Last week I bought a new camera, a Sony Cyber Shot T300, and have been in a lot of pictures in general over the past few weeks.  I think a photoblog category is in order.  As for the music Tumblr, those reviews will be coming on over the next few days.  I am done with my summer chemistry class and will use this weekend to catch up on all of the writing.

Christina wrecked her car a little under two weeks ago and it was totaled by insurance.  Monday she asked me to go with her to get all of her belongings out of the car, so I rode down to the towing lot with her.  The glove box was broken and had to be opened with a crowbar; the trunk was fine so we popped it right open and got everything out of there as well.  After I beat on the inside of the car a little bit with the crowbar (what does it matter? I mean, it IS totaled right?) I got the idea to take pictures to make it look like we were smashing the car up.  

Why not have a little fun, even if something like totaling your car and getting a chemical burn just happened?  When else are you going to get the chance to beat up the inside of a car with a crowbar and take awesome pictures with a wrecked car for the hell of it?

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Let me start with my recent lack of video blogging.  Long story short I do my editing with Adobe Premiere on my PC.  My PC has been down for the past two months and I’m re-situating myself for editing all of my video on my Mac.  I’m anticipating starting to publish video once again starting in August.  I might start earlier, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

I have been a little overwhelmed with work and summer school for the last three weeks so I haven’t had the time to keep up with my music Tumblr account.  I am getting back to that today with reviews of Junkie XL’s last album as well as the 4 Minutes maxi and several 12″ releases.  Watch for those to start popping up today and throughout the week as I have the time.

Over this last weekend I went camping with some of my neighbors and their friends up at Turner Falls.  We all had a great time.  I’ll write more about it, accompanied with tons of pictures, soon.  I would love to go back for a day trip before the summer is over and other people seem to like that idea as well.  A second article is coming up soon that I have been working on for a week and that is a review of the JBL JRX-125 speakers.  I’ve never reviewed professional speaker or amplifier equipment before so it has been a lot of work finding terms to use and how to go about reviewing the performance of the speakers.

The break from blogging and video blogging has been nice, but look for me to start becoming more prolific in the near future.

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Unpacking the DJM-909:
1) DJM-909, attached power cord
2) Manual, literature, etc
3) Hexagonal Allen driver (for adjusting X-fader)

Brief Feature Overview:
1) Built in Effects
2) Customizable cross fader (feel and curve)
3) Touch LCD
4) Foot switch connection
5) Pioneer CDJ exclusive options

Images for Reference:
Overview
Front
Back

Getting to know the 909:
At first glance it is easy to become overwhelmed by what is going on with this mixer. The touch LCD screen constantly screams to be touched and played with when first using the 909. Once you get accustomed to the LCD display it becomes your information hub and part of your lifeline. Tap the BPM and this is where its displayed, or it can be set to auto-calculate (which is wrong a lot of the time, as per usual with BPM counters). You also get the quick and dirty view of the current effects you have “hot keyed” and the ranges they effect (hi, med, low). Getting straight to work on the 909 is no problem, but learning to use the effects properly takes extra time and practice.

Faders:
Channel Faders – Sadly, these are your basic line faders. The good thing is that these can be upgraded to higher end faders if you chose to do so. There is nothing special in the channel fader department and nothing out of the ordinary.

Cross Fader – The DJM-909 cross fader is a contactless, optical fader that includes fully customizable fader adjustments and feeling adjustment. The included Allen driver can make the cross fader so light it feels like nothing in your hands stiffer, depending on your preference. Scratching is no problem on this cross fader and its definitely built to last.

Sound Quality:
The DJM-909 has exceptional sound quality as long as it is used correctly. There is no sound distortion until you start to hit the +3 dB level, and even at this point it’s minimal and unnoticeable to untrained ears. Either way, keeping the levels around 0dB to +3dB keeps you safe from unwanted distortion, however that number seems low when the mixer has a printed maximum of +14dB on it.

Cross Fader Adjust:
The DJM-909 gives you full control of your cross fader via rotary dials on the front of the mixer. Don’t know how the fader is going to react when you start adjusting the cross fader? Just hit the fader curve button on the mixer and view the cross fader curve in a visual, easily understood format.

Foot Switch (optional):
The 909 is the first mixer (as far as I know) that allows the use of a foot pedal. You are limited to simple 2 state pedals as the foot pedal is used to switch effects on and off. Personally I have not used the foot pedal feature, but it is something I would like to explore in the future. It can eliminate having to trigger the effects on and off by hand and leave them to other actions.

