Editing Screwtape and Watching and Reading Things

I am slowly falling back into my nocturnal sleeping habits.  I tend to, around 8pm, get down to some editing of audio.  I realized that many people wouldn't necessarily read my book The Screwtape Emails: Lessons in Ecclesiastical Mincing, but might listen to me read it.  Also, with how complex some of the sentence structure is, I think it helps to have me read it with my voice underlining what exactly I meant, so to speak.  Now I'm up to "email 16."

I read the whole thing into my computer, and edited about half of the "emails" into a listenable mp3 form to download from my site, then found I'd been reading them too quickly and I knew I could do better, so I re-read the book in more somber, well-paced tones.  Now I just have to go through, edit out mistakes and things, and slap in the eerie music I made to play under my voice.

Really enjoyed the new Harry Potter movie.  Devoured the new Jim Butcher book Turn Coat, got a bit tired of the Charlaine Harris "Sookie Stackhouse" books I bought, though I'm very into the True Blood HBO show based on it (girlporn is as foreign and ungratifying to most guys as guyporn is to most girls), started re-reading the last Harry Potter book, because the movie made me want to remember what happened after it, tried to get into Mad Men with indifferent success, watched episodes of Dr. Katz and The Ben Stiller Show, and plan to pick up Watchmen on DVD soon.  Watched Avatar: The Last Airbender with my niece, who seemed to find it riveting.  Have been doing a slow but systematic cleanup/cleanout of my apartment, which is going slowly but unprecedentedly well.  Need to buy food.

A Start to July

I finished up my school year with a whole lot of watching downloaded stuff, of course, and also watching my way through the rest of the series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as I have it on DVD and really think it was creatively and cleverly made.

I also wrote something the size of a book, meant to be a book, which was based on C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, but which I used to put forth my own ideas and story, rather than using his.  I used his conceit of a supervising demon advising a personal tempter how to mess up the lives of people, but instead of a demon screwing up one guy, I had it be the story of an evil spirit stifling, dividing and destroying the function of a Christian group (a "church community" if you will).  I found www.blurb.com which allows you to print your own books, and sell them, so I'm in the middle of making that happen.

Had a great Sunday BBQ at J's parent's place.  Some teachers came, and my sister and niece.  Many people played music, including me.  One guy sang just like Elvis Presley all the time, but didn't sing Elvis songs, which was interesting.

I've been trying to do something about my apartment.  It is very small, and I moved all my stuff into here after living in the ground floor of an entire house, and I amass as much stuff as I can (particularly in the realms of musical equipment, DVDs, CDs, LPs, books, magazines, comic books and the like).  This makes my tiny place look like every one of Ali Baba's forty thieves has been robbing book stores and Future Shop, and is using my place to store the loot.  Messily.

Yesterday I put out to the recycling and trash a record amount of cardboard packaging for such things, and stuff arrived from eBay. I collected pretty much every VHS tape I had (professional ones I bought, and not taped on by me) and put them out in a "Free" box today.  I would have done earlier, but it has rained so much this summer.  

The Power of the Interwebs

What I've always loved the Internet for is that every single thing I ever loved as a kid in the 70s and 80s (cartoons, late night television, video games) can all be obtained.  Any cartoon I used to watch I can download, stream on YouTube or buy on DVD.  Any game I ever played can be emulated in a tiny program.  It's like all those things that I experienced a tiny part of (the end of an episode of V:The Series caught in the TV section of a shopping mall at Christmas, a Colecovision game played at a cousin's house one time) can now be mine easily, cheaply and entirely (so, those two episodes of Blackstar that I cherished since 1982, that episode of Speed Buggy, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk or Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle that I still remember now can sit on my shelf or in my hard drive, with every single other one of its fellows.)  It's quite an emotional experiment to have a fairly clear memory of a cartoon I saw once or twice in the mid 70s or early 80s, and which I haven't seen since, and sit down and watch it through my now very grown-up eyes.  So much is so different from how you remembered it.  

Some things have eluded me until now.  The Six Million Dollar Man was very slow to become downloadable.  It still has never been manufactured on DVD in North America.  I downloaded it and bought a UK DVD of it.  Spenser:For Hire was the toughest.  It has never been released on DVD, and it isn't generally streamed or downloadable in Canada.  I think the main reason is that it is streamable for free on America Online in the States, and blocked in the rest of the world, though it is not on Canadian cable television, and not available on DVD, apart from those abysmal reunion movies.

Spenser:For Hire was based on the books by Robert B. Parker which I still love to this day.  It was more film noir, more psychological than most detective dramas at the time.  But it was on TV opposite Miami Vice.  Good luck.  (I never liked the Vice much.  I think it depicted everything that cocky assholes in the 80s wore, listened to and did.)

