Flashback #4: Fro the Ware & EDT Records.

Hexfix93 — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:44:58 +0000

*UPDATED, RE READ* Yes, Disease met Fro the ware when he was 15. It was through a bbs system, met on old forums talking about games. As teenagers, Fro the ware and Disease at one time ruled the Atari ST elite underground cracker scene in the USA as TOI(travesty Of idiots, a modern day pc version of a crew like this would be Razor 911 on the PC), we ran several bbs systems(private home computers set up to take calls on the modem, you would log in and you could download and upload files, or read the forums and use the messaging systems or play online text base games), wrote many documentation files for games, cracked games, and distro’d rare euro software to people in the usa, This lasted from 1989 to 1992. This was before VAC. Once Disease and some of the toi members got raided by the cops, toi was dead, Disease thought his life was over, so he started doing drugs and writing music like crazy, toxic coma and VAC were born out of this. Fro was a key part in VAC actually becoming known. Disease and Fro were the ones who recorded all the songs into the pc and made the cd burns, before this was even popular. Fro saved up and bought an expensive 2x cd burner, at the time they were like over 1 thousand dollars and were brand new. We recorded in the songs from a DAT machine. Fro also bought an expensive printer. So Disease and Fro copied and printed hundreds of cds, and cut out the lp covers by hand. over an hundred of each, fate, pestilence and neuralblastoma, these were sold at the local wax trax in down town Denver, we also made fliers, we sold about 100 + copies of each cdm We also branched out to isolation tank, and they started selling our home pressed cds. This was Electric Death Trip Records. It was a ton of work, Fro and i spent months many nights cutting out art and burning cds. This and posts from us on rec.music.industrial are what started VAC in the scene. This was the initial ball that rolled us onto the music scene. The funny thing is we did actually get attention this way before off beat records picked us up. In fact the guys that used to work at metropolis records used to make fun of VAC, as did a lot of the people on rec.music.industrial back in those early days, 1994-1996. Funny how things worked out in the end though. Metropolis would end up making us even more famous in the end. :) Fro was also a part of Toxic Coma. Fro stood by us through all the hard times back then and always helped us out. He also did the most work in electric death trip records, a label we all ran, cept he fronted the money for klinik, and suicide commando.

The first VAC lps were released on Electric Death Trip records before Off Beat Records pick VAC up. The first printed flyers that EDT made for VAC’s cds was hilarious, it was around christmas of 1995, Fro and Disease made this fucked up flyer with all these deformed babies, gross shit, and at the top of the page it said” MERRY FUCKING CHRISTMAS, FROM VELVET ACID CHRIST”. It was so foul. We had a lot of experience with flyers from the DJ days, we plastered them in parking lots at clubs, and at retail malls lol. This is how we sold our first records, with really foul fucked up flyers. EDT also released Pain Konsept, Suicide Commando, and Klinik. We tried really hard to get aghast view as well and lassigue bendthaus. We failed. EDT was supposed to be everyone in vac, plus hypostasis and fro. Once VAC got signed, Disease ended up doing tons of promotion for vac, and edt was left in the hands of everyone else, fro could not do it all by himself, so it eventually just vanished. Disease was also working with culture shock magazine at this time as a reviewer, the above add was for culture shock magazine, and because Disease worked for the magazine he got a lot of coverage for Velvet Acid Christ in culture shock magazine, another reason why vac got popular back then, we were in the biggest industrial music magazine a lot back then, that magazine was way better than industrial nation. EDT and Culture shock worked together as well, EDT was the ones who helped put together the included music cds for the magazine. The plan was to get VAC back on EDT, edt would fuse with culture shock but that never happened because culture shock vanished off the face of the earth over one weekend, and no one even knows what happened. Our only distribution was through metropolis records, and we didn’t have enough releases to be taken seriously by the other big distributors back then. The sad thing is, that Disease and Fro were the only ones who did anything for it. No one else cared. This was part of the beginning of the end for the people who did not help. This is where the early bickerings and fighting broke out with voevod and baphomet. The only people who were promoting VAC and edt were Disease and Fro. Voevod ran off to do his side projects, baphomet was allergic to work. Fro and Disease had to do it all, with a little help from hypostasis now and then. It’s a shame edt was a cool label and had a lot of potential, but a lack of dedicated staff killed it, and no one would step up to help. :( In the end it is why i chose the name of the vac media blog to edtm, to remember what was, and how we began. Electric Death Trip Records was what broke VAC onto the scene first. EDT was also the first label to release Suicide Commando in the USA with their Contamination LP. Then off beat, then metropolis. The funny thing is this, after fate, pest and nerual, VAC broke up, only Disease was promoting the records and writting new vac material. It wasn’t until VAC got signed to off beat that the former members even cared about VAC, and once they saw how little it made, they cared less and less and less. Once they left. VAC broke out with Fun with knives and changed everything. At one point Disease was thinking about putting toxic coma out on EDT, but that was a short lived fantasy, the world will never be ready for toxic coma. Over and out Disease Factory, aka Hexfix93.

