Allow me to take a break from our regularly scheduled blogging to present the “Keep the Joint Running Podcast” from Bob Lewis of IS Survivor Publishing with yours truly.
It is available by searching the iTunes store or directly via RSS with this link:
We’ve been working on this cast now for several months, and–quite frankly–I’m pleased with the results. It appears weekly and basically covers the same text as Bob’s weekly column of the same name. So tell all of your friends. They simply cannot survive a moment longer without listening to this podcast!
Seriously, give it a shot–the subjects are concise, topical, and helpful. If you are in Information Technology at all, I think you’ll enjoy the podcast.
Ordinarily, I try to keep this blog about tech stuff, but well, I have to break from the norm for just a minute! Forgive the self-indulgence. This kind of stuff doesn’t happen every day. Ok, not to me anyway :).
He’s pretty great, isn’t he? Unfortunately he has my hair–in fact after he received his first bath, he looked like he had a bad run-in with a Van de Graaf generator.
Now back to our regularly scheduled geekdom…Huh? Oh, I guess we can apply a bit of Internet meme here. Lessee… in the first picture, the caption could definitely be “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!”
Oh, now that I think about it–check out the birth announcement.
For those who don’t know: At the hospital, the day after a birth they come around with a strange-looking cart that seems to come from a high-tech medical TV show. It is actually a downward pointing camera that is specifically designed to separate new exhaused and stressed parents from their revenue.
Because the hospital needs more revenue.
So they take some pictures of every baby and then try to sell them back in a variety of sizes and formats. One of which is the birth announcement format. No thanks! With my trusty Canon A620 and a little time on my laptop, I had created what I considered an excellent birth announcement.
I first took several shots of the baby at a fairly high resolution. Loading these into Fireworks, I touched them up a bit with the Dodge tool. This helped even out his complexion a bit–it’s pretty hard work to be born. I cropped out an oval shape that feathered out on the edge and just dropped it to black and white.
Secondly, I used another favorite program to whip up a quick vector image for the scallops. Basically a bunch of identical circles with the top half whacked away. I saved that as a windows meta file and imported it into Fireworks. Once there, I copied it and flipped one upside down for the bottom border. Then on both I filled with the baby-blue color, applied a slight sideways drop-shadow and small bevel to the edge. (BTW, it’s good to remember to keep the light unified–so the shadow and the bevel both appear to be lighted from the same source.)
Next, I placed the text on the blue spaces with the font I wanted. I wanted to dress it up a bit, so I added a white outlined box, changed the line to dashes and fattened them up a bit. I then applied a grain texture to them to simulate thread.
So far my only cost is about 45 minutes of time. Ah, but here’s where the magic happens!
The hospital wants a parent to pay $40 to over $100 for a set of birth announcements! And who knows how long they will take to be delivered… With my method, I got 55 of them professionally printed on glossy photograph stock for $9 and had them in my hands an hour later.
I created an account, uploaded my final announcement jpeg, and was done. Well, mostly. My wife, in a spurt of craftiness, bought some brown ribbon (with little footballs on it) that we put on the top left corner of each announcement. If fact, that is the reason behind the space there.
Well…we’ve come to the end of our little revisit to my misspent youth. Only one little track left, and we can get back to more important things. Whatever those may be. Like some of those DOSBox articles I promised so long ago…
I actually went on this little journey for a number of reasons. First, as I think I already stated, a blog is something of a painfully open little journal. And because of this, all current interests and activities are fodder. But the root cause of all of this springs from my desire to return to the world of audio. This case in particular is some self-flagellating (and induced) training on audio mastering techniques. You will admit, as I do, that I still have much to learn!
And if I had had access to software like Ardour (www.ardour.org) fifteen years ago, who knows what we would have created. Maybe nothing–maybe all the goofiness of tracking boom-boxes back and fourth through a Radio Shack mixer was a necessary part of the process.
The evening that I showed up at Tom’s house armed with the “drums” from “The Phone Bill”, I found that he had done little planning ahead too. He had been out and about that day and picked up a “Relaxation” CD from some bargain bin. It was entitled something like, “Seashore with Cello and Gulls.” It was a real thing of beauty. Over 75 unadulterated minutes of white noise for only $3.95!!! It was cheap at half the price…I mean, twice the price!
The drums distracted him initially, and in reality, after we were done with phone bill, I was ready to go. However, Tom seemed a touch put out that we had not used his new CD for anything yet.
Sigh.
I’m glad I stayed though, or the world might never know about being “sturdy and strong.”
There were two parts to this one. The ocean noises and…well, that part in the middle. We simply ran a microphone into a quadraverb and turned the reverb up to eleven (a major mistake when you don’t have a true monitoring system) and played the CD. Tom did what Tom always did–wrote a funny little bit and spoke with alacrity.