CDJ specific options:
The DJM-909 comes equipped with features that smoothly integrate the 909 with Pioneer CDJ’s. Since I don’t have a pair of Pioneer CDJ’s I am unable to test the functionality of these options myself, but they are there to allow control of some options to be shifted to the CDJ’s themselves instead of being handled on the mixer itself.

Touch LCD:
This is where the 909 is really set apart from other mixers. The product review before this point can, for the most part, be applied to the DJM-707 as well. The DJM-909 is set apart from its counterpart by the included touch LCD and built in bank of 50 effects.

LCD Response – The LCD screen responds to even the softest of touches and operation is all around fluid. The LCD’s display includes the tracks BPM and whether that BPM value has been calculated or manually tapped using the tap pads. It also contains an area displaying a bank of 3 effects per channel, and sets of 3 banks can be switched through quickly by pressing the bank buttons to the right and left of the LCD screen. Each channel has 3 effects banks consisting of 3 effects each, giving you 9 quickly accessible effects per channel within a max of 2 button pushes.

Effects – The effects are best used in an effect specific view accessed by first selecting the effect you want to use from the bank of effects and then pressing the “FX ADJ” button on either side of the LCD screen. This presents you with the associated options for the effect, allowing you to manually edit the effect or select from a menu of precreated options. On this screen you can also adjust which levels the effect will act upon.

Effect Listing:
1) Delay
2) Echo
3) Pan Echo
4) Pitch Echo
5) Reverse Delay
6) Ducking Echo
7) Roll
8) Hold Echo
9) Milti Tap Delay
10) Rain
11) Reverb1
12) Reverb2
13) Reverb3
14) Pitch Shifter1
15) Pitch Shifter2
16) Pan
17) Trans
18) Rhythm Trans
19) Trans Pan
20) Tremolo
21) Vibrato
22) Chorus1
23) Chorus2
24) Chorus3
25) Flanger1
26) Flanger2
27) Phaser1
28) Phaser2
29) Touch Phaser1
30) Touch Phaser2
31) Filter (LPF)
32) Filter (HPF)
33) Filter (BPF)
34) Filter Pan
35) Compressor
36) Fader Roll
37) Fader Multi Tap
38) Fader Trans Pan
39) Fader Pitch Shifter
40) Fader Ring
41) Fader Vocoder1
42) Fader Vocoder2
43) Fader Filter (LPF)
44) Fader Filter (HPF)
45) Fader Filter (BPF)
46) Fader Flanger
47) Fader Phaser
48) Fader Synthe1
49) Fader Synthe2
50) Fader Synthe3

Note on effects:
Any effect preceded with “Fader” is controllable via the channel fader that effect is being applied to. This allows for tight control of your effects and added depth and customization to your actions. Effects cannot be stacked on the DJM-909.

Overall:
Overall the Pioneer DJM-909 provides a solid foundation as a scratch mixer while allowing you to explore the depth of other features it includes. The built in effects, while mostly basic and unstackable, provide you with a wide range of effects options to play with and a tight, polished control system to utilize them under. The 909 is definitely a unique piece of equipment to use and opens the door to a lot of creative freedom without the need for an external effects unit. The 909 still provides external effects unit capabilities for those who eventually outgrow the effects included on the DJM-909.

Pros: Built in effects, polished interface allows for lightning fast navigation to anywhere you need to go. Completely customizable optical cross fader with adjustable feel. Integrates well with Pioneer’s line of CDJ’s.

Cons: Effects cannot be stacked. Sound distortion above certain levels, this requires careful attention to your levels to maintain a clear sound.

Ease of Use: 5
Sound Quality: 3
Fader Quality: 5
Price: 4
Overall: 5
(Above ratings out of 5)

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New semester is one week in. Heres a breakdown:
Philosophy : M W F - 11:00 to 11:50
College Writing 1: M W - 12:00 to 12:20
Geology: M W - 12:30 to 1:50
Geology Lab: M - 2:00 to 3:50
Engineering Ethics: T - 2:00 to 3:50
Software Development: T Th - 11:00 to 12:20

This semester looks to be pretty light on the difficulty and work load, except for Software Development. Relaxing semester ahead hopefully.