This week I found a source to download Spenser: For Hire and am overjoyed to be watching that show again.  If it was for sale, I would have bought it long ago, and if I lived in America, I could watch every episode online,  free.  Stupid.  It's like "Here is my money.  Any takers?  No?  Anyone?"  No, I do not want to buy all of the seasons of Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons and Family Guy.  It's not like those shows are hard to get a chance to see.

So, happy.  Also got some ancient cartoons like The Archies and The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan and such.  Some of those I bought.

Trials and Defibrilations

So the school year ended with a moist-eyed farewell to our principal and librarian and now it's lazydays time.  A colleague of mine amusing himself by telling kids looking to hand in late work after report cards had been entered "Sorry.  That train has sailed."  Not a kid found that pronouncement odd.

I have been reading my Screwtape Emails into my laptop and making mp3s of them, hoping the rather challenging text will be more apt to find its way into people's heads if I'm reading it to them.  No clue if anyone has listened to a single one yet.  It's a lot of work, and I'm not done all of them, but there you go.  C.S. Lewis, in wanting to talk about how people screw up their Christianity, came up with the novel idea of writing a book of "letters" written as if to a man's 'guardian devil' from said demon's fiendishly bureaucratic supervising over-demon.  He called it The Screwtape Letters.  It's very cool, and the book on tape is read by John Cleese.  I did the same thing, only with "emails" and set in the 80s rather than the 40s, and with the guardian demon of a whole Christian group, rather than one man.  It is a bit challengingly dense with thought, and writing more or less in the same style as the original made it hard to cut through the barriers that keep modern people from being able to hear what people who spoke more formally were saying.  I hope it is also amusing in places.  I try.

Finding it natural to take a bit of a big step back from my usual summer tendency to fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way, usually alternating between Internet and DVDs.  I have a modded XBox networked to a 1 terabit hard drive filled with things, and surround sound speakers hooked up, so the experience is all the more convenient and cool, but I want to do things that actually take me outside.  Making stuff with computers I feel slightly better about than just taking it all in passively, though.  Also, doing things like making my five year old niece a DVD full of episodes of Jem and the Holograms seems pretty fun to do.  It was precisely girly enough to mesmerize her completely.

I decided yesterday to go buy a used bicycle.  I am kind of out of food, so I (foolishly) went downstairs to the always ironically named Superior Restaurant for a simple breakfast special.  The whole process took forty minutes.  The part where actually ate the food took three.  Everyone in there was old.  The couple next to me reminded me of how appalling, inane, pointless and insincere the conversation of seniors usually is (I'm being mean like this, because this is what they continually and thoughtlessly say about the vapid conversation of teens, and I hear a lot of that.  At least teen conversation is rapid-paced).

I then went to the Royal Bank of Canada bank machine up the street to get money so to buy a bike, and it was out of order.  Strike one, Royal Bank of Canada.  

I drove into the city, seeing the Fuel Low light come on midway through the trip.  I went to one of those cool, quaint little places in Ottawa where they have what should be a house, but is a store, filled to overflowing with decades of bike parts in piles like Watto's junkyard, and picked one out.  It was a Canadian-made Rocky Mountain Sherpa.  A bit battered, but very light and strong.  Of course, being hippie "cars are evil" folk, they had no means to take anything but cash, so I walked to the bus terminal to use the Royal Bank of Canada bank machine there.  It said to contact my bank immediately, and gave me no money.  Strike two, Royal Bank of Canada.

I have no cell (since mine was stolen, back when LCD screens weren't in colour) so I went to a payphone.  After all of the usual wrestling with menus and being put on hold, I got someone who said there'd been evidence of someone trying to guess my PIN after I'd used my Royal Bank of Canada Client Card someplace, and they'd put a freeze on my Royal Bank of Canada Client Card.  I told them I was trying to buy a bicycle with my money and told them how much money I needed (I asked for $100 more than the price of the bicycle, so I could buy gas and food this weekend).  The Royal Bank of Canada Security Department lackey said to use the bank machine in four small withdrawals.  I tried this, and after three small withdrawals, it stopped working again.  Strike three, Royal Bank of Canada.

I called them up to ask WTF and they said "Give us two minutes and try again."  I gave them two, and five, and fifteen, but it wouldn't work.  No longer counting strikes, Royal Bank of Canada.

