Belt buckles at the Denver Merchandise Mart "Giant Liquidation Sale", 9/26/2009.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Collins can't play anymore - followup
I'd be remiss...or I should say, I was remiss...in not noting that Collins' drumming career extended well beyond Genesis. The early Brand X records - frantic, blistering, screws-loose fusion, bred from an obvious love of Mahavishnu (without all the foreign-language modals) were chuck full of Collins absolutely playing his ass off outside the fairly rigorous controls of Genesis and their orchestral album-version dogmatism.
I've been tempted to turn my USB turntable process loose on a few of those records - Morroccan Roll and Unorthodox Behaviour especially - but I fear they're way too worn down for decent reproduction. In grazing my CD collection a few years ago, I did come across Missing Period, which is a collection of rehearsal versions of selections from both albums. Honestly don't remember ever getting the CD, but it was fun to find it and I do listen to it fairly regularly. There are a few obvious mistakes in there, and some comically off-the-grid soloing that would have sounded out of place (even for them) on album versions. But it's also a view into just how good this band was.
Phil hasn't drummed with Lumley and Goodsall for many years - but it'd be an oversight not to mention that affiliation in any discussion of Phil's drumming career.
Collins also showed up on other people's records - notably his old lead singer Peter Gabriel - but also outside the strictly-rock arena. I remember a long hitch I did from Boston to NY back in the late 70's, and getting picked up by a guy who, about my same age, also had very similar musical tastes and a a few tracks from Vimana, debut record from Narada Michael Walden's post-Mahavishnu fusion outfit. Terrific record, if not altogether easy to find anymore.
I've been tempted to turn my USB turntable process loose on a few of those records - Morroccan Roll and Unorthodox Behaviour especially - but I fear they're way too worn down for decent reproduction. In grazing my CD collection a few years ago, I did come across Missing Period, which is a collection of rehearsal versions of selections from both albums. Honestly don't remember ever getting the CD, but it was fun to find it and I do listen to it fairly regularly. There are a few obvious mistakes in there, and some comically off-the-grid soloing that would have sounded out of place (even for them) on album versions. But it's also a view into just how good this band was.
Phil hasn't drummed with Lumley and Goodsall for many years - but it'd be an oversight not to mention that affiliation in any discussion of Phil's drumming career.
Collins also showed up on other people's records - notably his old lead singer Peter Gabriel - but also outside the strictly-rock arena. I remember a long hitch I did from Boston to NY back in the late 70's, and getting picked up by a guy who, about my same age, also had very similar musical tastes and a a few tracks from Vimana, debut record from Narada Michael Walden's post-Mahavishnu fusion outfit. Terrific record, if not altogether easy to find anymore.
Inexplicata - band publicists
So...a band (and not exactly U2 here, kids) hasn't had new music out for nearly three years. They finally regroup, record a new CD and book a lengthy cross-country tour to promote it.
A writer, unsolicited, from one of those tour stops, sends a note to their publicist's office, four weeks ahead of time, requesting press support - a CD, phoner, etc.
They ignore him.
Make him go back and re-check his email contact info, and send another note. The Big Cheese gets and acknowledges it, passes it around their office; two days later, the ground game flunkie gets it and replies, asks for an address to send a CD (which was in the original email everyone ignored...)and says they'll work on getting an interview together...then they don't send a CD, but do tell you at the last minute the band can't do an interview (3 years off the road, and no one in the band has 10 minutes to get on the phone, with a week's notice???) and then casually ask for a pick story anyway.
Maybe I've been doing this too long...but wtf???
Dropped them. Picked up another artist for 10/1 edition. More later.
A writer, unsolicited, from one of those tour stops, sends a note to their publicist's office, four weeks ahead of time, requesting press support - a CD, phoner, etc.
They ignore him.
