put my Pure Data patches. Use 'em if you want 'em

I’m in the process of updating the official TFY website (formeryugoslavia.org, which is at the moment a generic Wordpress theme that needs content), and I was thinking about including a section where anyone could download any or all of the Pd patches that I used in one way or another in the recording of material for the Reinstatement album. In the meantime, I started putting some of this stuff on my Github page. Some of it’s fun. Some of it’s useful. All of it can run in Vanilla with at the very least zexy and cyclone installed via deken. Most of it was based on other people’s code (like a Rails instructor I had once always said, 99% of coding is Googling - lots of visits to the pdpatchrepo forums, random websites, even Stack Overflow), but a lot of it came from just playing.

*** Having worked in shipping, receiving, and product management for a record store chain in the 80s and 90s, I know what a pressing of 250 records looks like almost instantly, and I know that I don’t have THAT much closet space...

#tfy #the former yugoslavia #pd #pure data

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