“The Slash story is exactly the way I remember it. Dug this photo out of the archives, circa 1992.”

My brother posted this to my Facebook wall yesterday, after I posted my April 15th story

That photo conjures up some great memories. He was probably teaching me to play The Lemon Song or Radar Love or something else equally awesome. That was his bedroom at the time. He’d later move out and it would become my bedroom. Those guitars both eventually became mine as well. I owe him a lot. A lot.

joshualapierre:

ENO

Oh man. Eno playing an EMS VCS3.

That synthesizer single handedly steered me away from music education and into composition and performance. My alma mater has (had?) one in their music studio and, as the only student at the college who had any interest in taking Intro to Electronic Music, I was given free reign to play with it and all the other great vintage gear in the studio (tape machines, Yamaha DX7 IIFD, some primitive orchestral sampler MIDI box… all kinds of great inspiring stuff). All that gear, combined with the realization that I just didn’t feel comfortable standing in front of a classroom full of kids, led me to give up on music education (though I still earned the degree).

I would spend, quite literally, all night locked alone in that studio playing with the VCS3. That joystick was badass and the routing matrix was a much better solution to patching than the cables typical of other modular synths, and the Ring Modulator was brilliant.

I still miss cranking the volume up, manually syncing those three oscillators, patching them into the filter, and slowly sweeping through its frequency range. I swear the whole music building would vibrate.

“Sccchhhhweeeeeoooooooooooouuuuuuuhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmm”

That tactile control of synthesis - the feeling of the knobs and dials and switches in your fingers - is something I’ll never forget. Just looking at this gif I can still remember how smoothly those 30 year old pots turned, with just the right amount of pressure and resistance so that you actually had to put some effort into the action. Goddamn. I need to contact them and see if they still own it.

(via recordarchive)

marleymarley:

thebootydontstop:

have you guys SEEN this?

you put in whatever word, and it gives you a bunch of Calvin & Hobbes strips with that word in them.  I just spent like half an hour doing this.

[Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine]

yes please and thank you.

“poop”

(via felistella)

So… that was awesome.

I attempted to make a video of the experience but I couldn’t get the suction cup to stick to the window, so I gave up and decided to just live in the moment.

My flight instructor was in control during takeoff, but once we reached our cruising altitude (2,500 feet) I was in control. We were in the air about 35 minutes as I flew over my house, southeast towards Canandaigua Lake, then north up to the Erie Canal, turning west over Fairport, over my parent’s house (where I grew up), towards downtown Rochester, and then back southwest to the airport; he took over again for landing.

I’ve wanted to fly planes ever since I was a kid. I was only 6 years old when Top Gun and Iron Eagle were released. Sure, they’re both super campy with ridiculous cold war era plotlines  but none of that mattered to a little kid; I just loved seeing those awesome jets flying around and blowing each other out of the sky.  My best childhood friend moved away before the start of 6th grade. I never truly recovered, from a social perspective, and to this day I’m sure a big part of my social anxiety and introversion can be traced back to that event.

It was around that time when the first Gulf War started (just as I was entering middle school) and I was awed by the scenes unfolding on TV every night. I spent hundreds of hours through middle school and into high school building model airplanes. The smell of Testors model cement and paint will always conjure up great memories of time spent in the basement carefully airbrushing wings and missiles and gluing them together. When finished, they’d get strung up with fishing line and hung from my bedroom ceiling. The walls were emblazoned with posters of jets. I devoured aviation magazines and could rattle off facts and specs for dozens of famous military airplanes, both old and new. You could say I was a bit obsessed, and it was largely driven by the fact that I didn’t really have much of a social life. Rather than hanging out with other kids, I was building models and memorizing wingspans and airspeeds and learning the principals of flight.

As high school began, I very seriously envisioned myself enlisting in the Air Force upon graduation and pursing a career in military aviation; I I was frequently talking to recruiters in school (I don’t think local districts even allow recruiters to come into the buildings these days). Then during my junior year I got glasses and the recruiters basically gave me the bird and told me to get lost - anything less than perfect vision was unacceptable. That sucked, but in hindsight it was probably for the best. My obsession and dedication to aviation diminished as my talent and love for music grew, and now, rather than dropping bombs on foreign countries, I get to spend my time making music and posting poop jokes on the internet.. not a bad trade off, I guess.

Visited my old stomping grounds today. Worked here for 11 years. Some days I really miss it. (Taken with Instagram at Shadow Pines Golf Club)

Museum of Play (by Steelopus)

Sometimes I take photos.

This was December 2009.

I love the structural design of the interior of the Strong National Museum of Play. I don’t know if the architects intentionally made it look like a giant version of the steel-tube jungle gyms on which I grew up dislocating knuckles and spreading germs, but that’s what it reminds me of.

Never forget. (Taken with Instagram at Casa de Lopez)

fmgreen:

FMGreen Fun Fact:

The analog MCI console at GFI - through which we recorded our debut album (Yellow #5) - was the same console through which Metallica recorded their seminal debut album Kill ‘Em All in 1983.

I don’t mean it was the same model, I mean it was the exact console they used.

“We spent six weeks up in Rochester, New York, recording the album at the Music America Studio. The actual studio is in the basement of this huge old colonial-type of club house. Up on the second floor there’s this huge ballroom which is perfect for getting a good drum sound. The only problem is the place is fucking haunted, so I had to have someone else up there the whole time I was recording. My cymbals would start spinning, you know shit like that. It was scary, but I would love to record there again.”

— Lars, August 1983, Metallica: In Their Own Words
 (via)

We like to think they were just warming it up for us.