More Recording

We spent 5 or 6 hours today recording. We laid down Stray Cat Strut and Middle of the Road. Still lots of work left on them. Kim wants to replace her bass part on SCS, and we need to add backup vocals on both, and I need to totally replace my drums on everything, but I think I'll do that when we're all done and I can just work on it alone. I'd like to try miking up my acoustics, but that's an art best practiced by seasoned studio techs. I just hate the sound of canned toms and cymbals. They get better every few years, but still not perfect. Canned kicks are perfect, and some snares are fairly close to great if you're just whacking out 2 and 4.

John bought a black SG and used that today. Andy tried it and cranked out a bunch of AC/DC. Sounded great going through the standard Logic guitar amp sim.

Glasses Girl

The girl who helped me pick out frames reminded me so much of Mila Kunis. Her looks and body, and her way of speaking. I think I need to buy lots more glasses.

On the Drums: John Dakar

I was watching a promo vid for a drum sample package by Propellerhead when I noticed one of the kits was named John Dakar Drums. That cracked me up. In case you forgot who he is, go refresh your brain.

Intermittent Wipers = Movie Gold

We finally saw Flash of Genius tonight, the one about the inventor of the intermittent wiper battling Ford for patent infringement. I thought Greg Kinnear did an excellent job of playing a somewhat socially–inept engineer type. One scene involved him cross–examining himself on the witness stand, and he was convincingly sincere in his belief that it would be done that way. Lauren Graham plays his wife. She's cute and a good actress, normally really funny, but here more wife–like. Nice job of period set dressing, except for the mags on one Camaro, obviously modern big dumb bastards with low–profile tires. C'mon!

I finally found some glasses frames I like. I hate the wire ones I've had for the past bunch of years, because they're too short, so the bottom is right in my field of vision when I look down at something. I hate all the trendy tiny frames. They make most people look like perverts. It will be good when the designers decide to go back to something that better fits more people's faces and are actually good for the eyes. Anyhoo, I found some black plastic ones that aren't huge on me. We went into the shop last weekend when we were in the Galeria. Gotta go in tomorrow for an exam. I'm just glad I don't have to go all the way to uptown or where ever to find some geeky frames.

The FireWire audio interface I got came with a disc of 3rd party software. Most are extremely limited demos. God I hate those. What good is an Ampeg bass amp modeler if you can only turn the volume knob? But one of them is fully working and really cool. It's an electric piano modeler; Rhodes and Wurlitzers. It sounds damn good and has a variety of knobs for vibrato, phaser, overdrive, etc. Too bad I can't play keys worth a shit.

Esprit (Turbo)

When going through and driving most of the dozens, if not hundreds, of cars in Forza, I thought the Lotus Esprit was a lot of fun. It handled well and let you get away with a bit of sloppiness. So I bought one, turbofied it, and added all the stuff. The Marlboro paint scheme from the McLaren F1 cars was always a favorite of mine (my brother gave me the Marlboro G+Plus car when I was a kid), so I did that, going with one of the more modern flavors. I just wish they'd used the older Esprit, which was more angular and scares–old–ladies looking. Here it is under a bridge right before turn 6 at Elkhart Lake.

Hey Joe

All morning I've had Barry Manilow's I Write the Songs in my head. Leo, your wife would be happy for me. I, on the other hand, am not. I heard a little snip of Funk #49 (below with Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn) on the radio, so I'm hoping that listening to all the Joe Walsh songs I own will erase the Barry. Started off with The Confessor (bottom—whoa, I've never seen that one before), and that did the trick.



Joe fuckin' cracks me up. His dedication to all the people who've never had a song dedicated to them is priceless. Now if only people would figure out how to use their goddamn video creation software and get the frame rate and aspect ratios correct. Man that pisses me off. Idiots.

Joe Walsh - New Music - More Music Videos

Celebrity Sighting at West Music

A newsletter from Zildjian shows their Zildjian on Tour deal will be at West Music in Coralville on June 4th, with Chicago's original drummer Danny Seraphine.

Tesla Coil Synth

Ever wish you could capture the sound of a big ass Tesla coil and use it to play music? Sounds good to me. Hold down notes long enough to get the red bar all the way to the right and it 'splodes!