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New VAC Shirts!

Hexfix93 — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:42:55 +0000

Click thei mage above, or Click Here To buy them! and BTW, please leave a comment if you buy one.. comment here that is…

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VAC NEWS: July 2nd 2k10. New Gear, Apple Sucks, New VAC.

Hexfix93 — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 08:43:24 +0000

The above is a cool graphic a FAN on Facebook made me. I dig it. Where to start? Let me think, oh yeah. New VAC, I am shooting to get it all done by the fall. I have to really work my ass off to meet that. It’s so much harder in my old age to come up with new riffs and new songs. I promise, this lp is not going to be acoustic. It wont be that techno either. I think its going to be dance industrial. I want more rage in the sound, intolerance, and disgust. I am way more angry these days and I hope to make an angry record. I am listening to Bathory, old wumpscut, old legendary pink dots, old madonna, and old b52s. LOL strange influences this time.

Gear and how it is shaping how we sound. So yes, I have sold a lot of stuff and bought a lot of stuff. I moved away from the modern daw, and I am working the way I used to work, with a good stable live seq, sequencing all my synths live through a mixer. I mix on the mixer, then bounce down to two track master, this is it. I am now using a pc with wavelab to record my master tracks to, with a lynxtwo l22 audio card. I sequence with cubase 2.8 on a old p3 PC with windows 98, tight, and works great with my amt8 via serial. Bought 2x Bass stations for bass and lead duties, Using an Virus A for various things, jp8080 for strings and various things, korg trinity plus with prophecy, and trinitry rack, for atmospheres and drums, Boss DR660 like i used on old old vac up to cotd, also bought back an mks-50 and programming the fuck out of it, love this thing so much, used it on old old vac up to cotd as well. emu e6400 ultra for samples, drums, and vocals, roland r8m rack for drums, boss me 50 for vocal fx, and kurzweil ksp8 for vocal fx, drum fx, synth fx, onyx 1620 mixer, love it. I am able to get my drums aggressive with the r8m and dr 660 and sampler going through the ksp8, I can make it sound brutal again, I could not get that with the software I was using, battery and kontakt and halion. There is something magical about this hardware that just makes me able to write good drums from scratch that I cant get on anything else. I will review my new gear soon. I am really loving my new setup and new synths.

Why did I leave apple? I sold my ipad, I sold my macbook pro, I am in the process of selling all my apple software. Yes, Steve Jobs pissed me off that bad. The censorship king on the apps store, tells us what apps we can run, kicks in doors of companies and the press who get insider or leaked info like Watergate politics by nixon back in the day. Steve jobs to me is the new hitler of the tech world. I hate itunes, because their business model is destroying music, they put all the mom and pa stores out of business, well there the employees knew the music, they would hang posters and feature all kinds of things to help promote bands. Now there is itunes, and they don’t advertise shit, there is no way to promoted yourself there, or anywhere on the internet anymore so you no longer get random buyers. I could go on and on about this, but they need to make and advertising system for the artists and the different genres of music. But they wont. Any how, the iphone is a joke, the new one has a lot of tech problems. I don’t need a control phreak telling me what I can and cannot do with my ipad, or my mac. On osx I thought it would fix my midi, it did kind of, but it was still fucked up. No longer use midi on new computers because none of them can do it right. So that is no long a need. I wanted to play games, and to get a decent gaming rig on a mac, its 3000 bucks after tax. No thanks. I built a pc for about a grand, and windows 7 is so much better than the older windows, sure i like osx still, but it had its issues as well. Like not letting you back out of directories in load menus, not remembering window locations, the file browser sucks. Windows 7, man i love it. More than OSX. Never thought I would say that. But its true, vista made me go mac, windows 7 made me go pc again. Any way enough about apple. I’m done with apple. May that fascist company go down in flames, at least microsoft is not censoring companies and what they can publish and use on their os. Sure, I hate microsoft for all the underhanded bs they pulled back in the day, and their monopoly politics, and man that xbox 360, I still think they should get out of the console market and let the people who know how to build reliable good hardware like sony, nintendo and sega rule the market again. Hell, Napalm, Disease Out.