I called for a third time, and after being put on hold for a very long time they said they couldn't help me.  I pointed out that what they were saying was that they, my bank, were unable/were refusing to give me my own money, because they were keeping it secure.  From me.  They spoke of visiting a branch to rectify the situation and I pointed out that no Royal Bank of Canada branches were open, had been open for the past 24 hours, nor would be for thirty hours or so, and this suggestion was, therefore, absurd and unhelpful in the extreme, and that I was now good and truly screwed as to weekend plans, and that I saw this as due entirely to their feckless machinations, and not to anything I had done, let alone done wrong.

I had taken out just enough money for the bike, so bought it, put it in my van and drove home on fumes and a prayer.  As is often my wont when in a state of choleric agitation, I played White Zombie rather bracingly.  

I managed to get back to my apartment, though visiting my family an additional forty minutes drive away had originally been on the agenda.  Then I had a brainstorm: I paid rent to my landlord using the Internet, right?  And my landlord owns a money store downstairs? (well, collectible coins, foreign money, medals and things)  Why not get the landlord to agree for me to use the Internet (which is, of course, not a canceled Royal Bank of Canada Client Card) to put money in his account like when I pay rent, and then he could give me some money from his money store's till?  I went downstairs to make it so.

He was in Toronto and his mother was working.  I eventually made her somewhat aware of my plan (she was courteously bewildered) and then she made me aware that she had pretty much no money in the till (of the money store).  She offered me $20, which would certainly give me enough gas to take me to Smiths Falls, so I went upstairs, gave my landlord's account $20 using the Internet, and then was given two soggy ten dollar bills from the till of the money store.  Success!

I then got some gas in my van, and with the bicycle in the back, drove to Smiths Falls.  I ran out of White Zombie on the way, so Type O Negative filled in and I once again was reminded how much I'd like to take a break from my usual acoustic country-folk-rock stylings and do something really dark and deathy.

I arrived to see that one of the cars was missing.  I came into the family abode to see no sign of my sister, brother-in-law, niece or nephew.   "Sigh," I thought.  I was standing in the kitchen, when suddenly a naked little blonde baby wearing a red hat and purple Crocs ran by the window screeching.  My nephew.  They were out back in a newly mowed area of the back field which now had a little kiddie pool.

I'd intended to try my bike on the farm roads, but ended up sitting around and chatting, with beer, and burgers and Pepsi and so on.  Showed my brother-in-law the Classic Albums episode for Plastic Yoko Band, because he's such a huge Beatles fan.   He put on Dark Knight to show off his new Blu-ray system.  I'm not sure his TV was quite up to it.  Super sharp, but also weird video artifacts like sparkles in eyes and other highlights/reflections that looked a bit odd.

I came home and took my light-less, reflector-less bike for a tour around the town, verifying my fond hope that it would entice me to exert myself to exhaustion without getting me overheated, because biking around a dark town at night is pretty cooling, if there is a breeze going on.  I found that biking one's legs rubbery, and then carrying stuff up a three-storey fire escape to one's apartment is tricky work.

Reverb

This has been a time of taking stock, and there is a pervasive feeling of taking a step back and getting ready to straighten stuff around and accomplish things.  Even on a grey, rainy day like today.  There've been a lot of chilly, grey, drippy days lately, and a lot of sickly people wandering around.  I have one of those colds in which my body sort of kinda has a cold, but is pretty much handling it, so I don't notice much except when it occasionally sneaks up and causes a sniffle for a moment and then is beaten back for a few hours.  

I'm still learning about mixing, including re-learning stuff for Pro-Tools that I knew how to do (or achieve in other ways) with Sony Vegas, which program I used before Pro-Tools for both audio and video editing.  Today's achievement was figuring how to make a reverb bus in Pro-Tools, so I could send my bass guitar and drums (and my virtual piano plug-in, which has its own built in reverb) to the final mix without slapping the same reverb on them as on everything else.  

Recording has this odd element to it that I can explain for laymen pretty easily: if you walk into a big concert hall and a band is playing, it is all boomy and muddy and loud, and you don't mind because you're caught up in the spirit of it, and its all coming out of some P.A. speakers at one end, and absolutely filling the acoustically-designed room up with sound reflecting and re-reflecting off every flat, hard surface in the place.  That's a live experience.  The instruments are for that, the speakers are for that, and room is for that.  Record this as is, and you get the huge muddy, boomy sound of what's coming out of the speakers mixed together with all the sound reflections off the walls.  You can't adjust the individual instruments or anything, because you've recorded the sound of a room which is full of all that noise.  If you record "straight out of the mixer board" so there is almost no room sound at all, and you're getting stuff right out of the microphones without it even hitting a speaker, it sounds oddly flat and unnatural.  Sounds like that need a large room to fill or they don't sound right at all.  The sound directly from a microphone in front of a person's lips, with no reverb, and not played through speakers into a large room, but straight into some headphones is unpleasantly like sticking your ear to their lips to have them sing, and then being able to electronically make their voice quieter, but still uncomfortably close to your ear.  The complete lack of room sound (reflections of sound off the walls) tells your brain you are trapped in a tiny room with someone singing quietly in your ear.