Classy Digs

The house featured in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is up for sale. I'd buy it if I had a shitload of money and the desire to live in Illinois or any place even near Chicago. But I have neither.

Edit: Heh, Brent beat me to it.

Technology Doesn't Suck

I was learning more of Logic last night, getting things ready for recording the band. Logic has 64 busses you can use or whatever. I figured out I could use one of them as a monitor level, then route that bus back through outputs 3-4 in the FireWire interface, and plug the headphone amp into that pair. Now the recording mix can be whatever the person wants. I also took a cue from the Brandi Carlile example that ships with Logic, and used another bus for vocal reverb, routing only the vocal tracks into it, thereby reducing the processing power needed for generating reverb to one track instead of multiple tracks.

This morning before I get started with work, I read another section of the manual, Beat Mapping. It's a way to take a recorded performance that is either sloppy or doesn't follow a strict time signature and have Logic find the beats and apply tempo changes accordingly. As a trial, I dragged a recording from the late '70s of our band playing the intro to God of Thunder by Kiss, which turned into a drum solo. I think we did it as filler for our demo tape, since the tape ran out in the middle of my solo. That cracks me up. Anyhoo, after only a few clicks of the mouse, Logic analyzed and mapped itself to our wildly inaccurate tempo changes, starting in the 120s and ending in the high 150s, following all the ups and downs in between. No tedious staring at audio waves to find the transients by eye or anything like that; just a few clicks.

It also dawned on me how affordable it is to record a band these days. Back in high school, we had a tape deck, a mixer, and some mostly crappy mikes. If we wanted anything fancy, we'd turn up the reverb knob on the mixer and hope it wasn't too much. After the high school years, we got fancy and used two tape decks to do multi–tracking and record different parts at different times. Oooooo! Now anybody with a computer can produce an entire album and have it sound almost professional. It still takes a trained ear to do mastering and all that, but at least most of those tools are included with the software, not to mention all the things that would've cost us hundreds of dollars to buy individually back then, like a digital delay, multiple EQs, an actual plate reverb, compressors, etc. Plus lots of stuff that couldn't be done with a simple rack–mounted device, like reverse reverb and all the FM synthesis and filtering stuff.

Dork

View Larger Map

Oompah

You find the strangest things on the web. Here's Gary McCurdy playing his tuba in front of the band shell on the square in Washington, IA. I played in their muni band a couple Summers. One time the piccolo player couldn't make it, so he played the piccolo solo in Stars & Stripes Forever (it starts at 1:58 in this version). Or maybe it was the other tuba player, kind of a band geek guy. Either way, it was a sem–fun way to spend a few evenings during the Summer, although the snare parts in Sousa marches are rarely exciting. Looks like they now get a roof of sorts for rainy gigs. Hey, Pat Hazell played there too.

Manual Humor

Seen in the Logic Express manual:

Filter Frequencies Below 10 Hz: When this option is checked, frequencies below 10 Hz (which are usually not reproduced by speakers, and are not audible to human ears at any rate) are removed, leaving slightly more data bandwidth for the frequencies which humans can hear, resulting in an improvement in perceived quality. Only uncheck this option if you’re experimenting with subsonic test tones, or exporting MP3s for whales.

Sugar Doesn't Suck

Kim found some Mountain Dew and Pepsi Throwback today. I opted to try the MD first, since I'd just had a poorly mixed fountain Pepsi at the BBQ place. Man, that's good pop. It's time, Pepsico, to make the permanent switch from corn syrup back to sugar. The image that came rushing into my head after my first taste of MD Throwback was being about 8 years old, drinking a Mountain Dew from an old style bottle in the Central Cafe. It just tastes cleaner.

Robots Need Love Too

Giz gathered a bunch of creepy robot videos. The one that's most worth watching is the last one, the "baby". When it's flailing around on the floor is when I agree with them about taking it and a shotgun out back. Saya is also a bit creepy, but the video is worth a laugh because of the incredibly poor communication skills of the guy doing the voiceover—so bad that he (or somebody else) had to add subtitles. Simroid, the dental patient, is actually almost hot. Maybe it's just the way she lays there with her mouth dutifully gaping open.

Summer Good!