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I am now adding new articles weekly on the media blog, Reviews, and shining the spotlight on things I like. VAC writes all of these reviews and articles..
NEW ARTICLES:Music: Bathory: Under The Sign Of The Black Mark, Hexfix93′s Take., Model: Drucilla Graves, Video games: Hexfix93′s take on the industry as of July 2k10. Post E3.………….

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Velvet Acid Christ Flashback #3: We have to know.

Hexfix93 — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:13:47 +0000

A weird night, after making We have to see we have to know and putting the finishing touches on it, Disease was greeted by a friend who had been in la visiting with at some record label out in California, she got a bunch of cds from them. Juno reactor transmissions was what she brought back, all day after listening to we have to see we have to know, later that night we dropped acid and listened to juno reactor’s “transmissions”. This would forever change Velvet Acid Christ. This is the moment that sparked and first lead up to the creation of Calling of the Dead. After this, Voevod showed up really late, and took over the CD player, and threw in some of the most wild and insane shit ever heard. Praxis: Sacrifist. “I was tripping so hard, and this music was like a blow torch to my fucking brain”, said Disease. Praxis forever changed how Toxic Coma would be written. This was a huge night in VAC’s past, these two lps resonated with the VAC/Toxic Coma crew and became a main inspiration for the act. “I remember the hallucinations, with juno reactor it was like mars bending into Buddha, aliens dancing on insects on purple water, the planets were dancing on chem trails, and the faces in the patterns agreed that this music was the future.” said Disease. “Praxis on LSD, one of the most terrifying fucked up things that can be done to the mind, it was like mental rape. Especially really loud in the dark. I kept seeing headless chickens attacking priests, holes in the universe being punched through by huge hands and people being grabbed and pulled through violently, Like the world was being eaten alive by trans dimensional beings that had huge translucent fangs and arms that could stretch for miles and miles, people’s skin just melting off, talking skeletons, real night of the living dead shit.” Said Disease.

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NEW ARTICLES:Music: Visage: Fade to Grey: The Best of Visage, Hexfix9’s Take. , DJS/CLUB EVENTS: DJ PsyOp Interviewed by VAC @ The Mercury @ Machinewerks @ Seattle WA, Games: PS3: Red Dead Redemption, Hexfix93’s take. , Model: blackfantastix. ………….

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Velvet Acid Christ Flashback #2: The Bottle and the Head.

Hexfix93 — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:41:41 +0000

1998. VAC finishes Calling of the dead and sets out to tour. Band turmoil, only one member left is Disease Factory. This all led to the 1998 tour, in the last minute Disease found two keyboardists, Thorsten Stroht from Klinik and Ingo Bitez from Kalte Farben. Screen Shot above. This tour was strange as it was VAC’s first. Disease alone in europe while everyone around him spoke german and hardly ever spoke english. Suicide commando and pierre point where on this tour with VAC. At the end of this tour, VAC played WTG in 1998. The last show. So Disease decides to take a whole shit ton of drugs and drinks half of a bottle of vodka for good measure. Disease and torty pass out big joints to the front row. LOL. Disease was so high and dehydrated, he has all kinds of water on the stage by his monitors in the front. After the first couple of songs, Disease was dying of thirst, went to find his water and soda at the front of the stage but they were gone, he ask the audience who stole his water, someone in the front row handed back one of the plastic 1 liter bottles, it was empty. So Disease threw it back into the crowd. Vac finishes set. Back stage Disease was hallucinating at this point, there was this guy that looked like a mummy with blood on his face. He had his head all bandaged up, Disease thought he was a fan dressing up like ogre at first. Disease kept staring at him, till finally stefan herwig comes over and says, “you did this”. Disease was in shock and clueless and had no idea that he had thrown the bottle hard enough to hurt someone like that. It was an empty light 1 liter plastic bottle. Disease Apologizes and says, “I was not trying to hurt anyone, I didn’t think I even threw it that hard”. VAC paid the person off. Put a big dent in VAC funds at the time. Tour made no money as a result. This made VAC really poor at the time. Still today some people in eastern Germany think vac is a psychopath band that has been investigated by the government and beat up their fans. Once something like this happens, you get a reputation, it wasn’t helping that all the interviews VAC did at the time were all done on heavy amounts of drugs totally saying crazy shit joking around like, they might drive through a church in a pick up truck shooting nuns and preists with shotguns. LOL, shit like that doesn’t help your street cred. Hahahaah. This was before all the mass shootings in the media. It’s a shame people do not understand our dark sense of humor. They were kidding around…………………………………………………………….

