Jak’s Life 2.0

Thanks to Pandora I found some bands that are a lot like one of my favorite bands of all time, Crossfade. From this I rediscovered how much I love Breaking Benjamin and I found a new band to love…Default. Now I’m addicted to them especially “It Only Hurts”.

Just figured I’d share that little tid bit with everyone.

Last week when I was in Florida I went over to downtown Disney with my dad and into the Virgin Records store. As we were leaving I saw a table with two women that were letting people try out their headphones and enter a contest to win them. So today I found a package that I knew I didn’t order sitting out on my front steps. Inside that box was a short and to the point letter congratulating me on winning a pair of Ultimate Ears’ Super.fi 5Pro. I’ll be the first to tell you this, these are amazing headphones, if you’ve got the money go get yourself a pair the sound is incomparable to any other headphones I’ve ever heard.

I’ll tell you these headphones are making me enjoy my iPod even more than I already did.

I’m not sure if anyone else does this but as I’m running a song will just randomly pop into my mind when I’m running, almost always a fast paced one that I am very thankful for because it keeps me going. Although in my last meet the song I found myself singing in my head was Shut up and Drive by Rihana. I’ve heard this song so many times because of radio stations that repeat the top 40 over and over (KC101) I ended up singing the song that I’ve heard maybe twice and don’t really like. That’s why the top 40 is ruining my mind.

One idea that was drilled into my head at Projekt Revolution was that Music for Relief is a good cause and tonight I just looked at what they’re doing and to me it seems like a very good cause but I don’t have time or money to donate to the cause so the least I figured I could do was to put this picture on my blog

So go check out the site and do what you can to help out with the cause.

The Crew Setting Up for My Chemical Romance, originally uploaded by jak119.

A small sample of what the stage looked like for My Chemical Romance. The quality isn’t that good (only 1.3mp) so it’s a little tough to make out everything.

Yesterday I went to see Projekt Revolution at the Dodge Music Center in Hartford. This year’s tour featured many many great bands (Google Projekt Revolution for details) that I was thrilled to see even though I ended up at the concert by pure luck. Linkin Park is among my favorite bands so as you can tell I was more than unbelievably happy to see them in concert. I must admit I wasn’t too thrilled by the first few bands that played with the exception of Saosin. Then the main stage opened up and the setup that was awaiting us as we entered was amazing. If you don’t know yet I’m an A/V geek that’s learned my way around pro sound and lighting for my high school. The lighting grid amazed me, it must have contained at least 100 Martin Mac 600 lights or something similar, they were absolutely amazing, I’d love to get my hands on just one of them and there we were watching 100 or so of them moving in perfect sync. On top of that for Linkin Park there were the huge what looked like follow spots behind them that were also DMX controlled with color and gobo effects. These lights were the most amazing lights that I’ve ever seen. Now to move away from the lighting the sound equipment that was at this concert was also amazing. There were several massive line arrays (concert stacks) in the front on the stage and right above my seat for the lawn area. I’m not quite sure what I’d do if I had those speakers and the amps to power them, probably shake my house to pieces. The actually speakers and such were not as amazing as the mixer running the speakers and subs. The mixer was significantly larger than a normal stage DMX lighting board, it was actually closer to the size of one that I’d expect to find in a modern recording studio. That was the last thing I was expecting, I could only imagine what the lighting board was like. Well that’s all for now I’ll have more on some of the more interesting special effects as well as what I thought of the concert as a whole.