Once when I was in the 5th grade, I was sent home from school because my shoes were falling apart so badly, my toes were exposed where the front of my shoes were flapping open.
We lived in Las Vegas. My gambling-addicted mom didn't work. My alcoholic, drug addidcted step dad had money for a couple broken down speed boats and many guns, but for some reason couldn't buy me shoes. The $5 K-mart shoes that I had to get were to this day, my favorite shoes of all time.
The shoes I got were no-name, (read more)

You have more than 2 million bits of sensory information around you to process at any second. You are only capable of processing about 140 of those bits.



These 140 bits are the same basic bits we are conditioned to experience. Because of this what we look for, we find.



Do you see conspiracies? Are you held down by The Man? Do people look down on you for no reason? Do you believe you will never understand music theory?



Have you ever wanted something like a specific pair of sh (read more)

I get emails from people asking me what I use or recommend as far as equipment so I figured I'd break it down for you who are interested.
Computer: ZT Affinity Intel Quad Core Q6600 2.4GHz 4GB DDR2 500GB HDD
I got the computer from Costco online for $579. They don't sell that model anymore but it is similar to this one. My only complaints are it's Vista (which I'm not a big fan of) and it's got a pretty noisy fan. If you're doing recording with a microphone near the computer it will be an iss (read more)

Man.
Somedays it just plain sucks to be responsible for this site.
Don't get me wrong, I love the site to death and the community too.
The problem is that the site is getting to a tipping point and there are many days I just can't keep up.
I havent made a beat in weeks, maybe months. I sure havent touched my MIDI controller or FL Studio for anything but doing a tutorial in over a month.
Every little tweak I make to the site has the potential to break it. And that could  mean hours or d (read more)

...would be the name of this topic if I wanted to trick you into reading it.



Really what I wanted to say is going to piss off a few of you but bear with me. I'm writing this because I want the best for you guys.



A lot of people think that using commercial software they haven't paid for (warez) is somehow justified because they don't have money or are too young to work, etc.



A lot of people who do this also say that when they can afford it, they will purchase all their sof (read more)

It seems like a lot of people spend time trying to portay an image of what they're not.
 
I consider myself part of the hip hop culture because I love a lot of things in and around it. Music, grafitti, dance etc, are all things about hip hop that I am a fan and/or participant in.
 
But let me tell you what I'm not... I'm not a playa, a pimp or a a hustler. I'm not a thug, a soldier or a gangsta. I'm not iced out, ridin on dubs or rockin the trendy gear. If you saw me on the street (read more)

I have a book somehwere that talks about mixing in 3 dimiensions. I wish I could find it so I could more accurately paraphrase it but whatever...



The premise of the book is basically to say that music happens in three dimension. Visually speaking the 3 dimensions are left/right, up/down, and forward/back.  Musically speaking they are similar:



left/right = panning or balance
you can control the position of a sound from left to right using the balance or panning controls on you (read more)

Sometimes I wonder why music is so important to human beings.



Just about every culture has some form of music that is unique to themselves and helps us to understand them a little bit. But why is this so?



Victor Hugo once said "Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. " Is this true?



Does music create a culture or do culture create music? I would guess that the culture creates the music, but they are so closely born th (read more)