Make him go back and re-check his email contact info, and send another note. The Big Cheese gets and acknowledges it, passes it around their office; two days later, the ground game flunkie gets it and replies, asks for an address to send a CD (which was in the original email everyone ignored...)and says they'll work on getting an interview together...then they don't send a CD, but do tell you at the last minute the band can't do an interview (3 years off the road, and no one in the band has 10 minutes to get on the phone, with a week's notice???) and then casually ask for a pick story anyway.
Maybe I've been doing this too long...but wtf???
Dropped them. Picked up another artist for 10/1 edition. More later.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Gaming for the near-elderly
At this point, I have Undying, Oblivion, FEAR II, Bioshock and Fallout3 all loaded on the nice Intel quad core machine I put together (or I should say, my stepson put together, with minor assistance and relatively benign kibitzing from me...) this past July. I'm thinking of adding Titan Quest to that list.
I came to start using this handy little Belkin gamepad type device, that mimics the most typically used keyboard keys and adds some game-oriented flourishes, like another mousewheel, some joy buttons, etc.
Thing works great - it's nice to move the keyboard aside when you're playing, gives you a little more elbow room on a cramped desk - except for some reason (age related short term memory?) I'm having trouble remembering all the various key bindings for all the different games on it. I don't recall having this problem when I was just using keybord - so I'm inclined to think this is related to using this device, which actually moves me over to a different spot on the keyboard than I'm used to.
I came to start using this handy little Belkin gamepad type device, that mimics the most typically used keyboard keys and adds some game-oriented flourishes, like another mousewheel, some joy buttons, etc.
Thing works great - it's nice to move the keyboard aside when you're playing, gives you a little more elbow room on a cramped desk - except for some reason (age related short term memory?) I'm having trouble remembering all the various key bindings for all the different games on it. I don't recall having this problem when I was just using keybord - so I'm inclined to think this is related to using this device, which actually moves me over to a different spot on the keyboard than I'm used to.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Interview quote of the month
"I think of us as a stubborn effort to show people, in a microcosm, just how much humanity sucks."
Curt Kirkwood, speaking of his band The Meat Puppets, 9/18/2009.
Curt Kirkwood, speaking of his band The Meat Puppets, 9/18/2009.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Burning it up
Spent much of the weekend burning old vinyl to the iPod. The albums sit in crates in the garage these days - kind of a sad exile for my once-beloved collection. But they spent pretty much all of the 90's and this decade in a storage bin, cold and dark, no witness to the changing seasons or the many, many changes in my life. My old friends, my means of escape and glimmers of inspiration and benchmarks of an earlier life...like so much clutter now, and for so long.
Well, at least they're back in my own garage, and since May when I took them out of storage and we made room on shelves, I can actually visit with them sometimes. And I have, silly as that may sound. I have a strange relationship with things, and collections of things have their own unique character. It resides in the collective, and passes on some of that character to its individual pieces.
Sharon got me a pretty nice USB turntable for my birthday last spring, and I've used it on and off. Ripped five or six albums today - some old Tangerine Dream, REM, other things. I was reasonably pleased that most of what I have burned so far came from vinyl in serviceable condition. One REM record had irreconcilable warping/skipping on the first two songs (I ended up buying those two songs from iTunes to complete the album), but the others had little more than a thin veneer of popping and scratching. I guess I kept better care of my albums than I remember.
The turntable itself came with a sort of EZ burn software, that burns directly to MP3 and then prompts iTunes for an import into M4A. After some trial and error, though, I've settled on a different process that delivers higher fidelity sound, with only some drawbacks related to song titling, file size and file maintenance/handling:
1) Pulled down Audacity, a freeware sound recording and editing proggie, installed on my laptop.
2) Set up Audacity to record as .wav files. A few simple but necessary tweaks to the configuration may be found here.
3) Cue up an album, set Audacity to record, and just record the whole side. I started out babysitting it, but realized I didn't really have to - I just note the time and return in 15-18 minutes.
4) When the side is done, pause Audacity, flip the album, cue up, un-pause the program and repeat. Whole album on one wav file.
5) When done with the album, I save the Audacity project as .wav (I do 44K). It creates a pretty large file - 300mb to 500mb per album.