Summer sure is a long time coming up here. Could be worse if we lived in Canadialand. Or Sweden. We watched Let the Right One In last night, a Swedish movie about a 12–year old vampire. Man, everybody had 2 or 3 sweaters on most of the time. I much prefer shorts and driving with the windows down. BTW, that is a fantastic movie. It's more of a story about friendship than anything. One of the kids just happens to be a creepy kid so pale that he could be Edgar Winter's offspring, and is fascinated by murder. The other one is a vampire. I did not see the end coming.

Today I mowed the yard, then fixed the vent above the garage door. It's a big slatted thing made from wood. The slats have loosened up and eventually started falling out. One scared Kim one morning after she opened the garage door to leave, and it smacked down on the driveway. I just climbed on the truck through the attic access in the garage, pulled the whole thing out, got the brad nailer out and nailed both ends of each slat in, then put the whole thing back. Easy peasy.

We ordered a different rack for Kim. That SKB just sucked with the stupid little door in the back. We found a Gator that's a couple inches deeper, yet still not the full depth like the big ones. It arrived Friday, so we took the SKB back to Guitar Center today, and I picked up a bigger FireWire interface so I can record more than 2 mics at once. I also decided to get a 2nd set of double–bass pedals and another kick trigger to keep in the basement. The old EP1's are so loud because the rubber trigger is so hard, and one of them has died again. And I didn't want to deal with bringing in the ones I use on gigs because I'm lazy. We might start doing some recording on Monday. We need a new demo with Andy. The old one is so embarrassing with Jack on there. Steve the studio guy tried to clean up his timing issues and even ran some parts through autotune. But there's only so much shine you can get from a turd. (Although they got one pretty shiny on Mythbusters.)

Kim & I really wanted some pulled pork sandwiches from Baker's Ribs today, so we drove out to Eden Prairie on the way back from GC. Ack! They're closed this whole weekend for the holiday!! Fuck. We had our taste buds ready for that, so we went to Famous Dave's instead. Not nearly as good, but it still hit the spot. I had fun trying 4 of their BBQ sauces. The Sweet & Zesty and Georgia Mustard were my favorites. I like the kick of vinegar in the mustard one.

Cheap Equals Wow

Here's a really interesting collection of photos on Square America, all taken with cheap cameras or scanned from damaged negatives. The result is spooky, artsy, and often amazing, a sort of disturbing, distorted view of unique moments in time. I got a hoot outa the 2nd one from the top. I can't tell if she's just a fat lady having a great time or some crazy hillbilly yelling at the person behind the camera.

Farrah Sings, or Whispers or Blows or Something

Anybody remember her recording a song called You with some Frenchy in 1977? I sure don't. You can almost hear some rich Corinthian leather and Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante in the background. I think she expelled about 5 gallons of air with every word. No female has ever sounded breathier in a song, not even Michael Jackson.

Parking Is Hard

That's what she said.

Add Pizzaz to Yer House

And maybe piss off the woman if she ain't got a sense of humor. Here's a neat collection of random shit that just might do both of those. I'd go with the skull doorbell, sliced meat throw rugs, hunks of meat pillows, and the glowing moose head. But that's just me. And I like that they didn't load up the post this time with every hi–res image they could get their mouse on.

Doritos Alert

Hey, grab a bag of the new Late Night Tacos at Midnight flavor of Doritos. They taste a lot like an actual Taco Bell/John's type taco with some mild sauce, and very reminiscent of the original Taco flavor, not to be confused with the more recent Taco flavor, which are still good, but nothing like the old ones. I hope these stick around. And I'll once again say that Tostitos should bring back their nacho cheese chip. Those were so goddamned good!

Still haven't seen any real sugar Des/Pepsi yet, but then I don't get out much.

Good Gig

Last night's gig was fun. Denny wasn't able to make it due to a prior engagement, but a guy that Emily works used to run sound and is a real audio geek. So we were going to meet there half an hour earlier than usual so I'd have time to set up the board and all that shit. But when we got there, the place was packed with people and there was crap all over the tables and the stage. Some goddamned silent auction. So that blew our plan all to hell. Even so, we managed to get things set up in record time. It really helps now that everyone else is getting better at knowing how to plug in the PA and lights.