More Music
No surprise, really, is it? As of the last post I made I received my DJ QBert Super Seal battle wax in the mail. From that I jumped back into my love of the Japanese hip-hop scene and the equivalent, but largely underground, funky hip-hop scene here in the states. Made a sizable hip-hop CD purchase from Amazon, heres the list of what I’ll be getting in over the next 4-6 days:
Enter - DJ Kentaro
Finding Forever - Common
The Cool - Lupe Fiasco
Foot in the Door - Oddisee
Modal Soul - Nujabes
Donuts - J Dilla
Plug Label - Kero One & Various
Gagle - 3-Peat
I Do What I Do - Kev Brown
Sacrifice - Substantial

I wasn’t aware of how MANY shipping facilities Amazon had, so all of my CDs are shipping from separate warehouses except for a single shipment that was lucky enough to have two CDs in it. The UPS guy will be getting to know my house well this week. Once I get all of these in and have a good listen to them all I am going to start posting entries of my thoughts and overviews of each artist and the CD’s style. All the CDs above will fall into this as well as the CDs from my previous post. I’m still waiting on my copy of Shinichi Osawa and Fantastic Plastic Machine CDs, and since the were shipped from another country I don’t know when they will arrive exactly. The anticipation will make it even better when they finally arrive at the door! If you aren’t aware of any of the artists I have mentioned or listed in the post then look them up on MySpace and check out their music. I’m fairly certain that each of the artists I’ve listed has a good MySpace presence.

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It looks as if the blog that started off strong about video games has turned itself into my personal music opinion outlet.  I have a lot of artists lined up to write about for the Discover_Music section, most of them being from the Tokyo music scene which doesn’t get much exposure here in the US.  Planning on covering a few other random music related topics as well as posting more DJ specific items here as well.  My videoblog is already fairly well established for my day to day things so I am debating on whether or not to post DJ related videos to my videoblog as well and write extensively about them here in text form.

Lately I’ve been investing in electro-pop music to start experimenting with on the turntables.  The few CDs I’ve invested in so far to start myself off have been Junior Senior’s “D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop the Beat” and “Hey Hey My My Yo Yo”, The Cooler Kids’ “Punk Debutante”, and Shinichi Osawa’s “The One”.  When the rest of my CD’s crawl in in the mail I will rip them all in 320 Kbps glory and get them into Serato.   Other than those recent CD purchases I finally invested in a fresh wax copy of DJ QBert’s “Super Seal” battle wax.  Everyone knows what the super seal wax is and it has a lot of the most famous breaks to scratch with.  Once it gets in I’ll hit practicing full force once again and further my scratching techniques (which are terrible).

I’ll post some sort of live progress video, no matter how terrible it is, of me scratching to some basic beats.  At least then I will have something to look back on and reflect upon how terrible I used to be and how far I have come.  Thats the power of web video right there.  Laugh at your embarrassing past.

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Fantastic Plastic Machine (FPM)
Genre: Experimental / House / Nu-Jazz
Status: Major
Featured Track: Ain’t No Mountain High Enough (FPM Remix)
Official URL: http://www.fpmnet.com
MySpace URL: http://www.myspace.com/fantasticplasticmachine

Fantastic Plastic Machine is Tomotuki Tanaka’s solo experimental music project. Many of FPM’s tracks follow the line of hip-hop / nu-jazz that has recently been cropping up around Tokyo in the years after 2000. The song I’ve picked to feature is one of his many great remixes. The remix of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is a high energy House track that throws in catchy rhythms and slight vocals from the original song and puts them all together into something that so closely resembles, but is also worlds apart from the original song. Tanaka’s original work explodes with funky rhythms, hip-hop, and nu-jazz elements. For those outside of Japan the easiest piece of FPM’s work to access is his “Live From Tokyo” album, available exclusively through ITunes.

Most people I have introduced to artists such as Fantastic Plastic Machine point out the jazzy elements within the music and enjoy the blending of classical instruments and orchestral performances with dance bass lines. For those new to the idea of Nu-Jazz as a genre, Nu-Jazz is Jazz for the electronic genre and mixes in easily with hip-hop and house music alike. Domestically, there are only a few artists that are recognized in the realm of the Nu-Jazz genre. The lesser known, but more prominent Nu-Jazz artists is Fat Jon. The more well known is DJ Jazzy Jeff, who rose to fame with Will Smith as part of the DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince duo from the late eighties. Some of DJ Jazzy Jeff’s tracks have obvious Nu-Jazz influences and sounds. So go ahead, give Fantastic Plastic Machine and the Nu-Jazz genre a listen. If you like it, branch out into more artists and I’ll be sure to cover some more in upcoming Discover_Music posts.