6) I transfer the wav file onto a flash drive, load onto my desktop (which also has Audacity), and proceed to edit.
7) Using the cursor function in Audacity, I select each song (usually have to expand the visibility range with the magnifying glass function), identify the beginning and end of each track, highlight that segment with the Audacity cursor, then Edit/Export Selection As Wav, title the file with the track title.
8) Bring up iTunes, navigate to the folder where I've stored the individual songs, and select Edit/Add File to Library. Once they're in iTunes, I highlight the whole batch, right click and apply Artist and Album Name under the Get Info tab (so I only have to do this piece once.) Save, then edit each individual Get Info tab with song name and sequence.
9) Plug in the iPod, sync up, and off we go.
A few notes on this process.
a) It leaves in all the scratches and surface noise. Audacity has filters that will suppress the minor white noise, but I haven't messed with them. YMMV.
b) This isn't for Nano users. The resulting wav files are huge - but the sound quality far exceeds that of M4A, and is (IMO) noticeably better than MP3. I have a 30 gb iPOd, all but 8 or 9 of my albums are M4A. You'd pack a 30gb iPod pretty quickly with all wav files - so, this process isn't for the storage-challenged. Of course, you can get by with a smaller player, and just swap music on and off it.
c) I usually adjust volume in iTunes (turn it up to about 70%) on all my uploads, wav or MP3/M4A. You can do that on Get Info/Options/Volume Adjustment. I have found it works more reliably once the files on the iPod, rather than pre-synced iTunes files.
d) I've noticed that iTunes will seem to add a leading sequence number to the track title if you play the file in iTunes. Annoying, didn't see that in iTunes v8. Also, be careful about song titles, sequence numbers and artist/album names when entering them on Get Info - mistyping any of these will create headaches in sequencing and grouping your music on the player.
e) It's a little weird to listen to stuff on an iPod with surface noise, pops and scratches if you've spent years listening to music on CD's or digital players.
f) It helps alot having more than one PC to do this - I was editing one machine while recording on another.
g) Leave yourself time to do this - even using the EZ Record software, it's still time consuming if labeling individual track titles matters to you.
h) Have a decent sized flash drive and at least one set of headphones handy.
i) Prepare to puzzle over why you liked some of this stuff to begin with...
Well, at least they're back in my own garage, and since May when I took them out of storage and we made room on shelves, I can actually visit with them sometimes. And I have, silly as that may sound. I have a strange relationship with things, and collections of things have their own unique character. It resides in the collective, and passes on some of that character to its individual pieces.
Sharon got me a pretty nice USB turntable for my birthday last spring, and I've used it on and off. Ripped five or six albums today - some old Tangerine Dream, REM, other things. I was reasonably pleased that most of what I have burned so far came from vinyl in serviceable condition. One REM record had irreconcilable warping/skipping on the first two songs (I ended up buying those two songs from iTunes to complete the album), but the others had little more than a thin veneer of popping and scratching. I guess I kept better care of my albums than I remember.
The turntable itself came with a sort of EZ burn software, that burns directly to MP3 and then prompts iTunes for an import into M4A. After some trial and error, though, I've settled on a different process that delivers higher fidelity sound, with only some drawbacks related to song titling, file size and file maintenance/handling:
1) Pulled down Audacity, a freeware sound recording and editing proggie, installed on my laptop.
2) Set up Audacity to record as .wav files. A few simple but necessary tweaks to the configuration may be found here.
3) Cue up an album, set Audacity to record, and just record the whole side. I started out babysitting it, but realized I didn't really have to - I just note the time and return in 15-18 minutes.
4) When the side is done, pause Audacity, flip the album, cue up, un-pause the program and repeat. Whole album on one wav file.
5) When done with the album, I save the Audacity project as .wav (I do 44K). It creates a pretty large file - 300mb to 500mb per album.
6) I transfer the wav file onto a flash drive, load onto my desktop (which also has Audacity), and proceed to edit.