The 2 Stray Cats tunes were a hit, as was The Letter. Kim's new wireless worked very well. We did quite a bit of research before we decided on the Line 6. It's the only one that can handle the low B on her 5–string. It's digital and uses 4 channels, using 2 for low freqs and 2 for the highs. It sounds pristine, just like she's hard–wired to the head. The only bad part is that it's Line 6, so it's good audio quality in a very cheap case. They tend to make good, affordable stuff for beginner types. When we were deciding on this model at Guitar Center, the battery cover wouldn't close. They tried swapping it with another one, but it had the same problem. Poorly designed plastic shit. I was able to almost get it to work by filing away in a bunch of places, but still no dice. We'll get here a little velcro pouch for it instead. That'll at least hold the cover closed and make it so the transmitter can go inline with her strap instead of perpendicular.

The other problem with it was the batter clip. It's made of molded plastic and has a rim around it that hits the rim around the top of the fucking Radio Shack rechargeable batteries we had to get. Fifteen bucks a pop. Everybody says to never ever buy a battery from RS, but we couldn't find NiMH 9 volts anywhere else. Regular Duracell alkalines don't have that rim, so they fit. But I also filed down the rim on the clip so the rechargeables now fit. However, the rechargeable she started the night with went dead 3/4 of the way through the 1st set! She popped in an alkaline and it lasted the rest of the night with time to spare. Maybe NiMHs need to be charged and used a few times before they get to full capacity? I don't think so. I'm guessing it's just because they're fucking $15 Radio Shack pieces of shit.

We got her a small rack to put the receiver in, and I even managed to find the ears that came with her amp. But I hate the rack. It's SKB, which normally makes good shit. But this must be from their line that should be named Let's Skimp and Save Money. It only has one real cover, on the front. The back one is just a flat piece of plastic that sort of locks into place with 2 swing–down levers. But that means that access from the back is severely limited because the hole is so fucking small. I've convinced her to take it back and we'll find a real one somewhere.

Square America

Here's another place to kill an hour or two; Square America. Another collection of old photos. This one isn't as "oh, aren't we clever" like Shorpy is, with its comment–editing and know–it–all owner. I like this Kodachrome of 2 kids with a brand new Flintstones toy with Fred on his dino–excavator. The downside to this site is that they offer no hi–res versions and it's laid out in a very amateurish manner. Like on the main page, most of the images you see as you scroll through are links to themed sections. And the garish colored text links are so Windozian. It's a fantastic collection of photos that deserves a better home.

Air

There's a place on the Maple Valley track where you can get air, and in both directions. Although if you're going counter–clockwise, you need to hit the binders on landing and cross the peak from the far left to the right, otherwise you'll overshoot the curve. As you can tell by the missing front end, I did just that. A few times. But then the car was some horrible rice burner thing that had zero traction. The drifter homos would probably love it.



Here I am beating the pants off Ferraris and other Italian cars in my Lancia, just about to land. Yeah, I clipped a wall with the right–rear.

Pretty!

Why do drummers always have a stick up their nose?

The Fabulous Phantom

I wanna go to the Thril–a–thon and see the Fabulous Phantom jump his motorcycle and leave an 'L' out of the word "thrill"! It's world famous, ya know.



Yes, I've been watching CHiPs again. It's a sickness.

Putta–putta–putta

This kid's midget street racer reminded me of the old photo of Leo's Mom. Very similar tires on both, although this kid has headlights and even a horn! But then he is 16 and should be terrorizing the streets in a real car by that age.

Too Many Cores

Blarg. As I suspected, Poser can only spawn 4 render threads max. Not that I use it much, but it was always a nice way to run some benchmarks.

Impaired Vision

Arg. Only one display is working. I don't know why, but the Radeon 4870 card has one DVI jack and one Mini DisplayPort jack. WTF? What was wrong with putting 2 DVI jacks like they've been doing? Luckily I knew this ahead of time and ordered a DVI-to-Mini DisplayPort adapter. But it doesn't work with my old style Cinema displays. I've tried swapping them, one at a time, etc. Fuck!

Oh, I see the new LED Cinema displays use this new Mini DisplayPort, I'm guessing simply so they can plug straight into a MacBook.

I'm on the phone now with Apple Care. Hopefully the 1st tier guy will hurry up and "investigate" so I can escalate it to someone who will either tell me exactly how I can fix it or will overnight me a solution. This is the first time I've ever had hardware not work on a Mac out of the box. That's a pretty good track record for my 26 years of Mac ownership.