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Looks like Street Fighter IV is in the works on Capcom’s new engine. I hope they don’t take SF4 into an entirely 3D world, but I could settle for 3D characters stuck on a 2-D level plane. Street Fighter EX was for the 3D Street Fighters and all the Street Fighter fans know that though they may have been fun for a little while, the EX series didn’t touch the competitiveness of the main stream 2D Street Fighter games.

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Project Jenny Project Jan (PJPJP)
Genre: Electronica / Experimental
Status: Indie
Featured Track: 320
Official URL: http://projectjennyprojectjan.com
MySpace URL: http://www.myspace.com/projectjennyprojectjan

Project Jenny Project Jan consists, obviously, of two members. Ironically neither are Jenny or Jan, but they are Jeremy Haines (vocals) and Sammy Rubin (Music Programmer). Its hard to put the duo’s unique style into words. It follows along the lines of house in the sense that tracks are driven by vocals and lyrics, but the music itself doesn’t always quite fit into the house genre. The rhyme styles of Jeremy Haines alternate between lyrical and freestyle hip-hop vibes. Their sound is definitely unique and you would be hard pressed to find anything similar to their musical style. Looking for something fresh, different, and strangely addicting? Then give this masked duo from Brooklyn a listen.

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Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 showed me that the RPG world can still be rocked by the smaller companies and original franchises to compete with larger franchises such as Final Fantasy. While I consider the Final Fantasy games to be very solid in story, gameplay, and interest, they don’t give me the impression of style. I am a big Final Fantasy fan, but with the mainstream games, Square Enix sticks with their system of doing things and that both works well for them and is familiar to the Final Fantasy veteran. In steps Persona 3. From the second you load the DVD into your Playstation 2 until the second you decide to quit playing for the night, Persona 3 bleeds its originality and style. Even the first menu screen you see as well as all of those within the game are carefully crafted to reflect the feel of the game.

So I am ranting on about the style of the game, and if you haven’t payed Persona 3 you probably won’t understand it until you actually witness or play the game in person. The art team spent a lot of time on developing the world and characters in Persona 3 and one of the lead artists actually commented on how they first created the main character of the game and built the entire rest of the game’s art and characters in order to compliment the main character. You play… yourself (well the main character has no default name, so you’re expected to use your name), a high school student who just transferred to a new school at the beginning of your Junior year. I don’t want to spoil too much of the plot, but one thing leads to another within the first few days of your arrival and you end up on the roof watching one of your dorm mates attempt to shoot herself in the head while a giant shadow monster is approaching you. She is reluctant to pull the trigger and the shadow monster knocks the gun out of her hands, so what do you do? You pick up the gun and shoot yourself in the head of course!

That’s right! Did I fail to mention that the characters strengths rely on inner dwelling powers known as “Persona”, which can only be released when the user shoots them self in the head with a special pistol called an Evoker. Well thats just fantastic. Shadow monsters roaming around during some time called the “Dark Hour”, mysterious things happening within the community and your school, and to top it off high school kids shooting themselves in the head in order to defeat the monsters.

All of this is tied together into a game with original art, story, and gameplay. The gameplay works in a similar fashion to Harvest Moon. If you are familiar with the Harvest Moon franchise then you know that your goal is to bring a farm back to life, usually within one year, but you can also venture into town to pick up goods, learn about the residents, create social ties, and develop relationships. In Persona 3 the main character attends school on a daily basis, except for Sundays, and while in school is able to make friends, increase his knowledge, raise his social status, join one of several clubs, hit on girls, or make after school plans with classmates. These bonds you create with other students help strengthen your own inner power and persona abilities. You are given one year (April 2009 - April 2010) to play the game. You get to go through every day, spending as you so choose, making all of the decisions on your own and not stuck to a static line of events. Taking a couple days off from fighting is encouraged when your friends become sick or tired from battle and need time to recuperate. When you’re done with the daily school and club activities and any other errands or things your have planned then you can get down to the fighting RPG side of things and explore the strange tower which only appears during the “Dark Hour” every night. This fighting portion of the game is in essence the game’s main purpose and objective, but with all of the other game elements mixed in you have a constant variety in what you can do.

If you’re interested in an RPG / life sim hybrid that allows you to control what, when, and how you act throughout the game then give Persona 3 a try. As an added bonus, every copy comes with an art book and a copy of the soundtrack. Remember all of the style I was talking about earlier? The soundtrack is amazing in itself, really sealing the deal on the entire game with fresh music that is rarely seen in RPGs, let alone any games. Have a look for yourself and watch the intro to Persona 3 below.

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