Then make a recording of the same song, by the same artists.  Each part is recorded, usually by putting a microphone right up to the person's mouth, or the kick drum, or whatever, in exactly the same way it would be live, but to a separate track for each one.  If you play them into the headphones now (as in our example earlier with the person singing in your ear), there is an odd, unnatural sound because these are loud things like drums and electric guitars and people singing loudly, yet there is absolutely no echo, no reverberation, essentially the sound isn't reflecting back at you from the walls of a venue appropriate to it.  For an instrument to sound powerful and clear, you want the reflected sounds of it filling a comfortably large room.   If, for example, the sound you are recording is Metallica and a 100 piece orchestra, and you're playing the sounds of Metallica and the orchestra in your bathroom, the actual sound reflecting off the bathroom walls sounds stupid, as sticking Metallica in your bathroom isn't even possible.

Recording with fake reverbs and echoes allow you to simulate exactly what kind of room you are pretending this performance occurred in.  The longer the delay between the original sound and a reflection of it coming back to your ears off the walls, the farther away your brain thinks those walls must be, and the larger the room therefore is.  Outside concerts with no walls, and little or no slapback echo from nearby buildings or geography sound kind of "flat," because to us, the sound of an orchestral concert takes place in a room which sounds a very specific way (not like a bathroom or garage, for example), just as a loud rock song takes place in a room which sounds a certain way (not a bathroom, maybe a garage).

Once you get this kind of control, there are cheats.  You can achieve greater clarity by digitally minimizing the frequency (portion of the sound) made by each instrument which makes your song sound "muddy" and boomy, and with that blurry mud removed, you can then hear more of the stuff.  Just turning up muddy sounds more and more simply adds more mud, and less and less clarity.  

So reverb is a thing which adds warmth and atmosphere to a recording by defining things like what size of room and what kind of surfaces are in it.  Low, thudding sounds like kick drums, bass guitars and so on tend to add boomy mud to the sound if you use as much reverb on them as would sound ideal for, say, a flute.  So, you cheat.  You make a special routing (or bus) for all the stuff that sounds great with more reverb (voices, flutes, violins and so on) so they can get all the reverb you want, and you rout the growly, thuddy stuff directly to the final mix without all of that reverb (using very little, or maybe none, though a little sounds more natural).

I figured out how to do this today after watching even more Ronald D. Moore podcast commentary on the Battlestar Galactica DVDs I got a good deal on used a few weeks ago.  I've watched enough of the episodes to drive one mental, and had a Monster energy drink which just gave me a chronic case of the jitters without actually enticing me to venture out into the cold, dripping greyity.  The result was increased clarity in the song I tried it out on, and a feeling of satisfaction.

I also did typical editing tricks like: -doubling the MIDI data I recorded out of the music teacher's electric piano so I not only told Pro-Tools to apply that data to a piano, but also told it to apply the second copy of the performance to a Deep Purple style rock organ sound.   -turning up the dynamic range setting on the virtual piano so the difference between loud and quiet notes is exaggerated, ending up with it sounding like he played far more flamboyantly than he actually did (I'm turning this Broadway stuff into rock and roll for this CD) -quietly hiding tracks of vocalists' weaker takes in with their strongest performances (turned up) to make them thicker and stronger sounding. -editing the MIDI data for the piano and sliding bits of recorded bass guitar and drums around to make sure they all hit an important stop in unison. -copying and pasting drum parts into parts of songs where there weren't any, and I thought there should be -faking digital delay by doubling a lead guitar track, then panning it way to one side, turning it down a bit and sliding it slightly behind time. -deleting words that were sung out of rhythm or pitch and then subbing in the same word from a different performance in its place -deleting distractingly loud intakes of breath in songs where they sounded out of place.

Apart from music, I also picked up a 1 Tb (that's one terabyte, or a thousand gigabytes) external hard drive so that all of my massive amounts of data, stuck on four different hard drives in two different computers can be consolidated and made extremely compact and portable.  As messy as my apartment is, I find it soothing to get all my data organized so I can find all of it.  I am a packrat in both the real and digital worlds.  The fact that the Internet and pawn shops allow me to get digital versions (i.e. DVDs and data files) of pretty much anything I ever liked or found interesting when I was a kid is a constant delight to me.  Organizing all of it makes me happy in way I can only describe as deeply nerdy.  When it comes to media, I can be counted upon to bring in weird and fun stuff to my classes with regularity.