7) Using the cursor function in Audacity, I select each song (usually have to expand the visibility range with the magnifying glass function), identify the beginning and end of each track, highlight that segment with the Audacity cursor, then Edit/Export Selection As Wav, title the file with the track title.
8) Bring up iTunes, navigate to the folder where I've stored the individual songs, and select Edit/Add File to Library. Once they're in iTunes, I highlight the whole batch, right click and apply Artist and Album Name under the Get Info tab (so I only have to do this piece once.) Save, then edit each individual Get Info tab with song name and sequence.
9) Plug in the iPod, sync up, and off we go.
A few notes on this process.
a) It leaves in all the scratches and surface noise. Audacity has filters that will suppress the minor white noise, but I haven't messed with them. YMMV.
b) This isn't for Nano users. The resulting wav files are huge - but the sound quality far exceeds that of M4A, and is (IMO) noticeably better than MP3. I have a 30 gb iPOd, all but 8 or 9 of my albums are M4A. You'd pack a 30gb iPod pretty quickly with all wav files - so, this process isn't for the storage-challenged. Of course, you can get by with a smaller player, and just swap music on and off it.
c) I usually adjust volume in iTunes (turn it up to about 70%) on all my uploads, wav or MP3/M4A. You can do that on Get Info/Options/Volume Adjustment. I have found it works more reliably once the files on the iPod, rather than pre-synced iTunes files.
d) I've noticed that iTunes will seem to add a leading sequence number to the track title if you play the file in iTunes. Annoying, didn't see that in iTunes v8. Also, be careful about song titles, sequence numbers and artist/album names when entering them on Get Info - mistyping any of these will create headaches in sequencing and grouping your music on the player.
e) It's a little weird to listen to stuff on an iPod with surface noise, pops and scratches if you've spent years listening to music on CD's or digital players.
f) It helps alot having more than one PC to do this - I was editing one machine while recording on another.
g) Leave yourself time to do this - even using the EZ Record software, it's still time consuming if labeling individual track titles matters to you.
h) Have a decent sized flash drive and at least one set of headphones handy.
i) Prepare to puzzle over why you liked some of this stuff to begin with...
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Phil hangs up the sticks
Phill Collins can't play drums anymore, evidently. A spinal condition, evidently from too many years on the kit, has rendered it too painful to even hold sticks anymore.
Really a shame, as Phil is one of 70's prog rock's most accomplished drummers. We saw their comeback tour a couple of years ago, and while I wasn't altogether surprised by much on that giant and brilliantly lit stage (good show, great production, intelligent and thoughtful setlist, a shade bloodless in its delivery...), I was genuinely amazed at how good a drummer Collins still was in his late fifties, and especially after a protracted layoff. Thunderous and quick as a stampede of wild horsea, almost as if he hadn't missed a step since 1977.
One wonders now what role he'd play in any Gabriel-era Genesis reunion - during Gabriel's time, Collins sang only a smattering of backup, and lead only on a couple of ballads. Who'd drum? Chester? Manu Katche?
Maybe Bill Bruford could be coaxed out of retirement?
Then again...shouldn't prog rock be left to those young and idealistic and strong enough to play it with vigor?
Really a shame, as Phil is one of 70's prog rock's most accomplished drummers. We saw their comeback tour a couple of years ago, and while I wasn't altogether surprised by much on that giant and brilliantly lit stage (good show, great production, intelligent and thoughtful setlist, a shade bloodless in its delivery...), I was genuinely amazed at how good a drummer Collins still was in his late fifties, and especially after a protracted layoff. Thunderous and quick as a stampede of wild horsea, almost as if he hadn't missed a step since 1977.
One wonders now what role he'd play in any Gabriel-era Genesis reunion - during Gabriel's time, Collins sang only a smattering of backup, and lead only on a couple of ballads. Who'd drum? Chester? Manu Katche?
Maybe Bill Bruford could be coaxed out of retirement?
Then again...shouldn't prog rock be left to those young and idealistic and strong enough to play it with vigor?
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