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Velvet Acid Christ Flashback #1: The legend of Orange Disaster.

Hexfix93 — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:42:34 +0000

Sometime in 1992. Some idiot got drunk and spilled orange juice and vodka on our only keyboard that we made everything on, our roland w-30 sampler. That good old 12 bit sampler. Sounded good and was reliable, we ran it through this mixer from the 70s that was mono, we faked stereo with the monitor channel. This is when VAC was this really fat guy named }{%{}%(censored), and this freak who called himself Disease Factory. We spent the next week taking apart the entire synth and manually cleaning by hand every part to get the sticky crap off, all the buttons stuck when pressed and the keyboard mis fired. This was one of the most depressing moments in VAC history, because this was the only keybaord we could afford and owned at this time.

I can remember wondering if we would ever get it to work again, i remember tediously cleaning everything, and putting it together and then it still stuck, we had to take it apart and put it back together three fucking times, clean each part by hand, and there were hundreds of parts, it was a nighmare. This drunk person was not even in VAC at the time. These were the beginings, this was the era of oblivion interface, the first VAC ever made. I was a psychopath then. I remembered wanting to beat someones ass so fucking bad. Good thing i didn’t. It might of voided VAC all together if I had. This event lead to many things in vac changing for the better in the end. This guy who ruined our sampler was one of toxic coma’s best members, who would later on join the vac crew. He more than made up for it later. We did get the keyboard to work again, but my access to it was short lived after that event when the big fat dude i was in the band with decided to break into houses, i had no idea, i would of never let him if i had known. He was doing this all along to fund His drug habbits. He got caught, went to jail. The funny thing was, that we even tried and failed to steel gear to fund VAC. We were all poor at the time, doing lsd and smoking a lot of pot listening and trying to create some of the weirdest music out there. I looked to strange to get a job then, this was way before hot topic, nin, and manson made goth trendy. After I cleaned the W-30, and on the day my band mate left forever, i wrote “Cease to Understand, click to listen”, in 1992 which was about relationships deteriorating and ceasing, and later in 2008 became the main theme of my last release “The Art of Breaking Apart”. Funny how things work. END……..
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I am now adding new articles weekly on the media blog, Reviews, and shining the spotlight on things I like. VAC writes all of these reviews and articles..
NEW ARTICLES: Games: PS3: Final Fantasy 13, Hexfix93’s take. , Music: CJ Bolland: Analog Theatre, Hexfix93’s take. , Model: Pinkeye , Games: Ipad: Mirrors Edge, Hexfix93’s take. …….

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Apple: Ipad 16gb wifi model, Hexfix93’s Review.

Hexfix93 — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:20:47 +0000

Why did I take the plunge and become an early adoptee on the iPad? I was so skeptical of most of it’s features when they announced it. Over time I kept my eyes on the matrix synth web blog and saw all these ipod touch apps and iPad apps that made me really go wow, cool drum machines and soft synths with touch controls, no mouse crap like computers offer. I also always wanted a touch gaming console as well, but the nintendo ds is too much fluffy crap and kids stuff to bare, plus the tiny screens. I was very skeptical of apples mp3 players because I always hated their sound quality on the iPods. I have really expensive in ear headphones. I would always go to the stores and demo the units, and sony’s walkmans always came out on top in my tests. Not to mention the fact i hate using iTunes, and not being able to browse my mp3s by folder and files like on a computer. These things kept me away from the iPod touch. The video below shows me messing around with the Ielectribe, putting together a beat, tweaking it, running it through my EMU E6400 Sampler’s filters.

So what was it that made me impulsively buy the iPad? I decided to go to the apple store on the launch day. I have been wanting another laptop to use around the house so I am not always in the studio. I mostly wanted it to read, surf the net, and write up reviews and things. I also wanted the iPod touch for the games and nothing else. I also wanted the iPod touch for some of the audio apps I had seen over the last year. Especially the drum sequencer type drum machines. Very cool with the touch controls as are the soft synths. The idea of being able to be any where with my headsets banging out beats with automation and good sound quality really appealed to me. I am working on the new LP already and didn’t want to wait for the next gen ipad. I picked up the unit, loved how it felt in my hands, then I plugged my headphones in, listened to the iPod part while surfing the web and noticed how the sound quality was a lot better, when over to the ipod touch and listened to that too, the iPod touch sounded worse. DACs are a big deal to me.