But, we discovered that it needed something. That certain je ne sais quoi. By this time it’s really really really early in the morning. So, we kinda went back to defaults:
We randomly detuned his guitar to a truly janglely degree, put some massive distortion on my bass, and sampled about a 3 second loop into the effects processor. This loop was put on infinite repeat and fed back into the mixer with the analog synth. We rolled tape while I completely improvised some crazy “dance of the baby elephants” melody line. We just filled up a few minutes and ended the cacophony. The length didn’t matter, we knew it was going to be faded in and then back out.
Next we loaded that target tape up into one of the source decks and gave Tom a mic full of tube distortion. He tracked those fateful words so rich with meaning and portent, “Suddenly, a giant octopus…”
Step Three: Smile at a job well done.
With a little manual timing to start cassette players and quasi-deft hand at the faders, we mixed the two tapes together.
Now to clean this up, I followed the same procedure as before with one deviation. The source audio I sampled with the Extigy had two problems. To get a good level on the ocean waves part would cause the middle bit to clip badly and come in waaaaay too hot. The final product still has a defect on one or two of the peaks (it sounds like clipping), but unfortunately it was recorded that way; so GIGO rules apply.
The second problem stems from the fact that–back then–I was monitoring with really bad headphones two feet away from the input (Tom). I didn’t find out that the voice over was COMPLETELY UNINTELLIGIBLE until riding home in my truck that morning. I had cranked the wet/dry mix on the reverb to the place that one could barely hear what he was saying. Oh, sure, there were plenty of reverb reflections, but the words themselves where buried in them. Enough of the live sound was leaking into my headphones sitting across the table from Tom that I didn’t hear the problem going to tape until too late.
Gee…perhaps we should have invested in some real monitoring headphones?
Ouch. Before I could post it here, I would have to fix all of this. I tried a couple of ways to treat the entire track, but didn’t get too far. So, I eventually sampled the tape into two tracks in my studio software. That way, I could apply different filters on the ocean part and the crazy part. The first part cleaned up amazingly–a dynamic expander and more than a little noise reduction killed the lion’s share of the reverb and brought the vocal back to the front of the mix.
The crazy octopus part was more labor-intensive. I created a custom volume envelope for each peak so that I could automate “ducking” the bad spots. Then I compressed it and equalized the fire out of it.
Mixing these two tracks back together, I nudged the waveforms around a little which probably shortened the length some, but no biggie. I think I learned more about mastering with this one then I did on the others. Have a listen and tell me if you disagree.
Title: Little Pebble
Album: All Tech No Brains
Artists: Tom Murray and Joseph Baxter
Target: Self-Help Tapes
Ok, that is all. However, not a final all. My brother Brad gave me one of our old band’s “professional” tapes. It sounded horrible. I intend to remaster all eight songs as a favor for him. Of these I may post a sample as a before and after with screen shots on the entire process.
We’ll see how it turns out. Until then, thanks for stopping by, see you soon!
Welcome back! Today I have an unmitigated pile of steaming silliness for your consumption.
Wait.
Maybe that should be a steaming pile of unmitigated silliness.
There’s another of those pesky “flaming herring juggler” problems. (You’re free to do a site search on that one.) In any event, “Phone Bill” is the fourth entry of the five into this dastardly waste of our time and effort. To list some of the high points of its pedigree: It is somewhat politically incorrect. It holds the record for involving more household trash items in the recording phase. It may be the one that still elicits a few chuckles from me when I hear it. Or at least it ties with the giant octopus part of the fifth and final work. Hard to say, really.
Once again, the scene is 1992-ish. It all started with some changed plans, when Tom and I both found ourselves “at liberty” one Friday evening. So, to record! But what? As I was loading my gear into my somewhat beaten up 1985 Nissan King Cab, I started to look around the garage. Here was a set of toy bongo drums–who knows where (and when) they originated. And over here was a plastic document mailer tube. These are mostly cardboard now-a-days, but this one was almost like a chunk of PVC pipe, with two rubberized caps. Sure seemed like the evening’s recordings would involve some rhythmic elements.
I couldn’t have been further from the truth–but that was more in the vein of personal failings where the word “rhythm” is concerned…
Anyway, I also found a hardwired intercom that I had once purchased at a garage sale. It is so old that I can’t even find a picture of it anywhere on the web. But the units were beige, connected with 1/8″ phono connectors, and had these giant yellow TALK buttons. I tossed them into the truck with all the other stuff.
At Tom’s, the “drums” were brought in last and met with great glee. I guess sometimes enthusiasm may be worth more than careful planning–however this wasn’t one of those times!
We rolled tape on the two of us giving our new percussion instruments the “what for”. Tom was on the toy bongos playing barehanded. I had opted for the “shipping tube” with one end removed. Eschewing the use of a drumstick (not that we had one), I was using an ink pen. I’m pretty sure that we dropped a cheap RadShack microphone down into the tube for those big, ill-defined, boomy sounds. That and all the reverb on the tape.
Right here is where that planning thing would have come in to be useful. We both started playing random rhythms…and changed rhythms throughout the course of the tape. We probably intended to see what worked, and then go back and re-do it… But we didn’t. I can’t explain why.
