This is where the title goes...

...and this is the body.

Yes, it's me. I should be a bit leery of promising to "update more often" I suppose. Sheesh, it's a trip down memory lane to look back at some of those entries, but it's nice to be back. You know it's been a while when you have to do a "legacy" login and actually associate your blog with a google account that you've had for a while now. Kind of amusing.

So, it's me. Hi. I'm DJ Muse, and these days I'm doing the weekly thing at the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, MA. Check out the link for all the pertinent details and such.

Posting here is a part of getting my musical side moving again. I've been doing the DJ thing at the Cantab for over a year now (damn, how time flies), and it's an interesting venue for my musical inclinations. Since I'm also a sometime poet and writer, I'm seeing creative outlets complement each other. Since I'm a huge slacker, I'm at least getting the musical side worked out every week (I play music before the slam and between the poets on the open mic and also run sound).

These days I've got the studio in my house. It's now equipped with the turntables, CD decks, computers (mac and PC, how geeky is that), mixers (DJ and Alesis MultiMix16) and other assorted goodies. I've gotten really comfortable with Apple computers since my days at the New England Institute of Art (NEIA) and I really can tell my preference when I'm "forced" to use the PC. It's old, loud and has all those PC quirks that have me using it mostly to remove old music and projects from it when I need them.

One of my projects is encoding all my music on my studio machine (the Mac Pro). For the Cantab gig I'm running Traktor Scratch which I crossgraded from Final Scratch (don't get me started on Stanton's whole clusterfuck with the way they abandoned their software, please) on a PowerBook. I've got an external hard drive where I'm storing things I think I might use in different types of playing out gigs, and I'm going to start integrating it into my weekly gear that I bring to the Cantab. The other hardware for the Cantab gig includes a Stanton M.505 DJ Mixer (I bring the MultiMix if we're doing any events that require more than one or two mics), Stanton C.314 CD player, a Bose L-1 PA system and some assorted mics. The Cantab's venue is in the cellar, and there's a bar band that plays upstairs who usually start right about the time the feature's about to go on (after the open). I've tried a few mics before finding one that seems to record the poet well without getting a lot of bass bleedthrough from upstairs. The tradeoff is that they have to get close to the mic, so it's not as good for the open when the poets have varying degrees of success with remembering to get close to the mic. Since I'm usually not recording the open, I use a different, more forgiving mic for that. Think your basic SM-58.

So, that's where I'm at these days. What about you? Bueller? Bueller?

Also FYI - I've got a LiveJournal, too. It's pretty much how I communicate with a lot of online friends. If I know you I'll friend you, if not, you still get some stuff. Feel free to check it out.