I was amazed at how fast it was browsing the web, that this 1ghz arm processor felt faster than my 2.16 duo core MacBook pro. So this is life with out flash? A fast browser? Bring on html5. Death to flash, that slow inefficient processor hog. The swipe gestures you use to scroll the screen is so fast and responsive, as is pinching to zoom in and out. Some times on web pages, I would have to zoom in to hit the link I wanted but only when i held the iPad in the thin horizontal view angle. Launching apps is weird, sometimes it will think I am swiping instead of selecting. Typing is great actually, except if you need numbers all the time, then its a major issue, so doing math stuff in a text editor is really annoying because you have to switch back and forth to the number mode or letter mode. No arrow keys to move the cursor around either. So you have to hit the pad on the text and hold and then this magnifying glass thing pops up and you move that around then it lets you drag the cursor to where you need to go, this is kind of annoying.

I plan on reviewing games and audio apps on this device for the VAC site and e EDT site. Games were lack luster at first. I first downloaded this diablo like dungeon rpg. It had this fake analog stick control, and it sucked. It wasn’t for a few days that I realized that I could us tap controls on that game, and that instantly made it better. Then i downloaded the need for speed game, and it looks ok, kind of a bad frame rate, and is fun and controls well by tilting the iPad to steer it like a steering wheel. kind of cool. It wasn’t until I downloaded Flightcontrol HD, and Mirrors edge for the ipad that I really was kind of impressed with it as a gaming device. Mirrors edge looks great and is fun to play. Flightcontrol HD is a simple game where you draw flight paths with your fingers to land air planes. If two planes collide its game over. This is surprisingly fun, I saw the review for this on the Iphone via AREA5 and thought I’d give the iPad hd version a shot. It didn’t disappoint. The games are really cheap compared to DS and PSP and this is a real plus for me. Comparing the games on iPad isn’t fair though, the iPad games are shorter on average than a psp or ds game. So far as a gaming platform, it has potential, but it’s not even close to worth it for that yet. The video below shows me messing around with the ipad and all the stuff I have for it.

Overall how do I feel about the iPad?
Music Tools:
Audio apps kick major ass, the Ielectribe software drum machine from korg is worth the price of the iPad alone $9.99, a used electribe costs a little less used on the second hand market but I feel the software with the ipads DAC sounds better to me than the old electribe I used to own. Not to mention it’s easier to use with the drag menus. Other apps are coming as well. Being able to control a daw with it via Bluetooth is really cool. Using it as a drum pad, mixer controls. This thing is amazing for this kind of thing. Seriously, using the Ielectribe is way better than using the hardware. Easy to name stuff, and i love turning knobs with the touch screen, takes a little getting used to, but its kick ass like real hardware finally as far as the interface goes. For Audio apps, I give is a 9 out of 10.

Internet Device:
I do hate flash but the lack of flash on the iPad really is a hinderance if you want to look at sites like hulu and fail blog and media based sites that use a lot of flash players for video. I really like the touch interface for web browsing, so as long as you are reading sites its fine. This is a double edged sword, great interface but a lack of content due to the lack of flash support, so no flash games on Facebook or myspace, i hate those any way. I want html5 to take over because it is open source and flash is not. So in the end I think if enough ipads sell, flash could come to an end, and I couldn’t be happier about that. The lack of a good free chat i’m chat program that runs in the background is a big minus as well. Internet features gets a 7 out of 10.

Media:
Too big to be an effective iPod player, even though it has way better sound quality over the iPod touch. The iPod portion lacks cover flow as well, WTF apple? The screen is 4:3, not wide screen, so movies have a huge black bar, that really sucks. I think the 4:3 is a throw back to old computer screens, which i prefer for web viewing honestly, but for movies, epic fail. Media gets a 6 out of 10.

Games:
It’s to early to say weather or not it will succeed. I will say the fake analog controls have got to go, they are awful. The games here now are um, ok, not great, not terrible. kind of generic and no where near sony or nintendo, but way ahead of the zune and the other phone companies touch phones. The. Video a card in this reminds me of old pc stuff, like a few generations back. Reminds me of a dreamcast on roids in higher resolution. Nothing ground breaking other than the battery life. As a gaming platform I give this a 6 out of 10. I must say though, I see a lot of potential for god games and touch games.

