Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

It's been suggested lately that I learn guitar, and while I think that is a worthwhile project, the prospect doesn't appeal to me lately. I really don't see the appeal in guitars, except everyone seems to be stuck on them.

Rest assured that the new year will have me writing and recording in my brand, Flux Oersted, more than anything else. To the extent that I can play with other musicians, maybe I will.

To the future!

Robby.

The Cold Red Eyes of Home

I published my first kindle post yesterday. The Cold Red Eyes of Home is a short story about a man who builds a robot and they have adventures. I chose this story as a test, to see how the publishing process works, but hope to follow soon with more titles. I'm working on a serial story called The Interrogators, and am looking into ways to have it also available as an audio book or podcast. Not sure about the details on that yet. I may publish a collection of essays at some point, if I can find enough of them about. Some of my favorites were written to the Robitron discussion list over the past eight years or so. Some spelunking may be in order to locate them. Luckily, there is a search feature on the messages there. On Amazon.com, you can download free kindle reader software for macs, and there is a free kindle reader for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. I found that useful to me for testing, but now I am interested in getting a kindle. The Barnes & Noble Nook is an interesting device as well. I guess at some point they become like so many remote controls lying about the house.

New Projects

I've got several new projects in the works right now. The main one is a series of short stories called The Interrogators, based on a couple of dreams I had about a steam punk "body snatchers" sort of thing, that I intend to write in serial form with music. I think it will take place around 1905, so may be post steam punk, just a little bit. Maybe no steam at all. It was a "golden" year of sorts, and that may be part of the stories. I have a couple of loose songs left over from my last album, that would be nice to do something with. I'm not sure if they are "singles" material or not. But I rediscovered them in my iTunes jukebox, and thought, "That was pretty good!" I have an acoustic guitar recording project coming up hopefully, and would be nice if that turned into more than one song. More about that later. There is a drummer attached to this, plays digital drum pads. That seems ideal to me. I may be doing a project using JFRED as a story teller, with incidental music accompaniment. It's for a FutureMusic Summit, but still not sure what the entrance to that requires, or if I can do it or not. I not grok in fullness. Robby.

Fans

It seems the Chinese are finally leaving me alone. For a year they dominated my web stats by downloading all my music files, and probably didn't understand a word I said. I kept rearranging things and removing all my songs, then making them only available for a donation, then free, but renamed. Eventually all my traffic disappeared. I am either bipolar or enjoy html editing. Possibly both, but not necessarily in that order. My doctor says it is in remission. I don't know how he would know, he does all the talking. I miss the Chinese.

Finally finished with the setup and distributing of Fabric and Dreams. Now you can get everything from 128k free MP3's to lossless versions in FLAC from our website at FluxOersted.Com. Coming in the next few weeks will be CD on demand from Amazon.com, but apparently it takes them some time to set that up. This makes my fifth offering from iTunes, but we're about to retire two of them, and consolidate our material somewhat. If you're even the least bit interested, you should check out Fabric and Dreams, it really is our best album since Inference Patterns. I didn't know until recently that our best selling single was "Timothy Leary's Dead." It's on The Visitor album. It is a weird and kooky track but I guess the name says it all.

I've been working on a new album titled, Fabric and Dreams composed of songs that I've written over the past year or so. I feel like this is some of my best work. Some of it was written under duress, during times of stress. Other parts were written using some of my latest software tools. It's been a good year for writing.

The entire album is available for free at FluxOersted.com. I decided to release it for free as a normal mp3 file, and then later to make higher resolution copies available in stores and from other pay-optional sites like bandcamp.com. Strangely, the artwork may take longer to finish than some of the songs.

I went the extra step to register the album with ASCAP though on my web page I am using a Creative Commons license so that people can do what they want with it. You can download it, share it, remix it, and nobody will complain, especially me.

Now, on with the show . . .

In the 1970's Radio Shack sold a Moog synthesizer that they branded as "Realistic MG-1 Concertmate." It is essentially the same synth as a Moog Taurus or the Rogue with a few differences. One of the more interesting features it has is an auto trigger that you control the frequency with the LFO. It also has a continuous filter setting that would be like playing a Juno 6 with hold button on.

I've got one of these and it has suffered the ages rather poorly. The plastic end caps were held on by hot glue and these have popped off or are loose. I swapped the actual keys with my Moog Prodigy to restore the Prodigy. So the MG-1 has some broken keys. At one point, I tried to lower the pitch by an octave, and inadvertently changed its tuning so that the frequency change between an octave was off.

I bought a nylon tuning kit consisting of a set of plastic rods that fit into the little groove of an electronic trimmer pot. I have been successful in re-tuning the MG-1, but it has some other problems keeping pitch, possibly from the old broken keyboard, or some component on the main circuit board I'm not sure.

I still really like sounds it makes, so I'll have to keep working on restoring it now that I've become reattached to it again.