Cycling

It’s been an interesting year, so far. I’ve ridden a few centuries, and even completed the 160-mile Ride Across INdiana. I’ve ridden faster, and covered much greater distances, than ever before. All of this leads me to ask: what now?

I’ve given some thought to pursuing even longer distance rides, either through Randonneuring or other channels. And I have to admit, longer distances do sound appealing. For a while it felt like I was trying to see just how far I could go (literally).

But, the thing that I didn’t really consider, going into the longer rides, is that not only do the long events themselves take up a huge chunk of time, the training it takes to be able to do them is even more time-consuming.  It seems a few of the more hardcore local riders ride centuries on at least a weekly basis, if not more. For me, I think that would be physically doable, but it would leave me drained all the time, and I wouldn’t have time to spend with my beautiful wife, or doing anything else. I also think it would cease to be fun, if I approached riding that way.

After RAIN, I debated finding a double century or something else to build up to. But instead I found my riding tapering off a bit. Aside from commuting, I’ve been doing less riding during the week, and my weekend rides have mostly been shorter. And you know what? I’m having a blast!

Ultimately, cycling is a hobby. I’m glad I focused on it enough to do RAIN, but I need to find some balance. I need to spend more time with my beautiful wife, and our dog, and the rest of my family. And I also want to spend time on my other hobbies … especially writing music.

Music

You might ask, “What music?” I originally started this blog to chronicle my music-writing. I used to make electronic music, on a regular basis. Cycling just took over, and I haven’t written any music, or written about music, for quite a while. I miss it, and I’m going to start making music again. If you want to check out my music, listen to the album I made back in 2006, Elements (it’s free). There’s more where that came, which I will find a good way to share soon.

What does this mean?

Cycling-wise, I still intend to ride a lot, and probably even do centuries on a semi-regular basis. For right now, at least, I have no intention of pursing anything much longer than that, unless it takes the form of a multi-day tour. I’m not really scaling back my cycling much, except to return it to normal levels before I started training for RAIN.

And hopefully, you’ll see some new music from me soon. You might also see some music-related posts popping up around here. If they don’t interest you, ignore them. Or, you can always read only my bicycling posts, if you prefer.

I’ll leave you to ponder this hilarity: Ambient Sequencer AS-606.

Sarah and I were at Kmart last night, and I looked around the toy section to see if they had any cool toys that I could use for music-making purposes. I’ve been on a circuit bending kick, or at least I’m trying to learn how to do some circuit bending. Circuit bending is taking existing devices and messing up their circuits to get them to do different things, such as changing the pitch, adding effects, making glitchy sounds, etc. It’s generally done to toys, although ones from the 80s-early 90s are best, since newer ones often have all the circuitry on a single chip.

Anyway, I found this awesome toy, a “Zoundz,” made by Zizzle. It was on sale for $15, marked down from $49.99. The idea is, there’s a white surface with three “hot spots” in which you place various “pawns.” Each pawn makes a different sound, and will play different melodies or beats depending on which hot spot you put it on. The hot spots also light up/blink in various colors. You can also adjust some effects, and using the cube pawn, you can record 5 seconds of your own audio. You can also plug in a mic or iPod and play it through the Zoundz. You can see a video of a Zoundz in action on their site or in this YouTube video (not mine).

The Zoundz is pretty cool as-is, but of limited utility for making music. It comes with pre-programmed loops (except the recordable cube). I hope that I can find a way to hack this thing to play my own sounds, allowing me to use the pawns to control it. I haven’t looked inside the device yet, but this seems a little ambitious to me at the moment. I definitely need to tackle some easier projects first.

I’m looking forward to the arrival of the Barbie Karaoke Machine I am getting from eBay, as it’ll be a fun circuit bending target, and hopefully a learning experience.

I’ve already had some circuit-bending success, adding audio outputs to a cheap keyboard I got at Wal-mart, and doing some semi-successful experiments with this old equipment I bought at an antique shop. It appears to be a Dictograph from the WWII era, and would have been used for eavesdropping/spying. It has several elements that are either speakers or microphones, which I am hoping to use as mics. I got one of them to work (sort of) already, although I had to yell to make it pick up my voice. It had a great boxy sound, and I’d love to use it for something, so hopefully I can get it working a bit better.

Well, February Album Writing Month is over now, but before the end of the month, Halaka posted one of our recording sessions as a FAWM double album. It’s over an hour and a half in length, and so requires two CDs if you burn it. You can download the tracks from The Margarine Committee’s Unauthorized Business Plan. You can also stream the entire double album (you’ll still be able to choose certain songs to listen to).

I played smileyface synthguitar and synth proper for this session, and you can hear numerous screw-ups on my part, but also some good parts, I think. I even played a few cool guitar lines, which is pretty good given that I’m no guitarist.

Some things that I think are highlights are Henry the Waste of an Ape, Weeping Widows, and Dour Digital Delay (which play as something of a trilogy to me). Dour Digital Delay probably has some of my best synth playing on it.

The more I look at the track listing, the more I realize that I like most of this stuff, so it’s hard to say what else is the best. I guess I’d have to say that the death metal Margarine in the Road is pretty awesome, Kattan is Unable to Locate the Musical Pulse with an Illuminable Battery-Operated Hardware Device is pretty funky, I am the Mackerel just plain rocks, and Cock Rock City is hilarious.

Seriously, though, I recommend you just listen to the whole thing. You’ll be a better person for it.