Apps:
The lack of a number pad really ruins this for many types of applications. I have not tried pages, or iworks. It’s on here though so that really says to me that this is serious, because the windows media apps for phones are awful. These apps are very polished compared to the competition. The PDF stuff on this is garbage. I could not even. Read the manual for my access virus snow on this thing. They have a lot of bugs to fix on this thing, even the text app it comes with is buggy and has word wrap issues when typing large text files, I am experiencing this as I type this. It gets stuff wrong but the stuff it gets right is spot on, the Marvel comics app is amazing. The Book store and reader is great. There is a lot of promise here. I give the apps for the iPad a 7 out of 10. Lots of potential, but not there yet.

The Hardware:
The screen is gorgeous, this is what attracted me to it in the store. WOW. It’s a little heavy, but not a problem for me. Playing certain games does get tiring tho, because of holding it up, its not heavy, but its heavy enough that after an hour, its tiring. The motion controls are great. The touch interface is great, typing is pretty good, the keyboard is ok, but having to hit a key to switch the keypad to numbers and symbols is really annoying. Ok for text, but bad for typing in numbers. The battery life is amazing, i can use it all day and still have charge the next day for a while before I have to charge it, more than 10 hours and 1 month on stand bye. WOW. The interface is very responsive. No camera, so what, I don’t care, bad viewing angle because of how you hold the device, camera up your nose is not a good thing. I give the hardware a 9 out of 10.

Overall:
Apple is wrong, this is not revolutionary. It is good, but fails in many areas. It is great because finally we have a tablet that reminds me of star trek. The lack of being able to multi task apps is a major downer(yes it’s coming, but not till fall). It lacks flash, needs a bigger screen for wide screen two work. It’s not perfect. I must say though, It has apps other devices don’t like some of the games, Iworks, and Ielectribe that are all priced just right. This is a multi media device that has some functionality of computers. This is not a laptop. This is more like a Ipod, nintendo ds, Sony psp mixed into one device, with a big screen and a touch of osx thrown in. Does it live up to apple’s hype? sort of. If you like audio apps, or iphone apps, its a good thing. If not, you want and internet laptop device? Stay very very very far away from this thing.

What does apple need to do to fix this? We need flash, we need directional control, and screen stretching functions, in word press(no arrow keys), i cannot do any real editing because of this on the ipad. If it was not for me liking the ielectribe so much, i might actually sell this thing. I only like this 100% for the audio apps, everything else needs a ton of work. They have to fix this shit! I will say it though, I really love this thing, the Ielectribe, taking beats any where with 10 hr battery life, man this alone makes it worth it for me. I do use it for media, internet and everything despite thinking it is kind of weak at some things. By no means is this a bad review. Its a good device, but it is far from perfect. I give this overall a 6.955555 out of 10.

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Sequencing: Atari ST Cubase 2.0 :)

Hexfix93 — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:17:44 +0000

The Atari STe is mono chrome in 640×480 max res, 8mhz, yes, 8mhz motorola 68000 processor, with 720k floppy drive and no hard drive, external mouse and monitor, a space hog. Doesn’t make noise though. Cubase 2.0 is a dream. If you don’t have a lot of gear daisy chained this is a great sequencer. It’s tight, records midi in very well, it’s midi only. The timing is super tight with drums, if you put the drums on midi channel 1 and bass on midi 2, and put the hardware for the drums and bass 1 and 2 on the midi out chain, the drums and bass will be super tight. You can throw 170 bpm 32nd and 64th notes at it and doesn’t choke. It’s amazing. If you are doing aggressive electronic, high temp, or glitchy stuff with hardware, these are the best sequencers. No PC or modern MAC can match it.

I got this Atari STE off ebay for 160 plus shipping, so around 200 bucks. It’s a 4 mb expanded version. I had to buy a cable off ebay from the UK to let me use a standard vga flat screen monitor that does 640×480 mono. That cable was about 30 bucks plus shipping. I looked and looked for an Atari ST of any kind with cubase with midex output expander to give me more midi outs. I seem to be able to find Notator with Unitor more often on EBAY, but no matter how hard i have tried to use it, I hate notator, I hate the interface. I prefer cubase in every way. When a midex does pop up for the atari, it is always in europe :(. I have not tested the midi with a unitor or midiex on the atari st. So I am not sure it is as tight. One of the things that really matters when you have a lot of gear is having more than one midi out. Buy any more than 4 outs is pushing it, 5 to 8 midi outs on the 8 midi out boxes usually have sloppy timing. The first 4 are solid midi timing wise. It is not good to choke up one midi out with tons of notes, this will screw up your drums and bass timing. The midex on the atari would be good because its 4 total outs i think. I have not tested them so I am not sure.