Update: Um, now it works. I plugged it in while everything was running and it started working. WTF? Hopefully it's not an intermittent problem.

OctaMac

Wow. Here's Xcode compiling 16 files at the same time. Why that's 4 times what I was getting on the old one. Wheee!

Inbred?

Future Hee–haw star. Or NASCAR driver. Here he is when he was still young and svelte.

Time Takes Too Long

Whaaa! Mac Pro is here. I decided to go with the "Copy crap from another Mac" option it gives you when you first boot up a new install/machine. It's been saying anywhere from 1.5 to 14 hours. It's only gone up to the high side a few times when I hear long periods of disk grinding coming from the source Mac. Probably some big ass files that are fragged into hundreds of pieces. Ah, now it's down to 1:08. Woohoo! Can't wait to do a full build of Creator and see how much difference there is. I'll also try some Poser renders. It's a hog when it comes to rendering, requiring lots and lots of RAM, so the 8G I have now should help. It will be interesting to see if it can handle all those cores or if it will max out at 4 rendering threads.

Unreal Cars

Since I'll never be able to afford an actual racing car, I have to make do with the kind made up of electrons.

I had a little problem keeping my Golf GTI on the road. Those skid marks and cloud of dust? Those are pretty good indications that I'm doing it wrong. Dig the flying glass and driver side mirror.



It still went fast after that, but not straight. Here I am carefully backing into a parking spot. You can just see the rear wing flying off on the other side.



Continuing my series of famous liveries on other cars, I did my 914 up in John Player Special paint. I sure wish they had more fonts to choose from, as this one just ain't right. I actually had a nice controlled drift happening to keep the revs up around the Carousel at Road America in Elkhart Lake, WI.



I always liked the simple but striking L&M paint on the Porsches. This is about as good as I could get it on the way more curvy 911, again with the wrong typeface. And I shoulda gone with the red that was just 1 click to the left, as the one I used ended up being a smidge too orange.





Various Martini designs have been around forever, with the ubiquitous 3–color stripes. They're usually over white, but a few were silver.



Way back in the early '70s, my brother built a model of a 2–door '67 Impala and painted it like this. The stars on the hood were stickers. It was one of my favorites of his. Sadly just about all of my models got tossed out last year when my parents' basement got a bunch of water in it. They were all in a couple large cardboard boxes. I don't know why they couldn't have just taken everything out of the melted boxes. I should've brought them all up here long ago, even though they'd still be sitting in the boxes in my basement here. So I did a Charger in Forza and added stickers and the number. Here I am doing a burnout at Road America.



BTW, my new Mac Pro has made it to the Twin Cities! I'll be all keyed up tomorrow, getting excited every time I hear a truck enter the neighborhood.

C'mon Spring

Finally got around to mowing for the first time yesterday. A couple small areas were taller 'n shit. Had to pull 'er down into 1st gear and even then just creep through. The Lawn–boy started nicely, after I primed it enough to get fuel into the carb again. The weed wacker did too. The blower actually started pretty well too and ran at a good high speed. But then when I let off the throttle once, it died and I couldn't start it again. I kicked it and left it there on the driveway as I went to get the broom to finish the driveway and street by hand. That fucking thing has been pissing me off for a few years now. I really should take it in for a tuneup. I'm sure the problem is mostly old gas. But who wants to dump out year old gas? For one, it's wasteful. For two, where do you dump it? I ain't bringin' it inside to dump down the drain because that will stink up the house for the rest of the day, and possibly be dangerous. And I ain't driving to a gas station that recycles petroleum products just to dump less than a gallon. None of the other engines give a shit how old the gas is. I even buy premium for all my gas cans. It's just a little bitch.

Built–in Comedy

Some photographs don't even need a caption. Although I do like the one about Mr. Johnson.

Gulf Viper

I won a stock Viper in Forza and decided to paint it up in my favorite Gulf livery, like the Porsche 917s and Ford GT40s of yore. Here it is at Laguna Seca, with a nice layer of red California dust. They goofy paint wheel doesn't have the correct baby blue, so I went with one that was too dark and saturated, then put translucent white rectangular decals over the entire car (under the rest of the decals) to desaturate and lighten it up. Even made up a decent looking Gulf logo, although the lettering isn't right. But who can tell? Clicka bigga.

