I really liked having the “play notes while scrolling” option in MED, but the amount of bugs in MED, the kind of bugs where if you hit the wrong key accidentally, the program instantly closes from a crash and goodbye song that was being worked on, so I’ve come back HOME to Renoise.
Sorry I had went on for so long about that one option. It was originally a big thing to me, but I can do without it in exchange for a solid program with a good interface like Renoise.
About a month ago, The Mercury Rising begged for me to come back, just in time to have an interview with MTV, which went well. Things seemed to be going smoothly. Then they said they’d work on my music, but when the first song of mine that we worked on, “Why Do You Continue To Fight” offered a 7/4 time signature that they couldn’t even begin to wrap their mind around, especially the drummer, who after I was working with him for a half an hour playing the drum part on my keys, counting to 7 on the mic while doing it and telling him “ok, just try playing only the snare, on 3 and 7” and he still couldn’t get even that, and one of the guitarists had such a bad ear for pitch that after holding down an E on my keyboard for 2 minutes he still couldn’t find the note on his guitar (they’re tuned down to a C), and he won’t let me touch the fret on his guitar “Dude, don’t touch the guitar”, and when I said “just play an E” and he says “I don’t know theory dude”–after that disaster of a practice, and after I dared to make a comment about that guitarist’s song we had been working on (previous to working on my song) that it only had two chords, by the time the next practice came around, with the exception of the bass player who enjoyed the challenge, they voted to fire me for taking the band in a direction they didn’t want to go.
They ONLY want to do rock, but of course they want to do “cutting edge” rock and have convinced themselves that their two-chord songs are “cutting edge”, LOL. I was with them for about a month. At least I’ll still be on mtv.com in the interview, that’s free publicity for me, and at least they paid me a little bit for all the website work, the graphic design, their myspace theme/skin, etc., not much, but hey I got paid. They fired me because basically I made them feel musically inept, they saw me as a threat instead of a challenge, and that’s fine, it’s better that I don’t work with musicians who can’t make the cut, who can’t play anything other than standard rock.
So now I’m working at starting my own band from scratch called Traguna ( http://www.traguna.com ) that will primarily feature MY music, I’m waiting until around Christmas (to see if the bass player from TMR is going to quit TMR to join up with me, and we both know a fantastic guitarist who is very versatile) to really start pushing out ads looking for musicians.
Life has been interesting.