My brother-in-law and I took my Mom, sister and niece out for supper the day before Mother's Day.  My niece (5 years old) coloured the kid's menu far more neatly than I could hope to do, with perfectly parallel and equally dark crayon strokes in appropriate colours, never straying one hair over a line.  I had Guinness and Emu Stroganoff because it was on the menu.  It was grey and drippy, but my niece wanted to see the bridge over the swollen creek that runs through Stewart Park (in Perth Ontario, where we were) so I took her over to it though the grass was turning into a morass.

I really want to see the new Star Trek (I haven't liked much of anything they've done since the early 90s), but I think I'll wait until next weekend.  J wants to see Wolverine, so I'll probably see that with him.  I haven't been seeing many movies lately, and really find that only TV shows with long, sprawling, complicated plot lines keep my interest.  Movies are too flashy, too simple and too soon over for me lately.

What Have I Been Doing?

Recording and mixing, mixing and recording, and pretty much all of it other people's stuff, mainly me making a CD of the high school kids doing their parts from the musical Footloose that our school just finished.  I'm recording drums (4 mics), bass guitar, electric guitar, saxophones, flutes, percussion instruments, and all sorts of vocals, often by heavily-trained kids with high-powered voices.  It's plenty fun.  The songs, as recorded, will sound much more rock 'n roll than Broadway.

 A lot of that comes from how they are mixed.  Put turned-up drums, bass and many multi-layered guitars all over something, with some heavy-handed piano, and it tends to rock out more than it does when the instruments are plunking along docilely behind a stage full of performers singing.  Lots of work.  Very educational for me (I have recently tried out my equipment in many ways, as I have recorded direct-in from wireless microphones fed into a sound board, I have mic-ed any number of things, including the room sounds and over-all band sound at the musical, and also used MIDI data from electric piano, and fed instruments such as keyboards direct in.)

Here is Holding Out for A Hero.

Requiem and Flu

This weekend is shaping up to be pretty busy, which is a hard state for me to achieve, being me, and living around here.  The music madness kinda started Wednesday, with me borrowing a couple of mics to add to mine, and setting up my recording stuff at Rick's house to record some files of us playing some of my songs.  The rhythm was sloppy, but the vibe comes through in a way carefully-recorded stuff cannot usually provide.  Check some of it out here.  

  Then I went to the local open stage, despite being very tired, and performed a bunch of stuff.  Acoustic guitars were not in evidence (despite there being things like drum kits, amps, keyboards and electric guitars around), so I ended up having to drink Guinness (I had two, neither of which I had to pay for) and sat back to let a steady parade of people play my acoustic.  Kurtis played stuff from Metallica's Kill 'Em All, which is superfast and thrashy, and sounded quite oddly compelling played on an acoustic guitar. 

Friday evening after getting pizza delivered to the school for the yearbook kids, I hung out at home watching old episodes of Mr. Show With Bob and David, and did very little, sensing I'd be in a non-stop spiral of recording.  The music teacher had quite easily wheedled me into recording "Brahm's Requiem, which we're doing at St. Paul's United Church."  I agreed to stop in at the last rehearsal on Saturday before lunch to try out the mic placement (I ended up only having one mic to place, though I saw mics lying around at the church, which I will steal to use for the performance).  I got to see how things sounded, and will then go again Sunday night to get the actual show recorded.  I really had no idea I'd be recording all of this kind of thing at the rehearsal.  Afterward, the music teacher and one of the bass singers in the chorus and I went out for brunch.  Bob, the bass, chatted with us for quite a while, and eventually I started to get the sense that he'd worked as a teacher.  I asked him if he had taught, and he said "Yeah, I don't have to do that anymore."  I asked his last name and when he answered I realized I'd spent a couple of hours chatting and eating breakfast with my grade 9 History teacher.

Then it was to the family homestead, where the kids had the flu and tempers and fevers were alike running higher than usual.  Despite this, things went ok.  My dad had a new gizmo for hooking his laptop up to cars' computers.  My van is generally illin', so I was curious to see what the laptop would tell him. He sat in the passenger's seat with his laptop, and as I drove, he checked the speedometer and tachometer on his laptop's screen, calling out information about the richness of fuel mixture to the engine (too lean on both sensor banks), and telling me how fast I was driving (which was fun, because I haven't had a working speedometer since July).  He had the laptop set to "log" the trip, which meant it recorded the whole journey. Then he saved it and back at the house, played back the trip, with the speedometer, tachometer and all the other engine sensors re-enacting our little trip up the highway.