My midi timing test with cubase 2.0 yielded 2ms max and 1ms average with my high hat test at 16th notes. So this is as tight as the ASQ-10, and a Little Tighter than Cubase 2.8 with a serial interface on the high hat 16th note test. Cubase 2.8 seems to have quite a few more options than 2.0. 2.0 is really stripped down compared to 2.8. Who cares though because the timing and recording is so damn good. This thing records me playing drums better than cubase 2.8 on the PC, but just a little bit. Still, the ASQ-10 is better than both at recording. One thing that I prefer on my ASQ10 for sure is the ability in loop mode to delete the keys played in to the recorded out, with out deleting anything else when recording in loop mode. Like if i record the bass kick, snare and high hats, and i want to change the snare, i hold erase and then hold do the key or pad for the snare i want to delete, and it only deletes the snare. This is so cool. On Cubase, you hit the B key while in record loop, and it deletes everything since you hit record and starts over with out having to stop and delete it manually. This is great, and was lacking on the new cubase SX and beyond, but I prefer the ASQ10 way of deleting while in real time record loop mode. Although there is no way on the asq10 to delete all unless you hold down all the keys you played. Cubase 2.0 has a phrase synth, and midi FX like echo. I never used them though. I prefer to just write my own arps and phrases. If you like to run outboard gear, and only have like 3 synths. This is all you need. If you run hardware and have 8 to 10 synths, you need something with more outputs, either a midex for the atari ST (which I cannot find), or an ASQ10, OR Cubase or Logic on an older windows 95 setup with a serial interface. For slim downed gear set ups, Atari ST is perfect. Records great, and is tight as hell on playback. I Give this a 10 out 10 if it meets your needs.

Cubase 2.8 with serial on win 98 is tight(you have to put the comptuer in 256 colors, and tweak the os a little), but not this tight. Atari is slightly tighter than the ASQ10, but by a hair. These three sequencers kick the crap out of any modern software on the market today. So if you want tight timing on your hardware like I do. This is the only solution.

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Sequencers: Cubase 2.8 on Windows 98. Hexfix93’s take.

Hexfix93 — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:47:11 +0000

Now I have a hard choice to make. So I bought an atari STE, a Dell Pentium 2 laptop with windows 98, and an ASQ10. I used Cubase 2.8 on fun with knives and remember it being tight. I remember decypher having fast arpeggios that sound tight. I remember moments of that lp being really tight. This is why it sold well, this is why it got the club play, it was the midi I am sure of it. I used cubase 2.8 with a pentium 1 processor first. Even on the 486 dx 66 mhz, and it was tight. I used a motu micro express that had a printer port interface that was serial. I tweaked windows 98 for optimum performance. This is the midi only version of this application back then. Using this again brought back memories, it’s just like the atari version I used way back in the day. Has so much more midi control and features than any modern sequencer you can buy for the MAC and PC. Was it tight? Does it deliver like I remember it?

I swore to hate microsoft to the end of time. Now that I have this old laptop that I bought off ebay for 50 dollars plus shipping I am having fond memories, it is all coming back to me, all the old games I played when I first got my pc back in the day, like magic carpet, fall out, adventure games like space quest and leisure suit larry, doom, quake, what fond memories. A lot of the games then ran in dos and were a pain in the ass to set up your autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Still I remember how much I loved my PC back in the day. Those were the days of BBS systems(personal computers in homes set up to accept modem calls, with a database of file downloads, message boards and online text networked games, a totally different time in computer history that most young people know nothing about), the internet was a baby then. Piracy was not the big issue it is today then. I realize what a magical time it was then to own a PC. PCs were more of a pain in the ass back then, but the rewards were very high.

So did this deliver on my new set up, my p2 dell laptop with amt8 via serial port set to max baud, no flow control, with a tweaked windows 98? IN SPADES! OMG it is close to how the atari was but I have 8 ins and outs instead. My new test with this set up on this pc was 3MS max 2MS average of midi jitter(my 16th note test of hi hats or bass line, mono). I am so damn happy. I have a hard drive, usb memory sticks, cd, self contained unit with display and mouse. I have p2 233mhz processor, 80mb of memory, 2 gb hard drive, and 13 inch display and 800×600 resolution.