And to top it all off, this was before I forced myself to develop my own sense of rhythm. To put it simply, we didn’t have great timing (the failings I mentioned earlier).
In spite of all these factors, once we listened back, it actually sounded tribal. So, speaking into the shipping tube drum, I sampled the phrase “Oom-Laba, Oom-Baba”. At least I think that’s the proper spelling, I don’t have the ancient text on hand at the moment… No matter, this sample was queued on the Quadraverb to be triggered at the press of a button. This sample was added in on final mixdown–I remember triggering it by hand. We also added in someone tapping the plastic tube with a fork or something…don’t re
What I don’t remember exactly is the complete order of events that followed. We either bounced out a tape of the “drums” and my synthesizer part. Or Tom (after a significant amount of writing time during which I ground and brewed some blue-berry infused coffee beans) recorded the voice over. I think it was the later, which I believe we ran through the intercom system. Gave it that great, phoned-in, scratchy quality.
That just left the synth part, which should have been played on the mix-down (less bounces means better “quality”). However, I know that I trigged the samples, so it had to be on tape.
So…here it is. Wish I could say it was life-changing, but I do hope it will give you a smile. If you scrub up to about the 1:00 minute mark, it won’t hurt my feelings. That’s where Tom will be heard to say, “I was hunting asparagus deep in the jungles of Kenya…”
Oh, and one word of warning: The last line is proceeded by a curse word. Many may feel this particularly expletive to be relatively benign in today’s culture, however, I disagree. Actually, I believe that, at the very least, the use of curse words to be an indicator in one’s character that vocabulary and good manners are severely lacking. Now, this is certainly not the case with Tom, who was one of the most intelligent and erudite people I’ve ever met. I believe he included it here as a callback to phrases like “balderdash” and “pip, pip”. In other words, to further portray the pith helmet, monocle, and pork-chop-sideburns set.
Title: The Phone Bill
Album: All Tech No Brains
Artists: Tom Murray and Joseph Baxter
Target: Great White Hunters
Whee!!! Only one left. I think it is probably the best of all–no mean distinction, that. It is called “Little Pebble”. It makes me giggle like a silly schoolgirl whenever I listen to it. In addition to all this, it is probably the most complex musically and may even have the highest concept. Well, relatively, that is.
For the purposes of honesty, maybe I should add Richard Simmons to that list.
Maybe not.
Anyway, heretofore with these recordings I could always offer a general target at which the mockery aimed. This one…well…not so much. From the very first, “Hey, come on in, man…” to the last strains of the ill-advised kudzu solo, “My Buddy Eddie” escapes classification.
I guess the closest I can think of is this William Shatner album:
The phrasings from this particular piece seem to pop into my mind as much or more than the others for some reason: “Sit back, relax, yeah, be cool,” in particular. Perhaps it was just the way Tom rattled it off. Oddly, I don’t remember even paying attention to what he was saying at the time. Which is even more odd when you realize that there was no drug or alcohol use involved with any of these.
Seriously.
Let me deconstruct the layers a bit. It sounds as though we had at least two tapes queued up. The first one was Tom’s voice-over part. Obviously, we couldn’t get enough of my bass head’s tube distortion on vocals. There may have been a little reverb on it as well, or that may have been applied to the entire recording as it went to tape. I don’t know, I wasn’t really into consistent professional approaches to my mixdown procedures then.
I’m pretty sure that Tom’s little synth was this Casio CZ-1000. The pad I was playing was probably a preset. I ran it through the processor with some reverb, chorus, and a dash of digital delay. And for Heaven’s sake, could we even begin to record something without that STUPID panner?!?!? We mixed this into the second queued tape of some custom patches Tom whipped up (or hastily edited) that sounded a bit like sirens. I love to hear those operators burbling along there in the lower parts.
Analog synthesizers are just cool.
So, I started playing the pad and using the bend wheel rather than fingering. About a measure in, Tom started the tape with the siren sounds. And after killing everyone softly with my song, he started the vocal tape (with a massive hiss injection). And then for some reason, after the VO was done, he grabbed a mic, brought up the level, and started playing kudzu.
Completly atonally. Creative differences like this have broken up more that one band, let me just tell you!
Well, the defects (outside of the kudzu, that is) are pretty obvious. Like most complete tyros, we went on way too long with the first bit. It really shouldn’t have been interesting enough to warrant such attention. That said, all-in-all, I still think “My Buddy Eddie” is achieves it’s immediate goal of being funny to at least Tom and myself. Which was all we were asking for.
Title: My Buddy Eddie
Album: All Tech No Brains
Artists: Tom Murray and Joseph Baxter
Target: ???
Wasn’t that fun? Oh? Well, look at it this way, only two to go. And the next one, that we’ll just call “The Phone Bill”, isn’t particularly politically correct. But it is one of the most silly. And that is saying something!
