MY NEW BABY IS HOME!

Well, she actually came home with me a month ago, but, I’m still babying her. She has a beautiful, black polished steel frame, so many cooling fans you could cook a steak on them, a 24-core Threadripper Processor, a TRX40 Designare Motherboard, and two — COUNT ‘EM, DARN YA! — beautiful RTX3090 graphics cards hooked together with NVLink. It also has 256GB of RAM, an 8-TB SATA SSD drive, and a 10TB Toshiba (spinning) hard-drive. As to what it’s connected To, well, I got a top of the line surge protector; and I’ve got a TASCAM 16x08 audio interface plugged into it. Network WiFi COLOR laser printer. And right now, I’ve also got hooked up: My Traktor DJ software control station, with turn tables and everything . . . My Native-Instruments “Maschine 2 Mk3” drum and dance controller; a Korg 13 Arranger workstation; a Nektar MIDI controller with 88 (piano-weighted!) keys, and, soon, I might be — might be, maybe — adding a Yamaha PSRSX900 Digital Arranger Workstation. In terms of software, she sports Windows 11, Object Desktop (to make MS Windows tolerable to interact with!), Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Substance Cloud, Cinema 4D 2023.1, Blender, iClone 8 and Character Creator 4, and a few other 3D and 2D animation packages. In terms of musical software, she sports Cubase 12, Finale 27.9, Sibelius 2023.1 (for now), and the IK Multimedia TOTAL STUDIO MAX 3 bundle of tools. Also, Superior Drummer with six expansion packs, EZ Keys, EZBass, and the Hexachords Producer Suite, the Vienna Suite Pro, “Composer’s Cloud” and OPUS to use its many sounds with, and finally, Waves Mercury. That’s right — the Big Kahuna of Waves plugin bundles, with over 400 high-quality plugins available for it! And last but not least, she has the Steve Slate Audio Bundle in her. For her speakers, I chose a pair of IROK Studio Monitors. For input, well, there’s the keyboard, about five different mice (because I like a variety of control “feels.”) And oh yeah — she has a Steve Slate Raven M-2 touchscreen digital mixer and a Wacom Cintiq drawing monitor/tablet. I think I came out smelling like quite a rose with this deal. I only wish that everyone had access to this kind of creative powerhouse tool . . . Then the world might be full of less scary school shootings, and instead of those, some pretty twisted, personally-expressive artworks. And I don’t think the artwork is gonna hurt anybody, unless it’s the cover of Pink Floyd: The Wall and you’re dropping acid. Which you should not do anyway. Remember what Arthur C. Clarke (the famous sci-fi writer, creator of both 2001 and 2010, as well as the designer of the first communications satellite, once said to everyone: “Drugs don’t heighten creativity; they simply dull the voice of your inner critic telling you to do better.”)