Does Cubase 2.8 record what I play in accurately? YES, close to how the atari does. Doesn’t drop notes, and is really manageable. I think the ASQ10 is a little better though. The asq10 only has 2ms of jitter max on my test. So it is a tad bit tighter and a lot harder to use. In some ways I do prefer the asq10, it has the swing. Cubase 2.8 isn’t as funky. It’s still really musical though. I am now leaning towards Cubase 2.8 on this laptop. The interface is just so much better. So many edit modes, List(like grid), Score, Piano roll and a ton of midi things that other seqs don’t have. One thing though, notator on the Atari ST is like 1MS of jitter on this test. It is the tightest seq ever. Don’t believe me, go listen to the “virus ep” by front line assembly, or caustic grip. That is all done on notator and it is tight as hell.

So what happened? I remember it well, it was on TTG, I upgraded to cubase vst 5, this was when they introduced “AUDIO” into the application. This is when cubase started to suck, not record midi right and have really sloppy timing. It got even worse when they release Cubase SX. This is when usb took over, and they stripped most of the midi functions out of the application, it was more like another program than cubase at this point and basically remains the same to this day. It doesn’t record midi right, especially with USB midi interfaces and controllers, its a joke. The combination of windows XP and its background services(much of that didn’t exist in win 98) really made midi timing even worse on top of USB. USB writes and reads in bursts, not a steady stream like serial or DMA or pci does. Still, I even bought an rme fireface 800, and hdsp9652 and used the midi on that, and it was still sloppy, so it was not just USB. It was windows, and OSX that have so many background tasks running in the os, that midi is thrown to the dogs. This has ruined my interest in making electronic music over the last few years, because I could never get my hardware to sound right with the sloppy midi on playback and record. Seriously, making aggressive music with lousy timing does not work. In speed metal it is timing and speed that makes it so mean, its the same for industrial to the 9th degree, without real hardware and good timing, the aggression is lost. You can hear that in the last 3 VAC records. I bitched and moaned so hard on the cubase forums, and so many other echo’d my girpes and showed the midi to be faulty as I did. On cubase sx, it was 5 to 10 ms on the best days, on the worst sometimes up to 20 to 32 ms of jitter, horrid. If you put a big system load on modern pcs, get tons of audio running, tons of midi, tons of plugin fx, and plug in instruments, the external midi timing goes to hell, and it records midi in really bad. If you think I am crazy or the only one who freaks out about midi timing, just look up what BT and Vince Clark have to say about MIDI on google.

Most people think they suck at playing when they write with logic and cubase and all the modern daws of today. I think if they got this version of cubase, or an ASQ10, or and atari, they would see the difference and understand what a lot of people like me are complaining about. Timing is crucial in music. These jack of all trade and master of none music applications fall short on sound quality, external midi timing, and midi recording. I am over expecting software to do it all. These do it all devices suck. The dedicated devices and software, were they do one thing, and do it really well tend to sound the best and record and sequence the best. When we were making lust for blood, we constantly had to edit our midi recordings, it would stop the flow of work, this is how it was on hex angel, this is how it was on the art of breaking apart. It made things take longer, it made us uninspired after a while. Always having to fix the poorly recorded midi. NO MORE. I refuse to put up with it ever again. I went to the mac thinking it would be better with logic, and it was, until i started recording the audio, and the tracks would not line up and everything was slightly out of sync. My conclusion, pre audio cubase is way better at midi than new cubase. Win95, win98 with cubase 2.8 is great for live midi seq and composing. I cannot say that about anything I have used since on modern computers. Oh, and I think this is what Astral projection, the super tight trance band uses still. I give this a 10 out of 10.

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Bye, Bye to my best friend.

Hexfix93 — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:10:09 +0000

I loved you so much. I will miss you every day of my life.

Zyden, rest in peace, you were the best dog in the world.

2005 – 2010.

To young to die. I wish i could of moved long ago, these neighbors are bastards. He was given decon or something maybe, he acted and bled out like it. But, maybe he had a genetic disorder too the doctors told me. I cannot believe he could go from fine to horrid in 3 days. The transfusion and vit k shots didn’t work, he started bleeding out last night. Nothing could be done, he was pissing blood and shitting blood. I don’t feel like doing anything. I miss him so much. I planned on running with him this summer like we used to when I was raw. He was my walk running buddie. I really miss him. He was so cute. He made me happy.

My heart is crushed. I’m devastated.

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