The Waiting Is the Suckiest Part

Sherow Mea Leddah

Yup, tonight we worked up Joe Cocker's cover of The Letter. But unlike Joe, Emily annunciates, so the words should be recognizable. We also ended up doing 2 Stray Cats tunes, Rock This Town and Stray Cat Strut. Not sure if we'll end up keeping either or both, but we should, cuz they kick ass.

Foreigners Are Weird

These children's safety cards are amusing. The chick in #15 has some really bad gas.

Biiiirthdaaay

We played for neighbor Bruce's 60th birthday party yesterday. It was in the Marriott over in that stupid area designed by a stupid, stupid, stupid person that should be taken out and run over by cars and trucks driving in both direction. There is no way what so ever that all those idiotic 1–way streets circling all around helps any traffic problems. They even confuse computers; Kim's nav system told her to turn the wrong way on one of them.

But the party was a lot of fun. A bunch of neighbors were there. Bruce called me Saturday morning to talk about which songs he wanted to play. He plays a Strat, and sat in with us at the neighborhood party last year. He said the relatives showed up Thursday night and he'd been drunk ever since. He's good at that.

Hip Houseboat

If I had to live on a houseboat, it'd be this one. Much cooler than Quincy's. Dig the 9–cube book case that looks like it's being sucked into a black hole. That's inventive woodworking. Excuse the long load time. This person love to load up each post with every image they can find, rather than just linking to the original story where you'll see the original images.

Helvetica! Woohoo!

Party! It's Friday night! Let's watch a documentary about a typeface! OK!

I really enjoyed it. It'd been in our NetFlix queue ever since January, but Kim kept moving it to the end. She thought it would be geeky and boring. We're talking about important worldwide design here, woman, not how to type and kern a logo. Turns out she wasn't bored because of all the interviews with lots of design guys from different countries, including at least one who worked on Helvetica. There was even an appearance by Hermann Zapf. Yup, the guy who made Zapf Dingbats, Zapf Chancery, and many others we've all seen or used.

There was one German guy who was really interesting to listen to, especially when he got into the inclusion of Helvetica on Macs, then how Windows didn't want to pay to license it, so they used Arial instead. (Which is like the retarded, ugly, WalMart version of Helvetica. Even Kim noticed how ugly Arial was when one of the online games she plays daily changed their entire look, including the font. She mentioned how horrible it looked and how hard to read it was. I took a quick look and said, "Arial".) He was going on about how Microsoft stole all their ideas from Apple but never have enough sense to change it for the better. Everything they steal ends up being shittier and of less quality and usability. Enough about those dipshits.

What was most amazing is the vast proliferation of the use of Helvetica throughout the world. Sure, it's all over the place in Switzerland (it's a Swiss font), but almost any place you look in the US, you'll see it. The Target logo is Helvetica.

Upgrade Time

After loading a couple gig's worth of video onto my Mac, my hard drive has outlived its usefulness. And I want to keep the footage from at least 2 or 3 so I can have it all available to choose from when I put together a short segment for our web site. So the drive is at the point where doing relatively simple tasks cause minutes upon minutes of churning and grinding before an app or two will become responsive again. I've also had core envy since Greg got his 8–core after my 4–core. Well no more. I just ordered a new 8–core Mac Pro, which is sorta a 16–core because of the Hyper–Threading in the Nehalem. Gesundheit.

I went with 8G of RAM, doubling what I currently run, and went for a terabyte drive. My terabyte external backup drive still has plenty of room to hold 2 sets of backups from the 3 computers I keep backed up, so no worries there yet. I was really thinking of getting it with 2 drives and running them as a level 0 RAID (both act as one drive for faster i/o). But the damn hardware RAID card is $700 bucks, and I don't know if running a software RAID will end up being any faster because of the extra bandwidth it would use on the CPUs and that whole pipeline. If anyone has seen benchmarks of a Mac Pro running a software level 0 RAID showing marked improvements in disk i/o, lemme know. I can always add a 2nd drive later.

I also got Logic Express, just so I have the extra flexibility and power over Garage Band when we record the band.